S8 Ep59: Tim Tate - To Catch A Spy - Peter Wright and the SpyCatcher affair

[00:00:01] [SPEAKER_00]: Due to the themes of this podcast, listener discretion is advised.

[00:00:07] [SPEAKER_00]: Lock your doors.

[00:00:09] [SPEAKER_00]: Close the blinds.

[00:00:10] [SPEAKER_00]: Change your passwords.

[00:00:11] [SPEAKER_00]: This is Secrets and Spies.

[00:00:26] [SPEAKER_00]: Secrets and Spies is a podcast that dives into the world of espionage, terrorism, geopolitics

[00:00:32] [SPEAKER_00]: and intrigue.

[00:00:33] [SPEAKER_00]: This podcast is produced and hosted by Chris Carr.

[00:00:37] [SPEAKER_01]: On today's podcast we're joined by author and investigative journalist Tim Tate and

[00:00:42] [SPEAKER_01]: he discusses his latest book To Catch A Spy which looks at how the SpyCatcher affair brought

[00:00:49] [SPEAKER_01]: MI5 in from the cold as the then Thatcher government of the 1980s tried to silence MI5

[00:00:56] [SPEAKER_01]: whistleblower Peter Wright and hide the truth about Britain's intelligence services and

[00:01:01] [SPEAKER_01]: the political elite.

[00:01:02] [SPEAKER_01]: This is a really fascinating story of state-sanctioned cover-ups, government lying to parliament

[00:01:07] [SPEAKER_01]: and courts around the world and of stories leaked with the intention to mislead and deceive.

[00:01:14] [SPEAKER_01]: I really enjoyed chatting with Tim and I found our conversation truly fascinating and

[00:01:18] [SPEAKER_01]: I hope you do as well.

[00:01:19] [SPEAKER_01]: Just before we begin, if you're enjoying this podcast please consider supporting us

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[00:02:04] [SPEAKER_01]: Tim, welcome back to the podcast.

[00:02:06] [SPEAKER_01]: I believe this is your third visit now.

[00:02:09] [SPEAKER_01]: Grief is it.

[00:02:10] [SPEAKER_01]: Thank you very much for having me.

[00:02:11] [SPEAKER_01]: It's great to have you back on.

[00:02:13] [SPEAKER_01]: I think last time I spoke with you we were obviously talking about espionage and I think

[00:02:17] [SPEAKER_01]: you were telling me about the level of coffee and cigarettes you'd had in the National Archives

[00:02:22] [SPEAKER_01]: whilst researching a previous book.

[00:02:25] [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, it's a regular habit for me I'm afraid.

[00:02:29] [SPEAKER_01]: Not to worry.

[00:02:30] [SPEAKER_01]: Well it seems to be yielding really good results so you have a new book called To Catch a Spy

[00:02:36] [SPEAKER_01]: which we'll go into shortly but for listeners who may not have heard our previous interviews

[00:02:41] [SPEAKER_01]: or know much about you please can you just tell us a little bit about yourself.

[00:02:44] [SPEAKER_02]: Well I'm an investigative journalist, a documentary filmmaker and a widely published author.

[00:02:50] [SPEAKER_02]: And I've been a journalist working in one or other of those media, sometimes all at

[00:02:56] [SPEAKER_02]: once, for 45 years.

[00:02:58] [SPEAKER_02]: I've made more than 80 films for all British terrestrial networks plus various international

[00:03:04] [SPEAKER_02]: broadcasters.

[00:03:05] [SPEAKER_02]: I've written for most national newspapers and prior to this book I've published 18 previous

[00:03:12] [SPEAKER_02]: books all with mainstream commercial publishers.

[00:03:15] [SPEAKER_01]: Fantastic.

[00:03:16] [SPEAKER_01]: Well before we discuss the specifics of your latest book To Catch a Spy can you explain

[00:03:21] [SPEAKER_01]: a little bit about why you wrote it and how you went about researching it and maybe even

[00:03:25] [SPEAKER_01]: how many coffees and cigarettes you consumed whilst researching it as well?

[00:03:29] [SPEAKER_01]: Oh I think I'd need a calculator for the latter.

[00:03:33] [SPEAKER_02]: Well my previous book which we discussed as you said on the podcast was a biography of

[00:03:39] [SPEAKER_02]: the Cold War super spy Mikhail Golenevsky.

[00:03:43] [SPEAKER_02]: And Peter Wright who was then a very senior MI5 officer identified Golenevsky as one of

[00:03:50] [SPEAKER_02]: the most important Soviet block spies working for the West ever.

[00:03:56] [SPEAKER_02]: And he had written about some of Golenevsky's revelations.

[00:04:01] [SPEAKER_02]: And it was this he wrote about them in his book Spycatcher which we'll come to.

[00:04:07] [SPEAKER_02]: It was this plus my own recollections, my own memories of the truly enormous international

[00:04:14] [SPEAKER_02]: furore surrounding the British government's doomed efforts to suppress Wright's troublesome

[00:04:20] [SPEAKER_02]: books Spycatcher which made me wonder was there a deeper story behind the seemingly

[00:04:27] [SPEAKER_02]: endless succession of court battles the British government fought to silence Wright.

[00:04:33] [SPEAKER_02]: And spoiler alert there was a deeper story and then some.

[00:04:40] [SPEAKER_01]: Indeed indeed.

[00:04:42] [SPEAKER_01]: Well what were the you were there was it the National Archives and various other archives

[00:04:48] [SPEAKER_01]: that you used for researching this book?

[00:04:50] [SPEAKER_02]: National Archives here, the US National Archives, the Polish Institute of National Remembrance

[00:04:56] [SPEAKER_02]: all of that for the previous book.

[00:04:58] [SPEAKER_01]: Now one thing that's of interest maybe to an international audience is the Official

[00:05:01] [SPEAKER_01]: Secrets Act and I was going to talk about it in sort of two parts.

[00:05:05] [SPEAKER_01]: The first part will be the sort of 70s and 80s kind of the era of Peter Wright and how

[00:05:10] [SPEAKER_01]: it was sort of used and it was sort of the use of it was sort of semi inconsistent.

[00:05:14] [SPEAKER_01]: Can you talk to us a little bit about the Official Secrets Act?

[00:05:17] [SPEAKER_02]: Sure.

[00:05:17] [SPEAKER_02]: I mean the Official Secrets Act dated back to before the First World War and it was passed

[00:05:23] [SPEAKER_02]: amid public panic about suspected German spies operating in Britain.

[00:05:29] [SPEAKER_02]: That Act had a notorious catch-all clause which made it an offence, a criminal offence

[00:05:37] [SPEAKER_02]: for anyone employed by the government to reveal any information, official information, however

[00:05:44] [SPEAKER_02]: trivial which they'd acquired during their service.

[00:05:47] [SPEAKER_02]: And you know this didn't just cover spies or matters of national security.

[00:05:53] [SPEAKER_02]: Quite literally any information down to the menus in staff canteens in government offices

[00:06:01] [SPEAKER_02]: was an official secret.

[00:06:03] [SPEAKER_02]: But if that was the letter of the law it was rarely actually invoked and a succession of

[00:06:11] [SPEAKER_02]: former intelligence officers from MI5 and MI6 had published their memoirs without any

[00:06:18] [SPEAKER_02]: real interference.

[00:06:19] [SPEAKER_02]: And in fact in the very year that Wright joined MI5 in 1955 the former Director General

[00:06:26] [SPEAKER_02]: Sir Percy Sillitoe, former Director General of MI5 published his memoirs.

[00:06:33] [SPEAKER_02]: Beyond that the Security Service MI5 and the Secret Intelligence Service MI6 leaked like

[00:06:42] [SPEAKER_02]: sieves.

[00:06:43] [SPEAKER_02]: Individual officers briefed journalists, they placed stories in newspapers and occasionally

[00:06:48] [SPEAKER_02]: gave on-the-record interviews in which they were quoted by name, rank and the service

[00:06:54] [SPEAKER_02]: for which they worked.

[00:06:56] [SPEAKER_02]: And all of this would when the government sought to silence Peter Wright prove immensely

[00:07:05] [SPEAKER_02]: problematic.

[00:07:05] [SPEAKER_02]: Indeed.

[00:07:07] [SPEAKER_01]: And how do the Official Secret Acts have changed today?

[00:07:10] [SPEAKER_01]: Because obviously in the US and this podcast benefits from this, there are a lot of former

[00:07:16] [SPEAKER_01]: intelligence officers who write memoirs to this day and there's a process in the US where

[00:07:22] [SPEAKER_01]: a former CIA officer can kind of submit the book for official review and then they would

[00:07:27] [SPEAKER_01]: take out anything that sort of might explain an ongoing operation or something that might

[00:07:33] [SPEAKER_01]: be considered dangerous to national security.

[00:07:36] [SPEAKER_01]: But in the UK it doesn't appear like we have a system because we don't get many spy memoirs.

[00:07:42] [SPEAKER_01]: I don't think we've had any spy memoirs in recent times and if anything the SAS books

[00:07:47] [SPEAKER_01]: of the early 90s like Bravo 2-0 etc might well have sort of changed things and made

[00:07:53] [SPEAKER_01]: things even more difficult for would-be former intelligence officers to write memoirs.

[00:07:58] [SPEAKER_01]: So I was wondering if you could talk to us a little bit about the current situation?

[00:08:01] [SPEAKER_02]: Sure.

[00:08:01] [SPEAKER_02]: Before we do, you mentioned the CIA and its officers and contract agents sometimes being

[00:08:10] [SPEAKER_02]: enabled indeed encouraged to write books about their experiences provided they're submitted

[00:08:16] [SPEAKER_02]: via the official publications review board.

[00:08:21] [SPEAKER_02]: Now that situation applied at the time of spycatcher, the spycatcher trials in the 1980s

[00:08:30] [SPEAKER_02]: and indeed it was one of the things which was raised within the trials by Peter Wright's

[00:08:39] [SPEAKER_02]: defence lawyers.

