A fascinating insight into the secret world of espionage
I picked up this book in our last trip to our favourite second hand book store. I don’t read as much non-fiction as I should, but this instantly appealed to me so I decided to take it home.
Spycatcher is the story of the author’s career as an agent for MI5, Britain’s secret intelligence service. He was an electrical engineer whose work had proven useful to the intelligence services during the second World War, and by the end of the 1940’s he’d been recruited by them to continue his work from the inside.
Peter Wright was the first person employed by MI5 as a scientist. Military research encouraged innovative uses of technology in an environment of scarce resources, and this was an environment in which people (invariably men) like Peter excelled.
As well as detailing the invention and deployment of various covert surveillance and counter-surveillance devices, the book discusses the climate of international espionage as the Cold War began to warm up, so to speak. It’s fascinating to read an insider’s perspective on the tensions between the various allies, as well as the superiority in both technology and manpower of the Soviet intelligence services at that time.
This was a time of double agents and defectors, and much of the book deals with the controversy of highly placed moles within MI5. As well as discussing some defections which were highly publicised at the time, the author also reveals his part in these affairs as an agent conducting internal investigations of co-workers suspected of spying for the Soviets. A central theme of the book is the author’s allegation that Roger Hollis (Director of MI5 from 1956 - 1972) was a Soviet spy. This was a controversial allegation because it was not publicly known that Hollis had even been suspected of spying at the time that the book was published, and also because Wright remained convinced of Hollis’ guilt despite the fact that a lack of concrete evidence had resulted in Hollis being cleared by an internal investigation.
The author’s case is convincing, because the interrogations as he describes them seem to have been very genial occasions, with suspects sometimes having been interrogated by officers who were not only colleagues but close personal friends! In addition to this, suspected moles were of course quite familiar with the techniques employed in interrogation, and it seems likely that they would have been able to avoid any admission of guilt unless confronted with solid evidence.
Many of the events spoken of in this book were well known at the time of its publication. However there was some controversy over the publication because of the events revealed by the book which were previously unknown to the public, or even to parts of the British government.
I had been looking forward to catching up on developments in the saga post-publication, but there doesn’t seem to be a great deal of information online. The dust jacket discusses a trial which took place here in Australia, with quotes from numerous well known figures such as Gough Whitlam and Malcolm Turnbull (Peter Wright’s defence attorney!), but it all took place when I was in primary school and I have to admit that it escaped my attention at the time.
I postponed any attempt to find out what had happened until after I had finished the book, but when I happened to mention to a work colleague that I was reading it he said “Peter Wright? Oh, he died here in Tasmania a few years ago.”. Further research revealed a little bit more of the puzzle, and I have some links at the end of this review.
Despite leaving me with unanswered questions, I thoroughly enjoyed this book. If I was to make any criticism it would be that it was sometimes hard for me to keep track of who was who and what was going on, as general chronological progression of the story was frequently disturbed by excursions into the future or past in order to deal with the theme at hand. This is only a minor criticism though, and one which really didn’t detract much from the experience.
One thing I’d like to have read more about was the details of the various discoveries and ingenious uses of technology. It seemed to be very much a geeky kind of hands-on experimentation that they employed, but the author lamented that this later gave way to much more pedestrian, expensive and sometimes less fruitful research. In my opinion there are parallels within the computing industry today, although the open source movement currently seems to have injected some of that hacker-style enthusiasm back into things.
In short, if you have any interest in the subject matter and can track down a copy of this book, it’s a recommended read.
Further Reading:
The BBC’s On This Day archive shows stories related to the British governments attempts to ban the book. Those stories ran on July 31st 1987, and October 13th, 1988. There are also a few articles in the Wikipedia, on Spycatcher (detailing the controversy over the book itself), as well as the author Peter Wright, and also Roger Hollis.
Site updates
I started redesigning this site before we moved, so that I had a custom theme. Unfortunately my computer is packed up at the moment, so that’s on hold!
I’ve installed a Wordpress plugin to make it easier to post images, but I’m not completely satisfied with the way it works. I might try hacking it myself when I get my PC back, or maybe writing my own if I can find the time (yeah, right).
I’m also trying to categorise my posts, but I’m doing that a few at a time and I expect it’ll be a while before I finish.
Weekend outings..
Our weekends have been pretty busy lately. I guess that’s partly because we enjoy the chance to get out of the house together, and partly because venturing outside with a baby is such a major undertaking that if we have to go out we may as well make a real trip of it.
