Content
Spycatcher details the author’s work seeking to discover a Soviet mole in MI5, and that the said mole was Roger Hollis — a former MI5 Director General; it also describes people who might have or might not have been the mole; and renders a history of MI5 by chronicling its principal officers, from the 1930s to his time in service.
Moreover, Spycatcher tells of the MI6 plot to assassinate President Nasser during the Suez Crisis; of joint MI5-CIA plotting against left-wing British Prime Minister Harold Wilson (secretly accused of being a KGB agent by the Soviet defector Anatoliy Golitsyn); and of MI5’s eavesdropping on high-level Commonwealth conferences.
Wright examines the techniques of intelligence services, exposes their ethics (speculative until that time), notably their 11th Commandment: Thou shalt not get caught, and explains many MI5 electronic technologies (some of which he developed), for instance allowing clever spying into rooms, and identifying the frequency that a superhet receiver is tuned to. In the afterword, he states that writing Spycatcher was motivated principally to recuperate pension income lost when the British government ruled his pension un-transferable for earlier work in GCHQ, a ruling that severely reduced his pension.
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