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Ireland's political and cultural magazine
3 4 July 2017
On old spy’s secrets
about Ireland
Peter Wright CBE of MI5 finally managed to publish
his highly controversial memoirs, ‘Spycatcher’,
exactly 30 years ago this month. He did so after
winning a volcanic legal battle in Australia against
Her Majesty’s Government (HMG) which had tried
to prevent its publication. ‘Spycatcher’ cast MI5
and MI6 in a deplorable light: little more than
organisations riddled with traitors and immersed
in criminality.
Throughout the trial, HMG was stretched on an
anvil and hammered mercilessly by Wright’s
dogged lawyer, Malcolm Turnbull, who is now the
Prime Minister of Australia. When Turnbull pub-
lished his own account of the affair, ‘The
Spycatcher Trial’, he recounted how he had asked
Wright at their first meeting if he thought HMG
feared he might reveal other secrets. “They might”,
Wright replied adding mysteriously: “I spent a lot
of time in Northern Ireland, you know. But I won’t
reveal anything about that. Malcolm, it would be
easy for me to make this book very sensational
indeed”.
Wright had also cautioned Turnbull that: “I may
never be able to tell you the truth about some
things”. When Turnbull asked him what he meant,
Wright responded: “My work in Northern Ireland,
for example. Satellite surveillance. A lot of things.
This is a safe book compared to what I could write”.
The noxious secrets
Peter Wright held
about MI5, MI6, the
Establishment, and NI
by Joseph de Búrca
Britainted
POLITICS
According to
Cameron there would
be no Finucane
inquiry because “there are
people all around 10 Downing
Street who won’t let it happen”.
He raised a finger and made a
circular motion in the air
Peter Wright
July 2017 3 5
Threats, counter-
threats and a spy’s
life-insurance policy
Wright had retired from MI5 in 1976
a disgruntled man. He and his wife
Lois emigrated to Australia to live
near one of their daughters, Jen-
nifer, in Tasmania to raise horses.
By the 1980s he had decided to put
his pen into some ink.
Wright had diabetes, and was
frail and generally in poor health.
Before the Australian courtroom
drama began, Turnbull visited
London where he met a senior legal
figure acting on behalf of HMG.
Turnbull’s arm was seized by the
lawyer and held in a “hard” grip.
“Well you tell [Wright] from me”,
the lawyer said “that he’d better
seek some medical advice before
he comes to court. He’ll get no
quarter in the witness box on
account of his ill-health”. While
this was clearly not a death threat,
if this was how the occupant of one
of HMG’s loftiest legal perches was
prepared to conduct himself, what
was to be expected from the gang
-
sters in MI5? Wright had
participated in at least one – if not
multiple - MI5 assassination operations and
knew perfectly well what its cutthroats were
capable of. It probably crossed his mind that
given half the chance they might, for example,
arrange a road-traffic accident along a dusty Tas-
manian dirt track. To avoid this, he took out a life
assurance policy, one that involved a threat to
reveal his unpublished secrets if he was
murdered.
The legal wrangling dragged on for another
year. On 14 June 1988, while an injunction
restraining British newspapers from publishing
the contents of the book was crumbling in the
House of Lords in London, Wright made his
threat public: “There are 10 major stories which
I have not put in [‘Spycatcher’] and there are
probably others if I thought about it. I may put
them into a secret report or I may do nothing. I
just haven’t thought it out yet”. The next day, The
Times reported that HMG had “always been
aware that Mr Wright knew a lot more than he
revealed in ‘Spycatcher’, particularly concerning
his service as an MI5 officer in Northern
Ireland”.
From his home in Australia, Wright buoyed the
story by proclaiming that the real reason HMG
had gone to such lengths to muzzle him was
“because of the other things I know. But I said in
the beginning I wouldn’t publish them and I
haven’t done it. They have always been fright-
ened of what I know…”. Just in case the message
wasn’t clear, he told the BBC that his future
course of action would depend on how HMG
“behaved themselves”.
‘I spent a lot of time in
Ireland, and it was not
pleasant’
‘Spycatcher’ became an international
bestseller shifting over two million
copies and earned Wright a fortune.
