Peter Wright (MI5 officer)
Wright determined that the bugging device, dubbed The Thing, was actually a tiny capacitive membrane (a condenser microphone) that became active only when 330 MHz microwaves were beamed to it from a remote transmitter.
According to his memoirs, he then was either responsible for, or intimately involved with, the development of some of the basic methods of ELINT, for example: Wright worked as the first chairman of the new Radio Operations Committee (ROC) when it was formed in 1960.
[5] With like-minded MI5 officers, Wright became alert to the fact that some senior figures in the intelligence services, in politics, and in the trade unions had been recruited long ago as Soviet agents.
[2] His suspicions were further strengthened by Hollis's apparent obstruction of any attempt to investigate information from several defectors that there was a mole in MI5; and his discovery that Hollis had concealed relationships with a number of suspicious persons, including Claud Cockburn, a communist journalist who was at the time suspected of connections to Soviet intelligence; and Agnes Smedley, at a time when Smedley was in a relationship with Soviet spymaster Richard Sorge.
Gouzenko had provided Hollis with clear information about Alan Nunn May's meetings with his Soviet handlers and noted that the man who met him seemed to be in disguise, not interested in his revelations, and discouraged him from further disclosures.
Gouzenko had not known about Klaus Fuchs, but he had named a low level suspected GRU agent, Israel Halperin, a mathematician who was later completely cleared of any suspicions of espionage.
After studying the case for a year, Trend concluded that the evidence was inconclusive for either convicting or clearing Hollis; this was announced in March 1981 by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.
[10] Wright's investigation was also focused on Labour prime minister Harold Wilson, suspicions about whom were initially triggered amongst the MI5 leadership by James Jesus Angleton, chief of counterintelligence for the CIA.
Dame Stella Rimington, MI5 Director-General from 1992 to 1996, later wrote in 2001 that she believed that in a Panorama programme in 1988, Wright had retracted an allegation made in his book about the MI5 group of thirty officers who plotted to overthrow Wilson's government.
[11] Wright's case against Hollis was re-stated by Chapman Pincher[12] in his book, Treachery: Betrayals, Blunders, and Cover-ups: Six Decades of Espionage Against America and Great Britain (2009).
[22] The subsequent appeals against the decision were definitively dismissed in 1988, the High Court of Australia concluding in its decision on the case: ″[...] The appellant's claim for protection (whether injunctive or by way of accounts or damages) ought to have been refused simply on the ground that the Court would not, in the absence of statutory direction, protect the intelligence secrets and confidential political information of the United Kingdom Government.″[23] By then, the US edition of Spycatcher was already an international best-seller.
[22] A memorandum prepared by the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet said among other things: ″The British are seeking to avoid discussion of any of Wright's specific allegations, arguing that, for the purposes of the trial, they can all be assumed to be true and even then Wright's breach of confidentiality would be a breach of contract and inequitable.″[22] In the opinion of the official historian of MI5, Christopher Andrew, Turnbull's ″brilliant″ conduct of the Spycatcher case humiliated the British establishment and triggered much-needed reform in the intelligence services.
While admitting (on page 42) that the book included "factual data", the document stated that it was also "filled with [unspecified] errors, exaggerations, bogus ideas, and self-inflation".
