To Catch a Spy | Investigation
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This is True Spies, the podcast that takes you deep inside the greatest secret missions of all time. Week by week, you'll hear the true stories behind the operations that have shaped the world we live in. You'll meet the people who live life undercover. What do they know? What are their skills? And what would you do in their position?

I'm Rhianna Needs, and this is True Spies from Spyscape Studios. Peter Wright had become an unlikely whistleblower and said, no, actually, it's not a good idea for spies like me to do all our work in secret without any scrutiny. We need to have public disclosure of what we've been up to. And the British government said, oh, my God, absolutely not.

To catch a spy. Just before New Year's Eve 2023, the release of a set of newly declassified files whipped the British press into a frenzy. A headline in The Guardian read, Thatcher utterly shattered by MI5 revelations. The BBC reported, Thatcher was desperate to stop spycatcher publication. The files were the long-awaited records pertaining to the memoir of a former MI5 officer.

His book came out in the late 1980s amidst a flurry of controversy and, as confirmed last December, against the wishes of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. One briefing note Thatcher wrote to her cabinet secretary, released in the document dump, read: "The consequences of publication would be enormous.

There's a game involved here and governments know it. Governments the world over know that people like me, old hacks like me, we're a burr under their saddle and they play a game with us which says, well, we might or we might not release this, but why don't you ask again in a year? Or no, we've, sorry, we forgot about that. This week's episode of True Spies is all about the author of that controversial book.

Peter Wright, the self-proclaimed spy catcher who sparked fear and fury in the heart of the British government. But it's also the story of another fact-finding mission. And at the center of that story is not a spy, but a prolific journalist and author.

My name's Tim Tate. I'm an investigative journalist, documentary filmmaker, and an author. Peter Wright was MI5's longest-serving counterintelligence and counterespionage officer. Twenty years he did, at the helm of MI5's attempt to unearth Soviet spies inside Britain.

Wright's attempt to publish his account of working in British intelligence set off what's now known as the Spycatcher Affair.

Tim had come across the controversy in his research and was inspired to dig deeper. And when I went back and began researching this book, I was just astonished by the extraordinary breadth and Byzantine intricacies and, at other times, utter farcical absurdities of the whole spycatcher saga.

at the same time as the very serious issues that it uncovered and revealed. But Wright wasn't the only one who struggled to publish a book with a full accounting of the truth. As you'll soon hear, he and Tim share something in common.

I know there are problems with the Freedom of Information Act in the United States. Believe me, I know that. I deal with it every day. But compared to the UK, the US has it good. The UK has a truly dreadful record of

on official secrecy and not just official secrecy, but dirty little tricks and schemes that governments dream up to protect the secrets that would embarrass them. And Spycatcher encapsulated that in large and bold type. The Spycatcher saga begins in the mid 1950s in a six-storey red brick building in London's West End.

There's no sign on the door, no indication of what might go on inside. At the same time, it's no great secret what this place is.

take a double-decker London bus to the nearest stop and your conductor will announce Curzon Street and MI5. In 1955, Britain and in particular its domestic spy agency, MI5, was lagging dangerously behind the scientific curve in the new war, the new Cold War, which was essentially going to be an electronic war.

Enter 39-year-old Peter Wright. Self-confident and skeptical by nature, Wright had served as principal scientific officer in the Royal Naval Scientific Service during World War II, inventing ways of protecting Allied shipping from German attack.

He'd had a troubled childhood. His father, also a scientist, had worked for MI6, planting the seed for Peter's own desire to forge a career in espionage. But when Morris Wright's alcoholism interfered with his ability to work, and he was removed from his post, 15-year-old Peter was forced to leave school and find paid employment.

And when, years later, Peter came to the Royal Naval Scientific Service without the traditional academic qualifications, he did so with a deep-rooted distrust of the establishment. Wright was a boffin. He was a largely self-taught but genuinely innovative scientist.

He began, at its request, working for MI5 on a part-time, entirely free basis. Finally, in 1955, MI5 came to the belated realization that it actually needed a scientific officer in-house. So it hired Wright as its first ever scientific officer. Wright took it upon himself to bring the intelligence agency's tech into the post-war era.

At the time, MI5 had been recording its covert surveillance on bulky dictaphones and acetate discs.

