The Defence of the Realm (140 page)

Many Opposition MPs believed that the Security Service had become a political tool of the right. Gerald Kaufman charged in the Commons on 12 March that MI5 had ‘deliberately and wrongfully classified Joan Ruddock, the chairman of CND, as a subversive so that they could open a file on her' – the first time a shadow Home Secretary had ever made so serious a public charge against the Security Service. The charge, to which the government made no substantive response, was mistaken. What concerned the Service was not an erroneous belief that Ruddock was subversive but her meetings with a Soviet journalist who, though she did not know it, was a KGB officer.
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Some Labour backbenchers made even fiercer criticisms than Kaufman. David Winnick thought it ‘quite likely that MI5 is out of control', while Ian Mikardo claimed that Britain was ‘catching up fast' with the Soviet Union in its use of state repression.
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Mikardo's charges of Soviet-style repression were particularly ironic in view of intelligence from Gordievsky that prior to 1967 he had been a Soviet agent.
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Sir Antony Duff, who became DG soon after the passage of the Interception of Communications Act, became convinced that further legislation was needed. Though telephone and postal interception were legislated for under the Act, other eavesdropping had been omitted because any mention
of it was thought too politically sensitive by the government. Mrs Thatcher and some of her ministers initially ‘took the view, not altogether surprisingly, that setting out to legislate to allow the secret state to break into people's property for the purpose of planting microphones to overhear their conversations would cause a terrible furore and do the government no good at all'. Following the extensive publicity given to Peter Wright's boast in
Spycatcher
that ‘we bugged and burgled our way across London at the state's bequest, while pompous, bowler-hatted civil servants looked the other way', Stella Rimington recalls that Duff suspended operations which required ‘intrusion on property': ‘The result was a sudden loss of intelligence, just at a time when terrorist and other hostile activity was at its peak.'
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In fact, existing eavesdropping operations continued but it became more difficult, and often required several months, to obtain Home Office approval for further operations. Duff used the legal uncertainties over eavesdropping to press the case for a Security Service Act to provide a statutory basis for the Service itself as well as for its intrusions on property.
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The case for a Security Service Act was further strengthened by the judgment of the European Court of Human Rights in the case brought by Torsten Leander, a Swedish Marxist who had been sacked from the Karlskrona Naval Museum in 1979. Because the Museum was next to a large naval base, the Swedish security police, the Säpo, concluded that Leander was a security risk and informed his employer. The Säpo was cleared of any wrongdoing under Articles 8 (respect of privacy) and 10 (freedom of conscience) of the Human Rights Convention. The Court found greater difficulty in deciding whether there had been a breach of Leander's rights under Article 13 (denial of an effective remedy), since he had no means of redress under Swedish law. In March 1987, it decided by seven votes to five that there had been no transgression. The Court, however, concluded in its summing up:

The expression ‘in accordance with the law' in paragraph 2 of Article 8 requires, to begin with, that the interference [with human rights] must have some basis in domestic law. Compliance with domestic law, however, does not suffice: the law in question must be accessible to the individual concerned and its consequences for him must also be foreseeable (see,
mutatis mutandis
, the Malone judgment of 2 August 1984 . . . ).
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All security services were thus held to require a statutory basis, failing which the Court would not recognize the state's power to violate citizens' personal privacy in the interests of national security. The law regulating
the work of security services had to be ‘sufficiently clear in its terms to give an adequate indication as to the circumstances in which and the conditions on which the public authorities are empowered to resort to this kind of secret and potentially dangerous interference with private life'. Citizens must also have ‘adequate protection against arbitrary interference':
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‘In view of the risk that a system of secret surveillance for the protection of national security poses of undermining or even destroying democracy on the ground of defending it, the Court must be satisfied that there exist adequate and effective guarantees against abuse.'
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Though the Leander case made a deep impression on the Security Service's Legal Adviser Bernard Sheldon and his team, it was little noticed by the media and most politicians. By contrast, the prolonged litigation deriving from the government's misjudged attempts to prevent the publication of Peter Wright's memoirs made front-page news. Wright had retired in 1976 embittered both by resentment over the fact that his pension took no account of his fifteen years' employment by the Admiralty before joining the Security Service and by the fact that his conspiracy theories of Soviet penetration were no longer treated seriously. Short of working capital for the stud farm in Tasmania to which he had retired, Wright wrote to his friend, the wartime MI5 officer Lord (Victor) Rothschild, who warned the DG that Wright was thinking of writing his memoirs. He wrote again to Rothschild in 1980, telling him that he had thought of a way of publishing and avoiding prosecution:

