Photo: British PM Harold Wilson in 1975
Back in the 1980s, PM Margaret Thatcher was obsessed with Russian spying. The so-called Spycatcher Affair became THE cause célèbre in England, and its effects spread across the world, all the way to Australia. That is where Peter Wright lived after his time in London.
After formally leaving MI5, the British intelligence service, Wright retired to Australia and wrote a book that caused one of the greatest scandals in 20th century British politics and intelligence operations. He was not a Russian spy, but his book laid out the evidence that the head of MI5 itself was in the pay of the Soviet Union. Thatcher’s efforts to quash publication of Wright’s book knew no bounds, but ultimately the Iron Lady was defeated. I have a copy of Wright’s book, signed by him.
According to Wright, “There was good reason to suspect that the Establishment was rotten to the core with Russian agents.” We read that quote on page 71 of this book by Tim Tate, an investigative journalist with 45 years of experience. He has already published 18 books, many of them on espionage.
An internal MI5 committee dubbed FLUENCY was established in 1965 to examine any evidence for the penetration of the security services by spies. It had no actual powers, and MI5 “did not even have a dedicated department tasked with protecting the Security Service itself from traitors within its ranks. It was a symptom,” states Tate, “of the lingering incoherence surrounding Britain’s unaccountable intelligence services.” But the amazing fact is that the very existence of FLUENCY, and its recommendations, was hidden from the Prime Minister himself for 12 years! The reason is even more amazing.
According to Soviets who had defected to the UK, 200 agents were lurking in the intelligence services. Wright formed a team to deal with examining the evidence, much of which had lain dormant for years. Of the 200, 28 proved to be ‘solid cases, “and each suggested that Moscow had a mole, or moles, inside either MI5 or MI6, or both. [MI6 deals with domestic intelligence, MI5 with foreign] As each KGB handler in London was running multiple agents, Wright concluded there were at least 1,000 spies in England. When PM Harold Wilson became aware of all this, all hell broke loose, and it affected UK-US relations. “President Lyndon Johnson dispatched two members of his Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board to London. The resulting report was coruscating. It denounced the ‘inadequate’ size of British counter-espionage branches, the poor organization and lack of resources, and above all savaged Hollis for losing the confidence of both his staff and MI5’s notional masters in Downing Street.”
Hollis was Sir Roger Hollis, Director General of MI5. In 1979, Jonathan Aitken, a Conservative Member of Parliament, met with a retired mole-hunter, Arthur Martin. “The story Martin wanted to tell,” says Tate, “concerned the still-secret investigations into Hollis, his deputy Graham Mitchell and the lengthy aborted attempts to unearth the traitor inside MI5.” Martin said his investigation had been impeded by Hollis, and even more spectacularly, “Hollis and Mitchell between them recruited other Soviet Agents into the Security Services.” Aitken “proposed that Thatcher should make a new statement to the House of Commons, announcing a major reform of the Security Services.” The letter found its way to Sir Robert Armstrong, a key player in this book. He was Thatcher’s Cabinet Secretary, the highest position in the Civil Service.
Enter here a reporter, who had recently worked for the Daily Express newspaper: Chapman Pincher. He claimed to be working on a book about Hollis. Armstrong’s “supple mind,” as Tate slyly describes it, realized this “presented an opportunity too good to pass up.”
Armstrong hatched a “grubby scheme,” the quote used for my headline. Instead of ignoring Pincher, he would be used to engineer “an unprecedented leak of MI5’s most damning secret, which the Security Service had kept from previous prime ministers for almost a decade and hidden entirely from Parliament.”
Tate characterized this grubby scheme as “remarkably naïve. Armstrong grossly underestimated Pincher’s willingness to cause mischief. Nor did the Cabinet Secretary grasp the determination of men like Martin and his former FLUENCY colleagues to bring the truth – at least as they saw it – to light. The leader of that cabal was, in August 1980, languishing in Tasmanian exile: Peter Wright.”
So why did Wright and Martin hide Hollis’s likely treason from the Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson? Because Wright believed what a Soviet defector told him: that the death of former Labour leader Hugh Gaitskill was not from natural causes: he had been poisoned by the KGB. They knew “from reading its files that the Soviet intelligence service would only assassinate a political leader if they had already recruited his successor. This meant that Harold Wilson must be a Russian agent.” Yes, “Wright swallowed it completely: from that day on, he was passionately convinced that Wilson was a spy.” Thus, the very existence of FLUENCY was hidden from Wilson. Wow! It reminds one of Sen. Joseph McCarthy in the U.S., who claimed in the 1950s that President Eisenhower was a Russian agent.
Just seven weeks after PM Thatcher and Robert Armstrong “concocted their scheme to leak” MI5’s scandals, Victor Rothschild (a World War II intelligence officer) hatched his own plan: he would arrange for Wright’s dossier on all MI5’s dirty laundry to be published as a book. This, Tate writes, “was the foundation stone for all that would follow in the Spycatcher saga.”
The following hundred pages of the book go into great detail about the 1986 trial proceedings in Australia, where Thatcher was determined Wright’s book could not be published. She had control over its UK publication, but Australia was another matter. Armstrong himself had to testify, and his reputation was shredded there by the prosecutor. His use of the “dark arts” of the Civil Service – obfuscation, circumlocution and prevarication – were no match for lawyer Malcolm Turnbull, a hero figure in Tate’s retelling of the trial. The forensics of the case are compellingly told, as is the subsequent world-wide publication of Wright’s book. Despite all this, many of the Spycatcher files “are still locked in government vaults.”
In 2021, Aitken surmised the files contain “some bad-ish stuff on Armstrong and Thatcher.” Tate’s take on it is that the UK government wants “to silence Peter Wright, long after his death” which happened in 1995. Whatever the reason, this fascinating, well-written, and compelling book by Tate is a must-read for anyone interested in spycraft, and also the Thatcher years.
The book is complete with 43 pages of Notes so that one can access original sources, and the Index is also very fine. There are 8 pages of glossy plates, with 2 photos in colour.
Image: Harold Wilson in 1975
To Catch a Spy: How the Spycatcher Affair brought MI5 in from the Cold, is by Icon Books in London. It lists for 25 pounds (about $30).