Spycatcher, by Peter Wright
Szamuely, George
T he story of the British govern- 1 ment's unsuccessful attempt in the Australian courts to prevent the publication of Spycatcher has been told and retold in tedious detail. Little attention,...
...The Mitchell investigation fizzled out...
...Or third, Wright is himself a Soviet agent...
...Translation is usually a tricky business, particularly when so much hangs on it...
...732, 1718 Connecticut Ave...
...Part of the problem is that even his erstwhile partner, Arthur Martin, has by now gotten thoroughly bored with the whole business...
...Why were his relations with that great foe of Communism, Churchill, so good...
...His tone in writing about the Hollis affair—supposedly the overpowering obsession of his life—is oddly agnostic, rather distant...
...So which of the three is it...
...Why would he sign a non-aggression pact with Hitler thus enabling his great enemy to invade Poland and prepare for the onslaught on Soviet Russia, unless his aim was to save the British Empire from the covetous Nazis...
...Hollis had not been living it up beyond his means so as to put into question the source of his income...
...Yet not long before his retirement inJanuary 1976 Wright, almost incredibly, was to have one last chance...
...Similarly, we have to take Wright's word for the accuracy of his translation of Volkov's message...
...But the real problem is that though Wright has been keen to entertain suspicions about his bosses he has not shown any comparable keenness to come up with evidence to confirm his theories...
...The reverse bears a heraldic American Eagle, the weight and purity of the Silver content, and the legend: UNITED STATES OF AMERICA TRADE DOLLAR...
...Perhaps Wright thought that he might look foolish going into Hollis's office and asking him to authorize his own interrogation...
...And persistence paid off...
...Little attention, however, has been paid to the twenty-five year row in which Peter Wright was a leading participant and which forms the centerpiece of his memoirs...
...RESTRICTIONS: This special release of United States Silver Trade Dollars is restricted to private citizens only -- NO dealer orders will be accepted...
...coin...
...Quite why it was assumed that there had to be just one "mole" neither Wright nor Wright's John the Baptist, Chapman Pincher, in his massive Too Secret, Too Long, bothers to explain...
...He never got the recognition he sought, he was passed up for promotion, he had to be party to idiotic decisions made by his public-schoolOxbridge-educated superiors in MI5 that were subsequently to bring his beloved organization into disrepute, and, on top of that, he was left with a pitifully small pension...
...The coins in this special release remain in extraordinary condition, and our experts have graded them Choice Very Fine/Extremely Fine...
...So once again the matter refused to rest...
...In May 1974, his old chum Stephen de Mowbray had managed to secure an appointment with the prime minister, Harold Wilson, and succeeded in persuading him that a sufficient number of his MI5 and MI6 colleagues were so dissatisfied with the various inquiries into the penetration of MI5 that yet another investigation—this time by someone completely outside the security services—was called for...
...This was a fateful decision...
...Thatcher...
...And third, as likely as not, he probably was more responsible than anyone else for most of the past MI5 screw-ups...
...They had not succeeded in establishing anything left-wing, let alone Communist, in Mitchell's background, or a single connection, then or any time in the past, with known Soviet agents, or even—and this despite minute-by-minute surveillance—anything suspicious about his life...
...Almost unbelievably he seems to want to reopen the inquiry, for the fifth (or is it the sixth...
...Each coin measures 38.1mm in diameter, the same as the famed Morgan Silver Dollar that it predates...
...And so on and so on...
...Also on record were the masses and masses of Soviet wartime wireless traffic which MI5 had been permitted to attempt to decode only after 1945...
...Why did Stalin ditch the Greek Communists and help out the British...
...The MI5 files at the time included the (often) ambiguous testimonies of the growing number of Soviet defectors, any one of whom could be fake or part-fake...
...Martin returned to London in a thoroughly foul mood...
...Credit card customers are advised to place their orders by calling: Toll Free 1-800-228-2323 (24 Hours a Day) No lottery mechanisms will be utilized for this sale...
...He agreed that none of the relevant leads identified Sir Roger Hollis as an agent of the Russian intelligence service . . ." rr he rest of the story of how Wright, 1 first through the medium of the Daily Express journalist, Harry Chapman Pincher, then through direct appearances on television, and now through these memoirs, continued his campaign against Hollis and against the Whitehall establishment, is well known...
