To Catch a Spy E-Book

Tim Tate

• Herausgeber: Icon Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 719

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

The Spycatcher affair remains one of the most intriguing moments in the history of British intelligence and a pivotal point in the public's relationship with the murky world of espionage and security. It lifted the lid on alleged Soviet infiltration of British services and revealed a culture of law-breaking, bugging and burgling. But how much do we know about the story behind the scandal? In To Catch a Spy, Tim Tate reveals the astonishing true story of the British government's attempts to silence whistleblower Peter Wright and hide the truth about Britain's intelligence services and political elites. It's a story of state-sanctioned cover-up plots; of the government lying to Parliament and courts around the world; and of stories leaked with the intention to mislead and deceive. This is a tale of high treason and low farce. Drawing on thousands of pages of previously unpublished court transcripts, the contents of secret British government files, and original interviews with many of the key players in the Spycatcher trials, it draws back the curtain on a hidden world. A world where spies, politicians and Britain's most senior civil servants conspired to ride roughshod over the law, prevented the public from hearing about their actions and mounted a cynical conspiracy to deceive the world. It is the story of Peter Wright's ruthless and often lawless obsession to uncover Russian spies, both real and imagined, his belated determination to reveal the truth and the lengths to which the British government would go to silence him.

Leseprobe

 

 

Published in the UK in 2024 by

Icon Books Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre,

39–41 North Road, London N7 9DP

email: [email protected]

www.iconbooks.com

ISBN: 978-183773-117-6

eBook: 978-183773-118-3

Text copyright © 2024 Tim Tate

The author has asserted his moral rights.

Every effort has been made to contact the copyright holders of the material reproduced in this book. If any have been inadvertently overlooked, the publisher will be pleased to make acknowledgement on future editions if notified.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Typeset by SJmagic DESIGN SERVICES, India

Printed and bound in the UK

DEDICATION

To Howard and Annie Barlow, for six decades of friendship

‘Old wood is best to burn, old wine to drink, old friends to trust, and old authors to read.’

(Francis Bacon, philosopher and statesman; 1561-1626)

 

 

 

‘If your Snark be a Snark …

You may seek it with thimbles—and seek it with care;

You may hunt it with forks and hope

You may threaten its life with a railway share

You may charm it with smiles and soap …

‘But oh, beamish nephew, beware of the day,

If your Snark be a Boojum! For then

You will softly and suddenly vanish away

And never be met with again.’

Lewis Carroll: The Hunting of the Snark: An Agony in Eight Fits, 1876

CONTENTS

Prelude

Introduction

1.Sui Generis

2.Special Facilities

3.Penetration

4.1963

5.Confessions

6.Blunt

7.DRAT

8.‘Norman John Worthington’

9.Rothschild

10.Exposed

11.Plots

12.Pincher

13.Who Is Talking?

14.Out in the Open

15.Dirty Tricks

16.Hubris

17.Turnbull

18.Charades

19.Economical with the Truth

20.The Havers Conundrum

21.Smears

22.The Spycatcher

23.Judgments

24.Contempt

25.Farce

26.Losses

Epilogue: Forty Years Later

Author’s Note

Acknowledgements

Selected Bibliography

Endnotes

PRELUDE

Tuesday, 18 November 1986Supreme Court of New South Wales, Sydney

‘What is the difference between a misleading impression and a lie?

‘A lie is a straight untruth. A misleading impression is being economical with the truth.’

SIR ROBERT Armstrong, BRITISH GOVERNMENT CABINET SECRETARY

UNITED KINGDOM VS. PETER WRIGHT. CROSS EXAMINATION DAY 1

Sir Robert Temple Armstrong was an accomplished liar.

Over the course of a gilded career in Whitehall he had trekked through the foothills of fudge and ambiguity, climbed beyond the base camps of prevarication and obfuscation, before conquering the chilly peaks of circumlocution and periphrasis. He had ascended, seemingly effortlessly, through the senior ranks of Britain’s politely cut-throat Civil Service and garnered its most coveted honours. With a knighthood and the insignias of the Royal Order of the Bath and the Royal Victorian Order burnishing his entry in Who’s Who, Armstrong had been consigliere to four prime ministers and their conduit to the officially non-existent spy services MI5 and MI6. Now, aged 59 and with promised sinecures and a handsomely remunerated retirement in prospect, he served as both Cabinet Secretary to Margaret Thatcher and her chief advisor on intelligence matters; for good measure he combined these roles with the responsibilities of head of the Civil Service.

Sir Robert enjoyed the exercise of power, and took for granted that his integrity was, by virtue of his position, unimpeachable; his words, when whispered in the ears of ministers and fellow mandarins, or delivered on paper in the stately Victorian surroundings of England’s courts, were received with the respect traditionally accorded to tablets of stone.

And yet here he was, in the drab surroundings of a drearily modern courtroom in an unpleasantly hot city halfway across the world, facing an impertinent young Australian lawyer – a fellow who didn’t even have the decency to wear the traditional horsehair wig – ruthlessly questioning him into a corner, and a judge who seemed to view him as an unwelcome reincarnation of bygone colonial governance. Sir Robert Armstrong shifted uncomfortably in the witness chair and wondered how it had all come to this.

His week had not begun well. When he arrived at Heathrow Airport for the long flight to Sydney, a press photographer had approached him outside the terminal’s VIP suite, and asked permission to capture the historic moment. Unaccustomed to such impudence, the Cabinet Secretary to Her Majesty’s Government promptly lashed out with his briefcase, knocking the unfortunate snapper to the floor and smashing his camera. Now, six days later, an unruly phalanx of reporters occupied the court press benches and had the bad form to snigger as he gave his carefully circuitous evidence.

Sir Robert hadn’t wanted to come to Australia in the first place. Indeed, he had been shocked to discover that, as the British government’s chosen representative, the court would insist on him testifying in person. He had also been warned by the Attorney General, in whose name the attempt to suppress Peter Wright’s memoirs was officially launched, that the entire case rested on distinctly shaky legal foundations.

The cross-examination was fierce and unforgiving. Question followed relentless question. And this was only day one: an indefinite succession of further days of torment in the witness box stretched ahead. Embarrassment would be heaped upon discomfort, and each afternoon when the court adjourned, the Cabinet Secretary faced the lengthy trudge back to his temporary office; here he would face a difficult debriefing from his mistress and her staff in Downing Street – all of whom were just starting their days, but who would already have pored over the morning’s press coverage.

