The Green Ribbon Books

Spycatcher: The Candid Autobiography of a Senior Intelligence Officer

Peter Wright
1987

The MI5 website specifically denies one of the most eye-catching allegations in Peter Wright's notorious insider exposé of the service - that MI5 officers were plotting to bring down Prime Minister Harold Wilson.

Ironically, that must be one the best-attested claims in the book. Writers like David Leigh, Robin Ramsay and Stephen Dorril have documented extensive evidence, independent of Wright, that this is exactly what was happening.

Neither Leigh not Ramsay and Dorril believe that Wright was telling the whole truth in Spycatcher. They conclude that his involvement in the Wilson episode was much deeper than he lets on.

The one thing that everyone is agreed on, therefore, is that Wright was not a particularly trustworthy witness. Nevertheless, there is a great deal of interesting material in the book.

The Wilson Plot: The Astounding Truth about the Spycatchers who dabbled in Treason

David Leigh
Heinemann
1988

One of Britain's top investigative journalists describes how elements of MI5 and the CIA turned on the British Prime Minister.

The story has its roots its in the cold war paranoia engendered by the Cambridge spy ring, a brilliant Soviet coup that penetrated right to the heart of western intelligence. When KGB defector Anatoly Golitsyn claimed that Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell had been murdered by the KGB to make way for Harold Wilson, senior counterintelligence officers such as James Angleton of the CIA and Peter Wright of MI5 were prepared to believe him.

This helped pave the way for a covert campaign against Wilson that would climax during his second government in the mid-1970s. Although, this campaign would be revealed in Wright's book Spycatcher, Leigh argues that Wright concealed his own role. Leigh had access to a number of Wright's unpublished manuscripts, a source he prefers to the ghostwritten Spycatcher.

Blair

Anthony Seldon
The Free Press
2004

(review originally published in the Irish World, 2 July 2004)

A new biography of Tony Blair arrived on my desk last week, and it’s a weighty tome in every sense.

The author, Anthony Seldon, is one of Britain’s top political historians, and has collaborated at one time or another with most of the other people who could lay claim to that title.

The book, entitled simply Blair, consists of 20 chapters on key events in the Prime Minister’s life, alternating with 20 chapters on key individuals.

Who Framed Colin Wallace?

Paul Foot
Macmillan 1989
Pan 1990

The definitive account of one of the most remarkable stories ever to emerge from Britain's secret state.

When the British Army arrived in Northern Ireland in 1969, the local knowledge of Antrim-born public relations officer Colin Wallace proved a godsend. As the conflict developed, information became a crucial battleground, and Wallace became increasingly involved with psychological warfare.

Initially, this meant working with MI6, but in 1973 the Northern Ireland role passed to MI5. This was followed by the initiation of project Clockwork Orange, a smear campaign intended to discredit paramilitary leaders.

However, as Foot shows using Wallace's contemporary notes, the project soon became a right-wing propaganda campaign aimed at British politicians, notably including the key smear that Harold Wilson was a KGB agent.

The campaign intensified in 1974, as MI5 set out to undermine the new Labour government and it's attempt at power-sharing in Northern Ireland, the Sunningdale Agreement.

After Britain: New Labour and the Return of Scotland

Tom Nairn
Granta
2000

Nairn, arguably the leading Scottish nationalist intellectual, greeted the creation of the Scottish Parliament with this bold polemic, predicting the break-up of the union and calling for the emergence of new English and Scottish civic nationalisms.

The book depicted Britain as 'Ukania' a contemporary counterpart to the Austro-Hungarian empire, in which an early-modern monarchy struggled to contain emerging nationalisms.

After Britain included an early dissection of Blairism, predicting that the Scottish Parliament would transcend New Labour's limited aims for devolution. That judgment is perhaps already being vindicated by events

The most significant of the wave of book-length essays that emerged in the wake of Scottish devolution.

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Smear: Wilson and the Secret State

by Robin Ramsay and Stephen Dorril
Harper Collins
1992

A remarkable biography which adds up to a secret history of postwar Britain.

This book shows how Wilson's 1950s contacts with Soviet Union, while authorised by Winston Churchill, made him vulnerable to right-wing smears in his later career.

Wilson's ascent to the Labour leadership following the death of Hugh Gaitskell, doyenne of the CIA-backed Labour right, saw him labelled as a Soviet spy by defector Anatoly Golitsyn and right-wing counter-intelligence officers James Angleton of the CIA and Arthur Martin and Peter Wright of MI5.

The allegation would become a weapon in the political struggle over Wilson's attempts to modernise Britain at the expense of the City of London and the wider establishment.

Ramsay and Dorril details the coup plots against both Wilson Governments, and the internal rivalries within and between MI5 and MI6, whose competing agendas in Northern Ireland would become bound up with the campaign against Wilson in the crucial year of 1974.

Their portrait of US influence on the centre-left from the Gaitskell era to the fore-runners of the SDP is strikingly relevant to the New Labour era.

Meticulously footnoted with an extensive bibliography, this is one of the best books ever written about the intelligence world.

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