Peter Wright CBE, formerly of MI5, defeated Margaret Thatcher in a volcanic legal battle in Australia in the late 1980s. Thatcher tried – and failed – to injunct the publication of Wright’s book, Spycatcher, in Australia. The publication cast MI5 and MI6 in a deplorable light: little more than organisations riddled with traitors and immersed in criminality.
Throughout the trial, Her Majesty’s Government (HMG) was put on an anvil and hammered mercilessly by Wright’s dogged lawyer, Malcolm Turnbull, who later became the prime minister of Australia. When Turnbull published his own account of the affair, The Spycatcher Trial, he recounted how he had asked Wright at their first meeting if he thought HMG feared he might reveal other secrets. ‘They might’, Wright replied adding mysteriously: ‘I spent a lot of time in Northern Ireland, you know. But I won’t reveal anything about that. Malcolm, it would be easy for me to make this book very sensational indeed.’
Wright had also cautioned Turnbull that: ‘I may never be able to tell you the truth about some things.’ When Turnbull asked him what he meant, Wright responded: ‘My work in Northern Ireland, for example … A lot of things. This is a safe book compared to what I could write.’
Such was Thatcher’s anger at Wright – for telling the truth – that she set in train an amendment to British law to permit the UK to seek Wright’s extradition from Australia for committing a breach of the Official Secrets Act (OSA).
In a newly declassified letter dated 21st September, 1988, to her senior advisers Thatcher stated:
I shall be visiting Australia and New Zealand next month and I expect there will be some discussion of the Spycatcher litigation in those countries.
We lost our appeal to the High Court of Australia in June, the Court holding that it had no jurisdiction to entertain a case in which a foreign Government was seeking to enforce a governmental interest. I must of course be careful not to seem to criticise either Australian courts or Mr Turnbull, trying though that discipline will be. The principal issues suitable for discussion seem to me to be these:
… (e) Whether a request for extradition for an offence under the OSA (which will be possible under changes to the law to be introduced early in 1989) would give rise to a similar enquiry by an Australian court as to the underlying purpose of the request
1. Thatcher backs down
Thatcher, however, backed down and Wright was left alone.
Why?
The only logical answer is that she feared he would reveal far more embarrassing secrets than those he had disclosed in Spycatcher.
2. A disgruntled former spy, threats and legal action.
Peter Wright had retired from MI5 in 1976 a disgruntled man. He and his wife Lois had emigrated to Australia to live near one of their daughters, Jennifer, in Tasmania, to raise horses. By the 1980s he had decided to put pen to paper.
Wright had diabetes, was frail and generally in poor health. Before the Australian courtroom drama began, Turnbull visited London where he met with a senior legal figure acting on behalf of HMG. Turnbull’s arm was seized by the lawyer and held in a ‘hard’ grip at it. ‘Well you tell [Wright] from me,’ the lawyer said ‘that he’d better seek some medical advice before he comes to court. He’ll get no quarter in the witness box on account of his ill-health.’ While this was not a death threat, if this was how the occupant of one of HMG’s loftiest legal perches was prepared to conduct himself, what was to be expected from the gangsters in MI5? Wright had participated in at least one – if not multiple – MI5 assassination operations and knew perfectly well what its cutthroats were capable of. It probably crossed his mind that given half the chance they might, for example, arrange a road traffic accident along a dusty Tasmanian dirt track. To avoid this, he took out a life assurance policy, one that involved a threat to reveal his unpublished secrets if he was murdered.
3. Ten ‘Major Secrets’.
The legal wrangling dragged on for over a year. On 14 June, 1988, while an injunction restraining British newspapers from publishing the contents of the book was crumbling in the House of Lords in London, Wright made his threat public: ‘There are 10 major stories which I have not put in [Spycatcher] and there are probably others if I thought about it. I may put them into a secret report or I may do nothing. I just haven’t thought it out yet.’ The next day, The Times of London reported that HMG had:
always been aware that Mr Wright knew a lot more than he revealed in Spycatcher, particularly concerning his service as an MI5 officer in Northern Ireland.