His ghostwriter, Paul Greengrass,
went on to great success as a film
director. His credits include the Jason
Bourne film series.
After his publishing success, Wright
retreated into virtual seclusion on his
small farm near the apple-growing
centre of Cygnet, at least for a while.
Whereas he had once courted the
media, requests for interviews were
now batted out-of-court by his wife
Lois. “Sorry. He won’t talk to journal-
ists or anyone else like that”, she was
quoted as saying. “He has nothing left
to say”.
But he had plenty left to say, albeit
that some of it was utterly innocuous.
On 12 August 1990 the Sunday Times
reported that he was writing another
book provisionally entitled ‘Tomorrow
Is Another Day’ about “a tamer topic
that should unsettle no government”,
the rearing of pedigree animals. But at
least the proposed publication pro-
vided Wright with an opportunity to
remind HMG to behave itself. “Peter does talk
occasionally about writing down some post-Spy-
catcher reflections, but I fear they may never
come to fruition”, Sandy Grant, the managing
director of Heinemann in Australia, was quoted
as saying.
In 1991 he published a second spy book but it
was a limp offering, little more than an A-Z of
espionage terminology with a few stories thrown
in for good measure. It was entitled the ‘Spy-
catcher’s Encyclopedia of Espionage’. There was,
however, a hint in it at the Irish secrets he
intended to carry to his grave if HMG behaved
itself. “I spent a lot of time in Ireland”, he intoned,
“and it was not pleasant. We also did a lot of
things there which I am never going to talk about,
because it would just cause more trouble”.
There is a possibility, albeit a wafer-
thin one, that Wright may have eventually
let Turnbull have a peep inside his box of
secrets. In his book, Turnbull was able to
describe how Wright “had been privy to
some of the weightiest secrets of the free
world, he had spied on presidents and
prime ministers, he was at the very centre
of the fight against the…IRA)”. Perhaps
one day Turnbull will clarify what - if any-
thing - he learnt about Wright’s activities
in Ireland and whether he knows any-
thing about a secret dossier.
Peter Wright and his lawyer, Malcolm
Turnbull, now Prime Minister of Australia
Wright in The Times
3 6 July 2017
MI5’s peeping tom supreme
By the 1960s Wright had become MI5’s Witch-
Finder General, a position he exploited to
accumulate mountains of dossiers containing
embarrassing secrets about the British Estab-
lishment. During the incessant mole hunts
Wright undertook, he was granted access to any
file he required in his search for treachery, real
or imagined. His meddlings ranged across uni
-
versities, government departments - especially
the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and Home
Office - Buckingham Palace, and anywhere else
that took his fancy. He even interviewed Airey
Neave MP, who had escaped from Colditz, about
the political leanings of his fellow non-British
prisoners. According to Wright, MI5’s D-G, Roger
Hollis, instructed “that I myself had to conduct
any interview deemed sensitive, which normally
meant it was with a lord, a knight, politician, top
civil servant, or spy suspect”.
One of those Wright interrogated was the arch
MI5 traitor, Sir Anthony Blunt. Blunt was pre-
pared to betray many of his friends to preserve
his position: “Blunt, too, loved to discuss the
scandalous side of Cambridge life in the 1930s…I
soon realised that the [Cambridge] Ring of Five
stood at the centre of a series of other connect
-
ing rings, each pledged to silence, each anxious
to protect secrets from outsiders. There was the
secret ring of homosexuals, where loyalty to
their kind overrode all other obligations; there
was the secret world of the Apostles [a group of
Cambridge intellectuals], where ties to fellow
Apostles remain strong throughout life; and
then there was the ring of those friends of Blunt
and [Guy] Burgess who were not themselves
spies, but who knew or guessed what was going
on. Each ring supported the others, and made
the task of identifying the inner core that much
more difficult”.
Nothing has changed
Wright personally interviewed and re-inter-
viewed more than 100 people over a period of six
years. By the end of it he could boast: “I had seen
into the secret heart of the present Establish-
ment at a time when they had been young and
careless. I knew their scandals and their
intrigues. I knew too much, and they knew it”.
One of these was the former PM Anthony Eden.
