Yuri Modin - "The Fifth Man"

"The Fifth Man"

Modin published a book, Mes Camarades de Cambridge, in France in 1994. For the British translation, the British publisher Headline Book Publishing, made some changes, first to the title, making it My Five Cambridge Friends with the sub-heading: "For the first time, their KGB controller reveals the secrets of the world’s most famous spy ring—Burgess, Maclean, Philby, Blunt and Cairncross." Second, Headline changed lines on page 104, now implying that John Cairncross was the Fifth Man: ‘At the close of 1944, the name of John Cairncross, code-named the Carelian, was added to the four agents to whose cases I had been assigned. He was the "Fifth Man." Cairncross had at one time or another been in contact with the others, but he was hardly a member of the group.’

The words changed and inserted by Headline were pure fabrication, according to Modin, who pointed out that Cairncross, to his knowledge, had never been in contact with any member of the group. UK The Guardian journalist Richard Norton-Taylor rang Modin to check on this and found him angry that the false claims, changes and fraud on the British (and later US) buying public, had been made without him being consulted. Alan Rusbridger, who agreed with Perry’s assessment that Rothschild was the fifth man, also wrote in The Guardian: “Yuri Modin...says in the English edition of his recent book that Cairncross was “the fifth man.” Modin says he never used the term, which is not contained in the French edition of his book.’