Peter Wright, son of a long-wave radio pioneer, was a scientist with a talent for improvisation who flourished in the unstructured environment of the Admiralty Research Laboratory during the Second World War. He came to the attention of intelligence agencies on both sides of the Atlantic in 1949, when, as a navy scientist attached to the Marconi Company, he revealed the workings of ‘The Thing’ – a microwave-activated listening device embedded in a replica of the Great Seal of the United States that had been presented to the US ambassador in Moscow by the Young Pioneer organisation of the Soviet Union. 

Recruited to the UK’s internal security service, MI5, as its first scientific officer in 1955, Wright helped develop techniques of electronic intelligence that proved useful both at home and abroad. These included the penetration of cipher machines through acoustic cryptanalysis (Operation ENGULF) and the remote detection of radio receivers used by Soviet spies (Operation RAFTER). Another of Wright’s projects, Operation STOCKADE, enabled MI5 and GCHQ to read the cipher messages that passed through the French embassy in London when the UK’s membership of the EEC was first mooted in the early 1960s.

To Wright’s disappointment, these technical advances did not translate into decisive operational successes against the Soviet Union during the late 1950s and early 1960s. He began to suspect that someone at the top of MI5 was tipping the Soviets off – an alarming but not entirely fanciful hypothesis, given the MI6 agent Kim Philby’s defection to the USSR in 1963 and the suggestion by KGB defector Anatoliy Golitsyn in 1961 that Philby and his fellow traitors Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess were part of a ‘Ring of Five’.

Wright was appointed in 1964 to chair the FLUENCY Committee, a joint MI5 and MI6 working group tasked with unearthing Soviet infiltrators within the intelligence agencies. Although an enthusiastic witchfinder, he proved less adept at negotiating the wilderness of mirrors than the world of electronic surveillance. His investigation into MI5’s director general Roger Hollis ended inconclusively in 1971 and has been dismissed by Christopher Andrew, official historian of MI5, as misconceived. Wright retired to rural poverty in Tasmania, disillusioned by what he saw as Establishment cover-ups and angered by the failure of MI5 to pay him his full pension.

Revenge was served cold, in the form of Wright’s memoir Spycatcher – a pacey account of how, in Wright’s words (or those of his co-author Paul Greengrass), ‘we bugged and burgled our way across London at the State’s behest, while pompous bowler-hatted civil servants in Whitehall pretended to look the other way’. Spycatcher not only spilled the beans on Wright’s technical triumphs but also rehearsed his case against Hollis. Wright claimed to have identified ‘dead or alive, nearly forty probable spies’. Further charges against MI5 were thrown in, including that a group of some thirty officers had plotted to discredit and destroy Harold Wilson’s last government. Although Wright partially retreated from this claim in a later interview, it chimed with other allegations and seemed credible to Wilson himself, if not to his biographers. 

The first part of Tim Tate’s narrative is an account of Wright’s years at MI5. But the main focus of the book is on what followed – the desperate attempts by the British government, under the direction of Margaret Thatcher and her attorney general, Michael Havers, to use the law to prevent the publication of Spycatcher. That strategy was understandable, but its inherent difficulties and bungled execution led the government not only to defeat but also to mockery. It was remarkably counterproductive as well: Wright’s publishers had hoped for sales of twenty thousand, but with the help of the publicity from litigation in several jurisdictions, almost four million copies of Spycatcher were eventually sold across the world.

Wright had undoubtedly betrayed his lifelong duty of confidence to MI5, but he could not be charged under the Official Secrets Act unless he returned to the UK. A civil injunction to restrain publication would have to be sought in Australia, where, the British government learned in 1985, Heinemann intended to publish the book. This required proof that publication would damage the Australian national interest – a high bar, which the British government raised further by the legal gambit of inviting the court to assume, for the purposes of litigation, that everything in Spycatcher was true.

Three years of litigation in Sydney and Canberra ended in humiliating failure. Wright’s young and wigless advocate, Malcolm Turnbull, a future prime minister of Australia, skilfully exposed the hypocrisy of the intelligence agencies, which had not only been inactive in the face of other revelations but also previously fed some of the material in Wright’s book to favoured journalists, notably Chapman Pincher. Well-worn caricatures of the British Establishment were confirmed when Robert Armstrong, the cabinet secretary, spoke in the witness box of being ‘economical with the truth’, his elegant allusion to Edmund Burke translating for all but the most sophisticated observers into an admission of perfidy. Congenital secrecy was up against open justice, English stiffness against Australian irreverence, national borders against a globalising information landscape. In such a scenario, suggests Tate, there could be only one winner. So it turned out when the High Court of Australia dismissed the British government’s final appeal in 1988.

Things went little better in England. As the case in Australia was getting underway, the government obtained injunctions preventing British newspapers from reporting the book’s contents. Attempts to maintain such injunctions were soon rendered ludicrous by the ability to buy Spycatcher elsewhere in the world – notably the United States, where the First Amendment precluded any attempt at prior restraint. The matter eventually came before the House of Lords. The government took some comfort from the Law Lords’ excoriation of Wright for his ‘heinous treachery’ and from the confirmation that those publishing material in breach of confidence were liable to account for their profits – one reason, no doubt, why indiscreet memoirs written by UK intelligence officers have been rare in recent years. But these were isolated triumphs. A final ignominy was suffered in 1991 before the European Court of Human Rights at the hands of the Sunday Times and its then editor, Andrew Neil. 

By this stage, the plates had already begun to shift. MI5 was given legal status in 1989 (though Tate overstates the significance of the Spycatcher episode in precipitating this long-awaited change, which had been rendered inevitable by unrelated court judgements). A new Official Secrets Act was passed in 1989 and remains in force. Intelligence agencies are now closely scrutinised by both legislators and judges – thankfully so, in an age of conspiracy theories that make Wright’s wilder flights of fancy look modest indeed.

Yet the instinct for unnecessary secrecy has not been banished, and may never be. Tate complains that Cabinet Office and prime ministerial files on the Spycatcher affair remain under lock and key, although access to them has been given to more sympathetic writers. Tate’s otherwise impressive and well-sourced account could only have been improved by access to this material, which is likely to offer insights into the pressures operating on government. Selective control of official records was one of the causes of the Spycatcher debacle. It is an outrage to see it perpetuated today.