All of this gave MI5 a power over the political
establishment and provides one clue - among
many - as to why successive governments have
mangled their reputations by covering up the
criminal activities of MI5.
The control of politicians by the darker
elements of the civil service has not changed
much in the intervening decades. David Cameron
told the family of Patrick Finucane (the Belfast
solicitor who had been assassinated by British
agents in NI) that he could not order a public
inquiry into the scandal. Finucane’s brother
Martin asked him why. In a moment of candour
Cameron turned to Mrs Finucane and said:
“Look, the last administration couldn’t deliver
an inquiry in your husband’s case and neither
can we”. According to Cameron this was because
“there are people all around this place, [10
Downing Street], who won’t let it happen”. As he
was saying this, he raised a finger and made a
circular motion in the air.
What gave those ‘around’ Cameron such sway
over his administration - not to mention that of
Tony Blair and Gordon Brown? Theresa May was
Home Secretary at the time so there is no reason
to suspect that anything has changed since she
became PM.
POLITICS
Patrick FinucaneDavid Cameron
Geraldine Finucane took David Cameron to court after he ruled out a public inquiry
“I had seen into the
secret heart of the
present Establishment
at a time when they
had been young and
careless. I knew their
scandals and their
intrigues. I knew too
much, and they knew it”
The men at the summit of MI5 in the 1970s: Martin Furnival Jones, Sir Michael Hanley, Peter Wright
July 2017 3 7
Formulating MI5’s policy for
Ireland
By the early 1970s, Wright had clawed his way to
the top of MI5’s greasy, bloodstained pole. He
was close to its D-G, Sir Martin Furnival Jones.
When Michael Hanley, the Deputy D-G of MI5
became D-G in 1972, he appointed Wright as his
special adviser. Hanley asked Wright to formu
-
late proposals about how MI5 should deal with
NI after which he spent “a lot of time in Ireland”
and did the mysterious things which would have
caused “more trouble” if they were ever exposed.
The Irish Times, Irish Independent and other
mainstream publications never lifted a finger to
follow up the tempting clues the old curmudgeon
had laid out so publicly.
Nerve gas and poison
What Wright divulged in ‘Spycatcher’ was hair-
raising enough. He described how he and an
Irishman called Bill Magan had plotted to ‘neu-
tralise’ General Grivas during Britain’s struggle
against EOKA in Cyprus in the late 1950s; a trea
-
sonous plot against PM Harold Wilson; and
wrongdoing by MI5’s blood brothers over at MI6.
He described how at the start of the Suez Crisis,
MI6 had “developed a plan, through the London
Station, to assassinate [Egypt’s President]
Nasser using nerve gas. [British PM Anthony]
Eden initially gave his approval to the operation,
but later rescinded it when he got agreement
from the French and Israelis to engage in joint
military action. When this course failed, and he
was forced to withdraw [from Suez], Eden reac
-
tivated the assassination option a second time.
By this time virtually all MI6 assets in Egypt’s
had been rounded up by Nasser, and a new oper-
ation, using renegade Egyptian officers, was
drawn up, but it failed lamentably, principally
because the cache of weapons which had been
hidden on the outskirts of Cairo was found to be
defective”.
Had the nerve-gas plot proceeded, the collat
-
eral damage to Nasser’s secretarial and domestic
staff, not to mention anyone happening to visit
him, would have been devastating. The gas
would have asphyxiated the victims while melt-
ing their vital organs.
The gas MI6 had in mind to assassinate Nasser
was undoubtedly developed by HMG’s team of
Dr Strangeloves at a ghoulish scientific complex
known as Porton Down. Wright described how
he once visited it for a demonstration of a ciga-
rette packet which had been fitted with a poison
tipped dart by the staff of the Explosives
Research and Development Establishment: “We
solemnly put on white coats and were taken out
to one of the animal compounds behind Porton
by Dr Ladell, the scientist there who handled all
MI5 and MI6 work. A sheep on a lead was led into
the centre of the ring. One flank had been shaved
to reveal the course pink skin. Ladell’s assistant
pulled out the cigarette packet and stepped for
-
ward. The sheep started, and was restrained by
the lead, and I thought perhaps the device had
misfired. But then the sheep’s knees began to
buckle, and it started rolling its eyes and froth-
ing at the mouth. Slowly the animal sank to the
ground, life draining away, as the white-coated
professionals discussed the advantages of the
modern new toxin around the corpse”.