And the new scientific officer knew it was time to start using sleeker tools with better recording capacities. Hardly surprisingly, he described the service he joined as being covered by a thick film of wartime dust. And he set about reinventing it and bringing it, kicking and screaming, into the new battleground of the Cold War. Wright pushed for the agency to use reel-to-reel tape recorders.

This change brought MI5 out of the technological dark ages and allowed officers to collect significantly more recorded material. And that was good. It was where his real strength lay. The problem which followed was that once you improve, as he did, the surveillance techniques...

What you discover is that Soviet intelligence was miles ahead of British intelligence and that it had spies literally all over London, some undercover, some working under embassy cover.

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Hello, listeners. This is Anne Bogle, author, blogger, and creator of the podcast, What Should I Read Next? Since 2016, I've been helping readers bring more joy and delight into their reading lives. Every week, I tech all things books and reading with a guest and guide them in discovering their next read.

They share three books they love, one book they don't, and what they've been reading lately. And I recommend three titles they may enjoy reading next. Guests have said our conversations are like therapy, troubleshooting issues that have plagued their reading lives for years, and possibly the rest of their lives as well. And of course, recommending books that meet the moment, whether they are looking for deep introspection to spur or encourage a life change, or a frothy page-turner to help them escape the stresses of work, or a book that they've been reading for years.

school, everything. You'll learn something about yourself as a reader, and you'll definitely walk away confident to choose your next read with a whole list of new books and authors to try. So join us each Tuesday for What Should I Read Next? Subscribe now wherever you're listening to this podcast and visit our website, whatshouldireadnextpodcast.com to find out more.

Using his modern techniques, Peter Wright discovered some of Russia's so-called illegals, spies living and working under deep cover in London. But despite the new discoveries, and despite all the new technologies Wright helped to implement within MI5, all of the agency's efforts to surveil the Soviets in Britain were failing.

And that led Wright to say, "We've got a penetration problem." And that led him from science into mole hunting. For two decades, Wright and his colleagues got up to whatever dirty tricks they needed in order to identify the Soviet moles in their midst.

Wright spent 20 years breaking and entering, installing surveillance equipment in offices, embassies, and private residences. Boffin Wright was using his skills as a technologist to infringe on people's privacy.

even people who, ultimately, posed no threat to national security. They broke into embassies, Soviet bloc embassies, so you could say, well, he's doing the nation's business. They broke into houses next door to embassies. MI5 had an in-house burglary expert, a man whose basement was literally lined with

The walls were lined with keys that had been acquired, often in somewhat dubious circumstances, which enabled break-ins. When they couldn't use the keys, they picked locks. They burgled wherever they needed to, and they did so without any legal justification. Later, Wright would look back on that time with regret.

But in the moment, much of the sordid behavior was, as he saw it, a lot of fun. He described the branch with which he worked, which carried out the burglaries, as a place of infectious laughter. But much of what Wright unearthed was no laughing matter.

And raising the stakes even further, it implicated some high-ranking individuals, people that the intelligence establishment would never expect to be up to no good.

People like Roger Hollis. Roger Hollis was MI5's Director General. He'd been an MI5 officer from the earliest days of the war, Second World War, had risen through the ranks and became the late 50s its Director General, a Vahed Honcho, Britain's chief domestic spymaster.

In his investigative work, Wright stumbled on some unsettling connections between Hollis and the Soviet Union. Wright discovered that Soviet intelligence had been recruiting promising young people from the leading British universities for decades, since the 1930s. Many of the most powerful of those Soviet spies had been recruited by one man, Antony Blunt.

Blunt, like many of those he recruited come the Second World War, goes into the intelligence services. Blunt joined MI5. He rose to become the then Director General's assistant. He saw everything that the Director General saw during World War II, and he passed.

everything he saw to Soviet intelligence. So did many of those he recruited. Everyone knows the phrase of the Ring of Five, Burgess, Philby, Maclean and the rest.

This was Blunt's network. This was the heart of Blunt's network. And it was what Wright was tasked with uncovering and discovering and following through. And what he found was that those people who had been recruited in the 1930s had slipped seamlessly into the fabric of the British establishment. Blunt retired from MI5 after the end of the war.