[00:08:41] [SPEAKER_02]: They said quite rightly, look the CIA does this, we have offered, we the lawyers for

[00:08:48] [SPEAKER_02]: Peter Wright and Heinemann the publishers, have offered on behalf of them to vet anything,

[00:08:57] [SPEAKER_02]: to give you the book to vet and you take out anything which is severely damaging.

[00:09:02] [SPEAKER_02]: Why can't we do that?

[00:09:03] [SPEAKER_02]: They never got a coherent answer, to put it mildly.

[00:09:09] [SPEAKER_02]: The position in the UK today, it's an interesting question and I'm not sure there is a hard

[00:09:19] [SPEAKER_02]: and fast answer to it.

[00:09:21] [SPEAKER_02]: To get an understanding of what has or may have changed, we need to remember that at

[00:09:28] [SPEAKER_02]: the time Wright joined MI5, when he retired and when he set about publishing spycatcher,

[00:09:35] [SPEAKER_02]: both MI5 and MI6 did not officially exist because neither service was avowed.

[00:09:43] [SPEAKER_02]: In other words, the British government maintained, particularly over MI6, this bizarre pretense

[00:09:50] [SPEAKER_02]: that we didn't have a domestic, much less a foreign intelligence service.

[00:09:56] [SPEAKER_02]: And when Wright joined MI5 it was made clear to him that he was employed not by the government

[00:10:03] [SPEAKER_02]: but by the Crown under an ancient and unwritten royal prerogative.

[00:10:08] [SPEAKER_02]: And that meant there was no employment contract and he certainly had no employment rights.

[00:10:15] [SPEAKER_02]: There was nothing apart from the Official Secrets Act that in fact formally said an

[00:10:21] [SPEAKER_02]: officer could not speak about what he'd learned.

[00:10:24] [SPEAKER_02]: And all of that would prove one of the major legal obstacles for the British government

[00:10:28] [SPEAKER_02]: in its labrynthine attempts to prevent publication of spycatchers.

[00:10:35] [SPEAKER_02]: While English courts were ready, willing and able to enforce this, enforce the Official

[00:10:40] [SPEAKER_02]: Secrets Act, Wright was then living in Tasmania and neither the Official Secrets Act nor the

[00:10:47] [SPEAKER_02]: royal prerogative could be enforced in courts outside the United Kingdom.

[00:10:51] [SPEAKER_02]: And that meant that he or any other troublesome spy could legally write his or her memoirs

[00:10:59] [SPEAKER_02]: and publish them from the safety of an overseas bolthole.

[00:11:04] [SPEAKER_02]: One of the effects of the spycatcher debacle, which was an extraordinary combination of

[00:11:13] [SPEAKER_02]: high treason and low farce, was that the British government was finally forced over Margaret

[00:11:20] [SPEAKER_02]: Thatcher's vehement objections to put both MI5 and MI6 on a statutory basis with actual

[00:11:27] [SPEAKER_02]: contracts of employment.

[00:11:30] [SPEAKER_02]: In theory, that could make it easier for the government today to prevent ex-intelligence

[00:11:37] [SPEAKER_02]: officers from publishing unauthorised books, newspaper articles or giving broadcast interviews.

[00:11:46] [SPEAKER_02]: But I'm not sure this has ever been tested.

[00:11:50] [SPEAKER_02]: Or whether any government today would want to run the risk of the international ridicule

[00:11:59] [SPEAKER_02]: and opprobrium which Thatcher's doomed attempts to silence Wright attracted.

[00:12:04] [SPEAKER_02]: So whether a modern day Peter Wright could publish a 21st century spycatcher, I simply don't know.

[00:12:13] [SPEAKER_01]: No.

[00:12:14] [SPEAKER_01]: The closest to it was probably a book by Richard Tomlinson called The Big Breach that came

[00:12:19] [SPEAKER_01]: out I think in 2000, 2001.

[00:12:24] [SPEAKER_01]: And there was a similar kind of debacle with that.

[00:12:29] [SPEAKER_01]: And I believe it might have even been a Russian publishing house that actually published the

[00:12:34] [SPEAKER_01]: book.

[00:12:34] [SPEAKER_01]: And I know only in the last couple of years that the money that the book had made was finally

[00:12:41] [SPEAKER_01]: released so Richard Tomlinson could get access to the money he'd been owed for that book.

[00:12:46] [SPEAKER_01]: That's the kind of closest I can think of.

[00:12:49] [SPEAKER_01]: But I think there's some quite big differences between that and spycatcher.

[00:12:52] [SPEAKER_02]: And you know, that's also 21 years ago.

[00:12:56] [SPEAKER_02]: 22 years ago, I'm sorry.

[00:12:57] [SPEAKER_02]: Yes, yes, indeed, indeed.

[00:12:59] [SPEAKER_02]: I think it's anyone's guess.

[00:13:01] [SPEAKER_02]: Because it's not just a question of law, it's a question of politics as spycatcher was.

[00:13:07] [SPEAKER_02]: It was both law and politics.

[00:13:08] [SPEAKER_02]: And you know, politics being the art of the possible, whether a modern day government,

[00:13:15] [SPEAKER_02]: a 21st century government would be stupid enough to repeat the exercise which Thatcher's

[00:13:23] [SPEAKER_02]: government embarked upon against all good advice, I think is an open question at best.

[00:13:32] [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.

[00:13:32] [SPEAKER_01]: And what is the sort of situation with this declassification of files these days?

[00:13:38] [SPEAKER_01]: Because I think, am I right in the archives, you can't get past sort of files from, is

[00:13:43] [SPEAKER_01]: it the 60s or 70s with regards to MI5 and MI6?

[00:13:47] [SPEAKER_02]: Well, that's a whole other bag of snakes.

[00:13:54] [SPEAKER_02]: We passed after spycatcher, the Freedom of Information Act was brought in.

[00:14:01] [SPEAKER_02]: And in fact, at least to some small degree, spycatcher helped usher that in.

[00:14:10] [SPEAKER_02]: It specifically excluded the intelligence services from its provision.

[00:14:17] [SPEAKER_02]: So you can't submit a Freedom of Information Act request to MI5 or MI6 at all.

[00:14:26] [SPEAKER_02]: And there is no obligation on either service to publish anything from its files, however

[00:14:34] [SPEAKER_02]: old.

[00:14:36] [SPEAKER_02]: In fairness, and I think to its credit, MI5 does voluntarily release some files at its

[00:14:48] [SPEAKER_02]: own and entirely unfathomable whim after they've reached their 50th birthday.

[00:14:56] [SPEAKER_02]: But you have no right to say, I want these, I want to see these.

[00:15:00] [SPEAKER_02]: We may have paid for them, but we have no right to see them.

[00:15:03] [SPEAKER_02]: And all the files on spycatcher and all the espionage scandals from the 50s and 60s which

[00:15:13] [SPEAKER_02]: write, which so exercise write, all MI5's files or most of MI5's files on those remain

[00:15:22] [SPEAKER_01]: locked away.

[00:15:23] [SPEAKER_01]: Wow.

[00:15:24] [SPEAKER_01]: Well, we've mentioned the man a few times himself, Peter Wright.

[00:15:28] [SPEAKER_01]: Can you talk to us a little bit about who he was and what is known about his career

[00:15:33] [SPEAKER_01]: in MI5?

[00:15:34] [SPEAKER_02]: Sure.

[00:15:35] [SPEAKER_02]: First and foremost, Peter Wright was a boffin.

[00:15:39] [SPEAKER_02]: He was a largely self-taught but highly innovative scientist.

[00:15:45] [SPEAKER_02]: During and after the Second World War, he worked for the Royal Naval Scientific Service.

[00:15:51] [SPEAKER_02]: And but in the early 1950s, and he, sorry, he had some very real success in that role.

[00:15:59] [SPEAKER_02]: But in the early 1950s, he also worked unpaid and in his own time for MI5 at its request.

[00:16:08] [SPEAKER_02]: And he achieved some very real successes in doing so, particularly in uncovering the

[00:16:16] [SPEAKER_02]: histories of a then completely unknown microphone which the Soviets had invented, which

[00:16:27] [SPEAKER_02]: bypassed all of the cumbersome wiring and which they'd installed happily in the Great

[00:16:33] [SPEAKER_02]: Seal of the United States in the American Embassy in Moscow.

[00:16:40] [SPEAKER_02]: Wright, as this innovative but not formally qualified scientist, unpicked its mysteries,

[00:16:51] [SPEAKER_02]: worked out how it worked and created a British and American version which we duly put into

[00:17:02] [SPEAKER_02]: service.

[00:17:03] [SPEAKER_02]: And it was a very great innovation.

[00:17:07] [SPEAKER_02]: After that, he was in 1955, he was formally appointed as MI5's first ever in-house scientific

[00:17:17] [SPEAKER_02]: officer.

[00:17:18] [SPEAKER_02]: And he and his genuine genius, scientific genius, was very much needed because at the

[00:17:26] [SPEAKER_02]: time, MI5 was largely unfit for purpose.

[00:17:31] [SPEAKER_02]: It had achieved very real successes during World War II but then had been left to my

[00:17:36] [SPEAKER_02]: moulder and was quite unprepared for the new and largely electronic battleground of

[00:17:41] [SPEAKER_02]: the Cold War.

[00:17:42] [SPEAKER_02]: On top of which, it was utterly lawless.

[00:17:48] [SPEAKER_02]: Because it didn't officially exist, there were no legal controls on what MI5 officers

[00:17:56] [SPEAKER_02]: got up to.

[00:17:57] [SPEAKER_02]: And that left Wright and his colleagues free to break the law wholesale.

[00:18:04] [SPEAKER_02]: They broke into offices, embassies, private houses.

[00:18:08] [SPEAKER_02]: They copied people's keys to enable them to do that.

[00:18:14] [SPEAKER_02]: They learnt how to pick locks.

[00:18:17] [SPEAKER_02]: They placed anyone they were interested in, foe or even notionally friend, under surveillance,

[00:18:25] [SPEAKER_02]: telephone tapping, mail surveillance.

