Cairncross

At the end of the war, John Cairncross was posted to the Treasury. From his position there he could do all sorts of favors for his Soviet masters. In case you didn’t recognize the name he was accused of being the 5^th member of the Cambridge Five and indeed he was. The Cambridge Five have so far caused all manner of security breaches throughout British MI5 and MI6. Incredible amounts of information made its way right to the Kremlin and into the spy master, Beria’s small hands.

This time Cairncross acted on his own without a mission assignment from his Soviet handler. It was rather simple for him to redirect into storage Britain’s supply of VT fuses for the 3.7 inch Anti Aircraft munitions. Not every fuse of course as each battery retained a couple of hours worth of them but until the Soviet Army attacked on May 2^nd, 1946 the majority of the fuses were in storage. This occurred about 6 months ago.

It was Cairncross who first laid eyes on the paper concerning the problem with the VT fuse becoming damaged by damp conditions. This was significant enough. Added to this is the astounding fact that it could be jammed. He passed this information on to his spy master and promptly forgot about it. Then weeks later he happened to overhear a co-worker in Treasury mention the transporting and storage of all this AA ammunition and what a pain it was. A tiny bell went off in his head and he remembered the study he’d seen.

After gaining access to the invoices he noticed that it was only for the transportation of the shells. The shells weren’t identified by type nor were any special handling instructions included. So he simply altered their final destination of these shipments that night to the huge storage units in the dampest part of Britain near the live fire area of Okehampton. It made perfect sense that if you were going to use the shells for live fire practice you would store them near the live fire area so no bells and whistles should go off.

By having these shells stored in damp conditions for over 6 months they could be degraded by a good 30%. Added to the 20-30% factory failure rate documented in that same report this meant that the VT shell in the current British inventory could fail a good 50 to 60% of the time.

In his twisted mind this would greatly assist the Communist cause in overthrowing the Capitalist pigs currently in power in Britain and cement his place in history. Never mind the thousands of fellow Britons who would be killed and maimed. It was all for the cause and sacrifices had to be made. In the end more people will be better off under communism than the current corrupt system.

Who knows there maybe some future reward from a future grateful communist government when they finally obtained power, possibly some kind of leadership role? After all he is putting his life on the line for the cause. That should be worth some kind of reward above and beyond the privilege of living in a workers’ paradise. Maybe he should learn to speak Russian.