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.

MI6: Inside the Covert World of Her Majesty's Secret Intelligence Service

Stephen Dorril
Fourth Estate 2000
Touchstone 2002

A magisterial study of Britain's foreign intelligence service, the SIS, better known as MI6.

Although Dorril covers operations around the world and up to the 1990s, the key focus for more than half the book is on Europe and the early Cold War.

During Word War II, MI6's prestige rested more on its control of the Bletchley Park code-breaking programme than on recruiting agents in Europe, where its thunder was stolen by the rival Special Operations Executive.

MI6 absorbed SOE after the Second World War, acquiring in the process some expertise in political warfare as opposed to intelligence-gathering. One of the most intriguing aspects of this, MI6 involvement in the Gladio stay-behind networks, is touched on but largely left for another volume, which will certainly be very interesting if it appears.

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.

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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