FAIRFAX MEDIA ARCHIVES


The personnel director gave Wright a form to fill in with details of next of kin. That was it: “I was vetted,” wrote Peter Wright. “No wonder it was so easy for Philby, Burgess, Maclean and Blunt.” There followed a two-day training course, which included a lesson in lock-picking. Wright received a small piece of wire with a hook on one end and the advice: “Make sure you carry your police pass. Technically, you are breaking the law by going equipped for burglary.” And not just ‘technically’, as it turned out. “MI5 bugged and burgled its way across London,” Wright wrote. It rapidly became apparent why the security services wanted to keep themselves off the news pages. Wright recounts the unfortunate


mistake made by the MI5 ‘watchers’ who used to trail enemy agents. The British spooks went to great pains to disguise their own cars by spraying them fairly frequently and also by switching numberplates even more often. It turned out that one car was being driven about with different numberplates on the back and front, which would have made it somewhat conspicuous to twitchy Russians. Sometimes, Wright and his colleagues deserve our sympathy for their sheer bad luck. A massive computer programme finally


cracked an encrypted message revealing the true identity of ‘Stanley’, a Briton who was working for the Russians. This turned out to be Kim Philby, one


of the ‘Cambridge spies’, a foreign correspondent for The Observer who could easily have been arrested on one of his regular visits to the paper. Unfortunately, MI5 was too late: Philby had defected a few months earlier. Another failure involved an attempt to


blackmail a certain KGB agent. MI5 secretly set him up with one of their ‘high-class call-girls’ and then confiscated his trousers. Sad to relate, the randy Russian did not defect. John le Carré this ain’t – more an out-take from Carry on Spying. Graham Mitchell was another colleague on


whom Wright had his eye. “One Friday afternoon, he began drawing on a scrap of paper


and then suddenly tore it up and put it in his waste bin.” Highly suspicious, you’ll agree. Wright fished the fragments out of the wastepaper basket and reassembled this scrappy jigsaw. It was a sketchy map of an obscure part of Chobham Common and indicated an ‘RV’ – a rendezvous? Wright had the spot staked out. “Sadly, Mitchell never went close to the spot, nor did anyone else.” As head of MI5, Roger Hollis


had been one of the few people in the know about this escapade and Wright became convinced that the boss was a Russian agent. Annoyingly, a 1974 review by former cabinet secretary Lord Trend found no evidence


of this. Neither, most of us would agree, was Labour PM Harold Wilson much of a


Communist spy, even if Wright and a few MI5 mates began a failed conspiracy to force his resignation. As for Wright’s question about Wilson’s predecessor as leader of the Labour Party: was Hugh Gaitskell murdered? Probably not. Despite the improbability of the major


accusations, it is the absurdity of details that make the account of MI5 life so convincing. Drat! That’s not ‘drat!’ as in ‘botheration!’ but


‘Drat’ as in the name of one of the players in this game of security, a character so secret that he or she does not appear in the index, unlike ‘Top Hat’, ‘Squirrel’ Nutkin and Hamburger. The latter, incidentally, is not a cryptonym but the real Rudi Hamburger, the first husband of ‘Sonia’, alias Ruth, a spymaster or rather spymistress (Do keep up!). Fortunately, the law lords lifted the injunction on October 13 1988 on the grounds that any revelations were no longer confidential. All the media was able to feast on the previously forbidden fruit. If you didn’t buy the book, you could enjoy the Mail’s serialisation. Another pleasing victory for journalism came in 1991 when The Guardian and The Observer sued the UK government at the European Court of Human Rights for not lifting the injunctions at a time when they should have done; for this restriction of their freedom of expression, damages of £100,000 were awarded to the two papers. This clearly demonstrated that the Tory government were a bunch of complete REDACTED.


theJournalist | 25


Looking back to:


1987


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