From his home in Australia, Wright buoyed the story by proclaiming that the real reason HMG had gone to such lengths to muzzle him was:
because of the other things I know. But I said in the beginning I wouldn’t publish them and I haven’t done it. They have always been frightened of what I know…
Just in case the message wasn’t clear, he told the BBC that his future course of action would depend on how HMG ‘behaved themselves’.
At some stage Thatcher realised that Wright knew too much and no attempt was made to extradite him.
4. ‘I spent a lot of time in Ireland, and it was not pleasant.’
Spycatcher became an international bestseller shifting over two million copies and earned Wright a fortune. His ghostwriter, Paul Greengrass, went on to great success as a film director. His credits include the Jason Bourne film series.
After his publishing success, Wright retreated into virtual seclusion on his small farm near the apple-growing centre of Cygnet, at least for a while. Whereas he had once courted the media, requests for interviews were now batted out-of-court by his wife Lois. ‘Sorry. He won’t talk to journalists or anyone else like that,’ she was quoted as saying. ‘He has nothing left to say.’
But he had plenty left to say, albeit that some of it was utterly innocuous. On 12 August, 1990, the Sunday Times reported that he was writing another book provisionally entitled ‘Tomorrow Is Another Day’ about ‘a tamer topic that should unsettle no government’, the rearing of pedigree animals. But at least the proposed publication provided Wright with an opportunity to remind HMG to behave itself. ‘Peter does talk occasionally about writing down some post-Spycatcher reflections, but I fear they may never come to fruition,’ Sandy Grant, the managing director of Heinemann in Australia, was quoted as saying.
In 1991, he published a second spy book but it was a limp offering, little more than an A-Z of espionage terminology with a few stories thrown in for good measure. It was entitled the Spycatcher’s Encyclopedia of Espionage. There was, however, a hint in it at the Irish secrets he intended to carry to his grave if HMG behaved itself. ‘I spent a lot of time in Ireland’, he intoned:
and it was not pleasant. We also did a lot of things there which I am never going to talk about, because it would just cause more trouble. (114).
There is a possibility, albeit a wafer thin one, that Wright may have let Turnbull have a peep inside his box of secrets. In his book, Turnbull was able to describe how Wright ‘had been privy to some of the weightiest secrets of the free world, he had spied on presidents and prime ministers, he was at the very centre of the fight against the … IRA…’ (Turnbull page 19). Perhaps one day Turnbull will clarify what – if anything – he learnt about Wright’s activities in Ireland and whether he knows anything about a secret dossier.
5. MI5’s peeping Tom supreme
By the 1960s Wright had become MI5’s Witch-Finder General, a position he exploited to accumulate mountains of dossiers containing embarrassing secrets about the British Establishment. During the incessant mole hunts for Soviet agents in the UK which Wright undertook, he was granted access to any file he required in his search for treachery, real or imagined. His meddles ranged across universities, government departments – especially the Foreign & Commonwealth Office and Home Office – Buckingham Palace, and anywhere else that took his fancy. He even interviewed Airey Neave MP, who had escaped from Colditz, about the political leanings of his fellow non-British prisoners. According to Wright, MI5’s D-G, Roger Hollis, instructed ‘that I myself had to conduct any interview deemed sensitive, which normally meant it was with a lord, a knight, politician, top civil servant, or spy suspect.’
One of those Wright interrogated was the arch MI5 traitor, Sir Anthony Blunt. Blunt was prepared to betray many of his friends to preserve his position:
Blunt, too, loved to discuss the scandalous side of Cambridge life in the 1930s … I soon realised that the [Cambridge] Ring of Five stood at the centre of a series of other connecting rings, each pledged to silence, each anxious to protect secrets from outsiders. There was the secret ring of homosexuals, where loyalty to their kind overrode all other obligations; there was the secret world of the Apostles [a group of Cambridge intellectuals], where ties to fellow Apostles remain strong throughout life; and then there was the ring of those friends of Blunt and [Guy] Burgess who were not themselves spies, but who knew or guessed what was going on. Each ring supported the others, and made the task of identifying the inner core that much more difficult.