Newspaper and television reports of that afternoon’s proceedings would, Armstrong knew, be universally hostile. The representative of Her Majesty’s Government – the most senior official in London – had been accused of dishonesty. His deliciously clever bon mot about ‘being economical with the truth’ – a witticism that would have earned patrician praise inside Whitehall – had been greeted here with naked hostility. He wondered what story he could conjure up to explain the unfolding disaster.

If Sir Robert Armstrong had been more honest – not least with himself – he would have reflected that the argument he was making in support of the plea for an injunction – that intelligence officers owed a lifelong and never-broken duty of silence to the Crown – had been flouted whenever it suited the government’s interests. Both MI5 and MI6 routinely fed unattributable stories to newspapers, and he, himself, had been the instigator of an earlier scheme to leak top-secret information to a ‘tame’ journalist – who had then written a book with Peter Wright.

The files on that conspiracy – a tawdry plot involving the Prime Minister, MI5 and a former Attorney General – were, of course, safely under lock and key inside the Cabinet Office; yet somehow Wright’s lawyer had discovered enough of their import to challenge him. Armstrong decided there was only one course of action open to him: he would deny everything and lie, repeatedly and on oath, to the court for as long as it took to bury the story.

It was a strategy doomed to failure and, had he troubled to search his memory, Sir Robert would have known it. Peter Wright was no ordinary intelligence officer: for twenty years he had been MI5’s most senior ‘molehunter’, a man whose life was entirely devoted to sniffing out traitors – real or imagined – working on behalf of the Soviet Union. And if anyone in the British government should have realised the man’s unquenchable obsessions, it was Sir Robert Armstrong. A decade earlier Wright had delivered a lengthy report on Russian penetration to Number 10; Armstrong – then the Prime Minister’s Principal Private Secretary – had praised its relentless thoroughness.

Now he faced the same grim-faced old man glaring at him across the court. There had never been any real doubt about the lengths to which Peter Wright would go to catch a spy; the only question remaining was how far Her Majesty’s Government would go to silence him.

INTRODUCTION

Between 1985 and 1991, the British government fought a succession of vastly expensive, hugely damaging and ultimately unsuccessful battles in courts across the world to prevent a retired spy from publishing his memoirs.

Peter Wright, a senior Security Service officer for more than twenty years, had been at the centre of many of the most damaging intelligence scandals of the 1950s and 1960s. He had been MI5’s chief counter-espionage officer, leading its efforts to catch Kim Philby, to uncover Soviet penetration of Britain’s twin intelligence agencies, MI5 and MI6, and to root out the long tentacles of Moscow’s infamous ‘Ring of Five’ spies, embedded in the heart of the British Establishment.

Wright’s book, Spycatcher, was a very personal account of his own obsessive and relentless hunt for suspected Russian ‘moles’ inside his own Service, including a decade-long secret investigation into the former head of MI5, Sir Roger Hollis. But it was also a form of confessional: a platform for him to acknowledge his own role in MI5’s widespread criminality on behalf of the Crown.

Because the Security Service did not officially exist, and operated outside any legal framework, Wright and his colleagues were free to indulge in wholesale law-breaking, ‘bugging and burgling’ offices, homes and foreign embassies across London.

Peter Wright was an unlikely whistleblower. Virulently right-wing and rabidly anti-communist, he believed – on scant evidence – that British trade union leaders and Labour politicians were either paid Soviet spies or, at the very least, agents of influence for Moscow. Encouraged by elements of the CIA, he had fed top-secret MI5 monitoring of these supposed traitors to leading industrialists and Britain’s conservative press. He had also led an extraordinary – and entirely illegal – plot by a cabal of rogue intelligence officers to blackmail Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson and force him into resigning.

Wright’s realisation that MI5 was out of control and needed to be reined in had been reluctant and belated, but by the time he retired to run a horse stud farm in Australia in 1976, he was ultimately convinced that writing an account of his experiences was his patriotic duty. From the outset, Spycatcher was intended to drag Britain’s shady and unaccountable intelligence services into the light of a modern democracy.

The attempts by Margaret Thatcher’s government to block the book in London, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, Brussels and Strasbourg captured unprecedented global attention; day after day, month after month, newspapers across the world splashed the story on their front pages.

The trials were all in civil, not criminal, courts. Because Wright lived in Tasmania, he was beyond the reach of Britain’s punitive Official Secrets Act. Instead, Her Majesty’s Government applied for injunctions to prevent publication of Spycatcher, first in the Supreme Court of New South Wales, then in country after country across the globe. Parallel proceedings in London courts yielded draconian injunctions against national newspapers and individual journalists as the international cases unfolded.

In Britain, and throughout the world, the affair was viewed as both a chilling attempt to hide from the British public the truth about its intelligence services and political elites, and an absurd farce. The government argued that former spies had a lifelong and unbreakable duty to keep silent, yet it had regularly sanctioned semi-official press briefings by the Security Service. It had also allowed retired MI5 Director General Sir Percy Sillitoe and its in-house traitor Anthony Blunt to write their own memoirs, and had taken no action against Wright himself when he gave a lengthy television interview in 1984.

To justify this double-standard, the British government twisted itself into legal and political knots. Wright’s allegations of Soviet penetration of MI5, and of MI5’s habitual law-breaking, were simultaneously admitted as true for the purposes of the Australian trial but pronounced false in the House of Commons. When, at the start of the hearings in Sydney, Sir Robert Armstrong was cornered in the witness box and forced to confess that he had been ‘economical with the truth’ while giving evidence on oath, the government’s global reputation was shredded.

The international press and media covered the trials with a mixture of condemnation and incredulity. Downing Street’s increasingly desperate contortions seemed to combine a disturbing assault on the public’s right to know what its intelligence services had been doing, with an absurdist charade that could have stepped from the libretto of a Gilbert and Sullivan comic opera or the pages of Alice in Wonderland.

When an American edition of Spycatcher was released in the middle of the trials – US courts were beyond the reach of British government lawyers – more than a million copies were sold within a few weeks; many of them were exported to London. Yet although the book was banned in Britain, and public libraries were forced to remove imported copies from their shelves, there was no action taken against anyone selling them here.

Simultaneously, while choleric English judges granted injunctions prohibiting the domestic media from publishing any reference to the book’s contents – even banning newspaper reports of proceedings in open court in Australia – the British government was contractually obliged to distribute official journals containing extracts of Spycatcher that had been read out in the European Parliament.

