Spycatcher - the candid autobiography of a senior intelligence officer

Contents

By Peter Wright - former assistant director of the MI5, with Paul Greengrass
Published by William Heinemann Australia, 1987
Hardback with dustwrapper, in good condtion. 392 pages

First edition - out of print 

Peter Wright was a key figure in British intelligence for nearly a quarter of a century. This book, which the British government has gone to great lengths to keep from ebing published, is a memoir that recounts his extraordinary career in that wilderness of mirrors, the world of espionage.

It is uncensored, remarkably candid, and enormously revelaing about the real spy business that most of us know principally from fiction.

Peter Wright initially joined Britain's Secret Service, known as MI5, in 1955 in the capacity of the organisation's prinipal scientist, and devoted himself in the early years to the invention of varioius gadgets for use in the espionage trade. Along the way, he demonstrated a brilliant flair for the art of counter-intelligence.

He went on to become, for nearly two decades, the central figure in Britain's relentless and sometimes humiliating efforts to detect and expose Soviet espionage. From that vantage point, the reader is treated to a unique perspective on the likes of Philby, Maclean, Burgess, Blunt and a host of other exposed spies and alleged defectors.

The identity of the so-called Fifth Man Soviet spy has puzzled and fascinated many for decades. In Spycatcher, Peter Wright shares his conviction that the Fifth Man was none other than Sir Roger Hollis, long head of MI5 itself!

The story of how he and many of his MI5 colleagues came to this conclusion makes for some of the best reading found anywhere in the vast literature on espionage. As a result a great many trips Peter Wright made to the USA in his capacity as Britain's principal liason with American intelligence officials, his book is replete with sharply etched and sometimes humourous anecdotes about such notables as J Edgar Hoover, Richard Helms, Bill Sullivan, William Harvey, and above all, James Jesus Angelton, Wright's insights about the CIA and the FBI, their relationships with each other, with Amercia's allies is riveting stuff.

American interest ought to be especially aroused by peter Wtight'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.

Wright's mempir is also of interest because it is a first hand account of the bugging of embassies (of friend and foe alike), as well as other aspects of electronic eavesdropping, codebreaking and 'wet' affiars (assassinations_. But the most important aspect of this book is that it offers a rare inside glimpse of the real day-to-day giongs on within the intelligence world over a long period of time from a very high-level, authorative voice.