It was nearly two decades later, once Kim Philby defected to Moscow, that Wright and his colleagues stepped up their efforts to identify moles in MI5 and MI6. But, Wright later testified, their superiors always stood in the way.

In the early 1960s, 1963 to be precise, Wright is tasked with setting up a working party to examine penetration of MI5. It was called the Fluency Committee and it had seven members, five from MI5, two from MI6. Wright was its chairman. It laboured away

digging into the files, re-examining old evidence which had long since been forgotten or suppressed. And it came to an inescapable conclusion that MI5 had been penetrated by Soviet intelligence at a very high level. But by whom? In researching this story, Tim came across a security service report written decades later that revealed that there were only two people who could have been the mole in question.

One was Roger Hollis, and the other was Hollis' deputy, a man called Graham Mitchell. In other words, the two most senior officials in all of MI5. Naturally, the agency set up an internal investigation. First, it looked into Mitchell, but things did not proceed smoothly.

According to Wright, every time they tried to do something, Hollis stepped in and blocked the full investigation. No, no, you can't have full surveillance of him. No, you can't follow him back to his home. No, you can't do this. No, you can't do that. That made Wright deeply suspicious. It made all of fluency deeply suspicious. Nevertheless...

The Fluency Committee ultimately came to the conclusion that Mitchell was probably not the mole it was looking for. That left a question, didn't it? As Wright put it, it's no good saying, oh, well, jolly good, it wasn't Graham Mitchell. Fair enough. For MI5, there was no good outcome.

So, after an inexplicably long lapse, and long after Hollis had been allowed to retire on a nice fat government pension, MI5 opened a formal full inquiry into its own former Director General in the belief that he had been a fully-fledged Soviet agent who had betrayed Britain's most important secrets to the Soviets. The story of what happened next is...

- Bizarre. - Wright led an inquiry into Hollis.

And plenty of evidence, he believed, pointed to Hollis's treachery. Wright's team, the Fluency Committee, wrote three internal reports, all of which said, yep, Hollis, he was a spy. Hollis's replacement as Director General wasn't terribly happy about this and said, no, well, no, it's a preposterous... No, and ordered another inquiry. That came to a slightly less firm conclusion, but...

So the evidence still pointed at Hollis. After that, the British Cabinet Office, the centre of UK government tasked with supporting the Prime Minister, stepped in to carry out their own investigation. All of this, every last piece of paper, every last inquiry, every last damn paperclip was conducted in secret. Quite secret, indeed.

Hardly anyone was informed of the cabinet office's conclusions. The government wasn't told. The prime minister wasn't told. Let alone the public being told. Years later, Wright would find himself in the unlikely position of becoming a whistleblower for the intelligence agency's sanctioned wrongdoing. But in the moment, he relished his role as a spy catcher.

And over time, along with the bona fide double agents, he began to snag perfectly innocent people in his net as well. He was so patriotic and so obsessed by uncovering real moles, real Soviet penetration agents, that that led him to cross the line from time to time.

He got it into his head, as did several MI5 officers, that Harold Wilson, leader of the Labour Party and Prime Minister, was a Soviet spy. Now, Harold Wilson was many things, but a Soviet spy was not one of them.

Wright claimed that the CIA counterintelligence chief, James "Jesus" Angleton, had told him Wilson was a Soviet agent, information that Angleton said had been gleaned from a Russian source. In "Spycatcher," Wright wrote that 30 MI5 officers planned to leak incriminating information about the prime minister in order to oust him from office.

He later walked back that figure to fewer than 10, telling the BBC that the relevant portion of his book had been "unreliable". Nonetheless, Wright and a cabal of rogue officers, not many believed

fervently that Wilson was, these are Wright's words, a snake in the grass. But they plotted entirely illegally to blackmail him and force him to resign as Prime Minister. I mean, it is hard to imagine a more serious act of treason than what Wright plotted to do.

Roger Hollis died in 1973, before MI5's inquiry came to a conclusive end, and before he could face any of the possible consequences. The following year, oversight of the investigation moved beyond MI5 and into the hands of the British Cabinet Secretary, a man called Lord Burke Trend. And that was where the story appeared, from the outside, to stall for several more years.

