John Cairncross

John Cairncross was a Scottish civil servant and intelligence worker who secretly acted for the Soviet Union. His wartime career included access to highly sensitive material, and he passed intelligence to Soviet handlers while moving through government and intelligence posts. He was later identified as the fifth member of the Cambridge spy ring.

Cairncross was questioned after the exposure of other members but was never prosecuted and spent much of his later life outside Britain. Antonia Senior’s Stalin’s Apostles gives particular attention to the significance of the material he supplied and the wider consequences of the Cambridge Five’s espionage. The book is nonfiction and treats him as a documented historical subject.