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Margaret Thatcher authorised a leak of secret intelligence that helped trigger the so-called Spycatcher affair that plagued the then-UK prime minister throughout her time in office, according to declassified government documents published on Friday.
The papers released by the UK’s National Archives showed Thatcher signing off on a recommendation by her cabinet secretary, Robert Armstrong, to leak information to a journalist about an investigation by MI5 into claims that a former chief of the UK’s domestic intelligence agency was a Soviet agent.
Thatcher scrawled her approval in the margins of a memo dated June 10, 1980, from Armstrong that advised her to “make an exception to the rule” and leak the classified information about the MI5 probe into its former boss Sir Roger Hollis to Chapman Pincher of the Daily Express.
The plan put to the prime minister was to brief Conservative peer Lord Peter Rawlinson, a former attorney-general, who had offered to leak the information to Pincher to ensure he wrote about the claims with a “sympathetic presentation” before two Guardian journalists.
“Please see Lord Rawlinson,” the prime minister wrote on the memo, prompting Thatcher’s principal private secretary, Sir Clive Whitmore, to convey her approval to Armstrong in writing the next day.
The plan ultimately backfired when Pincher published his book on the penetration of western intelligence services by the Soviets, Their Trade is Treachery, the following year, which outlined his suspicion that Hollis worked for Moscow.
“It was an unprecedented leak of MI5’s secrets for government advantage,” said Tim Tate, author of an upcoming book on the Spycatcher affair. “The fact that MI5 had investigated its own head for a decade was not known outside government.”
The documents were among several classified files made public by the National Archives relating to the scandal, which was named after the memoir Spycatcher, written by former MI5 officer Peter Wright, documenting his time within the intelligence service. Wright, who was involved in the Hollis investigation, was also a source for Pincher’s book.
Thatcher’s government spent years trying to prevent the publication of Spycatcher through the courts. It failed when the book was first published in Australia in 1987.
Documents published by the National Archives showed that Armstrong, cabinet secretary from 1979 to 1987, lied in court to cover up the leak that Thatcher had approved.
Armstrong was a witness in the British government’s court case in Australia that attempted to block the publication of Wright’s book, in which he claimed he was part of a small group of MI5 agents that plotted to oust Labour prime minister Harold Wilson in the 1960s because they suspected he was a Soviet spy. Wright also reinforced claims that Hollis spied for Moscow.
Armstrong, who died in 2020, told the court in Sydney it was “totally untrue” that he had helped Pincher write about Hollis. During the hearing Malcolm Turnbull, who was Wright’s lawyer and later became prime minister of Australia, was denied certain key documents, including papers published as part of the tranche released by the National Archives.
