The Spycatcher Affair & MI5: The Scandal that Shook Britain with Tim Tate

Andrew Hammond: Welcome to SpyCast, the official podcast of the International Spy Museum. I'm your host, Dr. Andrew Hammond, a museum's historian and curator. Each week we explore some aspect of the past, present, or future of intelligence and espionage. If you enjoy the show, please consider leaving us a five-star review to help other listeners find us. Coming up next on SpyCast. In Wright's phrase, "The British establishment haven't just been penetrated by Soviet intelligence, but that it was," his phrase, "rotten to the core." [ Music ] In 1987, Peter Wright, former MI5 officer, an assistant director, published Spycatcher, the candid autobiography of a senior intelligence officer. Banned in England, but widely available and quite popular in Scotland, Australia, and beyond, the contents of Wright's book spread fast, and were going to change public perception of intelligence and espionage in the UK forever. This week I was joined by Tim Tate, bestselling author, documentary filmmaker, and investigative journalist. He's authored 20 nonfiction books, including his newest, "To Catch a Spy", which explores the infamous Spycatcher Affair and its lasting effect on British public life. In this episode, Tim and I discuss Peter Wright, his background and motives, the contents of Spycatcher, the exposure of alleged Soviet moles, and the accusation that the head of MI5 was one of them, Britain's efforts to keep their secrets secret, and the lasting effects of the Spycatcher Affair. The original podcast on intelligence since 2006. We are SpyCast. Now, sit back, relax, and enjoy the show. Well, thanks ever so much for joining me to speak about one of my favorite books of fiction stroke nonfiction, Spycatcher. It's a pleasure to speak to you, Tim.

Tim Tate: Thank you very much for inviting me.

Andrew Hammond: And I think it would be interesting just to start off. So you've written this book on this Spycatcher Affair. So this is based on a book that was written by a senior British MI5 officer back in the 1980s. So that's kind of what we're dealing with. So you've written a book on this affair that was prompted by a book. So let's just sort of unpack that like Russian dolls. Who is Peter Wright? Give our audience a little bit more of an understanding about who he is and why he's significant.

Tim Tate: Peter Wright was, for 20 years, MI5's most senior and most experienced counterespionage and counterintelligence officer. He was -- to coin the phrase, he was a spy catcher. He was a mole hunter. He devoted his life in MI5 to -- searching for and uncovering moles -- Soviet moles, both real and imagined inside the British establishment, inside the government, inside politics, the civil service academia, and most notoriously inside MI5 itself. And he did this not from some private whim, as has sometimes been implied, but because that's what he was tasked to do by his masters at MI5. From the early 1960s onwards, he was tasked with uncovering Soviet moles who had borrowed their way into British life since the 1930s.

Andrew Hammond: And it's so interesting to me all of this because it's very difficult, you know, with hindsight, we can say someone was on a wild goose chase, but one of the points that you make in the book was that there were actual real Soviet penetrations of the British state, but there were also ones that were, you know, not good leads or that were fictitious, or it was a dead end, but the people at the time investigating them didn't really know if it was completely a dead end or if they just didn't have enough information. So even -- and, you know, you mentioned the Zinoviev letter in the book. Not long before that, there had been the Zimmermann telegram, which helped to bring the US into World War I. So how does the average member of the public know which one is actually real and which one is false? I mean, they're kind of set up to look like pretty plausible to the average person on the street. So I think the point I'm getting at that when you're operating in this world of counterintelligence and spy catching and mole hunting, there's lots of shadows, there's lots of apparitions, and sometimes you get a hold of them and there's something material there, but other times it's immaterial. So there's really interesting thing that you bring out in your book where it's sometimes it's real, sometimes it's imagined, but these people at the time didn't necessarily know quite as clearly as what the difference was.

