| Spycatcher | |
|---|---|
| Author(s) | Peter Wright (with Paul Greengrass) |
| Language | English |
| Subject(s) | Espionage |
| Publisher | Heinemann (Australia) Penguin Viking (USA) |
| Publication date | 31 July 1987 |
| Pages | 392 |
| ISBN | 0-670-82055-5 |
| OCLC Number | 17234291 |
| Dewey Decimal | 327.1/2/0924 B 19 |
| LC Classification | UB271.G72 W758 1987 |
Spycatcher: The Candid Autobiography of a Senior Intelligence Officer (also Spycatcher), is a book written by Peter Wright, former MI5 officer and Assistant Director, and co-author Paul Greengrass. It was published first in Australia. Its allegations proved scandalous on publication, but more so because the British Government attempted to ban it, ensuring its profit and notoriety.[1]
Contents |
Spycatcher details the author’s work seeking to discover a Soviet mole in MI5, and that the said mole was Roger Hollis — a former MI5 Director General; it also describes people who might have or might not have been the mole; and renders a history of MI5 by chronicling its principal officers, from the 1930s to his time in service.
Moreover, Spycatcher tells of the MI6 plot to assassinate President Nasser during the Suez Crisis; of joint MI5-CIA plotting against left-wing British Prime Minister Harold Wilson (secretly accused of being a KGB agent by the Soviet defector Anatoliy Golitsyn); and of MI5’s eavesdropping on high-level Commonwealth conferences.
Wright examines the techniques of intelligence services, exposes their ethics (speculative until that time), notably their 11th Commandment: Thou shalt not get caught, and explains many MI5 electronic technologies (some of which he developed), for instance allowing clever spying into rooms, and identifying the frequency that a superhet receiver is tuned to. In the afterword, he states that writing Spycatcher was motivated principally to recuperate pension income lost when the British government ruled his pension un-transferable for earlier work in GCHQ, a ruling that severely reduced his pension.
Wright wrote Spycatcher upon retiring from MI5 and while residing in Tasmania. He first attempted publication in 1985.[2] The British government immediately acted to ban Spycatcher in the UK. Since the ruling was obtained in an English court, however, the book continued to be available legally in Scotland, as well as overseas. It also attempted halting the book's Australian publication, but lost that action in 1987; it appealed but again lost in June 1988.[3]
English newspapers attempting proper reportage of Spycatcher's principal allegations were served gag orders; on persisting, they were tried for contempt of court, although the charges were eventually dropped. Throughout all this, the book continued to be sold in Scotland; moreover, Scottish newspapers were not subject to any English gag order, and continued to report on the affair. Inevitably the British government's lack of preparation and knowledge of the legal differences between different countries within the UK weakened its standing in the case. Quantities of the book easily reached English purchasers from Scotland, while other copies were smuggled into England from Australia and elsewhere. A notable television report at the time featured a reporter flying to Australia, then flying back into England with ten copies of the book which he declared to Heathrow airport's customs officers. After some discussion, he was allowed to continue his carriage of the books into England, as they had been given no specific instructions to confiscate them.
In mid-1987, a High Court judge lifted the ban on English newspaper reportage on the book, but, in late July, the Law Lords again barred reportage of Wright's allegations.[4][5] Eventually, in 1988, the book was cleared for legitimate sale when the Law Lords acknowledged that overseas publication meant it contained no secrets.[2] 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 own newspapers.[6][7] The British Government’s legal cost were estimated at £250,000 in 1987.[3]
The Daily Mirror published upside-down photographs of the three Law Lords, with the caption 'YOU FOOLS'.[1] British editions of The Economist ran a blank page with a boxed explanation that
"In all but one country, our readers have on this page a review of 'Spycatcher,' a book by an ex-M.I.5 man, Peter Wright. The exception is Britain, where the book, and comment on it, have been banned. For our 420,000 readers there, this page is blank - and the law is an ass."[1][8]
Malcolm Turnbull, later a minister in the (conservative) Australian Liberal Government and then in September 2008 Opposition Leader, was the lawyer who overcame the British government's suppression orders against Spycatcher. The book has sold more than two million copies.[2] In 1995, Wright died a millionaire from profits of his book.[9]
The concepts and use of Public Key Infrastructure were discovered by James H. Ellis and British GCHQ scientists in 1969. After the re-discovery and commercial use of PKI by Rivest, Shamir, Diffie and others, the British government considered releasing the records of GCHQ's successes in this field. However, the untimely publication of Spycatcher meant that the government once again issued a gag order and full details of GCHQ achievement were never revealed. Richard Walton from GCHQ later said "It was a time when the government security market was expanding beyond the traditional military and diplomatic customer, and we needed to capture the confidence of those who did not traditionally deal with us. We were in the middle of Thatcherism, and we were trying to counter a sort of 'government is bad, private is good' ethos. So, we had the intention of publishing a paper, but that idea was scuppered by that blighter Peter Wright, who wrote Spycatcher."[10]
The primary case around which Spycatcher is based, that the Director General of MI5 - Roger Hollis - was a Russian spy, is brought up-to-date by Chapman, Pincher (2009), Treachery: Betrayals, Blunders, and Cover-ups: Six Decades of Espionage Against America and Great Britain. New York: Random House. ISBN 978-1-4000-6807-4. Updated edition published in the UK 2011 by Mainstream. ISBN 978-1-8459-6769-7.