[BITList] Spycatcher

Tue Aug 9 07:50:57 BST 2016

NOTE:

This article fails to mention that his lawyer was one Malcolm Turnbull - now PM of Australia

See…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spycatcher <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spycatcher>

ooroo

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Wright,  Peter Maurice  (1916-1995), Security Service officer and author, was born at 26 Cromwell Road, Chesterfield, Derbyshire, on 9 August 1916: it was said that he arrived prematurely because of shock to his mother, Lous Dorothy, nee Norburn, caused by a nearby Zeppelin raid. His father, (George) Maurice Wright (who became chief scientist at Marconi), had served in MI6 during the First World War, enabling Wright to claim that 'the thread of secret intelligence work had run through the family through four and a half decades'. He was a sickly child. He had a terrible stammer, suffered from rickets, and wore leg irons almost into his teens. Brought up in Chelmsford, Essex, he attended Bishop's Stortford school until 1931, and then worked for a while as a farm labourer in Scotland before joining the School of Rural Economy at Oxford in 1938. On 16 September 1938 he married Lois Elizabeth Foster-Melliar (b. 1914/15), with whom he had two daughters and a son.

Although he lacked any formal qualifications, Wright worked for the Admiralty research laboratory during the Second World War. At its end he sat entry exams for the scientific civil service, passing out joint first. For four years he was a principal scientific officer at the services research laboratory and in 1950, at the height of the cold war, he began working as an adviser for the Security Service (MI5), joining the service full-time in 1955. On his appointment Dick White, the head of MI5, told him, 'I'm not sure we need an animal like you in the Security Service'  (Wright, 29), but they shared a bond, both having been educated at Bishop's Stortford school. Told from the start that his late entry would deny him any of the agency's directorships, he quickly came to regard most of his colleagues as snobbish: they in turn regarded him with undisguised contempt as a technician, and not as a gentleman. At MI5 he was highly proficient in developing microphones and bugging devices, and many of his ideas were shared with the American CIA.

Technically proficient, Wright became obsessed with the belief that the KGB was infiltrating British institutions. Among the conspiracy theories he supported was the idea that the Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell had been killed by the KGB, a notion put forward by CIA chief of counter-intelligence James Jesus Angleton. With like-minded MI5 officers Wright became convinced that senior figures in the intelligence world, in politics, and in the trade unions were Soviet agents. After Kim Philby's defection in 1963 following a tip-off, Wright became convinced that the KGB had penetrated the higher reaches of the intelligence agencies. In 1964 he became chairman of a joint MI5/MI6 committee, codenamed Fluency, appointed to find the traitor and investigate the whole history of Soviet penetration of Britain. Given his head, Wright began to seek evidence. He became convinced that Sir Roger Hollis, then head of MI5, was a double agent. The evidence was circumstantial, but to a conspiracy theorist it was enough. His sights were also focused on Labour prime minister Harold Wilson, who he believed to be a Soviet agent. The 'Wilson plot' resulted in break-ins, leaks, dirty tricks, and false stories planted in the press to discredit the Labour government. None the less when Wright retired in 1976, Harold Wilson was again prime minister.

Peter Wright parted company with MI5 in a rancorous mood, believing that he had been cheated out of much of his pension entitlement. He settled in Tasmania, where he bred horses. He returned to Britain at the request of Victor Rothschild, who asked him to help dispel rumours that he was a Soviet agent. Wright agreed, and the result was Chapman Pincher's Their Trade is Treachery (1981), which carried the allegations that Hollis (now dead) had been a traitor. When Wright's role in supplying information for the book became known, journalists besieged him. As a result he agreed to break the Official Secrets Act and write his own memoirs. Although appallingly edited, the ghost-written work was published as Spycatcher in Australia in 1987; it was an immediate best-seller, its appeal enhanced by the ban on the work in the United Kingdom, under the Official Secrets Act, and made Wright very wealthy.

The Conservative government had determined to prevent publication of Wright's book wherever they could, and began an action in the Australian courts. They famously sent cabinet secretary Sir Robert Armstrong to give evidence. His admission that the government had been 'economical with the truth' when dealing with the Chapman Pincher book brought mockery on the government case. The sight of the frail Wright in his wide-brimmed hat and dark coat entering court compounded the impression of an overweening government seeking to inhibit free speech, and the whole episode slipped into farce. The matter ended in a House of Lords judgment allowing publication in Britain, and in the longer term the Wright case became an important step in opening up British intelligence to public scrutiny. Wright went on to publish The Encyclopaedia of Espionage in 1991, which had little impact. By this stage of his life he had become increasingly reclusive, suffering from diabetes and heart trouble; a year before his death in Tasmania on 27 April 1995, he was diagnosed as having Alzheimer's disease.

When the furore over Spycatcher died down, the prevailing tendency was to dismiss the substance of Wright's allegations as the product of the overactive imagination of a bitter man. His belief that Hollis was a KGB mole is generally not accepted, and Wright himself admitted that his account of the extent of the plot to discredit Wilson was overstated. But the more general portrait he painted of an 'inefficient, infiltrated and unaccountable security service'  (Neil) rang true. The implications of the Spycatcher affair were thus wide-ranging, both in terms of the enhanced public scrutiny of the security services, and in terms of the limits to which British governments can go to prevent free speech in the interests of national security: in 1991 the European Court of Human Rights ruled that the British government had contravened the law in trying to prevent Wright's book from being published.

Peter Martland 

Sources  P. Wright, Spycatcher (1987) + The Times (28 April 1995) + The Independent (28 April 1995) + T. Bower, The perfect English spy (1995) + The Guardian (27-8 April 1995) + Daily Telegraph (28 April 1995) + A. Neil, 'The spy who revealed the rot in the core of Britain', Sunday Times (30 April 1995) + b. cert. + m. cert.
Likenesses  S. Nicol, photograph, News International Syndication, London [see illus.] · photograph, repro. in The Independent

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