Review of Peter Wright with Paul Greengrass Spycatcher
The Candid Autobiography of a Senior Intelligence Officer. March 6th, 2014
Spycatcher: Peter Wright with Paul Greengrass (1987). I bought this book in 1989, but have only recently read it and made some notes. There was in effect a lot of publicity over the book; whether this was from genuine government concern is impossible to say.
This review is based only on the (detailed and interesting) book. I haven't made any attempt to check the supposed facts behind hostile comments elsewhere; nor have I attempted to find out who Paul Greengrass is. This book is indexed, but weak on signposting: it has 23 numbered, but otherwise untitled, chapters without section divisions, plus a short glossary (which doesn't include MOSSAD). The few photos are all portraits (including J Edgar Hoover). Page numbers refer to my paperback edition, (Heinemann Australia).
Peter Wright was born near the end of the First World War; his father was at one time head of research for Marconi and (for example) helped install ships' radios. He knew Sarnoff, of that American outfit - Radio City? His son must have picked up technical information from him; however, his father was sacked, following some company rearrangement, when Peter Wright was 15. One of the undercurrents of this book is sudden unexpected sackings: e.g. Arthur Martin, after 20 years (p 233). Later, Peter Wright developed new audio and radio spy techniques, though the detail is a bit vague; it's not clear how many people worked in labs, and there must have been some changes when transistors were invented, infra-red isn't really mentioned, satellite transmission is barely mentioned. And so on. Much of Wright's action was wartime Admiralty research, and Leconfield Road and Gower Street buildings in London, from 1939 to 1975.
Wright's views on power politics were disappointingly conventional: the First and Second World Wars 'broke out'; there's not the slightest awareness of Bolsheviks as Jews; there are hostile references to Germans, and I doubt he knew the implications of 'Nazism'. There's nothing whatever on deaths in eastern Europe both pre-and post-WW2, nothing on the Anglo-Israel War, nothing on Korea and Vietnam and genocide. There is no reference to 'the Holocaust'. There is nothing on Hiroshima as deserving of scepticism, the developing European Union, nothing on the murder of Kennedy as Jewish coup d'état, nothing on racial politics.
Wright comes across as painfully naive, outside his specialist field, in which (for example p 362) he suspected that Gaitskell had been murdered. Wright had been told by the media that the 'Soviet Union' was the enemy now, as he had been told Germany was 'the enemy' previously. It seems almost certain that MI5 and MI6 helped the USSR: all the secrets (such as the 'Berlin Tunnel', dug at great expense into east Germany) were handed over; before the tunnel was even dug, in that specific case. Wright's account of Hollis summoning him to his office and laughing at Wright's claims (pp 289ff) before retiring to his country cottage, and Hollis a bit later (p. 336 ff) on the point of retirement, 'interrogated' over two days by a gentlemanly chap, Hollis sidestepping and blurring any tricky question, suggest there was never any real security. Wright says (p 125) the Foreign Office tended to support the USSR.
Probably the whole policy was misconceived, because the people who were Jew-aware were on the side of the Jews, or at least liked their paper money. To take a few examples: there is no suggestion at all that I could find that international banks, the IMF and so on were spied on. The immense gifts of gold from USA Jews to USSR Jews and I think German Jews are unmentioned. There must have been some commercial espionage, but it barely figures; vast capital transfers and payments go unmentioned. Thus Wright says (p 158) 'Lenin understood better than anyone how to gain control of a country... the political class had to control the men with the guns, and the intelligence service, and ... neither the Army nor the political class could challenge..' Note the failure to mention Jewish money! On military matters, and fake military matters, Wright confines himself to copies of things like ICBM plans. He didn't even realise that 'American' 'atom spies' were Jews, with reasons, important to them, for lying. There's some material on Victor Rothschild who (my guess) was worried he might have been exposed as pro-USSR: '[Blunt] admitted being recruited in 1937, a year or two after Philby, Burgess and Maclean... Tess [Rothschild] ... went terribly pale ... "All those years," she whispered, "and I never suspected a thing." (p 216); Rothschild interfered in the process of appointing a new head (p 370) though he ended 'as head of the Central Policy Review Staff (CPRS). Never was a man more perfectly suited to a job. ...' (p 347); Rothschild asked Peter Wright to make a list of possible damage that Blunt's will might cause. Wright admired Victor Rothschild; it never seems to have occurred to him that Rothschild had his own motives. In retrospect, the whole nuclear fraud was being rigged up; but e.g. in the investigation of Fuchs the Jewish issue is not mentioned; nor is it in the Rosenbergs and Cohens and others (p 139).
Page 139 shows Wright's patient analytical methods: starting with files on Soviet espionage cases, arranging by KGB and GRU categories, then by singletons, sleepers, illegal spies with runners, illegal residents running illegals 'and so on', patterns took shape... Except for Lonsdale... Wright's book is approximately chronological, though of course the accounts of investigations span many years: much of Wright's later working life was spent sifting through files and testing codes and talking with witnesses from the past. Each investigation was given a code word; each agent had a code (Hollis was 'drat'); there are plenty of acronyms. Wright's vocabulary includes 'indoctrinate' (meaning tell someone about something), exfiltrate (persuade someone to leave a group).
Let's fast forward through some of the chronological material.
• By 1914, Wright claims, intelligence systems had been established in expectation of war. He doesn't take a long-term view.
