the Guardian By Caroline Davies and Kevin Rawlinson
National Archives papers show prime minister tried in vain to avoid inquiry over Peter Wright’s memoirs.
Margaret Thatcher was “utterly shattered” by the revelations in Spycatcher, the memoirs of the retired MI5 officer Peter Wright, files released publicly for the first-time reveal.
The files also reveal the dilemmas faced by Thatcher’s government in its futile battle to suppress the book, including whether to agree to the Australian media tycoon Kerry Packer mediating an out of court “solution”.
Allegations by Wright, a former assistant director of MI5 who retired to Tasmania, included that the security agency had bugged embassies, that a small group of agents had plotted against the prime minister Harold Wilson, and that Sir Roger Hollis, the director general of MI5 from 1956-65, had been a Soviet mole.
The book, which was banned in England in 1985, was first published in Australia and the US after the government lost its long-running high-profile court case against Wright in Sydney in 1987.
The documents show the government losing control in a legal game of “whack-a-mole” as extracts popped up in newspapers and books appeared in shops and on library shelves around the world.
The government insisted the allegations were not new and had previously been investigated by MI5 and no evidence found, though Thatcher wrote on one document in October 1986: “I am utterly shattered by the revelations in the book. The consequences of publication would be enormous.”
The fear was that Wright, as an “insider”, could give the allegations greater credence, with the government seeking an injunction on the grounds of his “duty of confidentiality”, having signed the Official Secrets Act.
Offers by Wright to try to settle the case were made up to, and during, the Australian trial. As Sir Robert Armstrong, who was the cabinet secretary and the government witness in the case, was mid-evidence, Wright’s lawyer, Malcolm Turnbull, who would later become Australia’s prime minister, proposed a “solution” to be mediated by the Australian media tycoon Kerry Packer, the papers released by the National Archives show.
Turnbull suggested that Thatcher would recognise the problems with “old spooks wanting to tell their stories” and set up an inquiry to look into adopting the US system, which allowed CIA agents to seek permission to publish books, so allowing Wright to publish with permission.
In return, Armstrong reported, she would be seen as a “champion of freedom of expression and freedom of speech” and Turnbull would do his best to say that he, Armstrong, “did a splendid job”. “Very good of him, I must say,” Armstrong added.
When the government lost the case, the question turned to appeal. The downside, one adviser told Thatcher, was Wright, aged 70 and in ill health, might die before the appeal, and the government would be “accused of ‘killing’ him by our intransigent attitude”. But Sir Nigel Wicks, Thatcher’s principal private secretary, believed the case for appeal was “overwhelming”. She agreed, writing in the margin of his memo: “We must appeal.”
It proved largely irrelevant, though, as the government then learned a US publishing house was planning to publish and was advised it could not succeed in legal action in the US. “Very disturbing,” wrote Thatcher…
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