Author's Achknowledgments

1 have had no access to classified information since Ì retired from MIS in January 1976. This book is based entirely on my personal recollections, and I have been careful to avoid disclosing anything which, in my judgment, would adversely affect national security.

It is impossible to thank personally all the many people who have helped in the fight to have this book published. But [ would like to give special acknowledgment to the following:

Malcolm Turnbull, my Australian lawyer, who took my case on when it seemed unlikely Spycatcher would ever see the light of day. Thanks to his tireless energy and legal skills, and the assistance of his wife, Lucy, the tide finally began to flow in my direction.

Heinemann Publishers Australia Pty., who fought with great courage for the right to publish this book, and in particular Nick and Sam Hudson, Sandy Grant, and Paul Hamlyn.

David Hooper, Heinemann's London solicitor, who gave valuable advice and assistance throughout the case.

Allan Kellock, of Viking in New York, who took a brave decision to be the first to publish Spycatcher, and whose sound judgment has been vindicated by events. The Observer, Guardian, Independent, and Sunday Times newspapers in London, who campaigned long and hard against the British Government's suppression of this book.

Lois and Tom Wallace, of Wallace and Shiel Agency in New York, who have given this project patience and encouragement throughout. Paul Greengrass, my coauthor, who supported this project from the very beginning, and has shared with me in its trials and tribulations, and ultimate victory. And lastly, of course, I would like to thank my family. My wife, Lois, and my children, Tessa, Jenny, and Bevis, have been my inspiration and strength throughout the past three and a half years. Without their special support and encouragement, this book could never have been written. —Peter Wright 1988 Preface ————————— JOHN LE CARRÉ ONCE WROTE THAT THE BRITISH SECRET SERvices have an image but no face. It is an image which has been carefully cultivated since they were founded in the first decade of the twentieth century. The CIA may have greater resources, the KGB greater machinations, Mossad the greater ruthlessness, but MIS and MI6 were the first players in Kipling’s Great Game; they are its master craftsmen. They invented the principles of tradecraft, broke the first codes, ran the best agents, bred the best spymasters, and taught the rest everything they know. Above all, they keep the secrets. In the intelligence world MIS and MIG are still primes inter pares. Britain has always carefully protected the reputation of its Secret Services. They are seen as embodying her most admirable national qualities—subtlety of mind, pragmatism, and an ironic detachment from the naïvetés which disfigure other nations. The more that Britain's prestige in the real world has declined in recent decades, the greater the importance which has been attached to them. It is almost as if clandestine expertise compensates for the loss of Empire and all the increasing irrelevance of much of British life today. The spy world remains the last arena where wellborn Englishmen can still exercise that effortless superiority which for centuries they were born to believe was theirs by right. The British Secret Services have also fulfilled another vital function. They have been the guardians of the state’s unconscioug mind. Their fles contain all that is most shameful in the national memory—assassination plots, lawbreaking, conspiracies against elected governments, and the full extent of Soviet penetration. For years MIS and MI6 kept these memories safely hidden from view. They were the custodians of an enormous storchouse of scandal. Britain was not alone in amassing an intolerable burden of intelligence-related scandals in the postwar years. The CIA had its anti-Castro plots, illegal surveillance programs, and foreign destabilizations, to mention but a few. The Canadian and Australian Services had their own variations, involving illegal wiretapping, burglary, and blacklisting. By the mid-1970s the strain of keeping the secrets out of view became intolerable. Like patients in therapy, each country needed to dispose of the accumulated baggage of the past in order to be able to embrace the future. They needed a ritual; a catharsis. The CIA released its burden in the mid-1970s through a long series of Congressional and Senate Committee inquiries, in particular that headed by Senator Frank Church. Both the Canadian and Australian intelligence communities underwent similar scrutiny by senior judicial figures, Justices MacDonald and Hope respectively. In each case, following the sensational public revelations, new rules and accountabilities were formulated to encourage public confidence and take the services forward to the 1990s. Only Britain, among the principal Western intelligence allies, stood alone in refusing to face up to the past. Ever since Burgess and Maclean defected in 1951, the British Government's rare public statements about the activities of the intelligence services have been characterized either by dishonesty, inaccuracy, or inadequacy. First there was Prime Minister Macmillan’s infamous clearance of Kim Philby in 1955, then the fifteen-year cover-up of Anthony Blunt's treachery and subsequent secret pardon. More recently there have been officral dernals of any plot or impropriety bv MIS ofheers agamst the Labor Government of 1974. But despite British resistance to any measure of inquiry or accountabihtv, the burden of the past has finally proved too great. In the end the secrets had to come out, and the catharsis has come not through the official or judicial inquiries favored by our alles in the mid-1970s but through publication of this book. Peter Wright is the only man who could have undertaken such a task. His twenty-five-year career inside the highest echelons of Bntish intelligence gave him a unique insight into all the mistakes, venal acts, and cover-ups of a generation of British intelligence gathering—from the widespread illegalities of the 1950s and the crazed witch-hunts of the 1960s to the sinister conspiracies of the 1970s. Peter Wright is a veteran of a hard school —that generation of intelligence ofhcers on both sides of the Atlantic who began their secret service in the trenches of the Cold War and ended it in the mid-1970s, just as the secrets started to spill out. He has never been an old-school-tie man. Part bofiin, part molehunter, he is an . outsider, and proud of it. He has been an enemy of the British Establishment ever since he began his lonely crusade to hunt down those wellborn Englishmen who turned traitor in the 1930s. The experience scarred him for life. He got little support from MIS. Few of the titled and eminent people he interviewed cared to recall the details of a prewar world which long ago had disappeared. Fewer still cared to remember their friendships with Philby, Burgess, Maclean, and Blunt, or admit the secret suspicions they had kept to themselves. A veil had been drawn over those years by an entire generation, and it gave Wright a fierce determination to tear it away. Today Peter Wright remains true to the precepts of the Cold War. Where others of his contemporaries have sought an accommodation with the post-detente world, he has always been a manat-arms, restlessly uneasy with peace.