[00:18:27] [SPEAKER_02]: As Wright put it in Spycatcher, we bugged and burgled our way across London while pompous

[00:18:37] [SPEAKER_02]: bowler-hatted civil servants looked the other way.

[00:18:42] [SPEAKER_02]: But, there's always a but, the service and in Wright's view the entire British establishment

[00:18:50] [SPEAKER_02]: also had a substantial in-house problem.

[00:18:55] [SPEAKER_02]: Because from the 1930s onwards, Moscow's intelligence services had recruited young

[00:19:02] [SPEAKER_02]: British men and women, often at the country's leading universities.

[00:19:07] [SPEAKER_02]: And they had progressed to careers in government, the civil service, sensitive industries and

[00:19:13] [SPEAKER_02]: both MI5 and MI6.

[00:19:16] [SPEAKER_02]: They were, bluntly, moles, people who betrayed their country's secrets and the intelligence

[00:19:23] [SPEAKER_02]: services operations against the Soviet bloc to Moscow.

[00:19:28] [SPEAKER_02]: From the late 1950s, Wright was officially tasked by MI5, for whom he worked, with finding

[00:19:38] [SPEAKER_02]: them.

[00:19:40] [SPEAKER_02]: And this moved him away from his primary expertise, science, and for the next 20 years he was

[00:19:49] [SPEAKER_02]: MI5's most determined and passionate, and in some cases less than brilliant, mole hunter.

[00:20:02] [SPEAKER_02]: Even when this involved him uncovering Soviet spies inside the government, the establishment

[00:20:08] [SPEAKER_02]: and the intelligence services themselves.

[00:20:12] [SPEAKER_02]: And that quest, that task, if you like, led to no end of trouble.

[00:20:22] [SPEAKER_01]: Yes.

[00:20:22] [SPEAKER_01]: Yes.

[00:20:23] [SPEAKER_01]: Well it's the infamous Wilderness of Mirrors from James Jesus Angleton, isn't it?

[00:20:28] [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, who crops up, from James Jesus Angleton, the shadowy, race-like head of counterintelligence

[00:20:38] [SPEAKER_02]: for the CIA, he crops up throughout the spy-catcher saga.

[00:20:43] [SPEAKER_02]: And his influence, largely malign, played a big role at times in both the effort to

[00:20:57] [SPEAKER_02]: reveal what MI5 had been up to and the British government's cover-up.

[00:21:04] [SPEAKER_01]: Well, what was it that led Peter Wright specifically to writing spy-catcher?

[00:21:11] [SPEAKER_01]: And you mentioned he obviously had to go to Australia to do it.

[00:21:13] [SPEAKER_01]: Can you talk to us a bit about that?

[00:21:15] [SPEAKER_02]: Sure.

[00:21:16] [SPEAKER_02]: By the time he retired from MI5 in 1976, Wright was convinced that the service itself and

[00:21:26] [SPEAKER_02]: large swathes of the establishment had been penetrated by Russian moles.

[00:21:32] [SPEAKER_02]: After 20 years investigating at MI5's explicit behest the 1930 spy rings, the espionage scandals

[00:21:42] [SPEAKER_02]: of Anthony Blunt, Kim Philby, and the defections of Guy Burgess and Donald MacLean, Wright

[00:21:50] [SPEAKER_02]: had identified at least 35 eminent, his word, other figures who could, and in his view should,

[00:21:59] [SPEAKER_02]: have been prosecuted or at least publicly exposed as Soviet agents.

[00:22:06] [SPEAKER_02]: And according to testimony he gave in a secret session during the spy-catcher trials, all

[00:22:13] [SPEAKER_02]: of these 35 eminent people were listed in MI5's files as, quotes, having been Russian

[00:22:23] [SPEAKER_02]: spies.

[00:22:24] [SPEAKER_02]: That's a direct quote from his secret evidence, which I got hold of.

[00:22:29] [SPEAKER_02]: And he listed their names in a separate and even more closely guarded written annex to

[00:22:36] [SPEAKER_02]: this secret evidence.

[00:22:38] [SPEAKER_02]: Wright had tried for years to get variously MI5 and Downing Street to do something about

[00:22:48] [SPEAKER_02]: this, but he had been repeatedly rebuffed.

[00:22:51] [SPEAKER_02]: And that, in his mind, strengthened the case for, as he put it, the establishment being,

[00:22:58] [SPEAKER_02]: quotes, rotten to the core.

[00:23:01] [SPEAKER_02]: It's another direct quote from his secret testimony.

[00:23:05] [SPEAKER_02]: After he left MI5 and emigrated to set up a horse stud in Tasmania, he began tinkering

[00:23:14] [SPEAKER_02]: away on a manuscript outlining what he called the cancer in our midst, Soviet penetration.

[00:23:24] [SPEAKER_02]: He first tried to get this into the hands of Margaret Thatcher.

[00:23:29] [SPEAKER_02]: After she became prime minister, believing, wrongly as it turned out, that MI5 had withheld

[00:23:35] [SPEAKER_02]: the information from her.

[00:23:38] [SPEAKER_02]: That effort was blocked, primarily by Sir Robert Armstrong, Thatcher's ambitious and,

[00:23:46] [SPEAKER_02]: I have to say, oily cabinet secretary.

[00:23:49] [SPEAKER_02]: At the same time, and we're talking now 1979, early 1980, a small rash of books by

[00:24:01] [SPEAKER_02]: journalists began to expose some of MI5's previously concealed scandals.

[00:24:07] [SPEAKER_02]: And primarily, the treachery of Sir Antony Blunt.

[00:24:13] [SPEAKER_02]: Now, in case anyone needs a quick primer on Blunt, he was a Cambridge Don, academic, who

[00:24:21] [SPEAKER_02]: had been Moscow's chief recruiter in the 1930s and who, at the beginning of World War II,

[00:24:28] [SPEAKER_02]: joined MI5 as a very senior officer.

[00:24:31] [SPEAKER_02]: In fact, he became the deputy to the director general.

[00:24:35] [SPEAKER_02]: He used that position to feed British intelligence secrets to Russia's spymasters.

[00:24:42] [SPEAKER_02]: After the war, he joined the Royal Family's household, the Royal Family's household,

[00:24:47] [SPEAKER_02]: this is, as surveyor of the King's Pictures and later held the same and other positions

[00:24:54] [SPEAKER_02]: on behalf of the Queen.

[00:24:55] [SPEAKER_02]: But since the mid-1950s, MI5 knew he had been, and very possibly remained, a Soviet intelligence

[00:25:05] [SPEAKER_02]: agent.

[00:25:07] [SPEAKER_02]: But they had no actual evidence, and Blunt denied it repeatedly.

[00:25:13] [SPEAKER_02]: Then in 1964, the service was given explicit evidence by an American man whom Blunt had

[00:25:20] [SPEAKER_02]: recruited at Cambridge University.

[00:25:23] [SPEAKER_02]: But instead of arresting Blunt, MI5, with then-government's backing, gave him immunity

[00:25:32] [SPEAKER_02]: from prosecution, provided he confessed to all that he knew and all that he had done.

[00:25:39] [SPEAKER_02]: Peter Wright led the interrogations of Blunt for eight years, and if Blunt was very far

[00:25:47] [SPEAKER_02]: from Frank during the interviews, it gave Wright enough evidence to support his belief

[00:25:53] [SPEAKER_02]: that Soviet penetration was vast, deep, and ongoing.

[00:25:59] [SPEAKER_02]: But, fast forward to 1979, with the Thatcher government refusing to listen, he began thinking

[00:26:07] [SPEAKER_02]: about writing a book.

[00:26:10] [SPEAKER_02]: At which point the plot becomes very muddy indeed.

[00:26:17] [SPEAKER_02]: Wright's old mentor was Lord Victor Rothschild, a former MI5 officer during World War II.

[00:26:26] [SPEAKER_02]: In fact, he had been the man who recommended Antony Blunt to MI5.

[00:26:31] [SPEAKER_02]: Rothschild became deeply enmeshed after leaving the service in the post-war fabric of politics,

[00:26:38] [SPEAKER_02]: science, and industry.

[00:26:41] [SPEAKER_02]: If anyone should notionally have discouraged Peter Wright from writing his memoirs or a

[00:26:50] [SPEAKER_02]: book, it would and should have been Victor Rothschild.

[00:26:54] [SPEAKER_02]: Instead, he encouraged it.

[00:26:58] [SPEAKER_02]: And he hooked Wright up with a notorious intelligence journalist, a man called Chapman Pinscher.

[00:27:09] [SPEAKER_02]: And the three of them together conspired, if you like, but worked out a deal in which

[00:27:17] [SPEAKER_02]: Wright would provide the information about MI5 scandals from his personal experience.

[00:27:24] [SPEAKER_02]: Chapman Pinscher would write it up in a book which would be published under his, Pinscher's,

[00:27:30] [SPEAKER_02]: name.

[00:27:31] [SPEAKER_02]: And Rothschild would funnel Wright's share of the proceeds to him in Tasmania via Rothschild's

[00:27:38] [SPEAKER_02]: numerous offshore bank accounts.

[00:27:41] [SPEAKER_02]: That book, which was the precursor, if you like, to Spycatcher, was called Their Trade

[00:27:48] [SPEAKER_02]: is Treachery.

[00:27:49] [SPEAKER_02]: It was published in 1981, and it exposed MI5's greatest secret, that the security service

[00:27:58] [SPEAKER_02]: had investigated its own director general, Sir Roger Hollis, as a suspected Russian spy,

[00:28:06] [SPEAKER_02]: a mole within MI5 itself.

[00:28:09] [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.

[00:28:10] [SPEAKER_02]: The government knew about the book and its contents in advance.

[00:28:14] [SPEAKER_02]: They knew that Wright was Pinscher's chief source of information and that Rothschild

[00:28:21] [SPEAKER_02]: was the book's impresario.

