Wright, Peter. Spycatcher: The Candid Autobiography of a Senior Intelligence Officer. New York: Viking, 1987. 392 pages.

Peter Wright joined Britain's MI5, which handles counterintelligence, as their first scientific officer in 1955. His specialty was electronic surveillance and countermeasures, and he also performed liaison with U.S. intelligence, which accounts for his anecdotes about J. Edgar Hoover, Richard Helms, William C. Sullivan, William King Harvey, and James Angleton. Wright retired as assistant director of MI5 in 1976 and moved to Australia.

"Spycatcher" had a significant impact on several levels. To begin with, Wright's book was a major challenge to Britain's secrecy laws, as British officials banned the book and then tried unsuccessfully to win an injunction against publication in a widely-reported trial in Australia. This of course guaranteed that the book would be a bestseller, whereupon some of Wright's allegations received more attention than they probably deserved: that Roger Hollis, the head of MI5 in the 1960s, was a Soviet mole, that MI5 sometimes bugged diplomatic conferences, that they plotted against British prime minister Harold Wilson in 1974-1976 (Wright claims that this was instigated by the CIA's Angleton), and that MI6 plotted to assassinate Nasser during the 1956 Suez crisis. Of these, the plot against Wilson was the most newsworthy, but Wright's treatment is considered self-serving. A better source on this is "The Wilson Plot" by David Leigh.
ISBN 0-670-82055-5

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