• 'Communism' (p 253) as a religion or catechism or list of articles of belief doesn't seem to have been taken very seriously by Wright. The fact it covers up the Jewishness of the protagonists seems to have been unknown to Wright.
• The 'vast KGB machine' (p 187) was built. Including (p 206) Dzerzhinsky's death-trap organisation of fake white Russians.
• 1928 ARCOS intelligence case was well-known at the time.
• (p 246 & others) 'Cambridge University, and the Oxford Ring', and the 'Shadow of War'. Wright lived through this period and found it fascinating. There is no mention of such people as Victor Gollancz.
• 1938 'Maxwell Knight smashed the Woolwich Arsenal Ring'
• Bletchley alleged computer and codebreaking centre remains enigmatic. Miles Mathis in August 2022 suggests ingeniously that the coding aspect was faked some time after the war and that it played no serious part except in the sense of being part of the higher-ups games. • Churchill ordered all anti-Soviet intelligence work to cease during the wartime alliance (p 182). It is painfully clear now that Churchill was just a part of worldwide Jewry.
• The Berlin Airlift (1948-9) may have been generated to cover atrocities in Palestine by Jews. If so, Wright had nothing to say about that aspect.
• (p 184) Wright notes in 1954 some change in the USSR, when duplicate one-time pads for secret codes were discontinued
• McCarthyism (e.g. p 330) is referred to with distaste; just one example of Wright's failure to understand the connections between so-called Jews and so-called communism
• Suez (1956) must I think have been more or less specifically Jewish: if you don't believe me, see if you can find a good account, anywhere, of what it was about. Vague evasiveness and unhelpful material are often found in Jewish topics. Wright has an interesting account of the Egyptian Embassy in London: 'Soviet' operatives arrived to sweep it, but in fact left a bug in a phone, possibly to allow the British to see the 'Soviets' were serious.
• 1961 Cuba 'Bay of Pigs'. Castro may have been a Marrano Jew. If so, Wright shows no awareness; he assumes Castro has magical powers, like Lenin.
• Penkofsky appears from nowhere as an agent (e.g. 204). His expertises were supposed to include Cuba, Kennedy and nuclear weapons (though my guess is he was a Jewish-promoted spy whose rôle was to keep up the myths of nukes and Cuban independence)
• Nossenko appears from nowhere as an agent (e.g. 305 so-called ICBMs, Israel).
• 1962 Cuba 'Missile Crisis'. The USA bombed Vietnam for more than a decade; it seems only to be Jewish media control that made Cuba seem self-directed and independent. Jews used Cubans in future, notably in Africa.
• 1963 Harold Wilson elected Labor [sic] Party Leader; (363). Prime Minister in 1964. For many years, rumours said Wilson was a 'Communist'. Wright has little on the Labour Party and Jews in it. But quite a bit on groups opposed to Wilson, one of which invited him to join. '.. political climax in early 1974, with the election of the minority Labour Government. MI5 was sitting on information which, if leaked, would undoubtedly have caused a political scandal of incalculable consequences. ..' Wright compared the possibilities to Watergate, but gives little information about the leakable material.
• I can't remember any mention of China or Japan in this book; very likely it simply wasn't considered Wright's field of work. But it's becoming clearer that both Japan and China were taken over by USA Jews, with probably immense casualties in China. Miles Mathis and a few others seem to have pioneered Internet work here.
Let me return to more Jewish material, which flickers throughout the book, and the lack of action on it. James Jesus Angleton wanted the MI5 file on Armand Hammer. But Wright didn't give it to him; Angleton seems to have been annoyed by this. P 145 states two NSA cryptanalysts 'defected to the Soviet Union, betraying vital secrets'. It's a plausible guess they were Jewish! '.. The Russians had a train of agents inside the American atomic weapons program ... some of these cases were solved..' It is unlikely any of these people were properly debriefed, if that's the word! On p 317 we find: '[The files] belonged to Victor and Tess Rothschild. "Victor is one of the best friends this Service has ever had. ..." "They are Jewish. David and Rosa are Jewish names ..." It sounded like KGB anti-Semitism to me...' Of course; nobody could possibly object to Jews, could they! P 345 states Kissinger opposed the expulsion of Soviet spies from Britain; this was some sort of toughening up process, perhaps. P 347 says 'Angleton always jealously protected his relations with the Israeli secret service, Mossad' which I think is the only mention of Mossad in the book, incredibly.
A significant part of the book, which I'd guess appeals to more readers than anything else, is the descriptive material about the intelligence men and the various associated women (Evelyn McBarnet, Anne Boyd-Orr..). The 'top men' seem to have been rather lonely, their whole lives revolving around their work and sometimes their hobbies. There were plenty of personality clashes; and it's surprising how much leeway they were given to arrange or rearrange their methods. But, considering the vast issues supposedly in the air - Nuclear war? Other wars? Vast expenses? - one has to wonder whether the whole spy issue was misdirection away from the deep events, a pretence it was Russians vs the West rather than Jews carrying out divide, rule, and lie. Peter Wright in my view comes out very well from this book: agonising over the right thing, doing his best to present useful evidence - such as names - to politicians and civil servants, serious and competent, unhappy with secrecy and cover-ups, exasperated with Hollis' destruction of some records. But unless he was an agent himself I think he missed the multiple elephant lurking in the rooms of the nations. Five stars; but one less for his gullibility.