Wright personally interviewed and re-interviewed more than 100 people over a period of six years. By the end of it he could boast:
I had seen into the secret heart of the present Establishment at a time when they had been young and careless. I knew their scandals and their intrigues. I knew too much, and they knew it.
One of these was the former prime minister, Anthony Eden. All of this gave MI5 a power over the political establishment and provides one clue – among many – as to why successive governments have mangled their reputations by covering up the criminal activities of MI5.
6. Formulating MI5’s policy for Ireland
By the early 1970s, Wright had clawed his way to the top of MI5’s greasy, bloodstained pole. He was close to its D-G, Sir Martin Furnival Jones. When Michael Hanley, the Deputy D-G of MI5 became D-G in 1972, he appointed Wright as his special adviser.
Hanley asked Wright to formulate proposals about how MI5 should deal with NI after which he spent ‘a lot of time in Ireland’ and did the mysterious things which would have caused ‘more trouble’ if they were ever exposed. The Irish Times and other mainstream publications never lifted a finger to follow up the tempting clues the old curmudgeon had laid out so publicly.
7. If Wright was prepared to describe the type of operations outlined below, one shudders to think what it was that he held back from publication in his book.
What Wright divulged in Spycatcher was hair raising enough. He described how he and an Irishman called Bill Magan had plotted to ‘neutralise’ General Grivas during Britain’s struggle against EOKA in Cyprus in the late 1950s; a treasonous plot against PM Harold Wilson; and wrongdoing by MI5’s blood brothers over at MI6.
He described how at the start of the Suez Crisis, MI6 had:
developed a plan, through the London Station, to assassinate [Egypt’s President Gamal] Nasser using nerve gas. [British PM Anthony] Eden initially gave his approval to the operation, but later rescinded it when he got agreement from the French and Israelis to engage in joint military action. When this course failed, and he was forced to withdraw [from Suez], Eden reactivated the assassination option a second time. By this time virtually all MI6 assets in Egypt’s had been rounded up by Nasser, and a new operation, using renegade Egyptian officers, was drawn up, but it failed lamentably, principally because the cache of weapons which had been hidden on the outskirts of Cairo was found to be defective. (Page 160)
Had the nerve gas plot proceeded, the collateral damage to Nasser’s secretarial and domestic staff, not to mention anyone happening to visit him would have been devastating. The gas would have asphyxiated the victims while melting their vital organs.
The gas MI6 had in mind to assassinate Nasser was undoubtedly developed by HMG’s team of Dr Strangeloves at a ghoulish scientific complex known as Porton Down. Wright described how he once visited it for a demonstration of a cigarette packet which had been fitted with a poison tipped dart by the staff of the Explosives Research and Development Establishment:
We solemnly put on white coats and were taken out to one of the animal compounds behind Porton by Dr Ladell, the scientist there who handled all MI5 and MI6 work. A sheep on a lead was led into the centre of the ring. One flank had been shaved to reveal the course pink skin. Ladell’s assistant pulled out the cigarette packet and stepped forward. The sheep started, and was restrained by the lead, and I thought perhaps the device had misfired. But then the sheep’s knees began to buckle, and it started rolling its eyes and frothing at the mouth. Slowly the animal sank to the ground, life draining away, as the white-coated professionals discussed the advantages of the modern new toxin around the corpse. (162)
Porton Down is still open for business.
Part 2
Peter Wright died a rich, yet bitter man, in 1995, at the age of 78. He had spent his declining years referring to Thatcher as a ‘bitch’ and those around her as ‘those bastards’. Assuming he compiled a secret dossier, what happened to it? After the passage of three decades it is unlikely it will now surface. Instead this section will take a stab at what it might have contained. A sobering thought is that for every error we may make, the likelihood is that some other unreported horror story remains concealed.