Porton Down is still open for business.
SECRET #1
Peeping at the Royal Family’s
dirty linen (1945)
Peter Wright died a rich yet bitter man in 1995 at
the age of 78. He had spent his declining years
referring to Thatcher as a “bitch” and those
around her as “those bastards”. Assuming he
compiled a secret dossier, what happened to it?
After the passage of three decades it is unlikely
it will now surface. Instead Village will take a
stab at what it might have contained. A sobering
thought is that for every error we may make, the
likelihood is that some other unreported horror
story remains concealed.
Before Wright’s began his interrogation of
Blunt, he received a briefing from Michael
Adeane, the Queen’s Private Secretary, who told
him: “From time to time you may find Blunt refer-
ring to an assignment he undertook on behalf of
the Palace – a visit to Germany at the end of the
war. Please do not pursue this matter. Strictly
speaking, it is not relevant to considerations of
national security” (‘Spycatcher’ p223). Wright
was hardly going to deny MI5 an insight into this
mystery since Blunt had undoubtedly passed
details of it to his KGB handlers. The odds are
high he learnt that Blunt had been sent to Ger-
many to recover the correspondence the Duke of
Windsor had exchanged with the Nazi hierarchy
after his abdication. Revelation of this nature,
even in 1987, still had the potential to shake the
foundations of Buckingham Palace.
Wright described
a treasonous plot
against PM Harold
Wilson, and an MI6
plan to assassinate
Egypt’s President
Nasser using nerve
gas
Gamal Nasser
Anthony Eden
Tests at Porton Down
The Duke of Windsor and friends
3 8 July 2017
SECRET #2
Bombing ships carrying
Holocaust survivors (1946-47)
Last April Village described how in 1946 and
1947 MI6 ran an operation to disrupt the flow of
Jewish refugees from Mediterranean ports to
Palestine codenamed Operation Embarrass. One
of the MI6 unit was an Irishman, Wing-Com-
mander Derek Verschoyle. The first account of
the Operation emerged in ‘The Friends’, a book
about MI6 published by Nigel West in 1988, a
year after ‘Spycatcher’.
MI6 expert Dr Stephen Dorrill dug up addi-
tional details which he published in 2000
revealing how one former MI6 officer had
described it as the “blackest page in MI6’s post-
war history” and that there had been persistent
rumours that one unidentified ship packed with
Holocaust survivors “may have been blown up
at sea, whether by accident or design”.
MI6 acknowledged the existence of the opera-
tion in 2010 when it let Professor Keith Jeffery of
Queens University, Belfast, include an account
of it in the official history of MI6 it had asked him
to write. In fairness to MI6, it should be com-
mended for the disclosure. It shows that not
everyone in it is addicted to lies, deceit and
cover-up and offers a glimmer of hope that it may
be mending some of its ways. Any reformers
should note too that MI6 survived the revelation
without much condemnation. Time now to admit
the Dublin bombings of 1972, perhaps?
SECRET #3
The sexual blackmail of an
archbishop (1959-60)
Bizarrely, while Wright was prepared to admit
that he had been involved in a plot to kill Colonel
Grivas in Cyprus, he was coy about the sexual
blackmail of the Colonel’s political ally, Arch-
bishop Makarios. (See Village February 2017.)
That operation was also exposed by Nigel West
in 1988. Two years later no less a figure than Sir
Dick White, the former head of both MI5 and MI6,
confirmed that it had occurred.
Wright and a colleague from MI6 had placed a
listening device on the telephone lines leading
to the Archbishop’s Palace in Cyprus. MI6 also
had a number of agents
inside it controlled by Sir
Stephen Hastings MC, who
later became a Conservative
MP. Wright gave no hint that any
of them had discovered that the Arch
-
bishop was engaged in homosexual relations,
or that this information had been used to black-
mail him. If he had, the revelation might have
raised questions about Wright’s involvement in
the sexual blackmail of MI5 targets in Ireland
where the British Army and MI5 had established
brothels for adult heterosexuals, not to mention
the blackmail of members of the Anglo-Irish pae-
dophile vice ring which preyed on boys at
Kincora and elsewhere, some of them as young
as eight years of age. Wright hardly relished the
thought that his daughters would discover that
their beloved father had stood back while chil
-
dren were raped and driven to suicide so that
MI5 could blackmail some of the participants in
a wide range of paedophile rings.
