Spycatcher; The Candid Autobiography of a Senior Intelligence Officer

New York: Dell, 1988. First Printing [Stated]. Mass market paperback. Good. Stuart Alan Becker (Author photograph). xv, [1], 496 pages. Glossary. Index. Cover has some wear and soiling. The former assistant director of MI5 offers an account of British Intelligence, including his work on the Ring of Five and exposing Soviet espionage and the conspiracy to oust Harold Wilson from the office of Prime Minister in the 1970s. Peter Maurice Wright CBE (9 August 1916 - 26 April 1995) was a principal scientific officer for MI5, the British counter-intelligence agency. . Spycatcher was part memoir, part exposé detailing what Wright claimed were serious institutional failures he investigated within MI5. Wright is said to have been influenced in his counterespionage activity by James Jesus Angleton, counter-intelligence chief of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) from 1954 to 1975. Wright worked as the first chairman of the new Radio Operations Committee (ROC) when it was formed in 1960. The technical staffs from the earlier separate and competitive British intelligence organizations finally began to combine their efforts, thus allowing the methods used in ENGULF and RAFTER to be expanded into domestic and foreign intelligence operations that would last into the late 1960s. According to Wright, MI5, MI6 and GCHQ had not functioned together or shared information as effectively since the war. In 1964, Wright became chairman of a joint MI5/MI6 committee, codenamed FLUENCY Working Party, appointed to find Soviet agents and moles in Britain. He regularly interviewed Anthony Blunt, a member of the Cambridge Five, trying to glean information from him about other Soviet agents. Peter Wright, former MI5 officer and Assistant Director drew on his own experiences and research into the history of the British intelligence community. Published first in Australia, the book was banned in England (but not Scotland) due to its allegations about government policy and incidents. These efforts ensured the book's notoriety, and it earned considerable profit for Wright. In 2021, the Cabinet Office was still blocking freedom of information requests for files on the Spycatcher affair despite the rule that documents should be released after 30 years. In Spycatcher, Wright says that one of his assignments was to unmask a Soviet mole in MI5, who he says was Roger Hollis, a former MI5 Director General. His book also discusses other candidates who may have or may not have been the mole. He explores the history of MI5 by chronicling its principal officers, from the 1930s to his time in service. Wright also tells of the MI6 plot to assassinate President Nasser during the Suez Crisis; of joint MI5-CIA plotting against Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson (who had been secretly accused by Soviet defector Anatoliy Golitsyn of being a KGB agent); and of MI5's eavesdropping on high-level Commonwealth conferences. Wright examines the techniques of intelligence services, exposes their ethics, notably their "eleventh commandment", "Thou shalt not get caught." He described many MI5 electronic technologies (some of which he developed), for instance, allowing clever spying into rooms, and identifying the frequency to which a superhet receiver is tuned. In the afterword, he said that he wrote the book chiefly to work to regain compensation for losses of significant pension income when the British government ruled his pension for earlier work in GCHQ was not transferable. Wright wrote Spycatcher in Tasmania, after his retirement from MI5. He first attempted publication of his memoirs in 1985. The British government immediately obtained a court order banning publication in the UK, but the order applied only in the United Kingdom, and the book continued to be available elsewhere. In September 1987, the UK government applied for similar orders to prevent publication in Australia, but lawyer Malcolm Turnbull representing the publisher, successfully resisted the application, as he did on appeal in June 1988. English newspapers attempting proper reporting about Spycatcher's principal allegations were served gag orders; on persisting, they were tried for contempt of court. These charges were eventually dropped. Eventually, in 1988, the book was cleared for legitimate sale when the Law Lords acknowledged that overseas publication meant it contained no secrets. However, Wright was barred from receiving royalties from the sale of the book in the United Kingdom. In November 1991, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that the British government had breached the European Convention of Human Rights in gagging its newspapers. In 1995, Wright died a millionaire from proceeds of his book.