Peter Wright - Later Life and Legacy

Later Life and Legacy

When Wright retired from MI5, bitter over disagreements regarding his pension rights, he moved from Britain to Australia, settling in Tasmania. He subsequently returned to Britain at the request of Victor Rothschild, who asked Wright to help dispel rumours that Rothschild was a Soviet agent, though the result was a production by a much maligned journalist whose testimony has been called into question on more than one occasion. Wright agreed, and the result was Chapman Pincher's Their Trade is Treachery (1981), which carried the allegations that Hollis (by then dead) had been a traitor. When Wright's role in supplying information for the book became known, journalists besieged him. Because of the interest and because of the rancour following the pension, in 1985, he decided to publish his memoirs, Spycatcher, in Australia in order to make ends meet. The British government did all it could to suppress publication, under the pretext that such a publication would be in violation of the Official Secrets Act. They brought an injunction against Wright in Sydney. The Australian court, however, ruled against the British government, thus turning a book that might have had moderate success into an international best seller. Furthermore, the verdict not only vindicated Wright but also represented a victory for press freedom.

With trans-Atlantic repercussions, Spycatcher first revealed the details and name of the Venona project, a cryptographic collaboration between the U.S. and U.K. that had succeeded in deciphering more than 2000 messages from Soviet agents in the two countries and elsewhere. Wright's revelations led to the public release of the Venona messages in 1995. The released texts incriminated a number of public figures who had previously been defended as victims of McCarthyism by left-wing historians, causing considerable reassessment of the period of the second Red Scare (1947-1957).

The publication of Spycatcher temporarily unlocked the doors of official secrecy as far as former intelligence officers were concerned. With the enactment of the Official Secrets Act 1989, an absolute prohibition on revelations by serving or former intelligence officers was imposed.

Wright went on to publish The Encyclopaedia of Espionage in 1991, which had little impact. By this stage of his life he had become increasingly reclusive, suffering from diabetes and heart trouble; a year before his death in Tasmania on 27 April 1995 (aged 78), he was diagnosed as having Alzheimer's disease.