Peter Wright
| Peter Wright | |
|---|---|
| Born | Peter Maurice Wright 9 August 1916 Chesterfield, Derbyshire, England, United Kingdom |
| Died | 27 April 1995 (aged 78) Cygnet, Tasmania, Australia |
| Occupation | Intelligence officer |
| Nationality | British |
| Citizenship | Australian |
| Education | Bishop's Stortford College |
| Subject | Espionage |
| Notable works | Spycatcher (1987) |
| Spouse | Lois Foster-Melliar (m. 1938) |
| Children | Three |
Peter Maurice Wright (9 August 1916 – 27 April 1995) was the principal scientific officer for MI5, the British counter-intelligence agency, noted for writing the controversial book Spycatcher, which became an international bestseller with sales of over two million copies. Spycatcher was part memoir, part exposé of what Wright claimed were serious institutional failings in MI5 and his subsequent investigations into those. He is said to have been influenced in his counterespionage activity by James Jesus Angleton, the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) counterintelligence chief from 1954 to 1975.
Peter Wright was born in 26 Cromwell Road, Chesterfield, Derbyshire, the son of (George) Maurice Wright, who was the Marconi Company's director of research, and one of the founders of signals intelligence during World War I.
During the Second World War, Wright worked at the Admiralty's Research Laboratory. In 1946, he began work as a Principal Scientific Officer at the Services Electronics Research Laboratory.
According to his own account, his work for the UK intelligence, initially part-time, started in the spring of 1949 when he was given a job of a Navy Scientist attached to the Marconi Company. According to Spycatcher, during his stint there, he was instrumental in resolving a difficult technical problem. The Central Intelligence Agency sought Marconi's assistance over a covert listening device (or "bug") that had been found in a replica of the Great Seal of the United States presented to the U.S. Ambassador in Moscow in 1945 by the Young Pioneer organization of the Soviet Union. Wright determined that the bugging device, dubbed The Thing, was actually a tiny capacitive membrane (a condenser microphone) that became active only when 330 MHz microwaves were beamed to it from a remote transmitter. A remote receiver could then have been used to decode the modulated microwave signal and permit sounds picked up by the microphone to be overheard. The device was eventually attributed to Soviet inventor, Léon Theremin.
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