And across Britain, while police forces made no attempt to interfere with numerous public recitals of extracts from Wright’s memoirs, former Prime Minister Edward Heath was warned he faced prosecution if he read Spycatcher for himself – though he would be safe from arrest should he instruct his housekeeper to read it to him. Not since the equally doomed bid to ban publication of Lady Chatterley’s Lover more than two decades earlier had the attempted suppression of a book generated such ridicule and denunciation.

The Spycatcher trials cost taxpayers at least £3 million – equivalent to £8 million today – all of which ended in defeat for the British government. Wright’s book became an international blockbuster, selling almost four million copies worldwide; his publishers, and later gagged newspapers, were awarded substantial damages and costs. The affair severely damaged Britain’s international reputation and had a devastating effect on morale inside the Security Service. Ultimately, far from protecting MI5 from scrutiny, the doomed litigation helped bring the intelligence services under parliamentary oversight for the first time.

But the secret history of Spycatcher, Peter Wright and the British government’s quixotic crusade to silence him is more sinister than this story of low farce and high treason. Previously unpublished evidence from the Australian trials, together with official files suppressed for more than 35 years, have revealed an extraordinary plot by MI5 and the Thatcher administration to conceal Britain’s most damaging espionage failures and scandals.

The Security Service was determined to cover up the truth about Soviet moles in its ranks, to conceal its habitual domestic law breaking and to prevent any democratic supervision of its actions. It persuaded Margaret Thatcher to lie on its behalf to Parliament; and at its behest, the Prime Minister and the Cabinet Secretary conspired to defuse the ticking time bomb of the investigation into Sir Roger Hollis by leaking top-secret information to a tame journalist and intelligence service asset, Chapman Pincher.

He, with official approval and the backing of Lord Victor Rothschild, himself a former spy, used this material to publish a book about the case in 1981. And Pincher’s secret co-author – as the British government knew – was Peter Wright.

It was to protect this tawdry scheme and to cover up MI5’s scandals that Sir Robert Armstrong, Cabinet Secretary and Britain’s most senior civil servant, was sent to lie, on oath, in the Spycatcher trials around the world.

It was a cynical conspiracy to deceive courts, judges and Parliament, and one that revealed the lengths to which the British government would go to silence a troublesome former spy. All that stood in its way was an elderly, difficult and obsessive man and his determination finally to expose the truth.

1. SUI GENERIS

‘Security Service … work very often involves transgressing propriety or the law’

JOHN CUCKNEY, MI5TRAINING OFFICER, 1955

On a cool, dull day in June 1955 a tall and intense figure strode through the warren of streets between Park Lane and Piccadilly in the heart of London’s West End. His purposeful gait, as he marched through Mayfair, was the result of a long-awaited summons.

Peter Maurice Wright was 39. A self-taught but often innovative scientist, he was impatient, unruly and unashamedly ambitious. He had toiled for years in the sluggish backwaters of the Admiralty’s research divisions, developing anti-submarine equipment. To his mind, at least, his talents were disappointingly underappreciated. True, he had earned some kudos from both British and American intelligence services for unravelling the mysteries of Soviet wireless surveillance technology, but thus far his career had been a frustrating struggle for recognition.

Now, at last, his abilities were finally being acknowledged. Peter Wright was about to join the most famous spy service that didn’t – officially – exist.

Halfway down Curzon Street was an anonymous six-storey building. There was no brass nameplate on the red-brick walls to identify who, or what, occupied the premises, but the address and its purpose was an open secret.

For eight years Leconfield House had been the headquarters of the Security Service, and bus conductors habitually announced to passengers on London’s red double-deckers rumbling along Park Lane that the next stop was ‘Curzon Street and MI5’.1

Peter Wright was ushered through the notional security of a wood- and glass-panelled alcove by a uniformed guard, before being escorted into an old-fashioned lift, operated by an equally archaic brass lever. The contraption slowly wheezed him to the fifth floor, where he was guided through a maze of shabby corridors and into MI5’s inner sanctum: the office of the Director General, Sir Dick Goldsmith White.

For the next twenty minutes, White grilled Wright about the newly created role for which he was being proposed. MI5 had never employed an in-house scientist, and Britain’s chief spymaster remained sceptical of the need for one, let alone what benefits this unconventional candidate might offer for the defence of the realm. ‘I’m not sure we need an animal like you in the Service,’ he mused. ‘But if you are prepared to give it a try, so are we.’2

Before dismissing Wright to the bowels of the building for the initial induction process, White stressed the unique and ambiguous position of the Security Service: it was not, he emphasised, like any other department of state.

MI5 was ‘unacknowledged’ by the government: its name would never be spoken in Parliament or by ministers, its efforts to defend the country would go unacknowledged in public, and its officers held no official rank. If there was one unshakable article of faith, it was that what transpired within the walls of Leconfield House was never to be revealed outside them.

Yet this fundamental principle of lifelong omertà was – at that very moment – being tested. Within the dusty corridors of Whitehall, a bad-tempered and bitterly fought dispute had been rumbling for a year, and its cause was Dick White’s immediate predecessor as Britain’s chief domestic spy. Sir Percy Sillitoe, the recently retired Director General, intended to publish his memoirs.

The organisation that Peter Wright was set to join was antiquated and barely fit for purpose. By the summer of 1955, MI5 was stranded between the warm glow of fading glories earned during the Second World War and the first harbingers of a much less winnable conflict in the new Cold War with the Soviet Union. That several of these unwelcome heralds turned out to be skeletons emerging from within its own dusty closets rather highlighted the problem.

After a shaky start in 1939, MI5 had enjoyed a good war. During the 1930s it had been allowed to wither on the vine of governmental indifference, budgetary reductions and staff cuts. When war with Germany became inevitable, MI5 was short of funding and personnel, and staff adopted an unconventional approach to solve the urgent need for recruitment. As the newly installed Director General, Sir David Petrie, recorded in an internal report in 1941:

When the war broke out, each officer ‘tore round’ to rope in likely people; when they knew of none themselves, they asked their acquaintances. Occasionally recruits were brought in who knew other ‘possibles’ ... If I am correctly informed, there have been cases in which recruits have been taken on by divisions (or sections) without so much as informing Administration.3

Many of these new – and entirely unvetted – spies were drawn from the traditional intelligence hunting ground of Cambridge University. None had any prior association with espionage or defence, but were appointed on the assumption that they were the intellectual, and often aristocratic, elite of their generation. Two, in particular, would encapsulate the simultaneous strength and weakness of this scattergun policy: Victor Rothschild, glamorous playboy scion of the eponymous international banking family, and his friend Anthony Blunt, an effete expert in art history whom Rothschild recommended to MI5 shortly after he joined the Service.4

Both men spent the next five years inside MI5, only departing, along with Petrie, in the wholesale exodus of its wartime recruits in 1945. But each – for very different reasons – was to become a dominant figure throughout Peter Wright’s career.

