Spycatcher: The Candid Autobiography of a Senior Intelligence Officer

by Peter Wright, Former Assistant Director of MI5, with Paul Greengrass
Hardcover: New York, Viking Penguin, 1987. ISBN 0-670-82055-5

From the jacket:

"Uncensored, remarkably candid, and enormously revealing about the real spy business that most of us know principally from fiction ... as Britain's principal liaison with American intelligence officials ... Wright's insights about the CIA and the FBI ... is riveting stuff ...American interest ought to be especially aroused by Peter Wright's charge that there was a conspiracy within MI5 to overthrow then Prime Minister Harold Wilson in the mid-1970s, and that it was instigated from within the CIA ... But the most important aspect of this book is that it offers a rare inside glimpse of the real day-by-day goings-on within the intelligence world over a long period of time from a very high-level, authoritative voice."

Seventeen years after its attempted suppression by the British government, its overseas publication in the Commonwealth and in America, and its twenty-week stay on The New York Times bestseller list, Spycatcher is no longer the shocker it once was. Post-September 11, we're now preoccupied with more recent failures in the intelligence community, nuclear weapons are more likely to be detonated from a suitcase than an ICBM, and the deadly game of Cold War cloak-and-dagger work seems a distant memory to those who did not live through it.

Perhaps now Spycatcher will be consulted mostly as a reference, by interested persons flipping through the index to get the original text of Wright's allegations. But the spy mindset it captures is very telling. Cryptographer Adi Shamir (the "S" in the RSA public-key cryptosystem which makes all Internet commerce possible) cites this book as part of the inspiration for acoustic cryptanalysis. In Spycatcher Peter Wright relates the story of how British intelligence was able to read all the settings of cipher machines at the Egyptian Embassy by listening to the operator set up the mechanical components of the machine at the beginning of the day. (Shamir's 21st-century version listens for sounds at much higher frequencies and is only useful in conjunction with a timing attack on RSA.)

Indeed, the codebreaking and electronic surveillance techniques from decades ago are fascinating. Breaking through hard-to-crack codes at the weakest link — the safety deposit box where the spy's one-time pad is stored, the faint cleartext echoes transmitted on the line by noncomplete electrical isolation of cipher machines, the necessity to transmit powerful signals to Moscow by radio in the days before modems and computer networks — though applied to primitive ciphers by today's standards, the general techniques are still very much a part of today's computer-based security research.

Spycatcher is an overwhelmingly technical and factual book, filled with the details of electronic gadgetry, acronyms, reports, code names; sometimes, it seems, introducing a new person every two paragraphs. The journalist Paul Greengrass has undoubtedly done some heavy editing in this as-told-to book, but it remains difficult to get through the book. Fortunately, the book is multifacted; since it follows Wright's career through MI5, it changes focus whenever his career changes direction. He starts with gadgetry, moves on to codebreaking and radio surveillance (often piggybacking on telephones), and recounts anecdotes of field operations in the colonies in the dying days of Empire. Readers interested in any of these topics can find several dozen good pages of first-hand information and anecdotes.

The meat of the book is on Wright's work in counterintelligence. As operations kept going wrong, and pieces of the puzzle began to fit together, Roger Hollins became the primary suspect in Wright's mind for the role of the Fifth Man, the only uncaught spy in a Soviet ring, all in high-level roles in the British government. But Hollis being the Director of MI5, Wright was never able to prove this. The allegation remains just an allegation today, as every few years a new book claims conclusive proof that another high-level British official was the Fifth Man. In the world of double-agents and barium meals (disinformation), colleagues turn out to be enemies, enemies turn out to be friends (most notably in the CIA), and the truth becomes only murkier after the subject goes to the grave.

