BRITISH SPY AGENCY CRITICIZED

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00965R000201540001-2
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 3
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: January 20, 2012
• Sequence Number: 1
• Publication Date: May 3, 1987
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

STAT
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/01/20: CIA-RDP90-00965R000201540001-2
ARTICLE APPEARED WASHINGTON POST
3 May 1987
British
Spy Agency
Criticized
Former Official
Describes .Abuses
In Unpublished Book
7 By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Foreign Service
LONDON, May 2- A retired
senior intelligence official has de-
picted Britain's domestic counter-
intelligence agency, M15, as fre-
quently incompetent and character-
ized by systematic abuses of power
and illegal acts, including efforts to
spy on and overthrow former prime
minister Harold Wilson.
The allegations are contained in
an unpublished book called "Spy-
cateher" by Peter Wright, a 21-year
veteran of M15 who left the service
in 1976. The British government is
engaged in a continuing legal battle
to ban publication of the book. But
new demands arose this week in
Parliament for an independent in-
quiry into the charges after a Lon-
don newspaper published an ac-
count of some of the allegations.
In the manuscript, a copy of
which has been obtained by The
Washington Post, Wright describes
an organization that often operated
outside the control or knowledge of
the British government of the day.
According to Wright, M15 routinely
used other British institutions, from
the post office to the media, to fur-
ther its aims, and covered up its
more questionable activities.
Wright's account is taken from
his detailed diary of events between
1955 and 1976, when he held a se-
ries of senior M15 positions. Its pri-
mary focus is on proving Wright's
long-held and widely aired belief
that former M15 head Roger Hollis
was the undiscovered Soviet agent
long suspected to be at the top of
British intelligence.
According to Prime Minister
Margaret Thatcher, a secret gov-
ernment investigation in the late
1970s cleared Hollis of suspicion.
But the manuscript also details
two decades of day-to-di' uftelli-
gence activities, frc m the bugging
of embassies of both friends and
foes by London and Washington to
plots to assassinate heads of foreign
governments.
Thatcher's government has
sought repeatedly to suppress pub-
lication of the book on grounds of
national security, and it is unlikely
ever to be published here because
of Britain's severe secrecy laws.
The government is involved in a
court battle to prevent its publica-
tion in Australia, where Wright, 71,
now lives.
Last week, The Independent
newspaper published a lengthy ac-
count of some of its allegations, in-
cluding a politically motivated plot
by up to 30 senior M15 officers in
1974 and 1975 to remove Labor
Party prime minister Harold Wilson
from office by smearing him as a
Soviet spy.
According to Wright, the plan
centered on selective leaking of in-
-formation gathered during Wilson's
,earlier term in office between 1964
and 1970, when M15 conducted a
secret investigation of him, and in
additional bugging of his home and
office following his reelection at the
head of a minority government in
1974.
The government has brought
contempt of court charges against
The Independent on grounds that it
violated previous injunctions
against newspaper publication of
Wright's manuscript in this coun-
try.
Butt the Wilson revelations al-
ready have led to charges in Par-
liament of an M15 cover-up of po-
tentially treasonable behavior and
demands for an independent inqui-
ry. Opposition party leaders have
renewed longstanding calls for
oversight of the intelligence ser-
vices, currently accountable only to
the prime minister and selected
'Cabinet members.
On Thursday, Thatcher firmly
ruled out any inquiry into the
Wright allegations about the Wilson
plot, saying the matter had been
investigated by the Labor govern-
ment of James an. tmiagnan
became prime minister in 1976,
when Wilson resigned for still un-
disclosed reasons.
But officials from the Callaghan
government have said the 1977 in-
vestigation concerned only the bug-
ging reports, which they said were
disproven, and not the more com-
prehensive plot that Wright has al-
leged.
While major Labor and other po-
litical opposition figures have de-
manded an independent inquiry,
Wilson, 71, said last week that he
respected Thatcher's decision.
- "It sounds as though she does not
intend to have one," he told BBC
television. "I accept that. She is a
little closer to it now than I am."
In a related controversy, Thatch-
er last month confirmed to Parlia-
lhent that the late Maurice Oldfield,
who during the 1970s headed M16,
Britain's overseas intelligence ser-
vice, was a homosexual as had long
been rumored. The fact that Old-
-field had repeatedly passed security
dhecks during his M16 tenure, com-
bined with the Wright charges, has
led to a reported desire on the part
of many current senior intelligence
officers for some sort of indepen-
dent inquiry to clear the name of
the service.
The issue so tar does not seem to
have captured public imagination,
which at the moment is more con-
cerned with whether Thatcher will
call national elections in mid-June.