But in 1978, the Times of London reported details about a forthcoming book by a BBC journalist. The book, it said, would provide new details about Soviet moles in British intelligence. And its sources had been highly forthcoming. Spooked, the British government took swift action to learn what had been discovered. And by the time the book was published, a new prime minister had come to power.

She'd learned of what had come to pass and chose not to share it with the public. Margaret Thatcher got up in the House of Commons and made a parliamentary statement. And she lied. She told lies to Parliament. She said, "There have been these inquiries, but Lord Trent has found that Roger Hollis was not a spy. He was not a Soviet agent."

And that, until New Year's Eve 2023, was as much as anyone knew of the official version of events. The trend report remains classified to this day. But just as Tim was putting the finishing touches on his book, some of its files were finally released to the public.

And they prove that Thatcher lied to Parliament. She said, "Absolutely not. Unequivocally, no. Trend found that Hollis had not been a Soviet spy. The files I found when they were released said something rather different. They said that he had reached the conclusion that there was a 20% possibility that Hollis had been a spy."

Thatcher lied, and it would not be the last lie that she or her government told to cover up intelligence scandals. But according to Tim, Thatcher's desire to hush up the truth backfired magnificently. To a man as patriotic and genuinely honorable in his own way as Peter Wright, that was infuriating and unforgivable, and Spycatcher was the result.

Newly appointed Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher had rejected the idea that the late Director General of MI5, Roger Hollis, had been a Soviet mole. She'd been spurred to act in advance of the publication of a book on Soviet spies in Western intelligence. But that wasn't the only reporting that was soon to come to light.

And that wasn't the only layer of this story Tim pulled back as he began his own investigation. The CIA's former head of counterintelligence, James Jesus Angleton, five years after he was kicked out of office, tried to warn Thatcher that some journalists were digging around the Hollis scandal. Clearly, Thatcher's denial hadn't closed the book on Hollis.

Angleton gave a tip-off to a member of Parliament called Jonathan Aitken, a member of Thatcher's party. He asked Aitken to pass it along to the Prime Minister. He warned that the agency had been penetrated by two moles, Graham Mitchell and Robert Hollis.

The MP tried to get Thatcher on board. She brushed him off. And sure enough, and this is the official version of events, a year or so later, the story emerged in a book written by a veteran intelligence journalist and muckraker called Chapman Pinscher. But Pinscher wasn't like the BBC journalist who had penned the other book about Soviet moles.

He was a friend of Thatcher's Conservative Party, someone they knew they could trust to put a friendly spin on things. Once again, the full story of how these events unfolded has only emerged since 2023.

According to papers which I discovered, documents I discovered just when they released at New Year's Eve, Thatcher knew that the secret of Hollis's alleged treachery was not going to hold. She'd been warned, and I've got the papers which show she had been warned by her own officials. She and her cabinet secretary, a man called Sir Robert Armstrong, who would appear in the court cases in Australia...

sat down and conspired to leak the Hollis scandal to this journalist, Chapman Pinscher, who they knew was both a reliable friend of the Conservative government and a part-time MI5 asset. If the details were going to come out, why not have them come from someone who could put a positive spin on things?

Tim says it was an act of damage control on the part of the Thatcher government. What makes this all the more incredible, because that in itself is extraordinary, is that Pinscher wasn't working alone. Pinscher had a co-author for this book which revealed, amongst other things, the Hollis scandal. And the government knew who that co-author was. That co-author was Peter Wright. Remember this moment.

The government made no effort to block the publication of Pinscher's book, on which Wright also worked. Only later, it would play by a different set of rules. Peter Wright retired from MI5 in 1976, and he should have been able to look forward to a comfortable retirement.

quiet retirement. However, when he joined MI5, because MI5 didn't officially exist, he was told he couldn't transfer his government pension from the Royal Naval Scientific Service to MI5. But MI5 told him, don't worry about that. We will make it up to you. They didn't. In 1976, Wright found himself in straitened circumstances.

He wasn't able to afford to live in the UK, simply wasn't. So he bought land in Tasmania, Australia's cheapest and sleepiest state, and he set up an Arabian horse stud as a way to pursue both his love of nature and a post-retirement income. With a bit of distance, he'd also begun to see his career in MI5 somewhat differently.

