Margaret Thatcher approved leak of MI5 mole story (original) (raw)

Margaret Thatcher’s handwriting in thin strokes of black ink shows the moment she approved the leak of information about MI5’s most damaging scandal.

The document, declassified after more than 40 years, reveals the prime minister conspiring with her cabinet secretary to brief a journalist about rumours that there had been a Soviet mole at the top of the Secret Service. It also proves that Robert Armstrong, who served as Thatcher’s cabinet secretary for most of her time at No 10, lied about their conspiracy under oath.

The alleged mole was Sir Roger Hollis, director-general of MI5 from 1956-65, whose suspected betrayal first came to public attention in 1981 with the publication of Chapman Pincher’s book Their Trade is Treachery.

Malcolm Turnbull, left, and Peter Wright. Turnbull, who was Wright’s lawyer, became the prime minister of Australia

JOHN NOBLEY/GETTY IMAGES

Peter Wright, a former senior MI5 officer who had been Pincher’s main source, sought to elaborate on the allegations in the mid-1980s in his book Spycatcher. His status as a former spy made the book even more controversial.

The British government obtained a court order banning the publication of Spycatcher in the UK before seeking a similar injunction in Australia, where Wright had emigrated.

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Armstrong, sent by Thatcher to represent the government in the Australian courts, was cross-examined by Malcolm Turnbull, Wright’s lawyer and a future prime minister of Australia.

Armstrong was asked why the government had allowed Pincher’s book but wished to block Wright’s. Had No 10 and MI5 agreed to let Pincher publish because he was a conservative-leaning writer who would be more sympathetic to the government than other left-wing journalists who were known to be working on the Hollis story?

• Inside Margaret Thatcher’s doomed crusade to ban Spycatcher

Armstrong dismissed that: “It is a very ingenious conspiracy theory and it is quite untrue.” He clarified that he meant “totally untrue”.

The newly declassified documents, now available at the National Archives, show that Armstrong was committing perjury. In a memo dated June 10, 1980, Armstrong briefed Thatcher’s principal private secretary that a Tory peer and ally of Pincher had written to him to tell him that Pincher, along with two other investigative journalists, was on to the Hollis story.

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“There is a strong hint that Chapman Pincher would like to be put in a position to pre-empt [his rivals], and would (for the sake of that) give a sympathetic presentation,” Armstrong wrote. “I should normally recommend a very long spoon indeed in dealings with Chapman Pincher. This instance, however, might be the case for an exception to the rule.”

The British government obtained a court order banning the publication of Spycatcher in the UK

PA

Armstrong suggests that he brief Lord Rawlinson, the Tory peer, on a confidential “Privy Counsellor basis … in the knowledge that he would pass on the relevant material to Pincher”. Thatcher’s handwritten reply at the top of the page is: “Please see Lord Rawlinson on P-C basis. MT.”

In a follow-up memo, also initialled by Thatcher, Armstrong confirms that he has briefed Pincher’s contact: “He will not seek [Pincher] out; but I said that, if Pincher came back to him, I thought that he might say that he had been sufficiently interested in Pincher’s story to make some inquiries, from which he had learnt that the inquiries had been thorough, and their outcome was reassuring.”

David Hooper, KC, who was Wright’s British lawyer during the Spycatcher trial, told The Times that Armstrong’s lie was a criminal offence: “A judge would certainly have concluded that Armstrong had perjured himself.”

Other memos suggest that Thatcher misled parliament when she gave a statement about Pincher’s book to the House of Commons. She declared to MPs that Sir Burke Trend, a former cabinet secretary tasked with assessing the allegations against Hollis in 1974, had “agreed with those who, although it was impossible to prove the negative, concluded that Sir Roger Hollis had not been an agent of the Russian intelligence service”.

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In fact, Trend had been more equivocal. His report remains secret but Armstrong’s declassified summary of it in February 1981 concedes that Trend found Hollis not guilty on the balance of probabilities and that he “put that balance at 80 to 20”.