Saturday we went shopping for a few items for the new house. First on the list is a fridge - when we moved into our unit we had to sell the fridge we had at the time because it didn’t fit. We bought a small fridge and a separate freezer, which would both fit under our stairs. I’ve missed the old fridge ever since we got rid of it, and now we’re both looking forward to getting a new one. This time around we’ll get an upside-down fridge (with the freezer on the bottom), and we’re keeping the existing fridge and freezer for extra space.
The other items we’re after are a dishwasher (there’s one in the new house, but it’s getting on a bit), a microwave (our current one had its timer fried in a brown out), and a BBQ (just wanted a new one).
We haven’t bought any of these items yet, we’ve just been comparison shopping and haggling with salespeople for discounts. Best discount so far is $400 off a $3000 package.
After a couple of visits we went to visit Bron in St. David’s park (she was working there, not sleeping under a tree), and then headed down to Salamanca Market. This was the second trip to Salamanca in as many weeks! Last week we bought one of those strap on baby holders, and I just like strutting round proudly with my son strapped to my chest.
We’d barely been home an hour from our morning visit when we headed off to Paul & Jo’s to have dinner with them! All up it was another busy day.
Sunday I really wanted to take it a bit easier, which I did, but probably still not easy enough. We made another trip to scope out items from the list above, then visited with Kevin, Maria and the boys. Well, we missed Tom as he’d had to leave for a rehearsal by the time we got there, so we all ate his share of lunch. Sorry Tom!
Baz had been very well behaved and contented throughout the day, but that was only because he was saving up his tantrum for when we got home.
After another long weekend I managed to set a new record for early bedtimes last night - in bed by 20:15. I’m not getting much out of each day at the moment, it’s only 16:15 now and I’m already feeling like I could do with a nap!
In Limbo..
The purchase of our new house settles on May 6th, or thereabouts. We’d love to be in there earlier, but at the moment that doesn’t look very likely.
In the meantime we’re living with Lou’s Mum & Nan - we spent 18 months with them before we bought our own place, and managed not to kill each other, so we figured we’d be ok. It’s working out pretty well, and the fact that we don’t have space to ourselves in their new house is offset by the fact that we don’t have any time to ourselves with a new baby!
My days currently go something like this:
- 05:30 Get woken up by hungry little boy. Get up, feed him, burp him, change him, put him back to bed. Shower, get dressed, eat breakfast. Maybe read for a little bit if I have time.
- 08:00 Leave for work. Depending on the time I leave it takes me 30-45 minutes to get to work from here.
- 09:00 Work stuff, which at the moment is mostly dealing with migrating data between two tape silos and planning to put a new server into production.
- 12:30 Lunch, usually with friends from work (or my previous job, as their offices are nearby!)
- 13:30 Back to work, more of the same. Try and deal with emailed requests for various things that aren’t officially in my job description, but which I tend to do for people anyway. Just because I’m such a top bloke.
- 16:30 Try and catch up with Slashdot and the like, wind down, think about going home.
- 17:00 Go home. Currently takes me around 45 minutes, but again this depends on the exact time I leave and traffic conditions on the day.
- 17:45 Get home, usually take Baz for his 6 o’clock feed. Change him, try and put him to bed. He tends not to settle down at this time of day, and if he’s been cranky during the day I try to look after him in order to give Lou a break. It’s not really much of a break, because if I’m looking after him then she’s probably making tea.
- 19:00 Eat tea, if Baz is asleep. Suffer quietly to myself while Today Tonight is on - I can’t really ban it when it’s not my house or my TV, unfortunately. I’m almost ashamed to admit that I don’t mind home and away, though..
- 20:00 Usually we’re watching TV, or everybody else watches TV while I read. Every now and then somebody probably has to get up and calm Baz down until he goes back to sleep. Sometimes we even talk to each other!
- 22:00 By now I’m probably back in bed, and hopefully asleep. Last night I was actually in bed by 20:45, and I know that I was asleep by 21:30.
Oh well, it’s now about five minutes to eight - time for me to head off to work!
P.S. Now that I’m at work and about to post this (no internet access at home :(), I thought I’d add that it took me 50 minutes to get to work today. Probably due to the wet weather, and everybody slowing down to look at somebody who’d rear-ended someone at some point, and was now parked on the strip in between the two sides of the highway.