SECRET #4
The gruesome murder of
Patrice Lumumba (1961)
Declassified CIA records confirm that President
Eisenhower of the USA ordered the murder of
Patrice Lumumba, PM of the Congo. Lumumba
was killed in a joint CIA-MI6 operation in 1961.
He had to endure a gruesome orgy of torture and
violence that lasted for five or six hours before
he finally expired. A harrowing account of it
appears in the towering international bestseller,
The Devil’s Chessboard (2016), a biography of
the egregiously evil Allen Dulles of the CIA.
While the book focusses on the CIA’s involve-
ment, MI6 played a significant part in it too,
something Wright would have known about.
Howard Frank Trayton Smith, who served as
Britain’s intelligence supremo in Northern Ire-
land, 1971-1972, was a pivotal figure in the
murder. He later became Ambassador to Moscow
and, in 1979, D-G of MI5. In 1960 Smith was a
senior official at the Foreign Office with respon-
sibility for the Congo. Daphne Park was serving
as the MI6 Head of Station in the Congo. Park
reported to Smith that Lumumba was allegedly
trying to take his country into the Soviet camp.
This was utter nonsense. Nonetheless, on 28
September, 1960, Smith circulated a memo to
the Foreign Office where it was digested
by a number of highly-placed pow-
erbrokers including the future
Prime Minister Ted Heath who
was then a junior minister
there. In it Smith noncha-
lantly explained he could
see “only two possible
solutions” to the situa
-
tion: ‘The first is the
simple one of ensuring
Lumumba’s removal from
the scene by killing him. This
should in fact solve the problem,
since so far as we can tell, Lumumba
is not a leader of a movement within which
there are potential successors of his quality and
influence. His supporters are much less danger-
ous material”.
By the time Wright’s book was meandering
towards the printing presses, Smith was a deco-
rated and recently retired D-G of MI5: exactly the
type of person HMG would instinctively rally to
protect. Meanwhile, Daphne Park was deeply
immersed in MI6’s Anglo-Irish machinations.
She was a governor of the BBC (where she inter-
fered with broadcasts about NI) and on the cusp
of becoming a life peer. She was also a friend of
the then serving Taoiseach Garret FitzGerald
(through her management role in the British-
Irish Association). MI6 could not afford to allow
Wright to expose her part in Lumumba’s murder
or other aspects of her sordid past: in the 1970s
she had served as the Head of MI6’s Western
Hemisphere division where - at a minimum - she
had knowledge of the MI6-CIA Gladio death
squads active in Europe at the time and had
spread smears about Charles Haughey across
the globe through MI6-CIA-controlled news
agencies. Had she been exposed by Wright, a
veritable can of Irish worms might have wriggled
free just as Haughey was about to wrest power
back from FitzGerald, and HMG was fearful
POLITICS
Ships carrying Holocaust survivors
Archbishop Makarios
with Colonel Grivas
Sir Dick White
Dame Daphne Park
July 2017 3 9
about what he might do with the Hillsborough
Agreement and security co-operation
generally.
Incidentally, Park remained an unapologetic
colonialist. When she was interviewed by the
Daily Telegraph in April 2003 she stated that the
“The [British] Government is too worried about
speaking out [against Mugabe] because they
think they will be accused of being colonialist.
Well I don’t think that’s such a terrible crime”.
Before her death, Park also acknowledged that:
“Yes, I have been involved in death, but I cannot
speak about that”. Interested readers should
purchase a copy of the fascinating ‘Queen of
Spies’ (2015) by the Dublin writer and intelli
-
gence expert, Paddy Hayes. One of the more
interesting quotes in it is that of John de St Jorre
of MI6 who worked with Park in Leopoldville: “I
always thought of Daphne as a blend of Marga
-
ret Rutherford, the bosomy and beloved actress,
and Rosa Klebb, the cold-eyed KGB dragon-lady
with a poisonous blade in her shoe”.