Wright's book contains numerous
references to the often stormy
Anglo-American intelligence rela-
tionship. He describes both M15
and M16 as poor and understaffed,
and looking across the Atlantic for
the resources they needed.
Both agencies, according to
Wright, feared American wrath
over suspicions of Soviet infiltration
of British intelligence. The suspi-
cions began with the 1951 defec-
tions to Moscow of British foreign
service officers Guy Burgess and
Donald Maclean, and continued to
poison the trans-Atlantic relation-
ship through the 1970s.
Among Wright's disclosures:
^ As chief scientist for M15 during
the 1950s, Wright successfully re-
produced a new form of resonance
microphone developed by the So-
viets and discovered hidden in the
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office of the U.S. ambassador in
Moscow The Americans subse-
quently ordered 12 of the devices,
and made another 20 themselves,
for their own use in Soviet Bloc em-
bassies.
During the late 1950s and 1960s,
until more sophisticated listening
methods were developed, Britain
used the device to bug the Soviet
Embassy and Consulate in London,
as well as the Hungarian, Polish,
Egyptian, Cypriot and Indonesian
missions here. Lancaster House,
where numerous conferences were
held leading to the independence of
British colonies in Africa and Asia,
was bugged, as were buildings
around London where various in-
ternational trade conferences were
held.
Efforts to install a listening de-
vice in the West German Embassy
failed, according to Wright. The
French Embassy was bugged to
listen to discussions about Britain's
application to enter the European
Economic Community, and to pass
information along to the Americans
about the French independent nu-
clear force. Wright says the Amer-
icans also installed their own bug in
the French Embassy in Washington.
^ British assassination plots were
launched in the late 1950s against
Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nas-
ser and Cypriot guerrilla leader Col.
George Grivas. Both plots failed,
but the techniques developed, in-
cluding the planned use of poison
nerve gas against Nasser, interest-
ed the CIA.
According to Wright, the CIA
asked in 1961 for British technical
assistance in its plans to assassinate
Cuban leader Fidel Castro.
"We're developing a new capa-
bility in the company to handle
these kinds of problems, and we're
in the market for the requisite ex-
pertise," Wright quotes senior CIA
officer Bill Harveya telling him in
Washing o
^ In 1965, president Lyndon John-
son became so concerned about
possible Soviet infiltration in Britain
that he ordered the Foreign Intel-
ligence Advisory Board to conduct a
secret review of MI5 and MI6 in
London. The result of the study,
which Wright describes as espio-
nage against a friendly government,
was a "devastating critique" that led
CIA counterintelligence chief James
J. Angleton to propose a plan o sta-
iion CIA agents inside MI5.
Playing on Britain's need for U.S.
intelligence resources, Wright says,
"they wanted M15 as a supplicant
client, rather than as a well-dis-
posed but independent ally." Learn-
ing of the investigation, M15 pro-
tested that it was a "blatant abuse"
of the alliance, and the incident
nearly led to the expulsion of a lead-
ing CIA official here.
? The first allegations against Wil-
son were made by Angleton, who in
1965 made a special trip here to tell
M15 that U.S. intelligence had in-
formation that the British prime
minister "was a Soviet agent." An-
gleton, according to Wright, re-
fused to divulge details unless M15
could assure him the information
would not fall into "political hands,"
presumably those of the Wilson
government. The British could not
make that guarantee, and the infor-
mation was filed away here under
the code name "Oatsheaf."
In 1967, Wright flew to Washing-
ton to query Angleton again. Angle-
ton said that "an agent of his ...
had heard that Wilson had clandes-
tine meetings very occasionally
with the Russians," but that the
source was "no longer available."
A CIA connection to the Wilson
story also has been recounted in the
recently published book "The Sec-
ond Oldest Profession," a history of
modern spying by British author
Phillip Knightley. Knightley writes
that shortly before Wilson's resig-
nation in 1976, when he believed
both M15 and M16 were plotting
against him, the prime minister se-
cretly sent an emissary to Washing-
ton to ask the CIA what it knew.
In response, then-CIA director
George Bush flew to London to as-
sure Wilson there had been no U.S.
involvement. The day before his
meeting with Bush, however, Wil-
son resigned.
In his book, Wright does not ex-
plain his decision to break the con-
tract of silence that virtually every
British intelligence officer has ad-
hered to, and that the Thatcher-
government has accused him of
breaching in the Australia case. But
the manuscript, and what is known
of M15 during the period he served
there, provide some answers.
Wright makes repeated refer-
ence to MI5's failure to provide for
its former employes, allegedly
cheating them, including himself,
out of deserved pensions and re-
wards. Another recurring theme is
the inability of top intelligence
chiefs, described by Wright as a
clubbish upper-class crowd more
interested in the Times crossword
puzzle than in systematic intelli-
gence work, to listen to the advice
of scientists and activists like him.