Wright wrote this book after what he considered a failed career, leaving an organization rapidly changing with the onset of computerization, with a pittance for a pension due to having joined MI5 midway through his career before civil-service transfers had been put in place. With the publication of this book he made millions and was able to enjoy retirement in comfort. But, he makes it clear, the life of a spy is a lonely one. His role in rooting out moles in the organization made him seem like a witch-hunter to office colleagues, and he often broods on the lives ruined by his work, including those who could prove their innocence only by revealing some other secret that destroyed their government careers. For a New Jersey resident living through Governor McGreevy's resignation over a homosexual affair, the constant references to homosexual liaisons among the Oxbridge elite and the leverage it provided the Eastern bloc are all-too-familiar. How much was lost because some people found it more palatable to betray their country than to be outed in the much-less-tolerant climate of the day? (not that today's tolerance exists outside a few select locations.)

The book is not without humor, though, especially when referring to incompetence on the part of MI6 (admittedly with an MI5 bias):

"One of their training operations ... The MI6 search party ... picked the lock of the flat one floor above ... the man inside ... protested his innocence, but believing this to be part of the ruse, the search party consulted the MI6 textbook marked 'persuasion,' and went to work as only enthusiastic amateurs can ... He was, in reality, a jewel thief ... believing that his captors were visitors from a vengeful underworld." p. 71
"The night before I returned to London, Angleton and I went to dinner at a small Chinese restaurant in Alexandria, where his son ate regularly. It was one of Angleton's favorite haunts when he felt the need to talk. We could be assured of privacy, he told me, because the Chinese kept the Russians out." p. 306

The deception practiced by intelligence agents is, after all, a game, albeit with deadly danger around every corner. Just two months ago in October 2004, Frits Hoekstra came forward to expose the Marxist-Leninist Party of the Netherlands, a Communist Party of the Maoist persuasion, as an operation of Dutch Intelligence.

Wright is quite disdainful of American intelligence services in general. From Hoover's FBI headquarters ("Antiseptic white tiles shone everywhere ... the obsession with hygiene reeked of an unclean mind") to his keen analysis attributing the failings of the American services to their lack of an established history and hence a willingness to take foolhardy risks, he positively bristles at the Americans' condescension and treatment of the Brits as the "junior partner" in the alliance. He becomes good friends with American champions of British Intelligence, and doesn't hesitate to credit the American services for information which helped him in his counterintelligence efforts. But ever since the days of McCarthyism, it seems, Wright has been soured by the American tendency to go to extremes. When he questions his own efforts, he wonders if he's becoming a McCarthyite, and there's the discussion of CIA "methods of imprisonment and physical pressure which would never have been tolerated in MI5." Thought-provoking — how much, if any, has changed in American intelligence, and how much, if any, did Wright leave out about British intelligence? Outsiders may never know.

The highly detailed nature of the book has led to some unquestioned errors in transcription (the Soviet cruiser Ordzhonikidze is described both as a battleship and as a cruiser, and MI6 is described as being interested in its speed when in fact it was its maneuverability that was astonishing to Western navies), and experts began jabbing at the book even before publication. But with names and details splashing around like a waterfall, the casual reader will not be disturbed by inaccuracies. The mindset feels very real — the sadness, the doubting, the letdowns of a failed operation, the joy of discovering a new way to tap into the other side's communications, and, indeed, the chilling uncertainty of having a colleague die of a very unusual disease

"He told me there was no way of proving it without doing a lot of scientific work ... and it was agreed that nothing could be done unless we had further evidence of the Russians' using such a drug to assassinate people ... Needless to say we had no further example of anybody who was in a vulnerable position dying of lupus." p.363

In retrospect, it is quite surprising that such a book could make it to the Times bestseller list, doubly so in this day of Harry Potter and the Greatest Generation and other, much easier-to-read cultural phenomenon. Undoubtedly the publicity over its British suppression and the self-reinforcing nature of bestseller lists contributed. I suspect a large number of the copies sold, in the US anyway, ended up largely unread, with its unfamiliar names and events.

For an overview from an undisputably authoritative source, and for individual anecdotes and introductions to elements of intelligence work, Spycatcher is worth a read.