Tim Tate: I think someone much better and much wiser than me coined the phrase the wilderness of mirrors, and that is the classic description of counterespionage and counterintelligence. My view is a take on that the game of detecting spies from reading the tea leaves of fragmentary pieces of information, some of which are second or third-hand, some of which are gossip, but that's a counterespionage officer's job. My take on is that it's more like a Rorschach test. What these myriad shapes mean to one person who's looking at it can mean something completely different to someone else. And it depends on what you bring to that task. What Wright brought to his task, I think, was two things. Originally, Wright was a scientist, an untrained, if you like, self- self-taught, but genuinely innovative scientist. And he brought that questing mind to the business of counterespionage and counterintelligence. But it's equally fair to say that he arrived there too, with a fairly healthy prejudice against anyone who was to the left of his own somewhat right-wing opinions and an absolute distrust of the British establishment. All of that factors into what he saw in the tea leaves of these fragmentary pieces in- of information. But- and here's the but, and this is what emerged from all the files I managed eventually to unearth and prize from the British government's, somewhat, reluctant hands. The evidence he assembled of widespread- the evidence he assembled of widespread penetration was more convincing than not, if you want to put it that way, he found truly acres of paperwork from old files, which had been disregarded and hadn't been properly followed up on, and leads that hadn't been properly followed. And when he pulled at them those threads of evidence, and when he chased it down, what he found as often as not was genuine reason to suspect the penetration -- the widespread penetration was real and serious.

Andrew Hammond: And that -- this is an interesting point maybe to the explore Peter Wright a little bit more. So tell us a little bit more about him. What's his upbringing, his father plays quite an important role. Help us understand the man that gets formed that then joins MI5 and begins to do these Rorschach tests. Like, who is he as a kind of person before he joins the intelligence services?

Tim Tate: Well, he was born to a man called Maurice Wright, who was a scientist for Marconi and who, during World War I, was co-opted into MI6 to work essentially as an undercover spy in Scandinavia. When the First World War ends, Maurice Wright goes back to Marconi. Peter Wright is then a young boy, but Maurice begins to show Peter what he knows about science. And it is a -- it's an exploration. They do this together. And he fires Peter Wright's imagination as Wright put it, you know, on the beaches at Essex or on the hills above the beaches. We played with dials and crystal sets, and we tuned up and down the frequencies. And that plus Maurice's involvement with MI6 and the exciting stories he told his son about those adventures fueled young Peter Wright's imagination and his desire both to be a scientist and to work in the intelligence services. In the 1930s, Maurice becomes unemployed. He loses his job at Marconi and spirals down into alcoholism. And the Wright family spirals down, not quite into poverty, but certainly not into a comfortable existence. Peter Wright, then a sort of mid teenager is pulled out of his private school. He had been expected to go onto Cambridge, and he's forced to go and earn a living as a farmhand essentially. And then to -- and he puts money by to try and fund a- what he hopes will be a college education at an agricultural college that is kiboshed by the arrival of the Second World War and the college is closed, by which point Maurice has recovered from his alcoholism enough to go back to work for Marconi and almost certainly for the intelligence services. And Peter, then a young man, is co-opted into the Royal Naval Scientific Service. And what he does there is innovative, it's innovative science. He finds a way- a new way -- invents a new way of protecting British shipping from German naval attack. And he does that very successfully for the duration of the Second World War, after which he takes the civil service exams, passes out very close to the top of his class and joins the RNSS full-time as a scientist. And again, he is a successful scientist, but always an outsider. He has no formal or academic education in science, just what his father taught him and his own restless search for scientific innovation, but he does it with real success. He helps MI5 and indeed the US Intelligence Services decode the mysteries of a new previously untold Soviet surveillance microphone, and this together with his other successes leads him eventually to be appointed as MI5's first ever scientific officer in 1955. And he's very, very good at it. In English parlance, Peter Wright was a boffin. He was a very talented, if self-taught. And all of those people who knew him and knew him well, who I talked to think by and large that's what he was best suited to. The problem is that once you do, as Wright did, which is upgrade MI5's truly antediluvian technology -- surveillance technology for the Cold War -- new Cold War, which is being fought as an electronic battleground as much as anything else. Once you do that -- and once Wright did that, it led him inexorably into uncovering evidence of Soviet penetration. And he -- as he said in court testimony, albeit secret court testimony during the Spycatcher trials, every MI5 technical operation against the Soviets in the UK in that period failed. Why did it fail? Wright pulled at that thread and that led him to the first stirrings of suspicion that MI5 had a traitor in its midst, an in-house mole working for Soviet intelligence.

Andrew Hammond: One thing that, I think has, you know, come, comes across in the book has the -- his personality is quite interesting too. Like, how would you describe having been immersed in this world for sort of four or five years now? Like, how would you describe it? He's painted obviously by different people in different ways, but, like, what's your take on him, Tim?