Tim Tate, a historian who campaigned for the release of the files for his book To Catch a Spy, published on Thursday, said that Thatcher had lied. “There was a 20 per cent chance that Hollis was a Soviet agent — which, when you’re head of MI5, is serious, isn’t it? In fairness to Peter Wright, his view was that in cases of this sort, the benefit of the doubt has to be given to the country, not the individual. I think he was right,” he said.

Sir Robert Armstrong, centre, sought to suppress the publication of Spycatcher in Australia

ANL/REX

Tate added that it was unclear whether Armstrong and Thatcher came to regret leaking to Pincher, who was still writing about Hollis’s treachery 30 years later.

“The outcome was both good and bad. Pincher did what he always did, which was to play both ends against the middle. He blew the Hollis saga [into a sensation] but he also betrayed Wright by coming to the conclusion that no inquiry is actually needed.

“Did it achieve Thatcher’s aims? Not really. She was forced to go to the House of Commons and give a statement, in which she lied. Pincher always thought Hollis was a mole but he didn’t think there was a need for an inquiry. That’s classic Pincher, trying to please all masters and pleasing none.”

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Wright claimed in secret testimony at the Australian trial that Pincher was an MI5 asset used by the service to leak information and disinformation into the public domain. Certainly, Pincher remained in favour with the secret services after his book: he was appointed to two Ministry of Defence committees and had lunch with Dickie Franks, then head of MI6.

After Armstrong’s death in 2020 The Times’s obituary noted that he had hated the Spycatcher trial, during which he was forced to admit that he had been “economical with the truth”. On his return, Thatcher bought him two expensive bottles of whisky to thank him for his service and, perhaps, for lying on her behalf.

This brazen lie is much worse than we thought

As Peter Wright’s solicitor during the 1987 Spycatcher trial, I watched Robert Armstrong’s performance from a front-row seat (David Hooper writes).

The cabinet secretary, surrounded by a small army of Australian and English lawyers and officials, seemed convinced that Mr Justice Powell would accept his evidence that Spycatcher was a threat to national security and confidentiality.

Our defence team, consisting of Malcolm and Lucy Turnbull, Paul Greengrass and myself, seemed sparse by comparison.

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Wright believed that the government had used Chapman Pincher’s book to get out their side of the story

ALAMY

Over two weeks of cross-examination, Armstrong’s confidence began to slip. His case was undermined by the unlikely assertion that Michael Havers, the attorney-general, had advised there was no basis for restraining an earlier book about the Roger Hollis affair: Chapman Pincher’s Their Trade is Treachery.

The alternative, as Wright believed, was that the government used Pincher to tell the story in a sympathetic way, an operation overseen by Victor Rothschild, a former MI5 officer and adviser to Margaret Thatcher.

Armstrong wilted under Turnbull’s cross-examination. There were gasps when he admitted he had been “economical with the truth” after claiming that no one in the service of the government had been aware of Pincher’s book. His QC conceded that Pincher had sent a synopsis to the head of MI6 in December 1980, three months before publication.

He also misled the court about how early the government had known of Wright’s interview with the ITV investigative current affairs series World in Action.

The disclosure of these files, through the hard work of the historian Tim Tate, shows the extent of the shameful deceit underlying the case. I hope that the Cabinet Office will recognise the public interest in releasing the remaining 32 Spycatcher files, which are due to be declassified by 2029, so we can see the full extent of this wrongdoing.

Armstrong was able to give false evidence, secure in his instruction that internal documents would not be disclosed, despite the judge issuing three disclosure orders.

Armstrong’s rejection of any understanding with Pincher as “an ingenious conspiracy theory and totally untrue” is exposed as a brazen lie, much worse than we had thought.

David Hooper was solicitor for Peter Wright and is the author of Buying Silence

To Catch a Spy, by Tim Tate, was published on August 15 by Icon Books