Wright began to rethink some of the work he and his colleagues had done in the name of mole hunting. How much of their snooping on innocent individuals had actually been justified? He had bugged and burgled, as he said, across London quite happily and enjoyed the experience.

and done so in secret, but had belatedly come to the conclusion that it was wrong that all of this work was done in secret with no scrutiny and no democratic control. You know, in short, he said to himself, I've done all this.

But was I right to have done all of this? But he was desperately short of cash, and he turned to one of his old friends and mentors, Lord Victor Rothschild, more formally the Third Baron Rothschild. Yes, one of those Rothschilds, one of the world's richest families. The Third Baron Rothschild had been an officer in MI5 during the Second World War,

And, being a Rothschild, he had money to spare. Wright turned to him first for a loan and then to continue their relationship, which had been ongoing throughout Wright's time in MI5. And at one point, Rothschild arranged for Wright to travel back to England in what can only be described as a deliberate midwifing of Wright's first attempt at a book.

Wright was now 64 and suffering from ill health. He was eager to reveal what he had learned about Soviet penetration of MI5 while he still had the chance.

Rothschild encouraged him to finally pen his own chronicle of events from his years in the intelligence agency, including all the sordid details. And he said, come and meet me. And well, they sat down in Rothschild's lavish home in Cambridge. And he said, but you can't write this yourself. I've got this journalist you should be working with. And that journalist was Chapman Pinscher. Thatcherite XMI5 Chapman Pinscher.

There are a lot of strange and unknown details in this saga, but Tim will be the first to say that's a highly suspicious turn of events.

especially because of the timing. That conversation, Rothschild summoning Pinscher to meet Wright, took place six weeks after Pinscher had been briefed on the orders of Margaret Thatcher and Robert Armstrong. And now here was Rothschild arranging for exactly the same sort of conspiracy on exactly the same subject, involving exactly the same people.

Coincidence? You decide. Wright and Pinscher's book came into being in 1981. It was called Their Trade is Treachery, and it came out in Pinscher's name, with Wright as its principal, unnamed, source. Years after its publication, Wright would claim that Pinscher hadn't shown him the final manuscript.

Only after it came out did Wright learn that the final chapter suggested there was no need for an inquiry into Hollis's treachery. Wright said, this conclusion was quite contrary to my views. And then when all of this began to unravel, when the government tried to ban Wright's own book, Spycatcher, in courts around the world...

After the publication of Their Trade is Treachery, Wright went on to work on his own book, Spycatcher. On the one hand, its creation was an act of penance, a way of making amends for all the lawbreaking he had done in the pursuit of truth as an employee of MI5. It was also an expose of the intelligence agency and of the unethical business it got up to, free from governmental oversight. And, of course...

It was Wright's own accounting of what he had learned about Roger Hollis and the major failings of British intelligence that allowed so many Russian moles to slip through the cracks. Wright knew that being the book's credited author would expose him to a certain amount of risk.

He was bound by the terms of the Official Secrets Act, which was then extraordinarily broad-based and wide-ranging. It was literally a criminal offence to reveal anything, including anything as trivial as the menu in the staff canteen. But that Act, the Official Secrets Act, didn't extend outside the United Kingdom's borders. Wright was in Australia. The publisher was in Australia.

That meant the only way the British government could silence him was to take out civil injunctions and then to try and get the court to order the banning of his memoirs. According to Tim...

Documents now reveal that the government fully believed they could pull that off. They assumed that Australian courts would do as English courts had done and indeed would do throughout the spycatcher saga, which was to roll over and have their tummy tickled. As soon as a British government official, in this case the cabinet secretary, filed an affidavit saying, no, no, no, no, no, this is terribly serious. You mustn't let this happen. This could damage...

Britain's national security. The government assumed that the Australian court would simply say, oh, well, in that case, right, we'll ban this. But Australian courts argued it was in the public interest for the book to be published. Australian North said, if you're disclosing iniquity, you're disclosing illegal acts.

Then you can't, as a foreign government, come to us and say, we mustn't let this chap disclose what we've been up to. No, the first court, in an absolutely massive judicial spanking for the British government, said no. The British government appealed. The Australian Appeal Court said, no, no, the first court got it right, right.

