Spycatcher
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| Author | Peter Wright (with Paul Greengrass) |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Subject | Espionage |
| Publisher |
Heinemann (Australia) Penguin Viking (USA) |
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Publication date
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31 July 1987 |
| Pages | 392 |
| ISBN | |
| OCLC | 17234291 |
| 327.1/2/0924 B 19 | |
| LC Class | UB271.G72 W758 1987 |
Spycatcher: The Candid Autobiography of a Senior Intelligence Officer is a book written by Peter Wright, former MI5 officer and Assistant Director, and co-author Paul Greengrass. It was published first in Australia. Its allegations proved scandalous on publication, but more so because the British Government attempted to ban it, ensuring its profit and notoriety.
In Spycatcher, Wright states that he was assigned to unmask a Soviet mole in MI5, and claims that the mole was Roger Hollis — a former MI5 Director General; it also describes people who might have or might not have been the mole; and narrates a history of MI5 by chronicling its principal officers, from the 1930s to his time in service.
Moreover, Spycatcher tells of the MI6 plot to assassinate President Nasser during the Suez Crisis; of joint MI5-CIA plotting against British Prime Minister Harold Wilson (secretly accused of being a KGB agent by the Soviet defector Anatoliy Golitsyn); and of MI5's eavesdropping on high-level Commonwealth conferences.
Wright examines the techniques of intelligence services, exposes their ethics (speculative until that time), notably their "eleventh commandment", "Thou shalt not get caught", and explains many MI5 electronic technologies (some of which he developed), for instance allowing clever spying into rooms, and identifying the frequency that a superhet receiver is tuned to. In the afterword, he states that writing Spycatcher was motivated principally to recuperate pension income lost when the British government ruled his pension un-transferable for earlier work in GCHQ, a ruling that severely reduced his pension.
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