...SALE PRICES: Each Silver Trade Dollar in this release is priced at $175.00 plus $5.00 for postage, handling and insurance...
...Second, Wright is a deeply embittered man...
...And, sure enough, apparently from memory Golitsyn was able to reproduce in exact detail a highly classified memorandum prepared by Peter Wright himself that he had seen in Moscow...
...Spycatcher is not likely to be published soon in Britain...
...Twenty-five years later, in Peter Wright's mind at least, the conclusions of that inquiry are not yet in...
...and, best of all, the man who debriefed Gouzenko was none other than Roger Hollis himself...
...Why would he pursue such ruthless policies in Eastern Europe thus compelling the return of American forces unless his aim all along had been to strengthen the Anglo-American special relationship...
...As a quid pro quo, however, Hollis fired Martin...
...And many merchants -- fearful of attack by Chinese warlords or bandits -- buried their Silver coins in secret caches...
...All that was needed now was the evidence...
...MI6 agreed to take him on, but promised to keep him well away from the inquiry...
...At the end Furnival Jones turned to THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1988 39 Wright and, with an air of finality, announced: "I hope we can move on to other things...
...He was occupying himself with small fry while his former boss, whom he so detested, was being allowed to escape his net...
...Nevertheless nothing happened...
...Since Philby was at the time working in the counterintelligence division of MI6 and since he had gone out to Istanbul to debrief Volkov, and since he had moreover ensured the Russian's almost certain death by conveniently delaying his departure, it had been more or less assumed by MI5 (though not by his chums in MI6) that he was the "mole" the two defectors had referred to...
...Something had to be done, something had to be done, Arthur Martin and Peter Wright were both heard to mutter each time they walked past the closed door of the office of the director-general, Sir Roger Hollis...
...A reluctant Hollis authorized Wright and Martin to investigate the deputy director-general of MI5, Graham Mitchell...
...No one has seen the telegram that the MI6 officer, Peter Dwyer, is alleged to have sent back to London outlining Gouzenko's detailed description of Elli...
...Wright was to know of his secret findings for some years before the whole world was to learn of them along with the existence of a "Hollis affair," not to mention the existence of someone called Roger Hollis, from the mouth of Margaret Thatcher on March 26, 1981 when she stood up in Parliament and uttered, in answer to a question, what she expected to be (wrongly, as it turned out) the epitaph to the twenty-year row: "Lord Trend reviewed the investigations of the case and found that they had been carried out exhaustively and objectively...
...It had been a mere twelve months since another defector, Michat Gotoniewski, had exposed MI6's (intelligence's) George Blake as a Soviet spy, and since that time Martin and his colleague, Peter Wright, had been convinced that there were many more "moles" burrowing away within Britain's security services...
...And, second, since the man was the boss, and had been in the organization for twenty-five years, as likely as not he had probably been involved in more MI5 investigations than any other employee, past or present, who—importantly—was still alive, of course...
...Perhaps Hollis was the Soviet spy and was using Mitchell to draw attention away from himself...
...But he remained dissatisfied...
...Wright often refers to Burgess as simply "Guy" even though he probably never knew him...
...Since the man had been Hollis's deputy, since he was appointed by the prime minister on Hollis's recommendation, and since the Russians would not have just allowed their man to retire without ensuring his succession, the conclusion appears inescapable...
...The Washington Mint, one of America's foremost private mints, fully guarantees satisfaction with a 30-day, money-back policy...
...Almost forgotten, indeed barely taken note of at the time, was the testimony of two Soviet spies who defected to the West within weeks of each other almost twenty years before—in 1945...
...Wright could barely suppress his excitement...
...What he obviously had not counted on was the eagerness of some of his officers to make amends for MI5's somewhat lamentable record, first, in failing to keep the "secrets of the atomic bomb" secret and, second, in preventing the Russians from getting a foothold in the British government...
...For one thing, he wasn't a very nice man, so if there had to be a viper in the bosom of MI5, it was better that it should be him rather than someone else...
...The high Silver content made the Trade Dollar popular with the chinese...
...B just as with Mitchell there was .1...
...Or perhaps he was the conscientious counterespionage chief assigning his best spy-catchers to the case and giving them the widest possible brief...
...The publication of Spycatcher is his way of getting even and of cashing in...