So the British government looked elsewhere for support. It tried to block publication in New Zealand...

but it failed there as well. It made a somewhat more successful bid in Hong Kong, where a court provided a partial injunction. But Tim believes that Wright owes his success in Australia to his lawyer, a man whose name you may already be familiar with. Malcolm Turnbull, a brilliant young lawyer who went on to become Prime Minister of Australia.

Turnbull was a young, ambitious, well-connected solicitor advocate in Australia and was, I think, the real reason why the British government lost, because he turned the case on its head. He made the British government justify what it was trying to do, and it could not. Turnbull called attention to the absurdity of the situation and tried to frame the entire hullabaloo rather more rationally.

At each stage, he kept trying to say to the British government, "Mates, this is Med. You've got to stop this. Tell us what you want redacted and we'll cut it out. You know, let's do a deal here. Let's try and not be foolish because the alternative is I will get your cabinet secretary, who is your representative, in the witness box in Sydney and I'll cut him to pieces."

In other words, before I make fools of all of you, why not just redact the parts of the book that aren't to your liking, like the Americans do? The CIA requires former officers to submit manuscripts for review before publication.

And they can strip out what they want without having to ban an entire book. And the British government, Thatcher in particular, was obdurate. It just said, no, no, no, we're not going to do a deal. No, absolutely not. And...

As night follows day, the cabinet secretary was dispatched to Australia. He managed to smash the camera of a photographer at Heathrow Airport who had the temerity to ask to take his picture. And when Armstrong got into the witness box, Turnbull carved him into small pieces. Have you ever heard the phrase, economical with the truth? That was coined by Turnbull.

He asked cabinet secretary Robert Armstrong whether he believed it was worthy of his post to be economical with the truth for the purpose of conveying a misleading impression. He asked how they could trust that Armstrong was telling the truth in court, to which the secretary responded, I am under oath. Armstrong wasn't just economical with the truth. He lied flat out.

He told complete untruths, and he did so knowingly. How do I know? Because I have the documents, released 40 years later, which show that answers he gave, he knew to be untrue. Armstrong, in my view,

could and should, had the government not hidden the papers for 40 years, have been prosecuted for perjury and possibly for conspiracy to pervert the course of justice and would have served a prison term for doing so. And I think also it's possible that...

because Thatcher was up to her neck in it, could have brought the British government down. That's serious in my view. You don't have the most senior government official conspiring with the Prime Minister to tell lies on oath in a foreign country. That is wrong. There's no other way of putting it. It's just wrong. And that he got away with it and that they got away with it is shameful.

On the 8th of December, 1986, Peter Wright himself finally took the stand. Wright was by then an old man in ill health, but he spoke confidently, giving the world an unprecedented perspective on a career in the British intelligence establishment. He spoke of his clumsy recruitment, of the way he'd worked for MI5 in his spare time and without pay for many years.

He talked of the technological backwardness of the agency and of how they had, in his words, no application or understanding of science. But he wasn't able to give all the damning details he had at his disposal. It didn't work that way because the British government fought...

tooth and nail to censor what Wright could say in open court. Wright had produced this lengthy affidavit which he was going to read out. He was frail and elderly at this point and that seemed to be the best way forward. The British government objected to just about everything in that affidavit being read out in court where journalists and the media and believe me the court was packed.

with people like me. Where everyone could hear it, where everyone could see it, all of the British government's dirty linen would be out for everyone to see and hear. Some of those details could still be revealed in secret session, however. And although the transcript of Wright's behind-the-scenes testimony has not yet been officially released...

Tim managed to get hold of it. That was coruscating. I can see why the British government didn't want him to do this in front of the world's press. He laid into Thatcher, he laid into his former employers at MI5, and he told truths they did not want told. The hearings unfolded over the rest of 1986 and into 1987. It wasn't until 1988 that the Australian court reached its verdict.

By then, Spycatcher had already been released in the US and elsewhere in the world. The secrets it contained were out. But still, Tim says, the outcome was staggering.

I confess, I love courtroom dramas and I love legal documents. I make no apologies for that. I'm a nerd. I would recommend to anyone to read Mr Justice Philip Powell's judgment in the spy catcher case. It's 280 something pages long and it's riveting. He set it out as a narrative. He told a story about

And he introduced and reproduced documents from the case so that there could be no doubt.