Tim Tate: My take on him, which is informed by both his own writings, not just in Spycatcher, but in the reports he wrote for MI5, which I obtained, and from talking to people who knew him very well, indeed. My take is that he was inevitably a very complicated man. He was in the great tradition of self-taught tinkerers, boffins, and he was, but he nurtured a deep resentment for what he saw as the scientific establishment. The men more privileged than he had been, who had nice shiny degrees from top universities, and who, in one of his memorable phrases, were shiny ass bastards inside the various services for which they worked. He had very little patience with them, he had very little patience with many people. So we have that chip on his shoulder right from the outset. He was also deeply, deeply patriotic, both in the best sense of patriotism. He loved his country and believed -- he believed in serving it and did, but he was also patriotic in the worst sense of that word, in that he viewed anyone from the left, however, soft left that might be as dangerous as potential if not actual Soviet agents be that direct or agents of influence, and that led him and indeed, MI5 some -- down some truly disastrous paths.

Andrew Hammond: Seems like quite a prickly character. Would that be fair?

Tim Tate: Yeah. I mean, I think that would be fair. He was very much of his era, but one of the things that I found most helpful was when I finally persuaded his daughter and his granddaughter to talk to me. Neither of them have talked publicly before, and they were able to share insights into Peter Wright, the man. And as was Wright's subsequent co-author in Spycatcher, Paul Greengrass, now a very famous Hollywood movie director. What they showed was the more human side. Wright was a truly loving family man. His family loved him unequivocally. He was also a -- he was passionate about nature and the countryside. You know, his immersion as in science, in agriculture, in his early mid-teens and onwards, had left him with a deep and abiding love of nature. And that is where he found solace, solace that was much needed. [ Music ]

Andrew Hammond: To help you understand this episode in a little more detail, I'm going to read a short excerpt from Peter Wright's book, Spycatcher. He ended up at the Admiralty Research Laboratory, and this is an account of his early days. "I felt terribly insecure when I arrived at the Admiralty Research Laboratory because of my lack of qualifications. The Admiralty Research Laboratory's contribution to winning the war has been much undervalued. One of the most pressing problems facing Britain at the outbreak of war was the threat of magnetic mines. At Dunkirk, for instance, thousands of mines littered the shallow water off the coast. Hitler was convinced that these would prevent any mass evacuation of British forces. But Butterworth, one of the figures there, knew that the German mines worked North Pole downward only, and suggested we magnetize our ships South Pole downward so that the ships repelled the mines. The Admiralty embarked on a massive program of reversing the magnetism of all the ships going to Dunkirk. The result was that not a single ship was lost to mines. Science in wartime is often a case of improvising with the materials at hand,solving a problem as best as you can at that time, rather than planning 10 or 15 years ahead when it may be too late. The war shaped my later approach to technical intelligence. It taught me the value of improvisation and showed me too just how effective operations can be when the men of action listened to young men with a belief in practical, inventive science. Sadly, by the end of the war, this attitude had all but disappeared. The dead hand of committees began to squeeze the life out of Britain." [ Music ] Tell us a little bit more about the book. So we've got an understanding of the man before we get to the trial. What's the book, Spycatcher? When does it come out? What is he doing, where is the -- where does the impetus for it come from?

Tim Tate: Well, we're going to start in the middle of that answer, if that's all right.

Andrew Hammond: Okay, sure. Yeah.

Tim Tate: The book was mooted -- it first began forming as a book officially in 1984 when Wright approached Paul Greengrass, who was then a producer and director with World In Action, which was British television's- commercial television's premium current affairs program. And he's --

Andrew Hammond: That was such a good show, wasn't it?