[00:28:24] [SPEAKER_02]: All of this clearly broke the Official Secrets Act.

[00:28:31] [SPEAKER_02]: No ifs, no buts, no maybes.

[00:28:33] [SPEAKER_02]: Yet the government did nothing to block the book.

[00:28:39] [SPEAKER_02]: And there was a reason for this.

[00:28:41] [SPEAKER_02]: The reason is that at quite literally the same time as Rothschild brought Pinscher together

[00:28:50] [SPEAKER_02]: with Wright, Thatcher and her cabinet secretary, Sir Robert Armstrong, conspired to have Pinscher

[00:28:58] [SPEAKER_02]: briefed on the Hollis scandal by a former attorney general.

[00:29:04] [SPEAKER_02]: The two of them, and we know this because I have the government papers which show this,

[00:29:09] [SPEAKER_02]: said, how do we defuse the Hollis scandal?

[00:29:15] [SPEAKER_02]: I know, let's leak it out via the pen of a tame journalist, a man we can control.

[00:29:24] [SPEAKER_02]: They knew the scandal was bound to emerge and they believed that Pinscher, who was a

[00:29:29] [SPEAKER_02]: tried and tested security service asset in his own right, could be trusted to break it

[00:29:36] [SPEAKER_02]: safely, that is with a high dose of pro-government spin and thereby cause the least possible

[00:29:44] [SPEAKER_02]: damage.

[00:29:46] [SPEAKER_02]: It was an unprecedented plot by the prime minister and her most senior civil servant

[00:29:52] [SPEAKER_02]: to leak the most sensitive and damaging secret in MI5's history to a journalist in the

[00:30:01] [SPEAKER_02]: hope of gaining political advantage.

[00:30:03] [SPEAKER_02]: It didn't quite work out the way they'd hoped.

[00:30:08] [SPEAKER_02]: Pinscher played fast and loose with Downing Street and with Wright.

[00:30:12] [SPEAKER_02]: He splashed the Hollis scandal in the most dramatic way possible and thus negating Thatcher

[00:30:19] [SPEAKER_02]: and Armstrong's hope for a nice safe little expose, but he betrayed Wright by insisting,

[00:30:26] [SPEAKER_02]: well, there was actually no need for any inquiry into what had gone on.

[00:30:32] [SPEAKER_02]: And that infuriated Wright.

[00:30:37] [SPEAKER_02]: Thatcher added fuel to this fire in Wright's view by deliberately lying to the House of

[00:30:44] [SPEAKER_02]: Commons.

[00:30:45] [SPEAKER_02]: She was forced to make a statement once Pinscher's book came out and she told MPs that Hollis

[00:30:53] [SPEAKER_02]: had been cleared of being a Russian spy by internal inquiries.

[00:30:59] [SPEAKER_02]: He hadn't.

[00:31:02] [SPEAKER_02]: As official documents released just at New Year 2023 revealed, that's more than four

[00:31:10] [SPEAKER_02]: decades after the spy-catcher trials, those documents showed that the internal inquiry,

[00:31:18] [SPEAKER_02]: the final internal inquiry, had concluded that there was a 20% chance that Hollis was

[00:31:26] [SPEAKER_02]: indeed a Russian mole.

[00:31:29] [SPEAKER_02]: After their trade is treachery, more books, more magazine articles, television documentaries

[00:31:34] [SPEAKER_02]: all followed on, all exposed yet more MI5 scandals and former security service officers

[00:31:41] [SPEAKER_02]: appeared on camera or wrote first-person accounts.

[00:31:45] [SPEAKER_02]: Wright himself gave a lengthy on-camera interview to World in Action, which was then ITV's

[00:31:51] [SPEAKER_02]: flagship investigative programme.

[00:31:54] [SPEAKER_02]: Neither he nor any of the other officers, much less any of the media outlets, was ever

[00:32:00] [SPEAKER_02]: prosecuted.

[00:32:02] [SPEAKER_02]: Eighteen months later, infuriated by what he saw as Thatcher's misleading of the House

[00:32:10] [SPEAKER_02]: of Commons and determined to expose the cancer of Soviet penetration as he saw it, he decided

[00:32:19] [SPEAKER_02]: to write his own book.

[00:32:21] [SPEAKER_02]: And he asked the World in Action producer, Paul Greengrass, to co-author it.

[00:32:27] [SPEAKER_02]: That book was Spycatcher and unlike any other book, print story or TV documentary, Thatcher

[00:32:36] [SPEAKER_02]: and Armstrong were determined to block its publication.

[00:32:42] [SPEAKER_02]: And you have to ask, why?

[00:32:45] [SPEAKER_01]: Well, let's take a quick break and then we'll be right back.

[00:33:05] [SPEAKER_01]: With Spycatcher, what were the kind of main revelations in the book?

[00:33:11] [SPEAKER_01]: Obviously Sir Roger Hollis comes up quite a bit there.

[00:33:14] [SPEAKER_01]: Can you give us a kind of quick overview of just what it was in this book with Sir Roger

[00:33:20] [SPEAKER_01]: Hollis' sort of allegations?

[00:33:22] [SPEAKER_02]: The first thing to say about Spycatcher is that it exposed almost nothing that hadn't

[00:33:31] [SPEAKER_02]: been previously published.

[00:33:34] [SPEAKER_02]: That's one of the great ironies of this.

[00:33:37] [SPEAKER_02]: By the time Wright and Greengrass wrote and published Spycatcher, just about all the secrets

[00:33:46] [SPEAKER_02]: that Wright had to tell were out.

[00:33:52] [SPEAKER_02]: They'd come out primarily in the book he helped Chapman Pinscher write, Their Trade is Treachery,

[00:33:58] [SPEAKER_02]: and then in a succession of newspaper articles, documentaries, magazine pieces which followed

[00:34:06] [SPEAKER_02]: on from that.

[00:34:09] [SPEAKER_02]: There were some revelations, though they were no great surprise.

[00:34:16] [SPEAKER_02]: As I say, he talked about his days bugging and burgling across London, but then again

[00:34:23] [SPEAKER_02]: we'd known that.

[00:34:25] [SPEAKER_02]: He talked about operations against friendly countries, the embassies of friendly countries,

[00:34:32] [SPEAKER_02]: which were utterly illegal under international law.

[00:34:36] [SPEAKER_02]: We bugged the French communications at a time when Britain was trying to get into what was

[00:34:47] [SPEAKER_02]: then the European Economic Community, the common market.

[00:34:51] [SPEAKER_02]: A gross breach of international law.

[00:34:55] [SPEAKER_02]: But MI5 and Peter Wright did it.

[00:34:57] [SPEAKER_02]: He talked about that, but above all he talked about the penetration problem.

[00:35:02] [SPEAKER_02]: This is what drove him.

[00:35:04] [SPEAKER_02]: He talked about the Soviet spies who had been in place since the 1930s, who had worked their

[00:35:10] [SPEAKER_02]: way up through the establishment civil service government, MI5 and MI6.

[00:35:16] [SPEAKER_02]: And he talked about Hollis.

[00:35:19] [SPEAKER_02]: Well, Roger Hollis in the 1920s and 1930s worked variously in international banking as a freelance

[00:35:26] [SPEAKER_02]: journalist and for British American Tobacco.

[00:35:29] [SPEAKER_02]: He travelled widely across China and in Russia.

[00:35:33] [SPEAKER_02]: He joined MI5 in 1938 and during the Second World War and then afterwards he rose steadily

[00:35:41] [SPEAKER_02]: through the ranks of the service.

[00:35:43] [SPEAKER_02]: In 1956 he became Director General, the head of the security service itself, and he stayed

[00:35:50] [SPEAKER_02]: in post until he retired in 1965.

[00:35:56] [SPEAKER_02]: For the last two years of his tenure, and then again after his retirement, he was formally

[00:36:03] [SPEAKER_02]: investigated by MI5 as, their words not mine, a suspected Russian spy.

[00:36:10] [SPEAKER_02]: The main investigation was carried out by an internal working party of MI5 and MI6 officers

[00:36:18] [SPEAKER_02]: called the Fluency Committee.

[00:36:21] [SPEAKER_02]: The chairman of that committee was Peter Wright.

[00:36:26] [SPEAKER_02]: It's hard to overstate the importance of this.

[00:36:28] [SPEAKER_02]: It was an utterly unprecedented investigation.

[00:36:31] [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.

[00:36:32] [SPEAKER_02]: Never before, and never since, had Britain's most senior domestic spy been investigating

[00:36:40] [SPEAKER_02]: as a suspected traitor.

[00:36:43] [SPEAKER_02]: A lot has been written about the case and after Pinscher's book with Wright, Their

[00:36:49] [SPEAKER_02]: Traders' Treachery was published, Thatcher delivered this lengthy statement to Parliament

[00:36:54] [SPEAKER_02]: exonerating Hollis, who was in any event by then long dead.

[00:37:00] [SPEAKER_02]: And the various published stories and Thatcher's statement all have one thing in common.

[00:37:08] [SPEAKER_02]: They're mostly bunk.

[00:37:10] [SPEAKER_02]: How do we know?

[00:37:12] [SPEAKER_02]: Primarily because of Wright's evidence in the spycatcher trials, both the testimony

[00:37:18] [SPEAKER_02]: given in open court and that which was heard at the government's behest behind closed

[00:37:24] [SPEAKER_02]: doors and which I obtained for this book, for my book.

[00:37:30] [SPEAKER_02]: Wright was convinced that Hollis was a spy and that he had been protected during and

[00:37:37] [SPEAKER_02]: after the formal investigations.

[00:37:40] [SPEAKER_02]: And you could say, as many people have since, that this was just Wright.

[00:37:47] [SPEAKER_02]: This was just Peter Wright.

[00:37:48] [SPEAKER_02]: This was the ramblings of an old and embittered ex-spook who had an unjustified bee in his

[00:37:55] [SPEAKER_02]: bonnet about unearthing molds.

[00:37:58] [SPEAKER_02]: And there is some truth in that.

