A case of spies on the brain

Press, 23 July 1987, Page 12

A case of spies on the brain

the- < memoirs of the \ retired* M MIS officersPflter. Wright,; has become available in'Britataby private purchase from / United States. . , \ . W The first question to ask about' the book is whether it tells the, reading public anything about ' the history of British not available from other sources, t And, if so, whether its revelations appear damaging enough to the conduct of intelligence and security operations to justify the measures taken by the Government to suppress its appearance, both in Britain and in Australia. The question is not one that is tackled easily. "Spycatcher” is a book that captures the attention of the casual skipper. It is a jaunty read, and most of its. pages contain something of interest, in the way that the gossip columns of a daily newspaper do. But it is not organised in a way that makes for serious instruction. There is no chapter list, and none of its 23 chapters has a heading. This may seem a reviewer’s quibble. But it is, on the contrary, a serious criticism of a work that purports to seriousness. “Spycatcher,” is haphazardly planned and will baffle the reader who does not not understand the structure of the intelligence services. Reworking its haphazardness, the story seems to run as follows. Peter Wright, who had obtained a university education with difficulty, began work during the war as an Admiralty scientist specialising in underwater detection techniques. Through that activity he made an acquaintance with MIS, into which he was recruited as a technical expert in 1955. From the start his speciality was in the electronic surveillance of targets identified by the service as of security interest. He was successively Involved in the bugging of the Soviet Embassy In Ottawa, the Polish and Egyptian Embassies in London, and eventually, at the time of Britain’s first attempt to join the Common Market, the French Embassy. He was, by his own account, good at his job and subsequently co-operated in surveillance work with the British intelligence services’ American counterparts, first the F. 8.1. and then the C.LA. Meanwhile, he was rising within MIS and became privy to a number of its successes—as well as its failures, as he conceives them to have been. A notable success was the breaking of the Venona material, Soviet encryptions intercepted during the war but not read until 1947, on the principle, first enunciated by the American Secretary of State Stimson, that “gentlemen do not read each other’s mail.”

He also learnt of the penetration of the British Communist Party’s personnel files, Operation Party Piece, of the extent of domestic telephone tapping generally, and of the Phllby and Blunt affairs. And he became concerned in the efforts, triggered by the original "missing diplomats” affair, to investigate the possibility that there were other moles within the intelligence services, to identity them and to repair what damage they had done. Concern with moles drew him into contact with Soviet bloc defectors, of whom the most important that came to the British was Anatoli Golitsin, a fugitive K.G.B. officer. Seeds of suspicion planted by Golitsin and others led him to consolidate his belief that there were moles within his own organisation and that they were to be found at the highest level. “There is a point in any mystery,” he writes, “when the shape of the answer becomes clear. In the winter of 1962-63 as I pored through the files, back checking the complex details of nearly eight years of frantic work, it all became very obvious. What had until then been a hypothesis became an article of faith.” Wright’s article of faith was that the head of MIS, Roger

John Keegan I; assesses the | book Mrs, . Thatcher has I . tried hard ■,:« to suppress

w;- / ■ - - ■ ■ ' ■■■. HWlis, was a.Soviet agent Abetted by fellow believers witbin the service, Wright formed a,committee, codenamed Fliiency, which dedicated itself to reviewing the whole history of mole penetration and eventually succeeded in having Hollis, then in retirement officially investigated, as a possible culprit His exculpation Wright has never been able to accept f A / These matters form the body of the book. The most sensational of all its contents, which concern the allegation that a body of MIS officers attempted to "destabilisse” the Wilson Government came right at the end and appear to be appended almost as an afterthought They concern the officers* suspicions that some of Wilson’s associates had Soviet connections, that these suspicions were held by others outside the Service and that at least one of them, an unnamed “businessman,” was prepared to pay highly for “anything on Wilson.” . Sir Harold Wilson may now himself regret that he allowed his premiership to be tainted by intimacy with associates like the late Rudi Sternberg, but the unwise friendships of a Prime Minister do not justify attempts by servants of the State to act in an unconstitutional way, if indeed Peter Wright’s colleagues did so. He is curiously unspecific about the nature of the “destabilisation" of which so much has been made by commentators in advance of his book’s appearance. He is, indeed, so unspecific that the reader is left to guess what form the alleged “destabilisation” may have taken. What, at the end of it all, will the reader make of Peter Wright’s 23 chapters? The specialist will observe . that he has read most of the material before. This is particularly true' for anyone who has digested Anthony Glee’s recent book, “The Secrets of the Service” (Cape, 1987), a scholarly history of Communist penetration of MIS and MI6. Glee’s account of the decryption >•’ of the Venona material not only antedates Wright’s but is more authorita-