Petrie’s replacement was an unpopular choice inside the Security Service. Sir Percy Sillitoe was a career policeman; now 58, he had been chief constable of a succession of forces where he had earned plaudits for introducing the use of radio communication between squad cars and their headquarters, and for breaking the power of Glasgow’s notorious razor gangs in the interwar period. But to the rarified minds of MI5’s senior management – several of whom had unsuccessfully applied for the top job – Sillitoe was a plodding flatfoot whose appointment ‘puts the stamp of the Gestapo on the [Security Service]’ and ‘generally downgrades the office’;5 he had also committed the unpardonable sin of having a very public profile.

Sillitoe had, however, a very powerful backer: Clement Attlee. The Prime Minister, like many in the new post-war Labour government, harboured a lingering distrust of MI5 – a misgiving dating back to the Zinoviev letter scandal two decades earlier.6 Attlee led the charge for his man, and Sillitoe entered the DG’s office on 1 May 1946.

He arrived with little knowledge of the organisation’s structure and, aside from a firm conviction that Soviet communism had infected the gilded generation who had studied at Cambridge and Oxford universities in the 1930s – ‘long haired intellectuals’ as he habitually scorned them7 – even less understanding of what the Security Service should actually do. Additionally, as he admitted on his retirement, from the very beginning he had held an outsider’s distrust of the cloak of secrecy under which the Service sheltered.

In common with the vast majority of the public, I knew very little of the work of MI5 … Since its earliest beginnings MI5 has alternately intrigued and infuriated the public by the aura of ‘hush-hush’ with which it has seemed to be surrounded, and when I joined I found it … extremely difficult to find out precisely what everyone was doing …8

Sillitoe’s bemusement was understandable. Although the Security Service had been at work for more than 30 years, he discovered that there appeared to be no legal basis for its existence and precious little in the way of control over how it operated.

The first – indeed only – official document setting out its purpose and functions had been written six months earlier and, in keeping with Britain’s habitual addiction to secrecy, had never been distributed outside a very narrow circle.9 It was also remarkably short on formal guidance.

The purpose of the Security Service is the Defence of the Realm and nothing else … There is no alternative to giving [the Director General] the widest discretion in the means he uses and the direction in which he applies them – always provided he does not step outside the law.10

The Service’s democratic parentage and its operating budget were equally opaque. Notionally, it was the responsibility of the Home Secretary, while its funds were allocated by the Treasury on the recommendation of a mysterious body known as ‘The Secret Vote Committee’. In practice, the former had little, if any, control over what MI5 got up to, while the latter never actually met.11 Instead, the Director General was expected to calculate the cost of defending the realm and pass his estimate to the Prime Minister, who would – without consulting Parliament – ensure that the requested quantity of taxpayers’ money quietly landed in the Security Service’s bank.

‘I realised,’ Sillitoe recalled, ‘that I had a big job and heavy responsibilities, but I thought I could tackle them adequately with common sense and energy, a fresh outlook on old obstacles and an enterprising approach to new problems.’12

To Sillitoe’s numerous critics, throughout his term as Director General he remained an old-school policeman: ‘vapid and shallow’ was the uncharitable assessment of his deputy and successor, Dick White.13 Yet he brought about the first stirrings of modernisation, establishing a committee to provide scientific advice to the Service; and during his tenure, MI5’s efforts led to the prosecution of three Soviet spies inside the nuclear establishment, the diplomatic service and the army.

If William Marshall and Tony Dewick were small fish, Klaus Fuchs was a sizeable catch. He had worked on both Britain and America’s top-secret wartime projects to develop the atom bomb, passing key documents to his Soviet controller throughout; by any metric, his apprehension was a feather in MI5’s cap. But Sillitoe committed the unforgivable sin of being photographed outside Fuchs’s Old Bailey trial in 1950 and publicly identified as the Director General – a transgression he repeated at London Airport a year later. Once again, the head of Britain’s Security Service allowed himself to be snapped by the press, this time en route to brief the FBI in Washington DC in the wake of the defections of two Foreign Office officials (and Soviet agents), Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean.

In April 1952, as he contemplated his approaching retirement, Sillitoe decided to write and publish his memoirs. These, he explained to a senior Cabinet Office official, would largely cover his years as a policeman but would also feature ‘some concluding chapters about his time in MI5’.14 In doing so, he fired the first shot in a war that would culminate in court in Sydney three decades later.

Sillitoe’s proposal horrified much of Whitehall’s upper echelons. ‘The more I think about this project the more doubtful I feel about it,’ Sir Edward Bridges, head of the Civil Service and a former Cabinet Secretary, wrote to his successor in Downing Street. ‘My doubts are in part instinctive and are a good deal stronger than perhaps I can justify by a process of logical reasoning … [but] to take first of all the question of principle whether a former head of MI5 should be encouraged to write for publication on these sorts of lines at all, I am apprehensive both about the direct effects and about the precedent which will be created … I cannot but think that officers in this or comparable posts should be anonymous; and certainly that they should be entirely silent in public.’15

For the next two years, Sillitoe fought a running battle to prevent the government and MI5 from censoring his book. He was determined to lift the cloak of secrecy under which MI5 shrouded its existence and activities. ‘My position as head [of the Security Service] is fairly well-known and it would create an anticlimax if I were to say nothing about it,’ he complained to Bridges,16 and his manuscript set out details of the Fuchs, Marshall and Dewick cases,17 as well as the hidebound attitudes he encountered inside Leconfield House and Whitehall.

None of this was palatable to the mandarin. Bridges summed up the problem in a last-ditch attempt to block the book. In a memo to Sir Frank Newsham, Permanent Under-Secretary at the Home Office, he foresaw the troubles that would come to plague the British government in the Spycatcher trials: ‘publication will make it infinitely harder to deal with others in the … Service who may wish to embark on undesirable publicity’.18

Four words are missing from the record of this storm in a Whitehall teacup: ‘lifelong duty of confidentiality’. The phrase upon which the government would base its entire case against Peter Wright does not appear at any point in the pages of this voluminous correspondence.