Tim Tate: Oh, I knew, I know -- I knew a lot of people from World In Action. We were contemporaries rivals because I worked for a rival program. But it was a vitally important and very brave program. Wright approached Paul Greengrass to say, will you help me write this book? And it didn't happen out of the blue. Earlier -- about a year and a bit earlier, Wright had finally, after Greengrass had nagged him for a while, agreed to give an on-the-record -- on-camera interview to World in Action. And that program broadcast in July, 1984 was a full-throated critique by Wright of the penetration of MI5 by Soviet intelligence. But then we need to stop and say that's not where that began either because we have to go back four years earlier and then some -- Wright left MI5 in 1976. He retired. He reached the retirement age. And he had completed this vast task, which MI5 had assigned to him to investigate Soviet penetration, and had led very successfully investigative committees, which had reached some seriously disturbing conclusions. They concluded that in Wright's phrase, "The British establishment hadn't just been penetrated by Soviet intelligence, but that it was," his phrase, "rotten to the core." These people who had been recruited by Soviet intelligence generally in the mid-1930s and onwards, had borrowed their way into politics, into the law, into parliament, into academia, into the civil service, and that was a serious issue. By the time he left, and this is, again, according to the testimony he gave in a secret session in the Spycatcher trials. I was fortunate enough to get hold of this for the first time. MI5 listed 35 eminent persons in British life, his phrase, "Soviet spies." And those people had never been exposed, prosecuted, or brought to any form of book. And nothing had happened with that. So when he left MI5, he left deeply worried about this, and he spent several years trying to get the evidence which he had accumulated officially into the hands of MPs and parliamentarians in the hope that something would be done. Each time he was blocked. It didn't work, which is when we'd come to 1990. One of his big -- and this is a story, I think, pretty much anyone who knows anything about Britain's myriad espionage scandals will know of. One of Wright's big beefs was that the former director general of MI5, Sir Roger Hollis, had been a Soviet agent. Wright and his investigative committee had written at least three reports saying, this is what we found. The evidence we have points to this. They had been largely blocked from doing anything about it. And indeed the evidence that they had accumulated and the allegation about Sir Roger Hollis was kept from MI5's political masters. It was kept from the Prime Minister and Downing Street for 13 years. It was all -- these investigations were conducted in secret, and all of them were eventually quashed from higher up within MI5, primarily. In 1979, journalists, people -- my colleagues, because I was a working journalist at the start of my career then, began getting a whiff of the Hollis scandal, this thing, which was completely secret at this point. And part of that whiff came from the CIA's former head of counterintelligence, James Jesus Angleton, a man who I know will need no introduction to you and your listeners. Angleton warned or tried to warn the new and incoming prime minister in Britain, Margaret Thatcher. The journalists were on the trail of this, that it was- the story was going to come out. And he said, "You've got to do something about it." Thatcher disregarded this. She brushed it off until it became apparent that this was a serious risk. This story, which had been suppressed for 13 years was going to come out. And at this point we get to the first extraordinary element of what my book is about. A journalist -- an espionage journalist again, who probably needs no introduction to your listeners called Chapman Pincher, a man who had been at the forefront of espionage revelations and defense, revelations in -- for tabloid newspapers in this country for decades, approached the British government. And he said, "I hear that some rivaled left-wing journalists are planning to write a book about Roger Hollis, and I'd like to beat them to the punch. Will you help me?" Now, it's a very strange request. This is a muckraking espionage journalist asking the new British government to help him beat his rivals to a scoop by leaking the details of Britain's most serious and damaging espionage scandal ever. And you would expect that any sensible, sane government would say no. Margaret Thatcher didn't. She had the information. She was told, "Pincher wants our help." And according to the government papers I laid my hands on, which had been kept secret for 40 years, I would point out, she said, "Okay, we'll do a deal. We'll have him briefed on privy council terms, essentially on the understanding that he will break this story, but he will put a positive spin on it. He will diffuse it so it doesn't become a political problem for the British government." And that's what happened. Pincher was briefed on the Hollis scandal and set about building this into a book. The government knew this. The government did this deliberately, if secretly, but they also knew that he had a secret co-author, a man who was providing him with background and detailed information, a former MI5 officer, and it knew that former MI5 officer was Peter Wright. The book comes out in January, 1981. Wright is not credited. The book Their Trade is Treachery exposed the Hollis scandal for the first time ever, but it did partially, at least put a nice friendly government spin on it in a way that infuriated Peter Wright. He felt cheated and betrayed. The government too felt cheated and betrayed because it hadn't got quite what it wanted, but it had enough for Thatcher to go to parliament and to make an almost unprecedented common statement in which she cleared Roger Hollis. She said, "No, there have been several in -- internal inquiries and the last of which found that Roger Hollis was not a spy." That was quite simply a lie, and it infuriated right even further. And so the -- all of this sowed the seeds of him wanting to go public in his own right. He said, "Thatcher lied to the House of Commons. She lied about Hollis, she lied about much else. There is evidence of penetration. I have done my best to get it into proper, official hands and nobody will take any notice. No one will let me do this." And that's why he eventually agreed to give Paul Greengrass and World in Action the interview, and then approached Greengrass to write his own book, which became Spycatcher. All of this, every last bit of this was anathema to Thatcher and the British government. And from late 1984, early 1985, they set out unequivocally to silence Peter Wright.