SECRET #1: THE ANGLO-IRISH VICE RING
The Blunt interrogations permitted MI5 and MI6 to discover the existence of the Anglo-Irish Vice Ring which preyed on children in Ireland. Kincora Boys’ Home in Belfast was a part of the network the vice ring controlled.
MI5 and MI6 used children caught in this horrific web as bait in a ‘honey trap’ operation. Senior Unionist politicians such as James Molyneaux and Enoch Powell, and paramilitaries such as John McKeague, were lured to places such as the Park Avenue Hotel and other venues where they were recorded raping children. Peter Wright, as MI5’s top surveillance officer, undoubtedly knew all about these operations. Indeed, it is more than likely that he was directly involved in the sordid surveillance.
Details about the Kincora scandal can be found on this website, including via the following link: https://coverthistory.ie/2023/09/29/kincoras-darkest-secret/
SECRET #2. PEEPING AT THE ROYAL FAMILY’S DIRTY LINEN (1945)
Before Wright’s commenced his interrogation of Blunt, he received a briefing from Michael Adeane, the Queen’s Private Secretary, who told him:
From time to time you may find Blunt referring to an assignment he undertook on behalf of the Palace – a visit to Germany at the end of the war. Please do not pursue this matter. Strictly speaking, it is not relevant to considerations of national security.’ (Spycatcher page 223).
Wright was hardly going to deny MI5 an insight into this mystery since Blunt had undoubtedly passed details of it to his KGB handlers. The odds are high he learnt that Blunt had been sent to Germany to recover the correspondence the Duke of Windsor had exchanged with the Nazi hierarchy after his abdication. Revelation of this nature, even in 1987, still had the potential to shake the foundations of Buckingham Palace.
SECRET #3. BOMBING SHIPS CARRYING HOLOCAUST SURVIVORS (1946-47)
In 1946 and 1947 MI6 ran an operation to disrupt the flow of Jewish refugees from Mediterranean ports to Palestine codenamed Operation Embarrass. One of the MI6 unit was an Irishman, Wing-Commander Derek Verschoyle. The first account of the Operation emerged in The Friends, a book about MI6 published by Nigel West in 1988, a year after Spycatcher.
MI6 acknowledged the existence of operation in 2010 when they let Prof. Keith Jeffery of Queens University, Belfast, include an account of it in the official history of MI6 had asked him to write.
SECRET #4. THE SEXUAL BLACKMAIL OF AN ARCHBISHOP (1959-60)
Bizarrely, while Wright was prepared to admit that he had been involved in a plot to kill Colonel Grivas in Cyprus, he was coy about the sexual blackmail of the Colonel’s political ally, Archbishop Makarios. That operation was also exposed by Nigel West in 1988. Two years later no less a figure than Sir Dick White, the former head of both MI5 and MI6, confirmed that it had occurred.
Wright and a colleague from MI6 had placed a listening device on the telephone lines leading to the Archbishop’s Palace in Cyprus. MI6 also had a number of agents inside it controlled by Sir Stephen Hastings MC, who later became a Conservative MP. Wright gave no hint that any of them had discovered that the Archbishop was engaged in homosexual relations, or that this information had been used to blackmail him. If he had, the revelation might have raised questions about Wright’s involvement in the sexual blackmail of MI5 targets in Ireland where the British Army and MI5 had established brothels for adult heterosexuals, not to mention the blackmail of members of the Anglo-Irish paedophile vice ring which preyed on boys at Kincora and elsewhere, some of them as young as eight years of age. Wright hardly relished the thought that his daughters would discover that their beloved father had stood back while children were raped and driven to suicide so that MI5 could blackmail some of the participants in a wide range of paedophile rings.