[00:38:04] [SPEAKER_02]: But official files, government files, declassified after decades, and we're talking within

[00:38:15] [SPEAKER_02]: the last two or three years, show that the government knew that Wright and Fluency had

[00:38:22] [SPEAKER_02]: a very good reason for suspecting Hollis and that far from being cleared, as Thatcher

[00:38:29] [SPEAKER_02]: had claimed in Parliament, and this again is an official MI5 internal document sent

[00:38:38] [SPEAKER_02]: to Number 10, Hollis was one of only two candidates for the mole who had most certainly penetrated

[00:38:51] [SPEAKER_02]: the security service.

[00:38:54] [SPEAKER_02]: The other was his deputy.

[00:38:57] [SPEAKER_02]: Now those documents, which were only released in 2018, explicitly ruled that the best which

[00:39:04] [SPEAKER_02]: could be said was the case against Hollis was not proven.

[00:39:10] [SPEAKER_02]: Beyond that, the final attempt at a posthumous inquiry, and this, as I said, this information

[00:39:15] [SPEAKER_02]: was disclosed just seven months ago, reached the conclusion that there was a 20% chance

[00:39:21] [SPEAKER_02]: that Hollis had been a Soviet mole and that he had betrayed Britain's secrets to Moscow.

[00:39:30] [SPEAKER_02]: Previous accounts post-Wright argued that most of the suspicion was ill-founded and

[00:39:38] [SPEAKER_02]: ill-intentioned and that it was conspiracy theorising stemming from James Jesus Angleton,

[00:39:45] [SPEAKER_02]: there's that man again, and his troublesome Soviet defector Anatoly Golitsyn, a former

[00:39:54] [SPEAKER_02]: intelligence officer.

[00:39:55] [SPEAKER_02]: The truth is that very little, very little of what Wright worked on and the conclusions

[00:40:04] [SPEAKER_02]: he reached came from Golitsyn.

[00:40:07] [SPEAKER_02]: Instead, there were 28, 28 separate pieces of evidence.

[00:40:15] [SPEAKER_02]: They're what MI5 calls serials.

[00:40:19] [SPEAKER_02]: Wright found this during his official inquiries into other cases.

[00:40:26] [SPEAKER_02]: The names of those cases are simply too numerous to mention.

[00:40:30] [SPEAKER_02]: All the details, should anyone want them, are set out in my book along with where you

[00:40:36] [SPEAKER_02]: can find the files for them.

[00:40:38] [SPEAKER_02]: But they explained to Wright a mystery which had nagged him, nagged at him throughout his

[00:40:48] [SPEAKER_02]: career.

[00:40:50] [SPEAKER_02]: As he testified in the spycatcher trials, every operation which MI5 had launched against

[00:41:00] [SPEAKER_02]: Soviet intelligence during Hollis' years in position of power had failed.

[00:41:08] [SPEAKER_02]: Only after Hollis retired, says Wright, did MI5 start having any real success.

[00:41:17] [SPEAKER_01]: Interesting, interesting.

[00:41:21] [SPEAKER_01]: And yeah, the way you sort of describe the committee investigating Sir Roger Hollis reminds

[00:41:26] [SPEAKER_01]: me a little bit of obviously Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, the John Le Carré novel that

[00:41:31] [SPEAKER_01]: was sort of written in that kind of era really.

[00:41:34] [SPEAKER_01]: Many believe it's about Kim Philby but there might be a Roger Hollis connection to it,

[00:41:38] [SPEAKER_01]: who knows?

[00:41:39] [SPEAKER_02]: Who knows?

[00:41:41] [SPEAKER_02]: Unfortunately, John Le Carré is now dead so you can't ask him.

[00:41:44] [SPEAKER_01]: No, no unfortunately not.

[00:41:46] [SPEAKER_01]: I don't know if it'll be something in his archive somewhere but no, very interesting.

[00:41:51] [SPEAKER_01]: And am I right as well, Peter Wright obviously was involved with another MI5 officer called

[00:41:57] [SPEAKER_01]: Arthur Martin and he, Arthur Martin, believed that there might have even been another Russian

[00:42:04] [SPEAKER_01]: agent who was either active or had just recently sort of retired from the security services

[00:42:10] [SPEAKER_01]: around sort of the late 70s, early 80s.

[00:42:13] [SPEAKER_02]: Martin was, I'm trying to think of the right word but he was essentially Wright's sort

[00:42:22] [SPEAKER_02]: of predecessor and then collaborator in the mole hunt.

[00:42:26] [SPEAKER_02]: All the earliest attempts by MI5 to locate traitors in its midst had been led by Arthur

[00:42:36] [SPEAKER_02]: Martin who was a bright, talented sleuth if you like.

[00:42:44] [SPEAKER_02]: He and Wright worked together from the early 1960s onward until Martin who I don't think

[00:42:53] [SPEAKER_02]: suffered fools gladly particularly, nor did Peter Wright, had a fallout with Sir Roger

[00:42:59] [SPEAKER_02]: Hollis, surprisingly enough, over the mole hunting and got kicked out of MI5 and joined

[00:43:06] [SPEAKER_02]: MI6.

[00:43:08] [SPEAKER_02]: It wouldn't be the end of his story but for the moment it is.

[00:43:13] [SPEAKER_02]: Martin and Wright had one, other than their unshakeable belief that Britain had been penetrated

[00:43:21] [SPEAKER_02]: by Soviet moles and that MI5 and MI6 had been as well, they had one thing in particular thing

[00:43:28] [SPEAKER_02]: in common.

[00:43:30] [SPEAKER_02]: They were, if you like, but they were certainly regarded as NCOs by the officer class which

[00:43:40] [SPEAKER_02]: ran MI5.

[00:43:42] [SPEAKER_02]: You know there was a very clear class division and Martin and Wright were, they're the NCOs,

[00:43:51] [SPEAKER_02]: we don't necessarily listen to them because they're not of our class.

[00:43:57] [SPEAKER_02]: And you can see that running through all the belatedly disclosed files, this attitude

[00:44:07] [SPEAKER_02]: that they weren't quite to be trusted because they weren't of the right class and Wright's

[00:44:15] [SPEAKER_02]: utter frustration with this.

[00:44:18] [SPEAKER_02]: Yes Martin believed, as did Wright, that there were other moles and I don't think anyone

[00:44:24] [SPEAKER_02]: has ever argued that, or not convincingly, that Hollis, if it was Hollis, was the only

[00:44:30] [SPEAKER_02]: mole.

[00:44:31] [SPEAKER_02]: If there were moles there were likely to have been others.

[00:44:36] [SPEAKER_02]: On the balance of probability I think you have to say Wright and Martin could well have

[00:44:43] [SPEAKER_02]: been Wright but as Wright put it, which I think was a sensible way of putting it, where

[00:44:53] [SPEAKER_02]: there is that level of doubt, remember, 20% versus, it was a 20% possibility that Hollis

[00:45:02] [SPEAKER_02]: had been a Soviet agent, Wright said in cases like that I think the country has to be given

[00:45:11] [SPEAKER_02]: the benefit of the doubt, not the individual.

[00:45:14] [SPEAKER_02]: And that I think summed up his attitude all the way through.

[00:45:19] [SPEAKER_02]: He was, for all his faults and they were legion, a deeply, deeply patriotic man.

[00:45:26] [SPEAKER_01]: Could you talk to us a little bit about the Harold Wilson plot which is still officially

[00:45:30] [SPEAKER_01]: denied today I believe?

[00:45:32] [SPEAKER_02]: Well it is and it isn't.

[00:45:35] [SPEAKER_02]: The Harold Wilson plot, or more accurately plots, because there were probably four, this

[00:45:45] [SPEAKER_02]: is the counterside to Wright as the heroic figure in this saga.

[00:45:52] [SPEAKER_02]: The plots against Wilson began not with Wright, they began much, or the interest in Harold

[00:46:00] [SPEAKER_02]: Wilson shall we say by MI5, began in the 1940s when it opened a file on him.

[00:46:06] [SPEAKER_02]: He was then an up and coming young politician in the Attlee government.

[00:46:12] [SPEAKER_02]: It opened a file on him under the title Norman John Worthington, that was the code name he

[00:46:18] [SPEAKER_02]: gave it.

[00:46:19] [SPEAKER_02]: And the reason it opened a file was that he had been in charge officially and tasked

[00:46:24] [SPEAKER_02]: by Attlee, then Prime Minister, with selling advanced jet fighter engines to the Soviet

[00:46:31] [SPEAKER_02]: Union.

[00:46:32] [SPEAKER_02]: MI5 didn't like that.

[00:46:35] [SPEAKER_02]: And although Wilson hadn't made the decision, Attlee had made the decision, they said well

[00:46:40] [SPEAKER_02]: we're going to open a file on him.

[00:46:41] [SPEAKER_02]: So they did.

[00:46:44] [SPEAKER_02]: After that, and this is where the plots and the conspiring really begin to gather pace,

[00:46:53] [SPEAKER_02]: in 1963 the leader of the Labour Party who was then expected to win the general election

[00:47:03] [SPEAKER_02]: which was coming within a year was Gateskill, Hugh Gateskill.

[00:47:09] [SPEAKER_02]: And he was on the right of the party.

[00:47:10] [SPEAKER_02]: He died unexpectedly in slightly mysterious circumstances a few weeks after coming back

[00:47:20] [SPEAKER_02]: from a meeting in the Kremlin.

[00:47:23] [SPEAKER_02]: And he died of an autoimmune disease, lupus.

[00:47:29] [SPEAKER_02]: The belief, and there was a reason for this belief, was that he had been poisoned by the

[00:47:38] [SPEAKER_02]: KGB.

[00:47:40] [SPEAKER_02]: Somehow it had managed in this telling to put something in his tea or his coffee that

[00:47:47] [SPEAKER_02]: he had biscuits in the Kremlin.

[00:47:49] [SPEAKER_02]: And the source of this allegation, the sources were our old friend James Jesus Angleton from

[00:47:58] [SPEAKER_02]: the CIA and his favourite Soviet defector Anatoly Golitsyn.