Andrew Hammond: One of the ways that they attempted to do so was using his pension. Is that correct?

Tim Tate: Not quite. Wright -- this is one of the great stories which is told about Peter Wright that he wrote the book, he wrote Spycatcher because he was embittered at having been denied his full pension. And he was embittered at having been denied his full pension because he had been denied his full pension. When he --

Andrew Hammond: I would be too.

Tim Tate: Yeah. I mean he had a very reasonable point. When he left the Royal Naval Scientific Service, which is a government department to join MI5, when he was recruited, MI5, which didn't officially exist at that point, said, "Yeah, you've got 14 years of pension entitlement with the RNSS, but you can't transfer it across to MI5 because we don't exist. So you'll lose that, but don't worry, our money comes from what's called the secret vote basically, and not in a wink from the prime minister. And we will make up your pension. We will make sure you don't suffer financially." When it came to retirement in 1976, MI5 reneged on that gentleman's agreement and Wright found himself genuinely in somewhat straightened financial circumstances. He couldn't afford to live in Britain, which was then racked with inflation, and he moved to Tasmania, Australia's smallest and sleepiest state where land was cheap and he was able to set up a whole stud, somewhat ramshackle and short of cash, but he managed to do that. And the big allegation, which has been bruited about Peter Wright is he only wrote Spycatcher for the money. He wanted to profit from what he knew, what he had learnt within MI5. That simply isn't true. It's partially true. He certainly did want and need the money, but it wasn't his motivation. Everyone I've talked to, everyone who knew him well, said his motivation was patriotic. He said, "We have a problem. This problem has not been addressed and is still not being addressed, therefore, I must do this." And in fairness, the evidence of the files that I obtained suggests that Wright had a very good point.

Andrew Hammond: Let's just circle back to Sir Roger Hollis because this is a big part of the Spycatcher book and a big part of your book. I know there's no smoking gun out there, but if you were to -- if you were a betting man and you had to put your pension on the red is, on the roulette wheel, is guilty and the black is not guilty, where would you place your money?

Tim Tate: I'm going to cheat.

Andrew Hammond: Okay.

Tim Tate: And I'm going to answer that by telling you what the British government's last its final inquiry decided. That inquiry was carried out over a year-long period by a very senior, former civil servant, a man called Lord Burke Trend. And the Trend report was what Thatcher in her statement to the House of Commons paraphrased, it's what she said Trend had found about Roger Hollis. And she said that Trend had found that Hollis wasn't a spy. And for 40 years that has been the conventional wisdom. The Trend report itself, of course, has never been published, but on New Year's Eve, 2023, files I had been fighting to get hold of, government files were finally and belatedly released. And within them, there is a very revealing passage. It's an internal government document -- internal Downing Street document, which said that far from clearing Hollis, Trend said there was a 20% chance that Hollis had indeed been a Soviet spy. I think that's an important figure to remember. And the second cheat I'm going to go with is what Wright himself said, bear in mind he knew what Trend had concluded, not what Thatcher told the public Trend had concluded. He knew the reality that there was a 20% chance. And Wright said, "In matters of this kind, in intelligence -- counterintelligence matters, there's rarely a smoking gun, but there's the balance of probabilities. And in cases like that, I think the country should get the benefit of the doubt, not the individual."

Andrew Hammond: Wow. I wonder if the truth of that will ever come out. That's huge, right? The head of MI5 a Soviet mole?