SECRET #5. THE GRUESOME MURDER OF PATRICE LUMUMBA (1961)
Declassified CIA records confirm that President Eisenhower of the USA ordered the murder of Patrice Lumumba, PM of the Congo. Lumumba was killed in a joint CIA-MI6 operation in 1961. He had to endure a gruesome orgy of torture and violence that lasted for five or six hours before he finally expired. A harrowing account of it appears in the towering international bestseller, The Devil’s Chessboard (2016), a biography of the egregiously evil Allen Dulles of the CIA. While the book focusses on the CIA’s involvement, MI6 played a significant part in it too, something Wright would have known about.
Howard Smith, who served as Britain’s intelligence supremo in Northern Ireland, 1971-1972, was a pivotal figure in the murder. He later became Ambassador to Moscow and, in 1979, D-G of MI5. In 1960 Smith was a senior official at the FCO with responsibility for the Congo.
Daphne Park was serving as the MI6 Head of Station in the Congo. Park reported to Smith that Lumumba was allegedly trying to take his country into the Soviet camp. This was utter nonsense. Nonetheless, on 28 September, 1960, Smith circulated a memo to the Foreign Office where it was digested by a number of highly placed powerbrokers including the future Prime Minister Ted Heath who was then a junior minister at the FCO. In it Smith nonchalantly explained he could see ‘only two possible solutions’ to the situation:
‘The first is the simple one of ensuring Lumumba’s removal from the scene by killing him. This should in fact solve the problem, since so far as we can tell, Lumumba is not a leader of a movement within which there are potential successors of his quality and influence. His supporters are much less dangerous material.
By the time Wright’s book was meandering towards the printing presses, Smith was a decorated and recently retired D-G of MI5; exactly the type of person HMG would instinctively rally to protect. Meanwhile, Daphne Park was deeply immersed in MI6’s Anglo-Irish machinations. All told she was a governor of the BBC (where she interfered with broadcasts about NI) and on the cusp of becoming a life peer. She was also a friend of the then serving taoiseach, Garret FitzGerald (through her management role in the British-Irish Association). MI6 could not afford to allow Wright expose her part in Lumumba’s murder or other aspects of her sordid past: in the 1970s she had served as the Head of MI6’s Western Hemisphere division where – at a minimum – she had knowledge of the MI6-CIA Gladio death squads active in Europe at the time and had spread smears about Charles Haughey across the globe through MI6-CIA controlled news agencies. Had she been exposed by Wright, a veritable can of Irish worms might have wriggled free just as Haughey was about to seize power back from FitzGerald and HMG was fearful about what he might do with the Hillsborough Agreement and security cooperation generally.
Incidentally, Park remained an unapologetic colonialist. When she was interviewed by the Daily Telegraph in April 2003 she stated that the
The [British] Government is too worried about speaking out [against Mugabe] because they think they will be accused of being colonialist. Well I don’t think that’s such a terrible crime.
Before her death, Park also acknowledged that: ‘Yes, I have been involved in death, but I cannot speak about that’. Interested readers should purchase a copy of the fascinating Queen of Spies (2015) by the Dublin writer and intelligence expert, Paddy Hayes. One of the more interesting quotes in it is that of John de St Jorre of MI6 who worked with Park in Leopoldville: ‘I always thought of Daphne as a blend of Margaret Rutherford, the bosomy and beloved actress, and Rosa Klebb, the cold-eyed KGB dragon-lady with a poisonous blade in her shoe.’
SECRET #6. MI5’s ROLE IN BLOODY SUNDAY (JANUARY 1972)
In January 1972 British paratroopers shot dead 13 unarmed civilians in Derry. HMG responded by building a pyramid of lies around the truth. A tribunal manipulated by Lord Widgery did the necessary. His fraudulent report was published in 1972 exculpating the paratroopers. Aside from a few gullible Colonel Blimp’s in the shires of Little England, no one believed a word of it. Decades later the Saville Inquiry managed to shine a light on much of the truth but was deflected by counter-insurgency guru, Brigadier Frank Kitson, and MI5 from the scandal’s deeper secrets.
As someone who was responsible for the formulation of MI5’s NI policy in 1972, Wright cannot but have known all there was to know about Kitson and MI5’s role in Bloody Sunday. At the time of the Spycatcher affair, Kitson was a doyen of the British establishment having retired as Commander-in-Chief United Kingdom Land Forces just two years previously.