There was a reason for this. Not only did MI5 not officially exist, but even in its spectral form it was not a government department; instead it operated under the archaic and unwritten royal prerogative. Officers who served in it – from the Director General down – owed a duty to the Crown, not to the political administration of the day. As a later Cabinet Secretary would ruefully observe, ‘the Service is in many ways sui generis’19.

That same description matched exactly the man who, in the summer of 1955, was about to become MI5’s first-ever scientific officer.

Peter Wright was a second-generation boffin. He was born in 1916, the son of an engineer theoretically employed by the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company in Chelmsford, Essex. Maurice Wright had joined Marconi four years earlier; fresh from university, he was set to work on improving the techniques of detecting long-range radio signals. But two days before the outbreak of the First World War, while testing an experimental vacuum receiver, Wright Senior found himself listening in to signals from German ships.

Since the focus of the looming conflict was widely anticipated to be a struggle for supremacy between the Royal Navy and the Kaiser’s Imperial fleet, the discovery had urgent potential: Maurice Wright was summoned to meet the head of Naval Intelligence, and in short order Marconi was ordered to release the young engineer to develop his direction-finding device under military supervision.

In 1915 Maurice was dispatched to Norway to test the latest iteration. Norway was then a neutral country, but one which occupied a strategic location in the battle for the seas. British and German spies closely monitored each other’s activities on the coast – which made it impossible for Wright to be given official accreditation; instead he was co-opted into the Secret Intelligence Service – MI6 – and, posing as a commercial traveller dealing in agricultural medicine, for six months operated a clandestine wireless detection station in the attic of a hotel.

While he was there, his son was born, prematurely, at his grandmother’s house in Chesterfield. A Zeppelin bombing raid coincided with Peter Wright’s arrival, preventing him from being taken to hospital for neonatal care; for much of his early childhood the boy had a severe stammer and suffered from rickets, requiring him to wear cumbersome leg irons.

According to Wright family lore, MI6 spirited Maurice out of Norway after German intelligence identified him as a British spy; the escape story he told his son involved a desperate ten-mile hike to the coast, then a hazardous journey across the North Sea on a Royal Navy destroyer.

True or not, it planted a seed in Peter’s youthful imagination, sparking a determination to follow his father into both science and the intelligence services.

After the war, two siblings arrived to join Peter in the Wright household, and Maurice returned to Marconi. At the same time, and with the company’s blessing, Wright Senior continued to work for MI6. The service’s legendary chief, Captain Mansfield Cumming, and Admiral Reggie ‘Blinker’ Hall, the equally celebrated head of Naval Intelligence, were frequent visitors to the family home, further exciting Peter’s youthful espionage ambitions. But it was the lessons learned from his father’s approach to science that resonated most strongly, and which would shape Peter Wright’s character.

My father was an intense, emotional, rather quick-tempered man – more of an artist than an engineer. As early as I can remember he used to take me … onto the open fields above the Essex beaches to teach me the mysteries of wireless. He spent hours explaining valves and crystals and showed me how to delicately turn the dials of a set so that the random static suddenly became a clear signal. He taught me how to make my own experiments.20

In the summer of 1931 Peter passed his school certificate – the then standard educational qualification – and was expected to win a scholarship to Oxford or Cambridge University. But within days his father was made redundant from Marconi and the family finances collapsed; shorn of income and status, Maurice quickly spiralled down into alcoholism. At the age of fifteen, Peter was removed from his private school and told to find a job. For the next three years he worked as a farmhand in Scotland and Cornwall, before scraping together enough money to fund a place at the School of Rural Economy in Oxford, studying the science of food production.

But war was again looming, and in September 1939 the college closed down. Maurice had managed to bring his drinking under control and joined the Royal Naval Scientific Service, analysing intercepted German communications. The head of RNSS, Sir Frederick Brundrett, was an old family friend, and in late 1939 he arranged for Peter Wright to come aboard, working on the urgent problem of ‘degaussing’ British ships to disguise their magnetic field and thus protect them against mines.

There was no manual for this, so Wright and his colleagues invented one. Giant coils of wire were wound round the ships’ hulls, and the makeshift infrastructure was connected to an electrical current. The technique worked; the vessels’ polarity was neutralised, and throughout the war the team ‘degaussed’ everything from battleships to submarines. The experience reinforced the lesson Peter had learned from his father.

The war taught me the value of improvisation, and showed me, too, just how effective operations can be when the men of action listen to young men with a belief in practical inventive science.21

When the war ended Peter Wright took the Scientific Civil Service exams, passing out joint first with a score of 290 from the maximum total of 300. In 1946 he was given a full-time appointment at RNSS, with the rank of principal scientific officer. It was a permanent and well-paid position and, just as importantly for a young man who remembered his family’s financial struggles during the 1930s, it had the benefit of a generous pension scheme.

Wright arrived at RNSS with a sizeable chip on his shoulder; unlike many of the service’s more traditional staff, he had no relevant academic qualifications and bore an ill-concealed contempt for the scientific conservatism of those who did. This, and the lessons taught by his father on the Essex coast, had convinced him that ‘on the big issues the experts are very rarely right’.22

His impatient self-confidence infuriated at least some of his new colleagues. Neville Robinson, a Cambridge graduate who served under Wright from 1947 to 1950, later denounced his boss as ‘an ignorant shit’ and complained that: ‘Nothing Wright touched ever came to anything … He was more of a radio repair man, a kind of ham radio enthusiast, than a physicist with a good grounding in the subject.’23

The head of RNSS was, however, rather more supportive. In 1949, on the orders of Sir Percy Sillitoe, Frederick Brundrett set up an ad-hoc committee to provide MI5 with scientific advice; he chose Peter Wright to be its leading member, deliberately bypassing, according to Wright’s subsequent Australian affidavit, other more qualified scientists.

Brundrett … told Sillitoe he did not need an eminent scientist with an FRS [Fellowship of the Royal Society] to assist the Service with scientific matters. He said ‘you need a young man with a good war who is a problem solver, as opposed to an analytical theorist’.24

The first issue confronting Wright was the antediluvian state of MI5’s technical capabilities. The Security Service had previously been at the forefront of espionage technology; during the Second World War it had become adept at installing then state-of-the-art covert microphones to record discussions between pro-Nazi sympathisers in London,25 as well as bugging the cells of captured German personnel in PoW facilities across the South East.26 But since then it had fallen back into the torpor of the 1930s, just as its Cold War enemies in Moscow were making rapid advances in the new primary battleground of electronic espionage.