It is not the Official Secrets Act that concerns me. With all the books written it would be very difficult to make it stick. But I was made to sign a document when I retired, never to disclose anything I knew as a result of my employment, whether classified or not. I can avoid action against me by staying in Australia and never returning to my beloved England.

Instead of dissuading Wright, Rothschild encouraged him. Though his motives remain difficult to fathom, they included a desire for a written statement by Wright exonerating him and his wife from whispered rumours that they had been Soviet spies. He may also have concluded that public revelation of the sensational charges against Sir Roger Hollis, of whose innocence he had no doubt, would distract attention from the innuendoes accusing him of involvement with the KGB, with which he had become obsessed. In August 1980, without telling the Security Service, Rothschild sent Wright a return air ticket from Tasmania to London. He arrived bearing a three-page testimonial and a ten-chapter typescript on Soviet penetration dramatically entitled ‘The Cancer in our Midst'. Having
devised a plan for a more readable version of the book to be produced by an author who would make no mention of Wright but share the proceeds with him, Rothschild introduced him to Britain's best-known spy-writer, Chapman Pincher, who was amazed by Wright's ‘willingness to tell me secrets for publication on a scale which I knew to be unprecedented in the entire history of the secret services'. The result, in March 1981, was Pincher's rapidly written book,
Their Trade is Treachery
, devoted chiefly to the case against Hollis. As Rothschild's biographer observes, ‘So little guilt did Victor feel in procuring that colossal breach of security that he continued to address letters to
The Times
deploring the steady leak of classified documents to the press.'
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Wright first informed the Security Service that he was writing a memoir in June 1981 when he reported an approach by a British writer seeking information on Hollis and Blunt. He said that he had told the writer that ‘for my own satisfaction and for the record, I am writing an accurate history of what happened but that it would not be published in my lifetime'.
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Wright failed to mention, however, that he had already secretly collaborated with Pincher on
Their Trade is Treachery
. Director B (John Allen) replied with what was intended as an ‘unambiguous letter of warning': ‘To avoid any uncertainty, I must tell you that your obligation not to make such a record, whether for publication or not, remains unchanged. I have little doubt that the authorities here would respond to a breach of your obligation by invoking any available remedy, under civil as well as criminal law.'
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On 16 July 1984 Wright appeared in a Granada
World in Action
television documentary on MI5 and for the first time made public his allegations that Hollis was a Soviet spy. Press reports revealed that he was writing a book, eventually entitled
Spycatcher;
his ghost-writer was to be the
World in Action
producer Paul Greengrass. Sir Robert Armstrong sent an outraged letter to the DG, Sir John Jones, written in his usual elegant hand:

I hope you are reviewing the possibility of discontinuing the payment of Peter Wright's pension. His contribution to the World in Action programme on 16 July was self-evidently in flagrant breach of his obligations under the Official Secrets Act . . . He is, moreover, in open and defiant breach of trust on which your service depends: we have surely to consider the effect on others if he escapes scot free.
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The DG replied, after taking legal advice, that he did not believe Wright's pension could be withheld but wondered, following the precedent set by stripping Blunt of his knighthood, ‘if there is any way in which HMG's displeasure might be shown by depriving [Wright] of the CBE which he
was awarded in the 1972 New Year Honours'.
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Armstrong told Mrs Thatcher that, regrettably, no such action was possible: ‘Mr Wright would present himself as a[n] aged patriot striving to do his duty and protect his country, and victimised for his pains.'
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The correspondence between Armstrong and Jones vividly reflects both fury at Wright's betrayal and frustration at their inability to take action against him.

