To Catch a Spy: How the Spycatcher Affair Brought MI5 in from the Cold
Introduction. Charles Dickens’s 1853 novel Bleak House centers around an interminable probate case, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, that bleeds the estate in question of all its value and leaves the eventual inheritor with nothing. The campaign of Margaret Thatcher’s government during 1985–91 to use the Official Secrets Act to prevent publication, and even public discussion of, the memoir of retired MI5 officer Peter Wright, Spycatcher: The Candid Autobiography of a Senior Intelligence Officer, has a similarly ironic outcome and produced a backlash akin to the British government’s failed attempt in 1960 to ban Lady Chatterley’s Lover under the Obscene Publications Act.
Motivated by the desire to prevent unauthorized disclosure of classified information and to protect MI5 from criticism, the effort must rank as one of the most counterproductive exercises in official censorship ever attempted. It cost the British government £3,000,000 pounds (over $10,000,000 today) and caused it severe domestic and international embarrassment. In To Catch a Spy: How the Spycatcher Affair Brought MI5 in from the Cold, investigative journalist and documentarian Tim Tate cogently and comprehensively lays out the inconsistency, duplicity, stubbornness, and shortsightedness of London’s wasteful and futile effort to suppress Wright’s book.
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