Wright was alarmed to find that ‘there was no application or understanding of science’; the sum total of technical services available to British intelligence officers were the Post Office’s Special Investigations Unit and ‘a pretty elementary chemical laboratory for detecting secret writing and developing secret inks. It was almost a schoolboy operation.’27

The most urgent challenge was to upgrade the antiquated surveillance technology. MI5 realised that legions of Soviet spies operated under diplomatic cover inside the Embassy, and their subagents were scattered across London in trade missions and client organisations – to fight the new intelligence war it was vital to eavesdrop on their discussions.

Unfortunately, MI5’s existing microphones were not equal to the task, since they had to be permanently connected to a power source, and once activated could not be switched off. This generated a clear electronic signal – ‘howl round’ – which made the bugs easy to detect in routine sweeps by Russian security staff.

For the next two years, Peter Wright worked for Brundrett, unpaid and in his spare time, to develop a new generation of microphones that required no electrical hardwiring, and which could be activated at will by a radio signal. Then, in March 1951, British and American intelligence discovered that Russia’s scientists had beaten them to the punch.

The British air attaché in Moscow was monitoring a Soviet Air Force radio channel when he overheard conversations between American diplomatic personnel inside the American Embassy coming through the ether. US State Department investigators swept the building and eventually located a telltale signal emanating from the Ambassador’s office; further searching revealed the presence of an entirely new type of microphone, hidden inside the Great Seal of the United States – a substantial wooden carving of the national emblem, gifted to the Embassy by the Kremlin in 1945 – which had been mounted proudly on the wall.

‘The Thing’, as the FBI termed the device, was removed and taken back to Washington DC. For several months US scientists probed and prodded at the microphone, trying without success to discover how it worked.

Finally, they conceded defeat; the Seal and the microphone were shipped to Britain and handed to Peter Wright for analysis. For three months, using homemade detection equipment, he experimented with a wide variety of frequencies; early in 1952, after painstakingly winding his dials up and down the wireless spectrum, just as his father had once shown him, he found the magic number of megahertz. The microphone suddenly ‘illuminated’ and emitted a clearly detectable signal.

MI5 was delighted. Using ‘The Thing’ as a prototype, British intelligence would now be able develop its own radio-controlled microphones; Wright was duly tasked with producing a prototype. There was, however, a problem. MI5 could provide none of the necessary funding: the budgetary inflexibility of the Secret Vote – and the impossibility of asking Parliament to authorise extra funds in an ‘open’ vote for an organisation which didn’t officially exist – meant that there was no money to pay for the unanticipated work.

Instead, Wright was instructed to go, cap in hand, to his employers and plead with the Admiralty to stump up the cash. ‘This,’ he later recalled, ‘was my initiation into the bizarre method of handling Intelligence Services finance … Instead of having resources adequate for their technical requirements, [they] were forced to spend most of the post-war period begging from the increasingly reluctant Armed Services.’28

Happily, the Admiralty proved supportive, paying for a purpose-built workshop inside Marconi’s laboratory building and seconding six Navy scientists to work under Wright’s direction. The project was assigned a codename – SATYR – and over the next eighteen months the team assembled a functioning prototype; by the autumn of 1953 it was ready.

SATYR Mark 1 fitted inside a small suitcase. In addition to the main set’s collection of valves and dials, two aerials disguised as ordinary umbrellas housed the transmitter and receiver. Wright brought the apparatus to Leconfield House and positioned the umbrellas in the Director General’s office, then took the suitcase to a safe house nearby and flicked the switch. Seconds later, conversation from inside MI5 came through loud and clear.

The success of SATYR – and the lack of any in-house scientist – prompted the Security Service to call repeatedly on Wright’s services over the next six months; by the spring of 1954 he was spending two days a week inside Leconfield House, and MI5’s senior management realised they needed a full-time advisor on technical surveillance problems.

Characteristically, the approach to Wright was made over a generous lunch of quail eggs in the dining room of an exclusive Pall Mall club – and, equally typically, it came with a significant catch.

Custom and precedent precluded Whitehall departments from poaching each other’s staff: even though MI5 did not officially exist, the time-honoured rule apparently applied, and Wright was warned that to join the Service as its first-ever scientific advisor he would need to resign from RNSS and spend a six-month ‘rustication’ period in private industry. That, in itself, was no great problem, since Marconi offered to house him for the duration of his enforced ‘purdah’. But the arrangement would have a distinct financial impact: not only was his annual salary to be much reduced, but he would also have to forgo all fourteen years of his Civil Service pension contributions. As he later recalled:

The MI5 people were adamant that these … could not be transferred over to MI5 where … pensions were … entirely discretionary. They said that I would not be disadvantaged, however, because they would make up any difference themselves.29

Reassured by this unwritten and entirely unenforceable promise, Peter Wright succumbed to the allure of working officially for the intelligence services, and in June 1955 he duly presented himself at Leconfield House. After the unexpectedly lukewarm discussion with Director General Sir Dick White, he was handed over to the officer tasked with his induction.

By chance, his arrival coincided with the long-delayed publication of Sir Percy Sillitoe’s troublesome memoirs. The cover of Cloak Without Dagger boldly identified the author as the ‘former Director General of MI5’, and included a pointed foreword by Clement Attlee, who fired a well-aimed potshot at the ‘obligations of secrecy’ which had prevented Sillitoe from revealing more of his experiences at the head of the Security Service.30 Nonetheless, the book contained many more details of his exploits than the Whitehall’s guardians of official omertà believed they had, reluctantly, sanctioned. ‘The manuscript goes beyond what you told him he could be permitted to include,’ Sir Edward Bridges complained to the Home Office.31

Against this backdrop, it was hardly surprising that MI5’s formal letter inviting Peter Wright to join the Service contained no injunction against talking about his new employers. On 11 July he was offered a ‘temporary appointment as a Senior Principal Scientific Officer … at a salary of £1,700 p.a.’. This less than princely sum – equivalent to £36,000 today – was to rise by modest increments of £75 for each of the three years he was to be on probation, pending confirmation of permanent employment.32 Wright accepted the offer three days later, and on 1 September 1955 reported for duty at Leconfield House.