Tim Tate: Yeah. And that's been, you know, that story that Hollis was or was not a Soviet mole has been in the public domain since 1981 and the arguments have raged backwards and forwards: Will the ultimate truth, if that exists, ever emerge? I think it's very unlikely. Even today, the British government remains determined that its dirty linen in espionage matters remains firmly tucked inside the dirty linen closet underneath Downing Street. I mean, it's -- I was astonished when I got hold of those files on New Year's Eve 2023 because that for the first time was cast iron evidence that the government knew there was a 20% chance that Hollis had been a spy and had lied about it. [ Music ]

Andrew Hammond: Here's another short passage from Spycatcher,this time on the so-called Spy of the Century, Kim Philby. "The choice of Elliott to travel to Beirut, Lebanon to confront Philby rankled strongly as well. He was the son of a former headmaster of Eton and had a languid, upper-class manner, but the decision was mad,. MI6's Elliott would fly out to Beirut. 'He returned a week later,' Philby had confessed. He had admitted spying since 1934. He was thinking of coming back to Britain. He had even written out a confession, at last, the long mystery was solved. Many people in the secret world aged the night that Harold Philby had confessed. I was nearly 45. It is one thing to suspect the truth. It is another to hear it from a man's lips. Suddenly there was very little fun in the game anymore. A Rubicon had been crossed. It was not the same as catching Lonsdale that was cops and robbers. To find that a man like Philby, a man you might like or drink with or admire, had betrayed everything to think of the agents and operations wasted, youth and innocence passed away and the dark ages began." Wright then talks about his mentor, Arthur Martin being passed over for a promotion within MI5. "He certainly deserved it in terms of achievement, but he had never been popular among the directors. He was seen as truculent, temperamental, too unwilling to tolerate fools gladly, which unfortunately, was a prerequisite for advancement in the service. There was no doubt in anyone's mind listening to the tape of Elliott and Philby, that Philby arrived at the safehouse well prepared for Elliott's confrontation. Elliott told him there was new evidence, that he was now convinced of his guilt. And Philby who had denied everything time and again for a decade, swiftly admitted spying since 1934. Arthur found it distressing to listen to the tape. He kept screwing up his eyes and pounded his knees with his fist and frustration as Philby reeled off a string of ludicrous claims. Blunt was in the clear, but Tim Milne, an apparently close friend of Philby's, who had loyally defended him for years was not. The whole confession, including Philby's signed statement, looked carefully prepared to blend fact and fiction in a way which would mislead us. I thought back to my first meeting with Philby, the boy's charm, the stutter, how I had sympathized with him, and the second time I heard that voice in 1955, as he ducked and weaved around his MI6 interrogators finessing a victory from a steadily losing hand. And now there was Elliott trying his manful best to corner a man for whom deception had been a second skin for 30 years. It was no contest. By the end, they sounded like two rather tipsy radio announcers. Their warm, classical public school accents, discussing the greatest treachery of the 20th century. [ Music ] One thing that I'm interested in as well in the book is the relationship that MI5 has with the British public. And the book, you know, you say it's not even -- it doesn't even officially exist. It's not in a legislative footing. Its budget comes from the secret vote. What's kind of going on there? And does the Spycatcher Affair play into that moving of the needle where it's now established and it's stolen and, you know, who's directors are and so forth, or is it still -- is there still a degree of opacity to it?

Tim Tate: To answer your last question first, the Spycatcher Affair drama dramatically changed the way Britain's spies do the nation's business. When Wright joined, MI5 didn't legally exist. It didn't officially exist. He was told this on his first day in the job. MI5 is quote unacknowledged by the government. We will never acknowledge you. We will never talk about it. We will never talk about what you do. There are no checks and balances on what you do because MI5 doesn't exist. There are no legal constraints. The only piece of paper which governed MI5's notional operating remit dated from the mid-1950s -- early, mid 1950s, and was about six paragraphs and said absolutely nothing about whether MI5 had to obey the law. Result, MI5 didn't obey the law. It routinely broke the law. And as Wright famously said, "We bugged and burgled our way across London while pompous bowler had its civil servants look the other way." All of that is a strand, I suppose, in my book, which struck me all the way through that this is absurd. The British public knew that MI5 existed. It was the subject of stories, books, films, and had been since the early 1950s, and indeed other memoirs by other MI5 officers, including the former director general of MI5, but officially the British government said, "No, no, no, no, no, no, no. We don't acknowledge this. We do not have any intelligence services." And that absurdity would be -- would come back to bite the British government in a big, big way during the Spycatcher trials.

