Peter Maurice Wright CBE (9 August 191626 April 1995) was a principal scientific officer for MI5, the British counter-intelligence agency. His book Spycatcher, written with Paul Greengrass, became an international bestseller with sales of over two million copies. 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 was educated at Bishop's Stortford College, His suspicions were further strengthened by Hollis's apparent obstruction of any attempt to investigate information from several defectors that there was a mole in MI5; and his discovery that Hollis had concealed relationships with a number of suspicious persons, including Claud Cockburn, a communist journalist who was at the time suspected of connections to Soviet intelligence; and Agnes Smedley, at a time when Smedley was in a relationship with Soviet spymaster Richard Sorge.

Later during his investigations, Wright examined the debriefings of Soviet defector Igor Gouzenko and found to his surprise that the revelations of that debriefing were neither reported nor recorded. After a lengthy check, he discovered that it had been Hollis who was sent to Canada to interview Gouzenko. Gouzenko had provided Hollis with clear information about Alan Nunn May's meetings with his Soviet handlers and noted that the man who met him seemed to be in disguise, not interested in his revelations, and discouraged him from further disclosures.

Gouzenko had not known about Klaus Fuchs, but he had named a low level suspected GRU agent, Israel Halperin, a mathematician who was later completely cleared of any suspicions of espionage. When the Royal Canadian Mounted Police searched Halperin's lodgings, they found the name of Fuchs in his address book. Fuchs immediately ceased contact with his handler, Harry Gold, and shortly afterwards took a long vacation in Mexico. Wright alleges in Spycatcher that Gouzenko himself deduced later that his interviewer might have been a Soviet double agent and was probably afraid that Gouzenko might recognize him from case photos that Gouzenko might have seen in KGB or GRU files, which would explain why Hollis was disguised.

According to Wright, the FLUENCY Working Party, an inter-agency committee created to examine all the hitherto unsolved allegations about penetration of the British security apparatus, unanimously concluded, among other things, that Hollis was the likely individual for allegations levelled by Gouzenko and fellow defector Konstantin Volkov. The committee submitted its final report shortly after Hollis retired in late 1965 as MI5 Director-General, but an investigation of Hollis was not authorized by his successor, Martin Furnival Jones, who nevertheless authorized the investigation of his deputy, Michael Hanley. A retired civil servant, Burke Trend, later Lord Trend, was summoned during the early 1970s to review the Hollis case. After studying the case for a year, Trend concluded that the evidence was inconclusive for either convicting or clearing Hollis; this was announced in March 1981 by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

On the basis of his interviews with Sir Dennis Proctor and friends, Wright also alleged in Spycatcher that Proctor, former Permanent Secretary at the Ministry of Power, was at the very least, by Proctor's own account, an unwitting source of secret information to the Soviets via his close friend and Soviet spy Guy Burgess, from whom he had kept no secrets. Wright's investigation was also focused on Labour prime minister Harold Wilson, suspicions about whom were initially triggered amongst the MI5 leadership by James Jesus Angleton, chief of counterintelligence for the CIA. The MI5 investigation into Wilson's background, however, failed to produce any conclusive evidence.

When Wright retired in 1976, Wilson was again prime minister. Dame Stella Rimington, MI5 Director-General from 1992 to 1996, later wrote in 2001 that she believed that in a Panorama programme in 1988, Wright had retracted an allegation made in his book about the MI5 group of thirty officers who plotted to overthrow Wilson's government. She also criticised Wright who, according to her, was "a man with an obsession, and was regarded by many as quite mad and certainly dangerous." Rimington alleged that Wright was a disruptive and lazy officer, who as special advisor to the Director-General had a habit of taking case files that interested him from other officers, failing to return them to their proper place, and failing to write up any interviews he conducted. in his book, Treachery: Betrayals, Blunders, and Cover-ups: Six Decades of Espionage Against America and Great Britain (2009). But in its obituary of Pincher in 2014, The Times discredited the journalist's theory ("Paranoia Hollisiensis") and asserted that Hollis had not been a Soviet spy.

Retirement, Spycatcher publication, and later life

Upon his retirement in 1976, Wright was denied a full pension on a technicality and emigrated to the town of Cygnet, Tasmania, Australia, where he bred Arabian horses.

In a bid to quell rumours that he had been the "fifth man" of the Cambridge Five, Victor Rothschild, 3rd Baron Rothschild paid Wright's airfare from Australia to meet with Pincher in writing Their Trade Is Treachery (1982). Wright received royalties of £30,000 for this collaboration.

After Heinemann announced the release of Spycatcher in 1985, the British government in 1985 attempted to ban its publication in Australia. In 1987, the Supreme Court of New South Wales ruled against the British government, Wright being represented in court by Malcolm Turnbull, later prime minister of Australia. By then, the US edition of Spycatcher was already an international best-seller. A memorandum prepared by the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet said among other things: ″The British are seeking to avoid discussion of any of Wright's specific allegations, arguing that, for the purposes of the trial, they can all be assumed to be true and even then Wright's breach of confidentiality would be a breach of contract and inequitable.″

The accuracy of various allegations made in Spycatcher was questioned in a review published by the Center for the Study of Intelligence, an in-house think tank for the CIA. While admitting (on page 42) that the book included "factual data", the document stated that it was also "filled with [unspecified] errors, exaggerations, bogus ideas, and self-inflation". The review added (on page 45) that "Gen. Oleg Kalugin, former Chief of Counterintelligence" had confirmed to Wright that Hollis had not worked for the KGB but did not include a discussion of the possibility that Hollis might have worked with the GRU.

Wright went on to publish The Encyclopaedia of Espionage in 1991 and reportedly was writing a fictional spy thriller at the time of his death on 26 April 1995, aged 78. The obituary in The Independent opined: ″No British intelligence officer other than Kim Philby caused more mayhem within Britain's secret services and more trouble for British politicians than Peter Wright.″

See also

  • Julia Pirie

References

Works cited

  • Penrose, Barrie & Freeman, Simon (1987), Conspiracy of Silence: The Secret Life of Anthony Blunt, New York: Farrar Straus Giroux.
  • 2011, Revised edition in the UK by Mainstream. .
  • Turnbull, Malcolm (1989), The Spycatcher Trial: The Scandal Behind the #1 Best Seller, Topsfield, Massachusetts: Salem House Publishers, Mass Market Paperback; .
  • West, Nigel (1987). Mole Hunt. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson . Nigel West is the pen-name of Rupert Allason.
  • "BBC '1988: Government loses Spycatcher battle'"
  • Peter Wright's allegations – Nick Davies