Wright, Peter Maurice

▪ 1996

      British intelligence officer (b. Aug. 9, 1916, Chesterfield, Derbyshire, England—d. April 27, 1995, Tasmania, Australia), was at the centre of a lengthy international legal battle when Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's government banned the publication or sale of his memoirs, Spycatcher: The Candid Autobiography of a Senior Intelligence Officer (1987), and filed suit (1985) in Australia in a prolonged but ultimately unsuccessful attempt to prevent the book's publication there. Wright worked as an electronics technician for the Admiralty Research Laboratory during World War II. He was an unpaid scientific adviser to MI-5, the counterintelligence branch of the British Security Service, from 1949 until 1954, when he was recruited as MI-5's director of technological improvement. He served as head of the research division in the counterintelligence department from 1964 until his retirement to Tasmania in 1976. In the early 1980s Wright, who claimed that the infiltration of communist spies in the British intelligence community was more widespread than previously thought and who allegedly was angry over the small size of his government pension, cooperated in the writing of Chapman Pincher's exposé Their Trade Is Treachery (1982) and Spycatcher. The U.K. government banned Spycatcher, prosecuted British newspapers and magazines for printing excerpts or reviews, and filed suit in Australia, charging that Wright had violated the Official Secrets Act. The government's actions triggered accusations of censorship and of hypocrisy since Pincher's book had not been suppressed. By 1988 the case in Australia had been lost and the U.S. edition of Spycatcher was already an international best-seller. Four years later the House of Lords ruled that the ban had become meaningless and overturned it. Wright also published The Spycatcher's Encyclopedia of Espionage (1991) and reportedly was writing a fictional spy thriller at the time of his death.

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