[00:48:04] [SPEAKER_02]: They peddled this story that the KGB had poisoned Gateskill to insert its own agent as his

[00:48:14] [SPEAKER_02]: successor, as leader of the Labour Party and putative prime minister.

[00:48:19] [SPEAKER_02]: And that successor was Harold Wilson.

[00:48:22] [SPEAKER_02]: So MI5 opened another file on these allegations.

[00:48:26] [SPEAKER_02]: This one was codenamed Oatsheaf.

[00:48:29] [SPEAKER_02]: There was precisely no evidence to support this theory.

[00:48:33] [SPEAKER_02]: Absolutely none.

[00:48:35] [SPEAKER_02]: In fact, all the scientific evidence pointed in completely the opposite direction and said

[00:48:41] [SPEAKER_02]: it was impossible for Gateskill to have been poisoned.

[00:48:44] [SPEAKER_02]: That didn't get in the way of MI5.

[00:48:49] [SPEAKER_02]: So by the time Wilson gets into number 10 in 1964 as leader of the Labour Party and

[00:48:55] [SPEAKER_02]: heading a Labour government, there was this established belief amongst some MI5 officers

[00:49:02] [SPEAKER_02]: that he was, their phrase, a wrong'un.

[00:49:05] [SPEAKER_02]: What Peter Wright called a snake in the grass, a bastard.

[00:49:10] [SPEAKER_02]: And they began wondering how to get rid of him.

[00:49:15] [SPEAKER_02]: Fast forward three or four years and there's a, in the mid to late 60s, there is a plot

[00:49:21] [SPEAKER_02]: by right-wing business leaders and army officers, and depending whether you believe this or not,

[00:49:28] [SPEAKER_02]: also involving Lord Mountbatten, to remove Wilson in what amounted to a coup d'etat.

[00:49:35] [SPEAKER_02]: Wright was on the fringes of that plot but it collapsed fairly quickly and he certainly

[00:49:42] [SPEAKER_02]: didn't get involved in it in any detail.

[00:49:46] [SPEAKER_02]: MI5 senior management knew about it but they did nothing to impede it.

[00:49:53] [SPEAKER_02]: A few years and several general elections and special elections later, Wilson is back

[00:49:58] [SPEAKER_02]: in number 10 and this is in 1973-74 and a much, much more serious plot was set in motion.

[00:50:08] [SPEAKER_02]: And this time Peter Wright was at its head.

[00:50:13] [SPEAKER_02]: He was approached by some further right-wing businessmen who were upset by Wilson, not

[00:50:24] [SPEAKER_02]: least by Wilson's association with some genuinely dubious East European émigrés who had become

[00:50:31] [SPEAKER_02]: very wealthy businessmen in the UK after trading with the Soviet bloc.

[00:50:38] [SPEAKER_02]: And they wanted him removed and they knew that the key to doing this was MI5's files

[00:50:45] [SPEAKER_02]: on Wilson, the files that MI5 had been building up and which were held under a special code,

[00:50:54] [SPEAKER_02]: if you like, in MI5's registry.

[00:50:57] [SPEAKER_02]: And they said to Wright, tell you what, you leak them to us and we'll get them into the

[00:51:03] [SPEAKER_02]: public domain and that will scupper him.

[00:51:05] [SPEAKER_02]: And Wright pondered this and thought about it and was tempted but in the end, largely

[00:51:11] [SPEAKER_02]: for I think reasons of self-protection, said no.

[00:51:15] [SPEAKER_02]: That didn't stop him however from gestating his own plot and his own plot was even more,

[00:51:24] [SPEAKER_02]: even less legal.

[00:51:25] [SPEAKER_02]: In fact, it really amounted to treason.

[00:51:29] [SPEAKER_02]: This is his own telling of the story so it's not me making it up, it's not

[00:51:34] [SPEAKER_02]: someone else attacking him.

[00:51:36] [SPEAKER_02]: This is his own version of events.

[00:51:38] [SPEAKER_02]: He decided that what should happen was that he should pull the files from MI5's registry,

[00:51:46] [SPEAKER_02]: the files on Wilson, the files which detailed Wilson's association with these somewhat dubious

[00:51:55] [SPEAKER_02]: businessmen and he would go to Wilson and say I'm going to use these,

[00:52:03] [SPEAKER_02]: I'm going to leak them to the press if you don't resign.

[00:52:09] [SPEAKER_02]: In other words, he planned, he and a group of up to 30 other officers conspired and plotted

[00:52:15] [SPEAKER_02]: to blackmail a sitting Prime Minister into resignation.

[00:52:21] [SPEAKER_02]: Now in the end, that plot too collapsed but did Wright consider it?

[00:52:29] [SPEAKER_02]: Did Wright plan it?

[00:52:31] [SPEAKER_02]: Absolutely right he did and we know that because he says so.

[00:52:36] [SPEAKER_02]: We did this.

[00:52:38] [SPEAKER_02]: MI5 knew about it, MI5 warned him gently not to do it and he finally heeded that advice.

[00:52:47] [SPEAKER_02]: So Anne Thatcher would eventually, when she was pinned to the wall in Parliament by

[00:52:54] [SPEAKER_02]: Wilson's successor James Callaghan, said no, no, no, no, no, no, no, it didn't really happen.

[00:53:00] [SPEAKER_02]: The new Director General of the Security Service has given me his personal assurance that none of

[00:53:06] [SPEAKER_02]: this happened, that there were no plots, there were no files, nothing.

[00:53:09] [SPEAKER_02]: Well that was frankly a lie and we know this not just because Wright says this

[00:53:15] [SPEAKER_02]: but because MI5 itself says yes there was a plot, there were several plots.

[00:53:22] [SPEAKER_02]: Not for the first or the last time Thatcher lied through her teeth in the House of Commons.

[00:53:29] [SPEAKER_01]: Thank you for that.

[00:53:30] [SPEAKER_01]: Okay we are going to take a second break and we'll be right back.

[00:53:51] [SPEAKER_01]: Let's move on to Thatcher's government trying to suppress Spycatcher.

[00:53:56] [SPEAKER_01]: Can you talk to us about the lengths they went to and why we think they wanted to suppress the book?

[00:54:02] [SPEAKER_02]: So why did, the question obviously is why did Thatcher and her consigliere Sir Robert Armstrong,

[00:54:12] [SPEAKER_02]: why were they so determined to silence Wright when they hadn't been determined and the previous

[00:54:20] [SPEAKER_02]: governments had not been determined and had not attempted to silence other intelligence officers

[00:54:25] [SPEAKER_02]: nor had Thatcher and Armstrong or MI5 made any effort to stop Wright giving his

[00:54:35] [SPEAKER_02]: television interview to the World in Action and Current Affairs Programme in 1984.

[00:54:42] [SPEAKER_02]: Why did they suddenly, so it would appear, decide to launch litigation

[00:54:50] [SPEAKER_02]: to prevent Spycatcher being published? I think the answer to that depends on who you choose to listen to.

[00:55:01] [SPEAKER_02]: The British government's official arguments which were set out in truly excruciating and repetitive

[00:55:08] [SPEAKER_02]: affidavits by Sir Robert Armstrong, the Cabinet Secretary, who was also Thatcher's conduit to

[00:55:15] [SPEAKER_02]: the intelligence services, were twofold. Firstly that all members, Armstrong argued, of, and former

[00:55:22] [SPEAKER_02]: members of the security service owed an unbreakable lifelong duty of silence that they could never,

[00:55:29] [SPEAKER_02]: should never reveal publicly anything they'd learned in the so-called secret services.

[00:55:36] [SPEAKER_02]: And the second leg of his argument was that if they were permitted to do so this would have a

[00:55:44] [SPEAKER_02]: devastating effect on British intelligence and national security. The problem, and we've touched

[00:55:52] [SPEAKER_02]: on it, was that far from being bound by this lifelong omerta, British intelligence had

[00:56:00] [SPEAKER_02]: leaked like a sieve for decades. Whenever it suited MI5 to funnel information or misinformation

[00:56:08] [SPEAKER_02]: and occasionally disinformation into the public sphere, its officers had been covertly encouraged

[00:56:15] [SPEAKER_02]: to do just that. As Wright was one of them. He had done that at MI5's behest.

[00:56:26] [SPEAKER_02]: And then on top of that all these retired spies had penned and published their memoirs, written

[00:56:32] [SPEAKER_02]: articles, television interviews. No one had been stopped. Only Peter Wright was to be different.

[00:56:40] [SPEAKER_02]: And that's where the other explanation emerges. When decades late and after much prodding by me,

[00:56:49] [SPEAKER_02]: amongst others, Margaret Thatcher's prime ministerial files on the spy-catcher affair

[00:56:56] [SPEAKER_02]: were dumped at the National Archives on New Year's Eve 2023. Quite the present.

[00:57:03] [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah. They revealed the true genesis of her determination and that of Armstrong to silence

[00:57:11] [SPEAKER_02]: Peter Wright. That motive was a shabby little plot which she and Armstrong had cooked up

[00:57:23] [SPEAKER_02]: to gain political advantage. The plot had involved leaking, as we've said, the Hollis scandal

[00:57:31] [SPEAKER_02]: to Chapman Pinscher via a former attorney general on privy council terms in the belief that Pinscher

[00:57:39] [SPEAKER_02]: would give it a safe government-friendly spin. Once No. 10 discovered that Wright was planning

[00:57:46] [SPEAKER_02]: to publish Spycatcher, Thatcher and Armstrong were faced with a dilemma. If they ignored the

[00:57:55] [SPEAKER_02]: proposed book, as they'd done with pretty much everything else, that ran the risk that Wright

[00:58:02] [SPEAKER_02]: would disclose yet more skeletons from within MI5 and Downing Street's closets.