...And if one had the taste for it (as Peter Wright certainly did), one could interminably peruse the files on past MI5 cases, some (most) of which were concluded unsuccessfully (and therefore in highly suspicious circumstances), and some (a few) of which were in fact brought to a successful conclusion (but in circumstances—needless to say—no less suspicious...
...As Martin put it in a letter to the Times: "no amount of reexamination can resolve the case, only new evidence will do that...
...Nothing of any significance transpired...
...The specifications for the special public sale of these historic coins is as follows: HISTORICAL DATA: In 1873, the United States was fighting for a share of the newly-opened China trade...
...It all began in December 1961 when Anatoli Golitsyn, a KGB officer stationed at the Soviet embassy in Helsinki, arrived at the home of the chief CIA man in the city, handed over hundreds of documents, announced that he wanted to defect to the United States, and offered to provide lots more information on Soviet espionage...
...Since the Russians had raised no objections to Blunt's retirement from the service in 1945, it had to mean that they could rely on another one of Stalin's Englishmen in MI5, someone moreover who must be near the top of the organization...
...Why should he pursue such murderous policies unless his aim was to destroy the appeal of Communism...
...In any event, he almost certainly believed the whole issue would be sorted out before the Whitehall summer vacations...
...The following January Kim Philby of MI6 confessed to having been a Soviet spy for almost thirty years and immediately disappeared, to reappear again in Moscow...
...Where Chapman Pincher is anxious to build the case against Hollis, Wright appears to be anxious only to reveal everything he can remember about everything he was ever closely involved with...
...Although Wright did not come up with a single genuine "mole," he had plenty to keep him busy and amused until his retirement...
...There was no proof of his having removed files from the office on any regular basis...
...Both Konstantin Volkov,the NKVD representative in the Soviet consulate in Istanbul, and Igor Gouzenko, the GRU cipher clerk in the Soviet embassy in Ottawa, had mumbled something about there being a Soviet spy within British counterintelligence...
...His attempts to sow dissension within MI5, his bringing into question the reputation of a former director-general, and now his revelation of just about every secret he can remember—each one of which presents the organization in an extremely unfavorable light—are in fact part of the well-documented Soviet effort to subvert the security services of the West...
...TOTAL: $180.00) SPECIAL DISCOUNTS: The following discount prices apply for customers placing quantity orders: THREE Silver Dollars for $490.00 plus $5.00 (TOTAL: $495.00) FIVE Silver Dollars for $770.00 plus $5.00 (TOTAL: $775.00) TEN Silver Dollars for $1420.00 plus $5.00 (TOTAL: $1425.00) ORDER INSTRUCTIONS: All mail orders must be accompanied by a check or money order for the full amount...
...Four months later, an MI5 (counterintelligence) officer, Arthur Martin, departed for Maryland, where Golitsyn was being kept in a "safe house," to glean George Szamuely is a former associate editor of the Times Literary Supplement...
...Furthermore, in this capacity he was responsible for monitoring Communist subversion in Britain, requiring him to take home files on Russians serving in Britain and thus making him the likeliest candidate for Gouzenko's Elli...
...As to the second possibility, if Wright was an embittered man then he probably had quite good cause to be...
...3 precious little to go on...
...There are, it seems to me, three possibilities...
...For Wright this was decisive confirmation of Golitsyn's allegations...
...Indeed, though he often calls Hollis's competence into question, it is odd that he should nonetheless insist on his man being the executor of a fiendish Kremlin master-plan...
...There were no cipher pads found in his possession...
...As with Philip Agee one must wonder about the motives for such apparently bizarre conduct...
...From the farcical disappearance of Burgess and Maclean to the handling of the case of Anthony Blunt, the attempt to come to grips with the Soviet penetration of the security services had been a disaster, and it is easy to see why a man as full of social insecurities as Wright should harbor grudges against Britain's "best and the brightest...
...How come Churchill was so sure Stalin would accept his percentages deal for the division of Europe...
...From which .one must conclude that whatever evidence does exist has now been set before us...
...time...
...True, Hollis had refused to sanction an interrogation of Mitchell, but it is by no means obvious that this would have led anywhere since they had nothing with which to confront their man...
...The coin's mint date is located at the bottom center...
...Not much deduction had been needed to persuade members to suspect Hollis...
...It would almost certainly have been impossible to justify the expenditure of scarce resources to the uncovering of "moles" who were already dead...
