The Spycatcher’s Encyclopedia of Espionage
Peter Wright
Heinemann, Australia, 1991
The cover-blurb says this is ‘the rest of the story’. It feels more like the out-takes from Spycatcher spiced with a few more fragments of interesting gossip. And I do mean fragments: the interesting bits of 260 pages — largish print and much white space — would reduce to about 2 single-spaced A4 sheets.
For example: on p. 35 he lists the educationalist Brian Simon, a sometime CPGB member, among Soviet ‘spies’, an allegation which has produced a writ; on p. 47 he claims that every room in Claridge’s hotel was ‘permanently bugged’. He casually tells us that Oxfam and the Red Cross — and, by implication, many other organisations — were ‘checked’ by MI5 to see if they had been penetrated by the KGB. As in Spycatcher he denigrates both MI6 and the CIA, here describing a minor Middle Eastern incident in which MI6 and the CIA were backing different factions in the same country.
The reliability of any of this gossip is undermined by another of his fantasies about Jack Jones and Hugh Scanlon. In Spycatcher Wright had them addressing a Heath Cabinet meeting. Here MI5 bug a meeting at CPGB headquarters attended by Jack Jones and Hugh Scanlon, ‘representing the TUC…. a lot of trade union leaders and two Russian trade union people… The meeting solemnly agreed to …. destroy the British motor industry with a campaign of strikes.’
You can just see it, can’t you? Presumably it went something like this. Voice from floor: ‘Move the vote’. Chair: ‘Those in favour of destroying the British car industry please show.’
Fairly typically, Wright doesn’t bother to date this meeting, though from the context it is meant to be the late 1950s. (Jack Jones didn’t join the TUC General Council until 1968.)
This fantasy was picked up and recycled by Robert Porter in the Sunday Telegraph, ‘Author accuses Jack Jones of Moscow plot’. (26 January 1992)
This smear of Wright’s rang bells for me, and I did a little checking. The earliest version of this theme I have found appeared in the 1963 Jack and Bessie Braddock book The Braddocks. (The Braddocks were Labour MPs who began on the left and ended on the Catholic right.) There, between pages 223-5, Bessie quotes at some length from a document headed ‘Cominform Report October 1959 — Secret, must not fall into unauthorised hands’. Among other things this document stated: ‘Although recent strikes which excellent undercover cadres have organised in the car industry are fully acknowledged, it is nevertheless of the greatest importance that these actions should be increased and become nation-wide occurrences.’
Bessie Braddock assured the reader that this ‘bears all the distinctive marks of a genuine Communist directive’. Although it is difficult to parody the Stalinist mind, I doubt that even the Cominform would actually have written that ‘new and concentrated effort must be made by specially suitable undercover activists to penetrate into that bastion of British capitalism and so set up the strongest possible Communist cells within the Conservative Party ….’.
This document, I suspect, is a product of the Foreign Office’s Information Research Department (IRD). This impression is greatly strengthened by Braddock’s report of another document, called ‘MVD Information’ (MVD became the KGB) ‘which circulates to executives of the Soviet secret police and secret service’. In this ‘it has been predicted that by June 1962, the number of fully-trained men and women who will be sent to work as Resident Operators and Control Agents in foreign countries will amount to about 230.’ Considerate of them to tell the counter-intelligence services of the NATO alliance, is it not?
A decade later we find the same theme in J. Bernard Hutton’s 1972 The Subverters of Liberty (p. 227): ‘In mid-May 1971 Moscow’s Special Division for Subversion (sic) sent the following directive to its master subverters (sic) in the United Kingdom: ‘The recent slackness of revolutionary industrial activity in Britain must be condemned. The forces of reaction must not be allowed a breathing respite. Intensify all efforts on all fronts. Do not concentrate solely upon large industrial plants or factories. Every minor industrial dispute contributes to the achievement of the main objective. Disrupt production everywhere! And ensure that even the smallest industrial dispute receives wide publicity….. It must always be apparent that demonstrations, strikes or riots etc. are spontaneous. It must never be suspected that political influences have inspired them’. (p. 228)
This astonishing guff is then followed by a five-page list of strikes, many of them in the car industry, between June and September 1971. This list, says Hutton, ‘shows the astonishing parallel between the Kremlin’s orders and what happened inside the United Kingdom’.
J. Bernard Hutton was a very minor Czech defector who made a living recycling the coarser products of the disinformation wizards at IRD. This 1972 book of his, for example, includes (p. 106) the all-time naff forgery ‘the text of a Special Division for Subversion directive, sent in code in April 1968 from Moscow to undercover master-subverters in West Germany’. This begins:
HIGHLY CONFIDENTIAL! MEMORISE! THEN BURN!
Action must be taken at once to create disruptive situations that will rock the very foundations of the capitalist system. The disturbances must occur on such a large scale that they cause deep concern to the population.’ Etc. etc.
The story about the car industry resurfaced again in 1978 via the estimable Lord Chalfont, erstwhile 1960s Times Defence Correspondent and Labour Cabinet Minister. On 2 October 1978 The Times carried a piece of his, ‘Soviet Saboteurs Bringing Britain to her Knees’. In this he reported meetings in late 1974 of the Metal Workers Trade Union in Vichy in France, and an early 1975 conference of the World Federation of Trade Unions in Dusseldorf. At the Vichy meeting, said Chalfont, ‘there was a call by the assembled comrades for concerted action against multinational companies, especially the car industry…’. At the Dusseldorf meeting ‘the main outcome…. was a programme of industrial disruption in the car industry.’
Clearly the WFTU did not invite Lord Chalfont to its meeting, and we are indebted to Chapman Pincher’s 1985 The Secret Offensive for the information (on p. 219) that Chalfont got this information from MI5 who had ‘penetrated a secret meeting in West Germany of Communist trade-union leaders from Britain and Europe to discuss tactics of disrupting industry throughout Europe in the ensuing five years’.
Steve Dorril adds: There is one little gem in Wright’s book which is worth noting. On p. 93 Wright reveals that the Director-General of MI5, Sir Roger Hollis, deliberately destroyed a document before the Denning Inquiry into the Profumo Affair. This showed that Hollis had tried, via the Cabinet Secretary, to enlist John Profumo’s help in an entrapment operation of the Soviet diplomat, Eugene Ivanov, in July 1961. Tony Summers and I speculated that this was the case in Honeytrap but had no evidence. Hollis misled Denning — easy enough — and Prime Minister Macmillan, who told a few lies to the House of Commons on this point.