MI5 historian Christopher Andrew takes Peter Wright to task for Spycatcher farce
CHRISTOPHER Andrew, the Cambridge University historian who this week published the first authorised history of MI5, says he has a cunning plan.
"All I have to do is get my book banned and have a farcical court case about it in an Australian court, then I might sell a million copies," he says. He is joking about the 1986 saga in a NSW court over Spycatcher, the memoirs of former British spy Peter Wright that the British government tried unsuccessfully to suppress.
Spycatcher went on to sell hundreds of thousands of copies, but it is the last thing that Andrew, the world's leading historian on the British intelligence services, wants his new book In Defence of the Realm to resemble.
Having had unprecedented access to MI5's archives, Andrew says Spycatcher's savage account of MI5 was grossly inaccurate, and that when Wright was an active officer his delusions and conspiracy theories did enormous damage to the secret service by wasting many of its energies and distracting it from real threats.
Wright, who died in Tasmania in 1995, may have been wrong about many of the great spy dramas of the Cold War, but Andrew says the British government's "comical" attempts to stifle his book did at least convince the spymasters and politicians in London that times had changed.
"There is a strong connection between the hopeless mishandling of the Wright affair, which included a trial in NSW that was somewhere between Monty Python and Yes Minister, and the fact I was eventually commissioned to write this book," the professor says...
Read entire article at The Australian
"All I have to do is get my book banned and have a farcical court case about it in an Australian court, then I might sell a million copies," he says. He is joking about the 1986 saga in a NSW court over Spycatcher, the memoirs of former British spy Peter Wright that the British government tried unsuccessfully to suppress.
Spycatcher went on to sell hundreds of thousands of copies, but it is the last thing that Andrew, the world's leading historian on the British intelligence services, wants his new book In Defence of the Realm to resemble.
Having had unprecedented access to MI5's archives, Andrew says Spycatcher's savage account of MI5 was grossly inaccurate, and that when Wright was an active officer his delusions and conspiracy theories did enormous damage to the secret service by wasting many of its energies and distracting it from real threats.
Wright, who died in Tasmania in 1995, may have been wrong about many of the great spy dramas of the Cold War, but Andrew says the British government's "comical" attempts to stifle his book did at least convince the spymasters and politicians in London that times had changed.
"There is a strong connection between the hopeless mishandling of the Wright affair, which included a trial in NSW that was somewhere between Monty Python and Yes Minister, and the fact I was eventually commissioned to write this book," the professor says...