Knightley, who said he read
Wright's manuscript during a visit
to Australia, described Wright in an
interview as the classic "boffin."
In British slang, "boffins" are "the
backroom boys, the unrecognized
scientists" who resent "the flashy
ones at the top," Knightley said.
They see themselves as the true
workers and achievers, deprived of
credit, and tend to hold grudges
when they are not listened to.
In Wright's case, he has long re-
sented the failure of British govern-
ments to believe his charges, and
those of some of his M15 col-
leagues, against Hollis, who headed
the agency until 1966.
But aside from Wright's circum-
stantial and hypothetical case
against Hollis, Knightley and other
seasoned observers of British intel-
ligence point out that much of his
book is based on detailed accounts
of events in' which Wright himself
participated, first as M15's chief
scientist and later as its head of re-
search and informal liaison officer
to U.S. intelligence.
Wright describes his early years
with M15 as a "fun" period during
which he and his colleagues
"bugged and burgled our way across
London at State's behest, whilst
pompous bowler-hatted civil ser-
vants in Whitehall pretended to look
the other way."
These endeavors were aided, he
says, by the British post office,
which shared part of its headquar-
ters with a permanent M15 mail
interception team. The post office
also ran the telephone exchange
system, and shared information and
assisted in bugging. According to
Wright, additional help frequently
was obtained from newspapers and
broadcasters who were in M15's
pocket.
Wright is critical of the lack of a
comprehensive clearance process
for M15 agents. His own introduc-
tion into the service, he says, con-
sisted of a light-hearted interview
in which he was asked if he'd ever
been a communist or a "queer."
During training, he says, he was
told of the service's "Eleventh Com-
mandment ... Thou shalt not get
caught."
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It was this lack of a clearance
procedure, Wright says, that al-
lowed so many British communists
and fellow travelers from the 1930s
to enter British intelligence.
Wright spent much of the 1960s
in a massive M15 effort, instigated
partly in response to American sus-
picions, to reinvestigate the "Ox-
bridge" crowd from where proven
spies like Burgess, Maclean and
M16 double agent Kim Philby had
emerged.
As a result of his "vetting of an
entire generation," Wright says, he
discovered as many as 40 "proba-
ble" Soviet spies, many of whom he
names in the book. Few prosecu-
tions or even interrogations re-
sulted, however, because of what
Wright maintains was the reluc-
tance of senior officials to cause a
political stir or increase American
worries still further.
It was also during this period that
M15, spurred in part by the Angle-
ton report, began to investigate
Wilson. Wright says his own suspi-
cions had begun with the mysteri-
ous death in 1963 of Labor Party
leader Hugh Gaitskill. Gaitskill, on
the party's right, was replaced as
leader by the left-wing Wilson, who
18 months later was elected prime
minster.
According to Wright, M15, with
assistance from Angleton, investi-
gated the possibility that Gaitskill
had been poisoned by the Soviets,
who were believed to prefer Wilson.
Wilson had at one time worked as
the representative of an East-West
trading company, and M15 began
secretly to track his association
with Eastern European acquain-
tances of that period. But the inqui-
ries eventually petered out, and in
1970, Labor lost the election to the
Conservative Party led by Edward
Heath.
In 1974, when Heath and the
Conservatives appeared likely to be
replaced again by the Labor Party
with Wilson still at its head, the Wil-
son investigations were revived.
According to Wright, a group of
senior MI5 officers met with him to
propose a plan to discredit Wilson.
"The plan was simple," Wright
says. "In the run-up to the election
... MI5 would arrange for details
of the intelligence about leading
Labor Party figures, but especially
Wilson, to be leaked to sympathetic
press men .... word of the mate-
rial contained in M15 files, and the
fact that Wilson was considered a
security risk, would be passed
around."
Wright says he balked at partic-
ipation in the plot, and refused to
allow the conspirators, who he said
eventually numbered about 30, or
"half the senior staff," to gain access
to the Gaitskill file.
Despite the smear campaign,
Wilson was able to form a minority
government after the 1974 elec-
tion. But the MI5 campaign against
him continued, according to Wright.
who says that in the summer of
1975 he reported it to then M16
head Oldfield.
Wright says that Oldfield warned
that news of the plot could "blow
up" on the intelligence services.
At Oldfield's urging, Wright says
he reported the conspiracy to then
M15 director general Michael Han-
ley, who asked him for the names of
those involved.
"I need to protect them," Wright
says Hanlev told him.
J.
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/01/20: CIA-RDP90-00965R000201540001-2