[00:58:11] [SPEAKER_02]: And bear in mind when they discovered this, when they launched their action, they hadn't seen the

[00:58:15] [SPEAKER_02]: book. They hadn't seen what it contained. The other option was to take legal action in an attempt

[00:58:23] [SPEAKER_02]: to block it, but that too posed a huge problem and a significant risk because Wright lived in Tasmania

[00:58:29] [SPEAKER_02]: beyond the reach of English criminal law. So if it wanted to silence him, the British government

[00:58:37] [SPEAKER_02]: would have to confect a succession of ever more absurd civil law arguments. First injunctions,

[00:58:46] [SPEAKER_02]: then actions for breach of supposed confidentiality. And the risk of this course of action,

[00:58:56] [SPEAKER_02]: other than the fact that the government's own law officers advised privately that it had no chance

[00:59:02] [SPEAKER_02]: of success, was that once legal battle is joined, the defendants, Wright and his publisher,

[00:59:11] [SPEAKER_02]: had an absolute right of discovery to see the government's own documents. And those documents

[00:59:20] [SPEAKER_02]: would very clearly expose Thatcher and Armstrong's collusion, backdoor collusion with Pinscher,

[00:59:29] [SPEAKER_02]: which, had it been exposed as one of her MPs told me, could very easily have brought the entire

[00:59:37] [SPEAKER_02]: government down. And that's why the documents I eventually got seven months ago contain the explicit

[00:59:47] [SPEAKER_02]: phrase relating to the papers about that plot, this cannot be discovered. They knew. So Armstrong

[00:59:59] [SPEAKER_02]: and Thatcher went to truly extraordinary and frankly absurd lengths to wriggle free from the

[01:00:05] [SPEAKER_02]: mess. And in doing so, they dragged the government into international disrepute and opprobrium,

[01:00:14] [SPEAKER_02]: day after damaging day. And they made the book a bestseller in the end. Yeah, I mean, again,

[01:00:20] [SPEAKER_02]: that's one of the law of unintended consequences should be should be hammered into the heads of

[01:00:28] [SPEAKER_02]: politicians and oily civil servants. The publisher, Heinemann Australia, the publisher,

[01:00:36] [SPEAKER_02]: when they commissioned it thought, there's not much in this. Not unreasonably since much of it

[01:00:42] [SPEAKER_02]: had been published before. We think we probably might sell about 20,000 copies. Because of the

[01:00:49] [SPEAKER_02]: government's action, and remember, it took action in Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong,

[01:00:56] [SPEAKER_02]: and wanted to take action in the United States, as well as the UK courts, because of the government's

[01:01:02] [SPEAKER_02]: actions. The book sold more than 4 million copies. That's the law of unintended consequences writ large.

[01:01:13] [SPEAKER_01]: Indeed. And during that time, there were some sort of weird inconsistencies with regards to

[01:01:18] [SPEAKER_01]: how people were treated when buying or selling copies, because it was published outside the UK,

[01:01:22] [SPEAKER_01]: but some did manage to find their way into the UK during that time.

[01:01:26] [SPEAKER_02]: Oh, a lot. The main action was in the main litigation was in Australia. That's where

[01:01:32] [SPEAKER_02]: Wright was. That's where the publisher was. That's where the British government sued,

[01:01:36] [SPEAKER_02]: attempting to get the book banned. And it dragged on and the transcripts of the court hearing,

[01:01:42] [SPEAKER_02]: which I got hold of, are, if you like that sort of thing, and I do joyous, because they show

[01:01:52] [SPEAKER_02]: Armstrong, who was the government's main, if not only witness, being absolutely crucified on the

[01:01:59] [SPEAKER_02]: witness stand. But before the Australian litigation, the key litigation could be concluded,

[01:02:10] [SPEAKER_02]: an American edition of the book was published. American courts are beyond, completely beyond,

[01:02:18] [SPEAKER_02]: and American publishers, completely beyond the reach of the British government.

[01:02:23] [SPEAKER_02]: US Constitution explicitly protects freedom of speech, and courts then particularly had a habit

[01:02:30] [SPEAKER_02]: of enforcing that. Once the American book edition was published, the cat was out of the bag. The

[01:02:41] [SPEAKER_02]: genie was out of the bottle. The toothpaste was out of the tube. You pick your analogy.

[01:02:46] [SPEAKER_02]: It was an instant bestseller. It hit the top of the US bestseller charts almost instantly,

[01:02:58] [SPEAKER_02]: stayed there for 11 weeks. Thousands upon thousands upon thousands of copies were exported

[01:03:07] [SPEAKER_02]: to the UK, where it was banned, and where British newspapers were banned by truly draconian

[01:03:17] [SPEAKER_02]: injunctions from repeating any of Wright's allegations. But copies of the book just

[01:03:25] [SPEAKER_02]: came in. People literally brought them in in suitcases full at a time. One enterprising

[01:03:33] [SPEAKER_02]: gentleman flew to New York, bought 100 copies for $3,000, and on the morning he arrived back

[01:03:44] [SPEAKER_02]: at Heathrow, got the tube up to the Houses of Parliament, set up a stand on the pavement

[01:03:52] [SPEAKER_02]: outside the Houses of Parliament, and flogged the books at 100 quid a go.

[01:03:59] [SPEAKER_02]: The whole farcical nature of this is, at the time,

[01:04:05] [SPEAKER_02]: literally at the time, British MPs in the House of Commons were being denied

[01:04:13] [SPEAKER_02]: the right to debate the saga, the debacle, the scandal, whatever you want to call it.

[01:04:22] [SPEAKER_02]: And yet here was this bloke flogging American copies on the pavement outside the Houses of

[01:04:29] [SPEAKER_02]: Parliament. Thatcher wanted Her Majesty's Customs to impound copies, she really have liked that,

[01:04:43] [SPEAKER_02]: but her cabinet colleagues explained that really wasn't going to be terribly practical.

[01:04:50] [SPEAKER_02]: And so reluctantly she said, all right, well, we're not going to make any attempt to stop people

[01:04:57] [SPEAKER_02]: importing it. And that led to commercial importation. I mean, literally tens of thousands

[01:05:04] [SPEAKER_02]: of copies of this book appeared on the streets in people's homes within days and weeks of its US

[01:05:15] [SPEAKER_02]: publication. At that time, no British journalist was able to report those allegations because the

[01:05:23] [SPEAKER_02]: government had, or anything the right said pretty much, because the government had secured these

[01:05:28] [SPEAKER_02]: injunctions. It was mad. It was utterly farcical. When I started researching and then writing the

[01:05:39] [SPEAKER_02]: book, the whole absurdist nature of the Spy Catcher saga was just, it was slightly mind-blowing really.

[01:05:55] [SPEAKER_02]: You could have the book, you could import it, you could buy it, you could

[01:06:01] [SPEAKER_02]: fill in a little mail order coupon and people would sell you the book and ship it to the UK,

[01:06:07] [SPEAKER_02]: and that was all fine. But British libraries were prevented by injunction from putting the books

[01:06:16] [SPEAKER_02]: on shelves. No, no, no, British readers can't read it in libraries. Oddly, the Thatcher's

[01:06:26] [SPEAKER_02]: predecessor as leader of the Tory party, and indeed a former prime minister, Edward Heath, summed up

[01:06:32] [SPEAKER_02]: the entire nonsense in a debate in the House of Commons in January 1987. He said,

[01:06:43] [SPEAKER_02]: someone sent me a copy of the book, the US edition of the book, but I was told I shouldn't read it

[01:06:50] [SPEAKER_02]: because I faced prosecution. But I was also told that if my housekeeper wanted to stand by the

[01:06:57] [SPEAKER_02]: fire and read it to me, that would be all right. This is Alice in Wonderland stuff.

[01:07:06] [SPEAKER_02]: And there was so much more of this, that it was almost like when I read the files and when I

[01:07:15] [SPEAKER_02]: went back into these and located all this, it was like reading the libretto, the script for a Gilbert

[01:07:22] [SPEAKER_02]: and Sullivan comic opera. It was just bonkers. Just as one other small, because there are so

[01:07:31] [SPEAKER_02]: many of these examples, at the same time as British journalists were prevented from reporting

[01:07:40] [SPEAKER_02]: any of the contents of Spycatcher, by injunctions and by, for newspapers and editors,

[01:07:48] [SPEAKER_02]: were charged with criminal contempt of court for having had the indecency to try and do so,

[01:07:55] [SPEAKER_02]: at the same time, the British government had to, because it was contractually bound to,

[01:08:05] [SPEAKER_02]: publish and put on sale the Journal of the European Parliament, which contained extracts

[01:08:15] [SPEAKER_02]: from Spycatcher, which had been read out on the floor of Parliament in Strasbourg.

[01:08:20] [SPEAKER_02]: So you had on the one hand, and this is explicitly recognised in the government's own files,

[01:08:26] [SPEAKER_02]: one arm of government saying, well we're going to have to publish and sell this journal,

[01:08:33] [SPEAKER_02]: which contains extracts from Spycatcher, and the other arm of government, trooping back and forth

[01:08:40] [SPEAKER_02]: to the High Court, to the Royal Courts of Justice in the Strand, securing a succession

[01:08:48] [SPEAKER_02]: of injunctions and appeals against the lifting of injunctions, to stop anyone reading,

[01:08:55] [SPEAKER_02]: let alone reporting, those very same extracts. Utterly, utterly bonkers.

[01:09:03] [SPEAKER_01]: It is indeed very bonkers. What is the legacy of Peter Wright and Spycatcher today?

[01:09:10] [SPEAKER_02]: Again, that's one of the other great ironies. Just about everything the British government

[01:09:19] [SPEAKER_02]: tried or said it wanted to achieve in seeking to ban Spycatcher and Peter Wright,

[01:09:28] [SPEAKER_02]: and silence Peter Wright, everything it sought to achieve, it achieved the absolute polar opposite.