Kitson is now over 90 years of age. On 27 April, 2015, he and the Ministry of Defence were served with papers for negligence and misfeasance in office by Mary Heenan, widow of Eugene Heenan, a fifty-year-old Catholic with five children who was murdered, in 1973, by members of the UDA led by a British agent called Albert ‘Ginger’ Baker, because of ‘the use of loyalist paramilitary gangs to contain the republican-nationalist threat through terror, manipulation of the rule of law, infiltration and subversion all core to the Kitson military of doctrine endorsed by the British Army and the British government at the time.’
SECRET #7: BOMBING THE REPUBLIC OF IRELAND IN THE 1970s.
The Republic of Ireland was virgin territory and a playground for the dirty tricksters of MI5 and MI6 in 1972. In December of that year they organised two car bombings in Dublin while the Offences Against the State Bill was limping towards its doom inside Leinster House. Many of the deputies in the Dail who were opposed to the bill backed off after the explosions and it was ushered onto the statute books. The assumption at the time was that the bombs were the work of militant Republicans, especially as there were protests in the city that night against the arrest of the Chief of Staff of the Provisional IRA, Sean MacStíofáin.
As the man formulating MI5’s policy on Ireland, it is inconceivable that Peter Wright did not know everything there was to know about the 1972 Dublin bombings.
The Dublin and Monaghan bombings of May 1974 were carried out by a group of British agents including Robin ‘The Jackal’ Jackson.
Jackson and his colleagues were run by British operatives such as Robert Nairac. They were involved in countless crimes including the Miami Showband massacre.
SECRET #8. THE JOHN HUME SMEAR CAMPAIGN.
MI6 and the IRD ran a vicious smear campaign against John Hume of the SDLP. Details of the operation can be read on this website at: https://coverthistory.ie/2022/11/07/john-hume-never-received-an-apology-from-the-british-secret-service-for-the-character-assassination-campaign-they-conducted-against-him/
SECRET #9: MI5’s ATTEMPT TO DISPLACE EDWARD HEATH AS LEADER OF THE CONSERVATIVE PARTY.
At the time of the legal battle over the publication of Spycatcher, most of the media attention that engulfed the controversy related to attempts by MI5 to topple Harold Wilson as Britain’s prime minister. Wright was at the centre of that plot. He was also a key player in a scheme to topple Edward Heath and have him replaced as Tory leader by Thatcher. This secret was particularly embarrassing to Thatcher and the memory of Airey Neave who was involved in the conspiracy. Neave, who was assassinated by the INLA as he drove out of the House of Commons in 1979, was very close to Thatcher.
SECRET #10: PLOTTING AGAINST CHARLES HAUGHEY.
In the late 1980s while Thatcher was Britain’s prime minister, Charles Haughey led the Irish government. Wright must have known about MI6’s incessant plotting against Haughey. Had he revealed what he knew about these machinations, it could have turned an already toxic relationship between Haughey and Thatcher into meltdown.
The foregoing list must cover at least some of the dirty trick operations Wright had in mind when he threatened Thatcher. There were undoubtedly many other scandals to which he was privy.
David Burke is the author of three books published by Mercier Press: –
‘Deception & Lies, the Hidden History of the Arms Crisis 1970’, and;
‘Kitson’s Irish War, Mastermind of the Dirty War in Ireland’ which examines the role of counter-insurgency dirty tricks in Northern Ireland in the early 1970s, and;
‘An Enemy of the Crown, the British Secret Service Campaign against Charles Haughey’, which was published on 30 September 2022.
These books can be purchased here:
https://www.mercierpress.ie/irish-books/kitson-s-irish-war/
https://www.mercierpress.ie/irish-books/an-enemy-of-the-crown/
https://www.mercierpress.ie/irish-books/deception-and-lies
Operation Clockwork Orange, an ebook, can be found on this website.
