The abuses of secrecy: the Spycatcher scandal then and now

Get our history out of the toilet!

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Sir Robert Armstrong, then cabinet secretary, centre, travelling to Australia in a doomed attempt to prevent Spycatcher’s publication ANL/SHUTTERSTOCK

In 1978 the great socialist historian E.P. Thompson described the UK as living in a “State of Blackmail”.

Ministers, soldiers, police officers and spies insisted on secrecy and inflicted severe punishments on those they claimed were threatening national security. Fair enough, you might think. All nations need secrets.

Yet when it suited their interests, when they wanted to create a panic to justify yet another assault on civil liberties, for example, or to smear left-wing targets, they would leak the supposedly sacred secrets with impunity to selected journalists.

No journalist was more select than Chapman Pincher of the Daily Express. You have to be very old to remember him now, or to remember the Express when it was in its prime.

Fifty-years ago, it was still a great newspaper, or at the very least a successful one, rather than the emaciated website it is today. Pincher was its star reporter, a right-wing figure of military bearing and the grateful recipient of selected state secrets.

Or as Thompson memorably put it at the time he was “a public urinal where ministers and officials queued up to leak”.

Thompson did not know the half of it.  Pincher was taking secrets from Peter Wright, a retired MI5 agent, whose job it had been to unmask Soviet spies in the British establishment.

There were undoubtedly many more than were ever caught. Kim Philby, Guy Burgees and Donald Maclean were exposed as spies whom Moscow had recruited when they were students at Cambridge in the 1930s. But as Wright and dissident officers noted, they all escaped to the Soviet Union before they were arrested.

Meanwhile MI5’s operations against Soviet targets kept failing, as if a mole inside the service was betraying them.

Even when MI5 found that Sir Anthony Blunt, the Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures, no less, was a traitor, the government of the day was desperate to avoid another spy scandal and covered up his crimes.

But by the 1970s, Wright and his MI5 allies, like their American counterparts in the CIA, were going more than a little mad. They saw traitors everywhere. In the evocative phrase of a CIA officer, they were lost in a “wilderness of mirrors”  

Wright became convinced that Sir Roger Hollis, the director general of MI5 from 1956 to 65, was a Soviet agent, along with Harold Wilson, the Labour prime minister.  In the paranoid world of the 1970s, the conspiracy theories that flitted around London’s newspapers and clubs helped destroy Wilson’s self-confidence in the months before he resigned.

Let us be blunt about it: MI5 officers, who claimed to be hunting traitors, were engaged in treasonous conspiracies of their own against a Labour prime minister.

Wright left MI5 and moved to Tasmania. He wanted to publish his memoirs, Spycatcher, in Australia. But E.P. Thompson’s double standard applied again. Chapman Pincher was not prosecuted. But Margaret Thatcher and the Cabinet Secretary Sir Robert Armstrong insisted on trying to suppress Wright’s book in the Australian courts because they did not want the unexpurgated account of a former spy out there.

They both lied. They both pretended that there was no double-standard, and that Whitehall did not leak to selected journalists, while punishing those who did not play the game.

The memory of their lies has passed into the language.

If you ever hear someone saying with a smirk that they are being “economical with the truth,” that phrase comes from Sir Robert Armstrong. He was giving evidence to the Supreme Court of New South Wales in 1987, and thought that a touch of the Mandarin style and the effortless superiority of the old imperial elite would impress the colonials.

Wright’s lawyer, Malcolm Turnbull, was questioning him on a clear lie the British government was telling, which Armstrong tried to dismiss as a mere misleading statement.

“What is the difference between a misleading impression and a lie?” asked Turnbull

 “A lie is a straight untruth,” Armstrong replied. “A misleading impression is being economical with the truth.”

Alas, Sir Robert’s attempts to refine deceit were a disaster that discredited the UK around the world. It fuelled republican sentiment in Australia and the determination to move away from the mother country. The fame Malcolm Turnbull gained eventually helped him become Australia’s prime minister.

This is all very interesting, I hear you say, but why drag up this old scandal now?

In part because Tim Tate has just published To Catch a Spy: How the Spycatcher Affair Brought MI5 in from the Cold,  an enthralling account of the paranoias of Cold War Britain.

But in part, too, because we have a Labour government, which like Wilson’s government in the 1970s, has a slender mandate and is faced by hysterical right-wingers who look as if they are the direct descendants of Chapman Pincher and Peter Wright.

There are more parallels. Wilson’s dogged work in keeping the Conservative party out of power has been an inspiration to Keir Starmer and the politicians around him. Indeed, the new Cabinet office minister is Nick Thomas-Symonds, who wrote an admiring biography of Wilson.

Thomas-Symonds has the power to authorise the release of all the Cabinet Office files on Chapman Pincher, Peter Wright, the intelligence officers who plotted to destroy Harold Wilson, the alleged treason of Sir Roger Hollis, and the Spycatcher affair.

He should because the paranoias of the past help us understand our paranoid present. But also because the same double-standard E.P. Thompson encountered is with us today, as Tim Tate shows us in gruesome detail.

Tate was writing a serious history and, naturally asked to see the Cabinet Office papers.

The Cold War ended in 1989. Downing Street’s own records on the affair are public. There are no possible grounds for keeping the 32 volumes of Cabinet Office papers secret beyond an establishment desire not to wash the state’s dirty laundry in public.

Margaret Thatcher and Sir Robert Armstrong prevented Malcom Turnbull and his defence team seeing them in the 1980s when Wright’s lawyers were fighting to stop the UK banning Spycatcher.

And the British state still stops everyone seeing them now.

Oh, hold on, did I say everyone? Of course it’s not stopping everyone. If you are suitably right wing and suitably deferential then state secrets are yours for the taking.

As Tate recounts