SECRET #5
MI5’s role in Bloody Sunday
(JANUARY 1972)
In January 1972 British paratroopers shot dead
13 unarmed civilians in Derry. HMG responded
by building a pyramid of lies around the truth. A
tribunal manipulated by Lord Widgery did the
necessary. His fraudulent report was published
in 1972 exculpating the paratroopers. Aside from
a few gullible Colonel Blimps in the shires, no
one believed a word of it. Decades later the
Saville Inquiry managed to shine a light over
much of the truth but was deflected by counter-
insurgency guru, Brigadier Frank Kitson, and
MI5, from the scandal’s deeper secrets.
As someone who was responsible for the for
-
mulation of MI5’s NI policy in 1972, Wright cannot
but have known all there was to know about
Kitson and MI5’s role in Bloody Sunday. At the
time of the ‘Spycatcher’ affair, Kitson was a
doyen of the British establishment having retired
as Commander-in-Chief United Kingdom Land
Forces just two years previously.
Kitson is now 90 years of age. On 27 April 2015
he and the Ministry of Defence were served with
papers for negligence and misfeasance in office
by Mary Heenan, widow of Eugene Heenan, a
fifty-year-old Catholic with five children who was
murdered in 1973 by members of the UDA led by
a British agent called Albert ‘Ginger’ Baker,
because of “the use of loyalist paramilitary
gangs to contain the republican-nationalist
threat through terror, manipulation of the rule of
law, infiltration and subversion all core to the
Kitson military of doctrine endorsed by the Brit-
ish Army and the British government at the
time”.
SECRET #6
Bombing the Republic (1972)
The Republic of Ireland was virgin territory and
a playground for the dirty tricksters of MI5 and
MI6 in 1972. In December of that year they organ-
ised two car bombings in Dublin while the
Offences Against the State Bill was limping
towards its doom inside Leinster House. Many
of the deputies in the Dáil who were opposed to
the bill backed off after the explosions and it was
ushered on to the statute books. The assump-
tion at the time was that the bombs were the
work of militant Republicans, especially as there
were protests in the city that night against the
arrest of the Chief of Staff of the Provisional IRA,
Sean MacStíofáin. Last December Village pub-
lished an analysis of the atrocity. It highlighted
the probable complicity of Kitson’s Military
Reaction Force (MRF) in it. Moreover, in April, we
reported how a former MI6 trainee had learnt
that MI6 had been involved in the 1972 attack
and that it had garnered a legendary status
inside MI6.
As the man formulating MI5’s policy on Ire-
land, it is inconceivable that Peter Wright did not
know everything there was to know about the
MRF and the 1972 Dublin bombings. If, as sus-
pected, MI6 and the MRF was behind it, it would
surely rank as one of Wright’s unpublished
secrets.
In addition, he would have known the inside
story of the Littlejohn affair during which the Lit-
tlejohn brothers petrol-bombed Garda stations
in 1972 at the behest of MI6. The Littlejohns were
caught and imprisoned in Mountjoy for a bank
heist they executed on Grafton Street in October
1972. They were released from prison early by
Garret FitzGerald in 1981 on “humanitarian”
grounds and are still alive.
In Sepember nd Ocober Village will
piece ogeher Peer Wrigh’s oher
likely unpublished secres including:
• MI’s smer cmpigns gins John
Hume of he SDLP nd oher consiu-
ionl poliicins in Irelnd.
• Wrigh’s involvemen in sexul blck-
mil including Kincor.
• MI’s emp o displce Ted Heh
s Leder of he Conservive Pry
nd replce him wih Mrgre
Thcher.
• How Wrigh possessed secres h
could hve pushed n lredy oxic
relionship beween Chrles Hughey
nd Mrgre Thcher ino meldown,
in .
• Briin’s Proxy Mur
der Mchine in
Irelnd.
The Irish Times, Irish
Independent and
other mainstream
publications never lifted a finger
to follow up the tempting clues
Wright had laid out so publicly
Bloody Sunday