Andrew Hammond: One of the figures that limps quite large in the book is Kim Philby. Can you tell us a little bit more about the role that he plays in Peter Wright's story?

Tim Tate: Philby, you know, no spoiler alert here because everyone knows this. Philby was a very senior Soviet agent inside British intelligence. He was one of the infamous ring of five. The group of bright young things recruited at Cambridge University in the 1930s who almost seamlessly drifted into intelligence and the establishment both before, during, and after the Second World War, and carried on all the way through. MI5 suspected or knew, believed -- they knew that Philby was a Soviet mole. From the early 1950s, they had evidence of this, but MI6, which employed Philby wasn't willing to listen and essentially helped Philby dodge the bullet. The best that happened was eventually that Philby was edged out of MI6. MI6 found him a nice job working for the observer in Beirut. Until in 1963, the evidence, once again, resurfaced and MI5 got hold of it, that Philby was a senior -- very senior Soviet spy. MI6 sends one of its own officers out to Beirut to interview him. They find Philby falling down drunk in his flat in Beirut, and Philby makes a partial confession. He says, "Yes, yes. Yes, I was, but I stopped being a Soviet spy in the 19, early 1950s, though I did help two other Soviet spies from the ring of five defect to Moscow. At that point, there's a planned interview. MI5 says, "Well, we've got to have the man back here." And MI6 agrees, got to have Philby back in London to fully debrief him about what he's done and who else he might have recruited. And Philby instead is tipped off about this. He's tipped off that they're planning to bring him home to London to face the music once and for all. And he flees to Russia to Moscow where he lives for the rest of his days. Wright as a counterespionage officer and as MI5's scientific officer had been involved with the Philby case from the mid to late '50s onwards. He had been part of the original investigations- the original interviews with Philby that MI5 had listened in on- officially listened in on. When he's tasked with unraveling the ring of five and whether there were more than five, and whether it extended beyond Cambridge University and Philby and his friends, Wright pursues this to the nth degree, and what he finds is that Philby was merely one of many, and his story and how Philby's actions before he did a run out to Moscow, linked in with, for example, the investigation into Roger Hollis. Is a complicated, but utterly to my mind, fascinating piece of counterespionage. Is Philby important in the Peter Wright story? Well, yeah. He's central, but he's by no means the only central or the most central character.

Andrew Hammond: There's lots of great characters in the book and really big and interesting personalities. So I would encourage our listeners to buy the book, which is a really fascinating insight into this whole affair. I think just to close out, I was just wondering if you could tell us a little bit more about the, you know, the effect that the Spycatcher trial had. So you mentioned, you know, trying to put the gag on him and going to core, and there's this great um. One thing I meant to say to you as a complement term is you can really write at the beginning, the part where you're talking about Sir Roger, Robert Temple Armstrong and how he ascended the heights of Britain's very polite, but vicious civil service and stuff. So it is such a well-written book as well, so thanks for -- just to close off.

Tim Tate: That's very, very kind and generous.

Andrew Hammond: Yeah. And it's true. Tell us- tell our listeners the effect that all of this brouhaha had on the book, because it was a bestseller around the world, right?