One of his first tasks was to sign a single-page document confirming that he had read, and agreed to be bound by, the Official Secrets Acts of 1911 and 1920.33 However, both Acts were hopelessly outdated and so broadly drawn as to be meaningless. The 1911 version, passed amid a pre-First World War public panic over alleged German spies, focused primarily on impeding international espionage, but included a second ‘catch-all’ section which made it an offence to disclose any official information – no matter how trivial – without government authority.34 Wright understood that this solitary document was routine bureaucratic boilerplate, to be ignored as needed. ‘I was never referred to any … confidentiality obligation other than the OSA [Official Secrets Act],’ he would later testify. ‘Often I discussed classified matters with non-vetted people in the course of my work.’35

Later that first day, his training officer bluntly laid out the realities of working for the Security Service. John Cuckney36 warned Wright that his position rested on remarkably shaky foundations. He, as an individual officer, had no rights – ‘I was told, “You can be instantly sacked without any reasons”’37 – nor did MI5 as an organisation have any legal standing: ‘the Security Service cannot have the normal status of a Whitehall Department because its work very often involves transgressing propriety or the law’.38

Ultimately, there was one – and only one – immutable rule. MI5 operated on the premise of the Eleventh Commandment: ‘Thou shalt not get caught’.39

2. SPECIAL FACILITIES

‘We knew we were breaking the law and we were told that if we were caught “You’re on your own”.’

PETER WRIGHT AFFIDAVIT: CONFIDENTIAL MATERIAL, NOVEMBER 1986

Leslie Jagger was ‘a burglar of genius’.

More specifically, he was MI5’s resident master of the dark arts of housebreaking, lock picking and covert microphone installation. After a career in the Army, during which he rose to the rank of sergeant major in the Rifle Brigade, Jagger was recruited to provide the Security Service with the means and equipment for wholesale law-breaking.

At some point during the Second World War, he set up shop in the basement of Leconfield House.1 His presence there was entirely secret: there is no public record of his appointment and his activities were controlled by nothing more tangible than whatever MI5’s senior officers deemed expedient.

As the end of the war approached, Anthony Eden, then Foreign Secretary, tasked veteran civil servant Sir Samuel Findlater Stewart2 to ‘enquire into the future constitution and scope of the Security Service’.

Since his report, delivered in November 1945, would provide the new Labour government with the first formal peacetime inquiry into MI5’s existence and activities, it might have offered an opportunity to put the work of Britain’s domestic spies on some form of legitimate basis. It failed to do so.

Although the report noted that the wartime use of covert microphones, telephone taps and mail interception – ‘special powers’ as it coyly described the tactics – was ‘essential if the Security Service is to carry out its responsibilities effectively’, other than recommending ministerial authorisation for microphone installation and a brisk injunction that the Director General should ensure Security Service staff did not ‘step outside the law’, Findlater Stewart found no space in his closely typed 33 pages to consider how these conflicting obligations could be met.3

Unsurprisingly, therefore, when Prime Minister Clement Attlee sent a written ‘directive’ to his hand-picked new Director General, it gave Sillitoe no instruction on the need to operate legally. Instead, it stated only that he was to ‘take special care that the work of the Security Service is strictly limited to what is necessary’ for the defence of the realm, and to ensure that he kept his organisation ‘absolutely free from any political bias or influence … you will impress on your staff that they have no connection whatever with any matters of a Party political character and that they must be scrupulous to avoid any action which could be so misconstrued’.4

Six years later, when Conservative Home Secretary Sir David Maxwell Fife issued a marginally updated version, it too made no mention of acting within the law of the land.5

The legality – or otherwise – of what MI5 got up to was thus discreetly swept under a tasteful Whitehall rug, where it stayed until the 1950s drew towards a close. Even when a Committee of Privy Counsellors considered the issue in 1957, ruefully reporting that there was no legal basis for much of MI5’s ‘special powers’ and that the only fig leaf of justification was ‘long usage’, nothing was done to resolve MI5’s precarious legal position. The result, as a leading legal scholar warned, was ‘that the Security Service, itself a body unrecognized by law, continues to rely on a practice which is also not recognised by law’.6

If mail interception and remote telephone taps were – notionally at least – authorised once a month by the Home Secretary, by the time Peter Wright was fully inculcated into MI5’s secretive brotherhood, no prime minister or Whitehall mandarin had given any thought to the mechanics of how Britain’s domestic spies were carrying out other clandestine missions which required physical access to a target’s premises.

For the Security Service, Leslie Jagger was – quite literally – the key. A large, broad-shouldered man, habitually clothed in a drab black suit which matched his often-dark sense of humour, Jagger’s basement workshop was an Aladdin’s cave of housebreaking equipment. Thousands of keys to homes and offices lined the four walls: each had been acquired by MI5 staff, copied and then painstakingly indexed, providing what Jagger proudly proclaimed to be ‘access ... to premises all over Britain’.7

The source of these duplicate keys was distinctly questionable. Some had been obtained during operations against legitimate Soviet Bloc intelligence targets: in one typical case, an agent recruited inside the Czechoslovakian Embassy covertly took a plasticine copy of the key to the safe holding cipher pads and passed it to Jagger, who made a working version. Looting the safe ensured that Britain’s spies gained access to top-secret coded Czech messages for a full six months. Others, however, had been pilfered in less excusable circumstances – during burglaries on ‘offices, hotels and private houses’.8

But this illicit key collection was merely the first, and easiest, line of attack. Should the Security Service be confronted with a door to which it didn’t possess a key, or a safe which had to be opened, Jagger trained its officers in the delicate art of lock-picking: using pieces of fine wire with a tiny hook at the end, he taught Wright and his colleagues how to ‘stroke’ the inside of locks to release the pins which held them shut.

Mere possession of this equipment – let alone using it – would have been enough to guarantee a prison sentence for anyone outside MI5’s ranks. But Jagger’s concern was less for legality than the risk of alerting his targets. ‘It’s virtually impossible to pick a lock without scratching it,’ he warned Wright. ‘That’ll almost certainly give the game away to a trained intelligence officer. He’ll know the premises have been entered … Only pick the lock as a last resort.’9

MI5’s unlawful activities reached an early apogee in June 1955, when Operation PARTY PIECE encapsulated both the technical ingenuity and the moral ambiguity of its methods. The Communist Party of Great Britain had long been the subject of Security Service attention; since the 1930s, MI5 officers and agents had infiltrated CPGB branches to monitor what the membership was up to on behalf of the Soviet Union. This interest was unquestionably justified: for decades, Moscow had funded and largely directed the policies and actions of Britain’s communist leaders.

But although CPGB had, in the words of Findlater Stewart’s report, been ‘linked … with Russian espionage’, it was not banned and remained a legal political party; while most of its members were open about the fact and were ‘reputable people who have not pledged themselves to extremist doctrines’,10 MI5’s moles inside the Party reported that beneath them were thousands of secret members, whose existence was too sensitive to be acknowledged publicly.

