An ex-spy, a furious government, a global publishing battle, and the spectacular failure of censorship.
In November 1986, in a Sydney courtroom, the most powerful civil servant in Britain took the witness stand and spent days being taken apart by a thirty-two-year-old lawyer. Sir Robert Armstrong was the Cabinet Secretary, the head of the British Civil Service, and Margaret Thatcher’s government had shipped him halfway around the world to help stop a book. His cross-examiner, Malcolm Turnbull, was a young Australian lawyer acting for the book’s author and publisher, and would one day become Prime Minister of Australia himself.
Turnbull had caught the government in a contradiction. Years earlier, it had asked the publisher of Andrew Boyle’s The Climate of Treason, a book about British intelligence, for a copy, even as it quietly held the page proofs.
“What is the difference between a misleading impression and a lie?” Turnbull asked.
“A lie is a straight untruth.”
“What is a misleading impression—a sort of bent untruth?”
“As one person said,” Armstrong conceded, “it is perhaps being economical with the truth.”
The phrase “economical with the truth” entered the political lexicon and followed Armstrong for the rest of his life. But the truly extraordinary thing was not the exchange itself. It was the reason the head of the British Civil Service was ten thousand miles from Whitehall, under oath, squirming for days: a book.
The book was called Spycatcher, and its author was Peter Wright, a former senior officer in Britain’s domestic intelligence service, MI5. Its allegations about spies, secret operations, and misconduct at the top of the British security establishment were considered a threat to national security. So it went to court. Then it went to court again. Judges issued injunctions, editors faced legal threats, and the government spent hundreds of thousands of pounds trying to keep the story under wraps.
There was just one problem: the government’s power ended at the border. The book would be published in Australia and the United States, far beyond the reach of English injunctions, and the harder the authorities fought to suppress it, the more irresistible it became.
The Man Who Knew Too Much
Peter Wright had spent decades inside MI5, Britain’s domestic counterintelligence service. When he retired in 1976, he moved to a horse farm in Tasmania and began working on a memoir with a writer named Paul Greengrass, who would later become famous as the film director behind United 93, Captain Phillips, and the Bourne sequels. And Wright had plenty of material: intelligence operations, internal feuds, suspected double agents, the kind of knowledge an author can only get one way, by being there.
His manuscript made explosive allegations: suspected Soviet penetration of British intelligence, covert activities involving senior officials, and political intrigue inside the security services. Some were disputed, and Spycatcher was no neutral institutional history. It was one man’s account, its claims to be judged one by one.
But the government had a more immediate concern: Wright had worked in an organization whose members were expected to keep their secrets for life, and officials argued he had no right to publish what he had learned while serving the Crown. In 1985, it began legal proceedings in Australia to stop the book, going after Wright and his publisher, Heinemann, seeking not just an injunction but every penny of the book’s profits. The government wanted to establish that the duty of secrecy followed an intelligence officer to the grave, wherever he lived: a serious principle, seriously argued, and about to collide with courts that did not see things London’s way.
The Government Goes to War
The authorities quickly discovered that banning a book in your own country is one thing; banning it in somebody else’s is quite another. Wright’s publisher fought back in the Australian courts, with Turnbull leading the defense, and the government kept losing, first at trial, then on appeal, all the way up. The Sydney hearing turned into a fiasco: the government’s chief witness, in front of the world’s press, struggling to explain the difference between a lie and a “misleading impression.”
Meanwhile, the controversy spread like a spilled inkwell. The book was published in the United States in July 1987, then in Australia that October, then in country after country. British newspapers began reporting on the proceedings and the allegations inside the manuscript, and the government responded with injunctions. The Observer and The Guardian were restrained from publishing material from the book, and The Sunday Times was hit after it ran extracts.
The result was one of the strangest situations in the history of the free press: a book you could legally buy in New York or Sydney, while the journalists of the country it was actually about were forbidden from discussing its contents, and every fresh injunction made the futility more obvious.
In October 1988, the dispute having climbed to Britain’s highest court, the House of Lords threw out the remaining injunctions. By then, Spycatcher had been published across the globe, and copies were easy to obtain in Britain itself. The judges did not rule that intelligence officers were free to publish whatever they liked; they affirmed that former members of the security services remained bound by lifelong duties of confidentiality. But the practical case for muzzling the newspapers had collapsed. As Lord Griffiths put it, it might have been better to let the book be published, because it was “such a boring book.”
What Was Really in the Book?
It is tempting to remember Spycatcher simply as the book Britain tried to ban, but its contents were controversial in their own right. Wright made allegations about the history and conduct of MI5, including suspected double agents and covert political activity; some were disputed, and not everything was new: he had already been a source for journalists writing about British intelligence. The book’s power lay in who wrote it. Wright was not an outsider guessing at how the machinery worked; he had worked inside the institution he was criticizing. That did not make every claim true, but it made the book very hard to dismiss: readers were being offered a glimpse into a hidden world by a man who claimed to know it from the inside.
The Most Effective Advertisement Is a Ban
There is an old problem with censorship: forbid something, and people want it more. Spycatcher became the textbook case. Every legal battle generated headlines, every injunction made the book more notorious, and every hint that the government considered its contents dangerous gave readers one more reason to find out why. And the affair raised an uncomfortable question: if the book was genuinely so sensitive, why allow years of courtroom drama to advertise its contents to the world?
To be fair, the government’s arguments were serious: former intelligence officers do owe a continuing duty of confidentiality, and unauthorized disclosures can genuinely endanger sources and methods. But critics saw an institution trying to bury allegations because they were embarrassing, not dangerous.
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