The press reported on 2 August 1984 that the Attorney General, in consultation with the Director of Public Prosecutions, had decided to prosecute Wright for unauthorized disclosure if (which was doubtless considered unlikely) he returned to the UK.
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Bernard Sheldon initially hoped to prevent publication by warning off potential publishers. Wright's literary agent, Anthony Sheil, was successfully identified,
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and two publishers lost interest in Wright's memoirs after being warned off. On succeeding Jones as DG in the spring of 1985, Sir Antony Duff approved a similar attempt to warn off Heinemann, the third publisher to enter the
Spycatcher
arena.
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Heinemann, however, sought to avoid an injunction preventing publication by transferring the book to their Australian subsidiary. On 17 June 1985 Sir Robert Armstrong chaired a meeting attended by, among others, ‘C' (Sir Colin Figures), the DDG (Cecil Shipp) and Sheldon to consider how to proceed. The Treasury Solicitor, John Bailey, said there was ‘some reason to hope that an action in Australia might be successful':

He cited the judgment in the Fairfax case where the court had said it would be prepared to grant an injunction if it could be proved that disclosure would be inimical to the public interest . . . Summing up, Sir Robert Armstrong said that there was general agreement that legal action should be taken, both in Australia and the United Kingdom, if there was a reasonable chance that it would be successful, both to prevent the damage that would be caused by this particular book and to deter others.
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As the action to prevent publication proceeded, however, Armstrong's condition that there must be ‘a reasonable chance that it would be successful' tended to be lost sight of in Whitehall. In Stella Rimington's view, ‘It was decided to pursue the book through every possible legal channel, whether there was any hope of success or not.'
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In September 1985, the Attorney General, Sir Michael Havers, acting in the name of the British government, began proceedings in Australia against Wright and Heinemann Australia, seeking an injunction to prevent publication on the grounds that Wright was in breach of his duty of confidentiality to the Crown. In order to avoid having either to confirm or to deny the
accuracy of any of Wright's allegations, the Attorney General decided to admit – for the purpose of these proceedings only – that all the allegations in
Spycatcher
were correct. Though this was intended only as a legal tactic, the Australian judge, Mr Justice Powell, pronounced the admission ‘quite dramatic'. The effect was to make it much more difficult for the British government to argue that publication was contrary to the Australian public interest – as it had to do if it was to win its case. The tactical acceptance of Wright's most sensational allegation – that Sir Roger Hollis had been a Soviet spy – was of considerable public interest in Australia since Hollis had had a major role in the foundation of ASIO, the Australian security service.
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The
Spycatcher
trial, which was to last five weeks, opened in Sydney in November 1986 and attracted a level of global publicity unequalled by any other book since the British government's equally ill-fated attempt to ban the publication of
Lady Chatterley's Lover
on the grounds of obscenity a quarter of a century earlier. Heinemann's British solicitor, David Hooper, ‘could not avoid gaining the impression that the British government overestimated the deference that they thought would be accorded to them by the Australian courts and government'.
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‘It was an enormous lark', recalled Wright's counsel, the able, aggressive thirty-two-year-old Malcolm Turnbull, ‘and I enjoyed every minute of it.'
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The part of the ‘lark' he enjoyed most was probably questioning Sir Robert Armstrong, who had been selected, rather than a senior Security Service officer, as the principal witness in support of the government case.
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Though Armstrong was the accounting officer for the funds received by the Service under the Secret Vote, he had no first-hand information about any of the operations described by Wright and, even with the voluminous briefing material provided for him, he was placed, as Stella Rimington, then Director K, later acknowledged, ‘in a very difficult if not impossible position'.
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The urbane, patrician Armstrong made an irresistible target for much of the Australian media. Turnbull positioned his lectern so that, when answering his questions, Armstrong was facing a press gallery who, wrote Turnbull, ‘were laughing at him and some were sneering too'.
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