Tim Tate: Yeah, I mean, the Cole's note versions of this, Wright is living in Australia. He writes the book -- he wants to publish the book. Heinemann Australia- the publisher of Heinemann Australia agreed to publish the book, and none of them thought that this would be a problem. Any number of previous books, including the one Wright helped Chapman Pincher write had been published without interference. Wright had appeared on World In Action, full face on camera. They didn't think this was going to be a problem, and nor did they think it was going to sell that many copies. You know, the publisher thought, "If we're lucky, we might sell 20,000 copies, if we're lucky." Bizarrely, and there is a reason for this, the British government decided to make an example of Peter Wright. They said, "We are going to launch legal action in Australia to silence him. They took out injunctions, and they asked the Australian courts to ban Spycatcher to stop it being published and to ban Wright from ever talking. And they did. So this was the government's case because Briti- British intelligence officers owed a lifelong duty of confidentiality to the crown -- to the government or the crown, depending on which affidavit you read. And that if Peter Wright were allowed to talk and publish his book, this would do untold damage to Britain's intelligence services. All of this was utter nonsense and -- I mean, it was just utter nonsense. MI5, as the judge in Australia finally said -- finally said in his judgment, MI5 and indeed, MI6 had leaked like sieves for decades. Many other people had published books. There was no evidence that there would be any damage, not least because what Wright was saying in Spycatcher had already been published. It was mad. It was this quixotic battle that Thatcher and her cabinet secretary, Sir Robert Armstrong, decided to pursue. And it was disastrous. I mean, it's hard to overstate just how badly this played out day after day in newspapers and on television stations across the world, because the government didn't just try and stop the book in Australia. It launched parallel actions in New Zealand, in Hong Kong, and in London, and it fought this legal battle at vast cost to the British taxpayers knowing, because I've got the advice it was given at the time that it wouldn't win. It was beyond absurd. And why I say that -- I say this in the book, at times, the Spycatcher Affair descended into fuss. It was likened to, and I think rightly, Alice in Wonderland, or in my view, it's like the libretto from a particularly poor Gilbert and Sullivan Comic opera. You know, facts were admitted, facts that Wright claims that he'd made, they were admitted as true by the British government in court in Australia, but simultaneously denounced as lies in parliament. I mean, that was a charade that was mad enough and it's on right. British journalists were prevented under truly draconian injunctions here from reporting Wright's allegations. At one point, they were even repor- prevented from reporting what took place in open court, nevermind in the closed sessions. The whole thing was an absurdist fuss that the British government knew it would lose, and duly did. The result were the polar opposite of everything the government said it was setting out on this quest to achieve. Wright's book wasn't just published selling a few thousand copies. It became a global blockbuster. It sold more than 4 million copies. The book was translated into any number of languages. And in terms of MI5 and MI6, and the rest of Britain's intelligence services, the knock-on effect of all of this absurdity and the huge outpouring of condemnation, which I would stress lasted for years, was that for the first time, MI5 and MI6 and GCHQ were put on a statutory basis. For the first time they were established in law. Thatcher had fought tooth and nail to prevent this from happening, but because of her own hubris, her arrogance in pursuing this case, legislation is introduced, which places MI5 and MI6 on a statutory basis, and institutes finally some form of parliamentary oversight of what they get up to. It's impossible to overstate, in my view, how much the Spycatcher Affair with all its absurdities, with all its much more Machiavellian plots because Thatcher and Armstrong were involved in some seriously tawdry plots. It's hard to overstate just how much this changed the way British intelligence goes about the nation's business. It changed it fundamentally, and for all time.

Andrew Hammond: This has been such a great conversation. I've really enjoyed speaking to you, Tim. I'll leave you with one story, which you'll appreciate. So there's someone that I know here who's a counterintelligence officer. He was in NSA, CIA. Now he does it at a more senior level, a policy level. And he told me that the reason he got interested in intelligence is because as a kid to growing up, he heard that there was a book that the British government did not want him to read. So the very first thing that he wanted to do was to try to get hold of that book. And from that story and reading Spycatcher, that's when he decided he wanted to get in counterintelligence.

Tim Tate: If you wanted an encapsulation of the idiocy of what the British government set out to do, you've got it there and then.

Andrew Hammond: Thanks ever so much. This has been so much fun.

Tim Tate: Thank you so much for having me. [ Music ]

Andrew Hammond: Thanks for listening to this episode of SpyCast. Please follow us on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcast. If you enjoy the show, please tell your friends and loved ones. Please also consider leaving us a five-star review coming up next week on SpyCast.

Tim Tate: When you look back at the archives for the US Intelligence community is the importance, not just from a foundational perspective, but the majority of our knowledge base and how it is built on that open-source context.

Andrew Hammond: If you have feedback, you can reach us by email at spycast@spymuseum.org, or on X @INTLSpyCast. If you go to our page at the CyberWire.com/podcast/spycast, you can find links to further resources, detailed show notes, and full transcripts. I'm your host, Andrew Hammond, and my podcast content partner is Aaron Dietrich. The rest of the team involved in the show is Mike Mincey, Memphis Vaughn III, Emily Colletta, Emily Renz, Afua Enokwa, Ariel Samuels, Elliot Peltzman, Trey Hester, and Jen Eiben. This show is brought to you from the home of the world's pre-eminent collection of intelligence and espionage-related artifacts, the International Spy Museum. [ Music ]