...What else was there...
...Not a single one of the recently decoded wireless messages transmitted by the Soviet embassy to Moscow during the war seemed to contain information that could point to him...
...But Hollis had got it wrong...
...But our traders were severely handicapped by the Silver content of U.S...
...By October 1964 Wright, Martin, and a young man from MI6 who joined the team, Stephen de Mowbray, had drawn a blank...
...METAL CONTENT: Each one of these Silver Dollars contains 420 grains (27.22 grams) of .900 Fine Silver -- the most Silver of any U.S...
...The questioner, as he puts it in Spycatcher, was just no damn good: "He never got close enough to street-fight, to grapple and gouge him, and make him confess...
...The story might well have ended here had it not been for the shock of Sir (as he then was) Anthony Blunt's confession earlier in the year to having been a Soviet spy throughout his time at MI5...
...With the Watergate affair reaching its denouement in Washington, politicians and Whitehall mandarins were terrified that the dread word "cover-up" might suddenly surface in the London press...
...Elli was supposed to have been able to take out files on Russians serving in London, which neither Philby nor Blunt had the opportunity to do...
...In allowing an investigation to go forward without any particularly promising leads, without any clear terms of reference, one that was moreover conducted by two men who were themselves possible suspects, Hollis was obviously asking for trouble...
...I Moreover, if Hollis was a Soviet spy, then it is surely a reasonable presumption that his successor, Martin Furnival Jones, was working for the Russians as well...
...coins: Our Silver Dollar weighed a little less than the Mexican Piece of Eight, so thrifty Chinese merchants were giving their business to countries that used the Mexican coin...
...As to the possibility of Wright's being a Soviet spy, the least one can say is that the case for it is rather more credible than the corresponding one for Hollis...
...Hollis's retirement in 1965 gave Wright his chance, but his successor, Martin Furnival Jones, refused to authorize any questioning of the out-going director-general...
...His request is unlikely to be fulfilled, not merely because he has, to put it mildly, hardly endeared himself to Mrs...
...A limit of ten coins per order will be strictly enforced, and all orders are subject to acceptance by The Washington Mint...
...Gouzenko's allegation had not been followed up even though his testimony had led to the arrest and conviction of the atom spy, Alan Nunn May...
...100 Year Old United States Government Silver Trade Dollars In Accordance with its Established Policy, The Washington Mint Hereby Announces the Limited Release of 1,200 U.S...
...The committee was given the code-name Fluency and a chairman who was none other than Peter Wright...
...Silver Trade Dollars Minted between 1873-1878...
...But MI5's approach to the evidence had been slapdash, to say the least, and Wright pounced on its deficiencies: Volkov's message had been mistranslated...
...And something was finally done...
...Ostensibly the publication of his Spycatcher has a purpose grander than his (understandable) desire to top up his £2000-a-year MI5 pension...
...First, Hollis was indeed a Soviet agent and, after repeated frustration at the hands of the civil service mandarins, Wright has elected to put his case before the public at large...
...He was satisfied that nothing had been covered up...
...We had nothing to worry about, he laughed, because we knew we would always get advance warning of any impending defections...
...A recently rediscovered private cache of 100 year-old Silver Trade Dollars -- one of our nation's most beautiful, yet little known, coins -- has now been authenticated and certified by The Washington Mint...
...In 1969 a reluctant Furnival Jones finally agreed to recall Hollis from retirement and have him interrogated, but it had to be conducted by someone other than Wright...
...Orders will be filled on a strict FIRST-COME, FIRST-SERVED basis according to the POSTMARK date of mail orders and the TIME AND DATE of telephone orders...
...Each coin was minted between 18731878 at United States Mint facilities in Philadelphia, San Francisco, or Carson City, Nevada...
...Yet curiously neither Wright nor Pincher casts any aspersions on Furnival Jones...
...One has to say straight away that Wright adds not a single piece of fresh evidence to Chapman Pincher's case against Hollis, as outlined in Too Secret, Too Long...
...Under his direction, almost from the first day, the committee, instead of dealing with the general issue of "penetration," got down to the general issue of the boss, Roger Hollis himself...
...He demanded that the inquiry be reopened once more (on the grounds, one must assume, that since he had failed to catch a single MI5 "mole," and, since there had to be a "mole," then the only person who could be that "mole" was Hollis...