And it gives the British government an historic spanking. He ticks them off for serpentine weavings. He ticks them off for behaviour which they should be ashamed of in court. He finds that Armstrong was utterly unbelievable. This is an old-school, old-fashioned Australian judge who just said, no, this is what the law says.

And this is what we're going to follow. And I'm sick to death of the way the British government has behaved. It was a major victory for Wright, many, many years in the making. And thanks in large part to the scandal surrounding its publication, his book became a blockbuster hit, selling four million copies worldwide. You might presume that now...

being the author of an international bestseller. Wright could lean back, his financial troubles ended, and be at peace.

You only get a percentage of sales for a start as an author, but also the various agents who had brokered the various deals took a comfortable amount. So in the end, I think Wright probably ended up with half a million Australian dollars, probably equivalent to two or three hundred thousand British pounds.

And that certainly helped him. I talked to his daughter, Jenny Andrews, who said, yeah, that made life a lot easier in this ramshackle horse stud in Tasmania. But money wasn't the motive.

Right was, for good and ill, deeply patriotic. And money wasn't his motivation. What was his driving force was protecting the country. Now, in fairness, some of the spectres from which he wanted to protect the country were, I think, imaginary. Some weren't. There was a mix of fact and not fact within that.

Remember Wright's allegation that Prime Minister Harold Wilson had been a Soviet agent, and his plan to blackmail Wilson and force a resignation? Not all of Wright's spy-catching had been in the public interest.

It did, however, have consequences for MI5. It caused untold damage inside the service. The flip side to that is that it brought MI5 under democratic, some kind of democratic control. Eventually, the spycatcher affair led to the Act of Parliament, which established MI5 for the first time in its history in the statute books and...

instituted some form of parliamentary scrutiny. Whether MI5 would say that was a good thing, I guess you'd have to ask them. I think it's a very good thing.

Perhaps the biggest reputational damage was sustained by the government itself. Everything the British government set out to do achieved the complete opposite and at huge cost to the taxpayer, at least £8 million in today's money. And Britain was the laughingstock of the world for what the British government was doing in courts around the world to try and silence Peter Wright.

Tim's perspective on the good and bad that came out of the spycatcher affair is informed by his role as a journalist. Nearly 40 years after the battle in Australian court, it remains challenging for people like him to get their hands on the truth.

The government's own files, which should have been released at the very latest under a mechanism it itself has put in place by December 2019. By the time I initially finished writing the manuscript,

for this book in October last year. None of the 32 Cabinet Office files on the Spycatcher saga or the 15 Prime Ministerial files, Thatcher's own files, on the saga had been released. I had fought up hill and down dale to get these files and was told no.

In September 2023, the government issued a final refusal in response to his requests for the documents, Tim says. Which was rather strange.

because those same files were released in neatly digitized form, 3,200 pages thereof, to the National Archives on New Year's Eve last year, after I delivered my manuscript. Fortunately, I was able to scramble and incorporate them in the manuscript itself.

But there are 32 cabinet office volumes, Tim says, that remain withheld from British taxpayers. That's got to be somewhere in the region of 10,000 pages of official documents, at minimum, still secret. That doesn't stop Tim seeking out the facts. We know it as journalists. We know that this is a game they play. Yes, it's irritating, but

You know, I think any journalist worth his salt will tell you, A, that's par for the course, and B, it's part of what drives us to do what we do. The real losers in this aren't people like me, because we don't matter, I don't matter. It's the citizenry, it's the public. Democracy dies in darkness. Tim Tate's 19th book, To Catch a Spy, is available now.

I'm Rhiannon Needs. Join us next time for more True Spies. Disclaimer. The views expressed in this podcast are those of the subject. These stories are told from their perspective and their authenticity should be assessed on a case-by-case basis.

The encryption button on the train.

And that exemption, when I looked it up, was odd because what it said was to give this personal data it holds about me to me would endanger national security. I'm a 68-year-old journalist. How?

How on earth this could possibly endanger national security, or as it implied that I was a danger to national security, is over keeping with everything the British government did during the spy catcher affair and has done since. True Spies, The Debrief from Spyscape Studios. Search for True Spies wherever you get your podcasts.