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The MI5 spy Margaret Thatcher wanted to extradite from Australia. He made her back down with a threat of revealing details of a series of scandals, including MI5’s involvement in the Kincora Boys’ Home child sex abuse scandal. By David Burke.

Peter Wright CBE, formerly of MI5, defeated Margaret Thatcher in a volcanic legal battle in Australia in the late 1980s. Thatcher tried – and failed – to injunct the publication of Wright’s book, Spycatcher, in Australia. The publication cast MI5 and MI6 in a deplorable light: little more than organisations riddled with traitors and immersed in criminality.

Throughout the trial, Her Majesty’s Government (HMG) was put on an anvil and hammered mercilessly by Wright’s dogged lawyer, Malcolm Turnbull, who later became the prime minister of Australia. When Turnbull published his own account of the affair, The Spycatcher Trial, he recounted how he had asked Wright at their first meeting if he thought HMG feared he might reveal other secrets. ‘They might’, Wright replied adding mysteriously: ‘I spent a lot of time in Northern Ireland, you know. But I won’t reveal anything about that. Malcolm, it would be easy for me to make this book very sensational indeed.’

Wright had also cautioned Turnbull that: ‘I may never be able to tell you the truth about some things.’ When Turnbull asked him what he meant, Wright responded: ‘My work in Northern Ireland, for example … A lot of things. This is a safe book compared to what I could write.’

Such was Thatcher’s anger at Wright – for telling the truth – that she set in train an amendment to British law to permit the UK to seek Wright’s extradition from Australia for committing a breach of the Official Secrets Act (OSA).

In a newly declassified letter dated 21^st September, 1988, to her senior advisers Thatcher stated:

I shall be visiting Australia and New Zealand next month and I expect there will be some discussion of the Spycatcher litigation in those countries.

We lost our appeal to the High Court of Australia in June, the Court holding that it had no jurisdiction to entertain a case in which a foreign Government was seeking to enforce a governmental interest. I must of course be careful not to seem to criticise either Australian courts or Mr Turnbull, trying though that discipline will be. The principal issues suitable for discussion seem to me to be these:

… (e) Whether a request for extradition for an offence under the OSA (which will be possible under changes to the law to be introduced early in 1989) would give rise to a similar enquiry by an Australian court as to the underlying purpose of the request

1. Thatcher backs down

Thatcher, however, backed down and Wright was left alone.

Why?

The only logical answer is that she feared he would reveal far more embarrassing secrets than those he had disclosed in Spycatcher.

2. A disgruntled former spy, threats and legal action.

Peter Wright had retired from MI5 in 1976 a disgruntled man. He and his wife Lois had emigrated to Australia to live near one of their daughters, Jennifer, in Tasmania, to raise horses. By the 1980s he had decided to put pen to paper.

Wright had diabetes, was frail and generally in poor health. Before the Australian courtroom drama began, Turnbull visited London where he met with a senior legal figure acting on behalf of HMG. Turnbull’s arm was seized by the lawyer and held in a ‘hard’ grip at it. ‘Well you tell [Wright] from me,’ the lawyer said ‘that he’d better seek some medical advice before he comes to court. He’ll get no quarter in the witness box on account of his ill-health.’ While this was not a death threat, if this was how the occupant of one of HMG’s loftiest legal perches was prepared to conduct himself, what was to be expected from the gangsters in MI5? Wright had participated in at least one – if not multiple – MI5 assassination operations and knew perfectly well what its cutthroats were capable of. It probably crossed his mind that given half the chance they might, for example, arrange a road traffic accident along a dusty Tasmanian dirt track. To avoid this, he took out a life assurance policy, one that involved a threat to reveal his unpublished secrets if he was murdered.

3. Ten ‘Major Secrets’.

The legal wrangling dragged on for over a year. On 14 June, 1988, while an injunction restraining British newspapers from publishing the contents of the book was crumbling in the House of Lords in London, Wright made his threat public: ‘There are 10 major stories which I have not put in [Spycatcher] and there are probably others if I thought about it. I may put them into a secret report or I may do nothing. I just haven’t thought it out yet.’ The next day, The Times of London reported that HMG had:

always been aware that Mr Wright knew a lot more than he revealed in Spycatcher, particularly concerning his service as an MI5 officer in Northern Ireland.