Newly-released files show how then-Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was left “shattered” by a 1980s memoir of a former spy. Spycatcher by ex-MI5 officer Peter Wright contained explosive claims about UK espionage operations. The UK government attempted to block the book’s release.
The new files reveal the extent of panic over the memoir’s threatened publication. “The consequences of publication would be enormous,” Thatcher wrote on a briefing note by her cabinet secretary.
Wright served for 21 years in MI5 before leaving in 1976. His memoir, the unpublished manuscript of which Mrs Thatcher read in 1986, alleged that a former MI5 director general had been a Soviet spy and claimed MI5 officers had plotted against the then-Prime Minister Harold Wilson in the mid-1970s. All these claims were dismissed by the government.
While some of the most explosive claims had already been reported in Harry Chapman Pincher’s Their Trade is Treachery, published five years earlier, it was the fact that the book was written under Wright’s name that alarmed Mrs Thatcher and her advisors. They feared that allowing an MI5 officer to publish a detailed memoir under his own name would set a dangerous precedent.
Although the UK government successfully blocked Spycatcher’s publication in the UK, it was later released in Australia despite an embarrassing court case. The subsequent publicity fuelled discussions about MI5’s activities and the actions of its personnel
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