[01:09:38] [SPEAKER_02]: It said, you know, we're doing this to protect the security service and to maintain the morale

[01:09:45] [SPEAKER_02]: of security, MI5 officers. Well, the official history of MI5 says, no, no, no,

[01:09:52] [SPEAKER_02]: it had the opposite effect. It actually dragged the service into international disrepute and damaged

[01:10:00] [SPEAKER_02]: severely morale in the service. That was the easy bit. It said it wanted to prevent others

[01:10:08] [SPEAKER_02]: like Peter Wright from publishing their memoirs. What it actually showed them was

[01:10:17] [SPEAKER_02]: a route to do this. All they had to do was go to Australia, and the courts there, as the Spycatcher

[01:10:23] [SPEAKER_02]: saga ultimately showed, would say, no, if you're revealing stuff that needs to be revealed, you can

[01:10:29] [SPEAKER_02]: do it with impunity from here. Above all, Thatcher said we must never have her view, her argument,

[01:10:41] [SPEAKER_02]: any form of parliamentary scrutiny of the intelligence services, nor should they ever be

[01:10:49] [SPEAKER_02]: established in law. Spycatcher ensured the opposite in both cases. It directly led to the

[01:11:00] [SPEAKER_02]: MI5 and MI6 being put on a statutory basis for the first time, which stopped

[01:11:10] [SPEAKER_02]: future Peter Wrights from bugging and burgling their way across London. And it led also directly,

[01:11:18] [SPEAKER_02]: the Spycatcher saga, to the first ever parliamentary oversight and scrutiny of the

[01:11:26] [SPEAKER_02]: intelligence services. The Security Intelligence Committee was created as a direct result. So

[01:11:34] [SPEAKER_02]: everything the government tried to do in the Spycatcher saga, it achieved the absolute opposite.

[01:11:44] [SPEAKER_02]: What happened to Peter Wright in the end?

[01:11:46] [SPEAKER_02]: Wright? He and his lawyer won in Australia in 1987 and won on appeal and then won in the

[01:11:57] [SPEAKER_02]: ultimate, the highest court in Australia in 88. And the book came out in Australia.

[01:12:06] [SPEAKER_02]: There had been newspaper accounts or claims that it made him a millionaire. It didn't.

[01:12:14] [SPEAKER_02]: After deducting agents fees and everything else, he made a tidy sum of money and it genuinely lifted

[01:12:20] [SPEAKER_02]: him and his wife, Lois, out of quite genuine penury. They were living in really

[01:12:31] [SPEAKER_02]: heart-straightened circumstances until the money came through. He lived two or three more years

[01:12:40] [SPEAKER_02]: after that. He was very sick throughout much of the trials. And trying to find out more about

[01:12:51] [SPEAKER_02]: him as a person, which is what I wanted to do, wasn't easy. I was very grateful that Paul

[01:12:58] [SPEAKER_02]: Greengrass, his co-author, who's now a celebrated and award-winning Hollywood movie director,

[01:13:04] [SPEAKER_02]: talked to me and was incredibly helpful. And eventually, one of Wright's daughters,

[01:13:11] [SPEAKER_02]: Jenny Andrews, talked to me and she was really useful. It helped fill out the human picture of

[01:13:18] [SPEAKER_02]: this man. The British government constantly sought to portray him as a man embittered

[01:13:30] [SPEAKER_02]: by what had genuinely happened, which was the service denying him his full pension that he had

[01:13:36] [SPEAKER_02]: been entitled to. He'd been promised. It reneged on that promise. And they tried to portray him

[01:13:43] [SPEAKER_02]: as a greedy old man. What Paul Greengrass and Jenny Andrews, Wright's daughter, and

[01:13:52] [SPEAKER_02]: Malcolm Turnbull, who was his remarkably effective lawyer, were able to do was to put

[01:13:59] [SPEAKER_02]: that into, not just into perspective, but to say, no, that wasn't what drove the man.

[01:14:05] [SPEAKER_02]: This was a man who, for all his faults, and he had those faults, was genuinely motivated by

[01:14:13] [SPEAKER_02]: patriotism and by a belief which was, to some extent, if not largely justified, that Soviet

[01:14:25] [SPEAKER_02]: intelligence services had penetrated the British government, the civil service, and the British

[01:14:33] [SPEAKER_02]: intelligence services. He was a very moving part at the end of his testimony, moving to me anyway,

[01:14:42] [SPEAKER_02]: at the end of his testimony in Sydney in the court case. And he quoted Pope Gregory VII. He said,

[01:14:49] [SPEAKER_02]: I have loved my country and hated iniquity. Therefore, I die in exile. And that's exactly

[01:14:56] [SPEAKER_01]: what happened to him. Yeah, yeah, it's very sad. And one last question that may or may not be big.

[01:15:03] [SPEAKER_01]: Is there anything else you'd like to add that's important to you about anything we've discussed

[01:15:07] [SPEAKER_02]: today? Yeah, and very briefly, if I may, we've talked around and mentioned that the files

[01:15:15] [SPEAKER_02]: were, or remain suppressed. Some were released in remarkably odd circumstances.

[01:15:24] [SPEAKER_02]: What I think we shouldn't lose sight of, and why this story matters today, is that there were 32

[01:15:33] [SPEAKER_02]: Cabinet Office files on the spycatcher saga. They were created between 79 and 86. By law,

[01:15:44] [SPEAKER_02]: they should have been released by December 2019. None of them have been. And the Cabinet Office

[01:15:52] [SPEAKER_02]: has told, given a succession of misleading, false, and in some cases flat out lying excuses

[01:16:00] [SPEAKER_02]: for not having done so. They may or may not be released by 2029, if we're very lucky.

[01:16:09] [SPEAKER_02]: Beyond them, there were 15 files that Thatcher's office, her private office,

[01:16:15] [SPEAKER_02]: prime ministerial files, created on the saga. And I asked for them years ago. Again,

[01:16:25] [SPEAKER_02]: they should have been released by 2019, which is when I began asking for them. And I was told,

[01:16:31] [SPEAKER_02]: no, no, you can't have them. You can't have them. National Security, no, absolutely not.

[01:16:34] [SPEAKER_02]: Can't have them. And they told me that again in 2023, when I made a last despairing, September

[01:16:42] [SPEAKER_02]: 2023, I made a last despairing attempt saying, look, I'm writing this book.

[01:16:47] [SPEAKER_02]: I should have that access to those files. No, no, no, you can't have them.

[01:16:52] [SPEAKER_02]: Which made it rather odd that three months later, on New Year's Eve 2023, 3,200 pages

[01:17:02] [SPEAKER_02]: from those files miraculously appeared in digitised form at the National Archive.

[01:17:07] [SPEAKER_02]: And that was after I'd delivered the manuscript. Fortunately, I was able to get it back. I was

[01:17:12] [SPEAKER_02]: able to annotate, fillet the files and reintroduce them, or introduce that information.

[01:17:21] [SPEAKER_02]: But, and here's the bit which I think matters particularly, for all that time that all those

[01:17:30] [SPEAKER_02]: files were withheld and remained in many cases withheld, two favoured tame writers

[01:17:41] [SPEAKER_02]: were allowed access to them. One was a former civil servant writing the official history of

[01:17:47] [SPEAKER_02]: the cabinet secretaries. We'll draw a veil over that for the moment. But the second was Charles

[01:17:53] [SPEAKER_02]: Moore, former editor of The Spectator, The Daily and Sunday Telegraphs, a Tory, a loyal Tory to the

[01:18:00] [SPEAKER_02]: tip of his brogues and Margaret Thatcher's official biographer. He was not just allowed

[01:18:08] [SPEAKER_02]: access to these secret files, in some cases still secret files, he was actually provided with them

[01:18:18] [SPEAKER_02]: inside the cabinet office. Staff, cabinet office staff brought them up from the basement and said,

[01:18:24] [SPEAKER_02]: there you are. He was allowed to quote from them. What were the conditions? Well, it's hard to know

[01:18:29] [SPEAKER_02]: because neither Moore nor the cabinet office will talk about this, but he certainly gave them a

[01:18:36] [SPEAKER_02]: friendly spin. And when I talked to Peter Wright's lawyer, Malcolm Turnbull, an incredibly able man

[01:18:50] [SPEAKER_02]: who went on, we should remember, to become Prime Minister of Australia for three years,

[01:18:57] [SPEAKER_02]: I told him this. I said, this is, what's happened, Moore was allowed access to these and gave them a

[01:19:03] [SPEAKER_02]: spin. Turnbull, who's no stranger to the rough house of politics, was absolutely furious. He said,

[01:19:15] [SPEAKER_02]: they're doing it again. They're doing with Charles Moore what they did with Chapman Pinscher

[01:19:20] [SPEAKER_02]: 40 years ago. Nothing changes. As he put it, the mendaciousness, the duplicity of these people

[01:19:29] [SPEAKER_02]: is shocking. And that's why I think the story has a particular resonance today, because it isn't over.

[01:19:38] [SPEAKER_02]: Because the same dirty tricks that they tried in the 1980s and which fell flat on their faces

[01:19:46] [SPEAKER_02]: are being repeated in 2023 and 2024. And no one, I suppose other than me or Malcolm Turnbull,

[01:20:00] [SPEAKER_02]: is calling them to account. And I think that's wrong. Yeah. Well, Tim, thank you very much for

[01:20:07] [SPEAKER_01]: all that. Thank you for your time. Where can listeners find out more about you and your book?

[01:20:11] [SPEAKER_02]: My website, www.timtate.co.uk has extracts from and explanations for all 19 of my published books,

[01:20:21] [SPEAKER_02]: as well as freely viewable versions of a lot of my films. And it also has a contact page with my email

[01:20:28] [SPEAKER_02]: address on it. And I'm always very happy to answer any questions from readers. Fantastic. Well,

[01:20:34] [SPEAKER_01]: I hope the listeners do get a copy of To Catch a Spy. It's a very good book. And we've only just

[01:20:39] [SPEAKER_01]: scratched the surface of what's in there. So, Tim, thank you very much for your time today.

[01:20:44] [SPEAKER_02]: Thank you very much for having me.

[01:21:18] [SPEAKER_00]: Thanks for listening. This is Secrets and Spies.