In spring 1955 the Service acquired a tantalising piece of intelligence: all the secret membership rolls were stored in the north London home of a wealthy communist couple, Ronald and Nancy Berger. Phone taps, mail intercepts and visual surveillance of the address, in Grove Terrace, Highgate, soon threw up another stroke of good fortune. Nancy Berger phoned her husband at work, saying she was leaving the house and would be out for an hour; she told Ronald she would leave the key for him under the front doormat. Within minutes of her departure, MI5 officers arrived and copied it.

Further phone taps revealed that the Bergers were planning a weekend in the Lake District. While ‘watchers’ from MI5’s A Branch shadowed the couple on their brief holiday, a second team used the stolen key to burgle the house. They then employed Jagger’s lockpicks to open filing cabinets holding the membership records and photographed a haul of 6,000 documents.

Three months later the burglars returned for a second, late-night raid. They rushed 48,000 additional records to Leconfield House where banks of pedal-operated microfilm machines were waiting to copy them; by dawn the next day, all the original files were safely back in place in the Bergers’ house.

Peter Wright – now one of Jagger’s most frequent customers – was jubilant. PARTY PIECE gave the Security Service ‘total access’ to CPGB’s membership; the purloined documents recorded not just the names and personal details of all its known members, along with their reasons for joining the organisation, but many of the files belonged to the Party’s covert members. Their identities and occupations sparked the ready kindling of Wright’s nascent belief in a dangerous communist fifth column, which he believed had burrowed into politics, industry and Whitehall itself: ‘These were people in the Labour Party, the trade union movement or the Civil Service … who had gone underground.’11 Over time, Wright would fan these smouldering embers of suspicion into an overarching obsession with rooting out Moscow’s agents in government, labour and civil rights organisations – and within MI5 itself.

By MI5’s metrics at least, PARTY PIECE was an operational triumph: at the end of the Second World War, the Security Service’s card index had recorded the identities of just 413 men and women subject to monitoring on the basis of their ‘left wing’ views – a tiny fraction of the total of 1.2 million names stored in its central database, the Registry.12

The raid on the Bergers’ files added tens of thousands of names to the roll call of those suspected of some form of disloyalty or subversive activity on behalf of the Soviet Union. Better still, until Wright revealed the story, CPBG remained blissfully unaware that its secrets had been stolen and its clandestine members uncovered.13

Operation PARTY PIECE was followed by a succession of break-ins at the London headquarters of Soviet Bloc countries. Two of these highlighted the personal risks MI5 expected its officers to take in the line of duty.

In a late-night operation to install microphones inside the Polish Embassy in Portland Street, a team from A Branch broke into the adjoining empty house next door. As they threaded cables under the second-storey floorboards, carefully pushing them beneath the shared wall, Wright lost his footing and fell through the ceiling of the room below. Jagger was summoned to effect emergency repairs to the plaster and paint, and the burglars counted themselves lucky that the racket went unnoticed by neighbours or Embassy guards. They were not always so fortunate.

In a mission to mount eavesdropping equipment inside the Hungarian Embassy, Wright clambered on to the roof of an adjacent house. His ascent was spotted by a neighbour, who phoned the police to report a burglary in process. Within minutes uniformed officers hammered on the front door, ordering whoever was inside to open up, come out and explain themselves. When this produced no response, they started to force entry. MI5’s scientific officer hurriedly stuffed cables, microphones and receivers under the attic floorboards, then rushed sheepishly downstairs to talk his way out of trouble, implausibly claiming the house owner had contracted him to carry out ‘late night renovations’.14

Wright viewed these adventures and close calls as ‘fun’: they were precisely the sort of spy capers that had characterised his father’s early career and had sparked his own determination to join British intelligence. But his masters in Leconfield House left him in no doubt that should a mission go badly wrong, they would deny all knowledge of his illegal activities. ‘When we were instructed to burgle an embassy or something of that kind, we knew we were breaking the law,’ he would later testify in a secret court session in Australia. ‘We were given Special Branch15 passes which usually enabled us to escape from any serious problems, but … we were told that if we were caught, “You’re on your own”.’16

If illegal break-ins at the premises of the Soviet Union, its Warsaw Pact allies and its British satraps could be justified by the realpolitik of fighting the new Cold War, other operations were rather more dubious. As the British government struggled to come to terms with the winds of change buffeting the Empire, MI5 was tasked with mounting covert surveillance operations against the leaders of independence movements in its colonial outposts and the Middle East.

In 1956, when Prime Minister Anthony Eden launched an ill-fated military adventure to oust Egyptian President Gamal Nasser and seize back control of the Suez Canal, Wright installed microphones in the walls of the Egyptian Embassy to record and then unpick coded cypher messages sent from London to Cairo. Although the operation was a technical success, providing Eden with advance notice of Nasser’s plans, it failed to save either the British mission or Eden’s premiership.

The Egyptian bugging was swiftly followed by the wholesale installation of covert microphones inside the Lancaster House conferences, at which several of Britain’s Imperial colonies negotiated their independence. Every word of the private conversations of representatives from Kenya, Malaya, Nigeria and Cyprus was recorded, transcribed and passed back to Downing Street.

All of this stretched MI5’s conveniently elastic remit – that its operations were ‘strictly limited to what is necessary’ for the defence of the realm. A subsequent operation against the French Embassy unambiguously shattered that still-secret instruction.

In 1961 the British government applied to join the European Economic Community – the forerunner of the European Union – and Downing Street was consumed by the desire to discover the views of its most resolute opponent, President Charles de Gaulle. Wright had the Embassy cipher cables tapped, and for the next three years all messages between London and De Gaulle’s private office were delivered to the Foreign Secretary and Prime Minister. Wright was duly thanked for the ‘priceless intelligence’ provided.17

Eavesdropping on the private conversations of the remnants of Empire at the same time as negotiating their independence – let alone intercepting the diplomatic traffic of a friendly ally in peacetime for political advantage – amounted to major international offences. But Wright and his colleagues in A Branch – ‘a place of infectious laughter’ – were cheerfully untroubled. He later recalled that, free from any oversight or legal constraints, ‘for five years 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.’18

He was, in truth, rather more exercised by the antediluvian state of the technology at his disposal. His earliest impression of the Security Service was of a complacent and insular department, living on its wartime successes and still ‘covered with a thick film of dust’.19