To Catch a Spy: How the Spycatcher affair brought MI5 in from the cold
Tim Tate (Icon, £25)
IN 1604, James I’s new ambassador to Venice, Sir Henry Wotton, wrote a Latin epigram in a guest book en route: Legatus est vir bonus peregre missus ad mentiendum rei publicae causa, usually translated as: ‘An ambassador is an honest man sent to lie abroad for the good of his country.’ The author of the latest book in the long-running ‘Spycatcher’ affair probably had the pun in mind when writing of his bête noir, Margaret Thatcher’s cabinet secretary Sir Robert Armstrong.
Between 1985 and 1991, Thatcher’s government initiated various expensive—ultimately futile —court cases to stop a retired MI5 officer, Peter Wright, publishing his memoirs, Spycatcher. These purportedly exposed Soviet penetration of the Security Service (MI5) and chronicled Wright’s hunt for ‘moles’, including former MI5 director-general Sir Roger Hollis. Wright, described by Dame Stella Rimington, a later MI5 chief, as ‘self-important [with] an overdeveloped imagination and an obsessive personality that had turned to paranoia’, further ‘revealed’ that MI5 indulged in wholesale law-breaking and, in 1976, mounted a plot to blackmail the Prime Minister Harold Wilson into resignation.
It might have been better to dismiss the book as the work of a fantasist, but No 10 believed that blocking publication would discourage others from writing— ‘the lifelong and unbreakable duty to keep silent’. Armstrong was sent abroad to give evidence for his country. In court in Sydney, he faced the publisher’s counsel and future prime minister Malcolm Turnbull, who forced him to admit that a letter he’d written relevant to the case contained not a lie, but ‘was being economical with the truth’, a phrase that entered the language accompanied by mirth, indeed, derision.
Tim Tate uses hitherto unpublished court evidence and withheld official files to charge the Thatcher government with deception to conceal espionage failures; he argues that Spycatcher brought greater ‘accountability’. Wotton’s epigram doesn’t work as a pun in Latin, however. The verb mentior means to lie as in deceive, not ‘lie down’. When the scholar James I heard it, he was not amused. Wotton backtracked, telling another diplomat ‘to be in safety… and serviceable to his country, [the ambassador] should always and upon all occasions speak the truth’. Some may feel this counsel of perfection is no more suited to the real world today than it was in 1604.
Allan Mallinson