...At last he had something with which to confront Hollis...
...Wright had to accept that but he remained disgruntled...
...For if his translation of Volkov's statement was correct, then what the Russian was saying was not that the "mole" was "fulfilling the duties of Head of a department of British counterintelligence"—which could certainly be taken to be referring to Philby—but that he was the "acting head of a section of the British Counter-Intelligence Directorate" which, according to Wright, was a pretty accurate description of Hollis who during the war headed the F Division of MI5...
...So Congress authorized the minting of an extraordinary Silver Coin - the United States Trade Dollar, a magnificent coin with more Silver than either our standard dollar or the famed Piece of Eight...
...As a result, the former cabinetsecretary, Lord Trend, was asked to go through the evidence once more...
...It is at least noteworthy that in a memorandum Gouzenko submitted to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in 1952 and which the Canadian government released in 1981 he speaks of the "mole" in terms nowhere near as specific as Wright would have him speak...
...Gouzenko was adamant that the Soviet spy, code-named Elli, worked for the GRU, and not for the NKVD, as Philby did...
...It was Wright, not Martin, who was the source of his problems...
...This does not of course excuse the publication of a book 'Indeed the case against Hollis often sounds like the old story about Stalin being a British agent: Strange the way none of the old Bolsheviks knew much about Stalin's background...
...which does at least as much damage to the services as did the activities of the men and women against whom he rails...
...Hollis barely had time to pause for breath after closing the Mitchell case before he was more or less forced by SPYCATCHER: THE CANDID AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A SENIOR INTELLIGENCE OFFICER Peter Wright/Viking/$19.95 George Szamuely 38 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1988 MI6's Dick White to set up a joint MI5-MI6 committee to go through all the records of both intelligence services and to confirm or deny, once and for all, that there was a "mole" who fitted Golitsyn's description, and to whom every single past counterespionage failure could be ascribed...
...Certification of Authenticity will accompany each Silver Dollar in this release...
...what he could about Soviet infiltration of the British government...
...The questioning took place in a house in Mayfair and lasted two days...
...Check and money order customers should send their orders directly to: The Washington Mint Dept...
...Perhaps, also, Harold Wilson had his own reasons for wanting to see MI5 discredited...
...Moreover, added the Russian to excite and infuriate his English interrogator, the Soviet embassy in London was the only mission abroad not to have a special security officer (someone who ensures that no defections take place among Soviet personnel) assigned to it...
...There was no more reason to believe Mitchell to be the Soviet "mole" than, say, Martin or Wright himself or, come to think of it, even Roger Hollis...
...The tale he recounts of how he first pursued the deputy director-general, then the incumbent director-general, Roger Hollis, then the future director-general, Michael Hanley, and then once again Roger Hollis, is not to be taken as a confession of failure, since, for all his efforts and ingenuity, he never did find out who that "mole" was...
...Or perhaps he just wanted to be seen to be doing something...
...Where Hollis departed for a peaceful retirement, Wright has spent the last ten years—conveniently residing outside the jurisdiction of Britain—doing his damnedest to discredit his country's security services...
...Moreover, thanks to the skill and ingenuity of Peter Wright (who was MI5's resident scientist), all kinds of neat gadgets like closed-circuit television, secret writing materials, radioactive detectors, and bugging devices were available for MI5 surveillance work...
...NW Washington, DC 20009 © 1986 The Washington Mint THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1988 41...
...What is less well known is what Wright is really after...
...For instance, while Spycatcher is full of venom for his former MI5 colleagues, it only has kind things to say about Blunt and Philby...
...COIN DESCRIPTION: The obverse of each coin features the seated figure of Miss Liberty extending an olive branch...
...Although it is by no means impossible that Hollis was a Soviet spy, what we have heard so far is, to say the least, 40 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1988 unconvincing, all the more so because it is Wright's word we must take for the existence of the only two specific leads there are...
...As a quid pro quo, however, he agreed to allow Wright to investigate pretty much anyone else who might take his fancy in MI5—including the future director-general, Michael Hanley—just so long as he kept clear of the wretched Hollisaffair...
...There was nothing to connect him with any known Soviet agents past or present...
...The coins in this special release have been hidden in China for 100 years...
Vol. 21 • March 1988 • No. 3
