How Not to Silence a Spy

Spycatcher, the autobiography of Peter Wright, former assistant director of Britain's counterintelligence agency, is not the stuff of a runaway best seller. The writing is pedestrian, and many of Wright's revelations about the inner workings of MI5, although sensational, have been made elsewhere. But a 23-month campaign by Margaret Thatcher's government to ban the book and any reports about its contents in Britain and the Commonwealth has turned the book into an international publishing phenomenon. It has also sparked a showdown between a defiant Fleet Street and a stubborn Prime Minister over Britain's press and secrecy laws.

Seven of Britain's 20 major newspapers have violated the ban. In the U.S., where the book was published by Viking Penguin last month, Spycatcher is in its fifth printing; it has already sold 210,000 copies, and next week will rank first on the New York Times best-sellers list. Thousands of copies have crossed the Atlantic: two entrepreneurs were spotted hawking copies of the book for $158 beneath a statue of Winston Churchill, across from Parliament. Last Sunday Labor M.P. Tony Benn read aloud from Spycatcher before a large crowd of journalists and onlookers at Hyde Park's historic Speakers' Corner.

The furor underscores the conflict between Britain's shaky tradition of press rights and stolid tradition of government secrecy. In mid-1986 two British papers reported that Wright, who signed the standard life pledge not to reveal official secrets, had prepared a manuscript disclosing, among other things, that a group of MI5 agents had conspired in 1974 to topple the Labor government of Prime Minister Harold Wilson. Wright also speculated that a former MI5 director general, the late Sir Roger Hollis, was a Soviet mole. In the U.S., such charges might have produced a riot of headlines and calls for congressional hearings. But in Britain, the Thatcher government quickly won a court order barring the press from even discussing Wright's disclosures. It also filed suit in Australia, where Wright is living in retirement, to prevent publication of the book there.

As the case wended its way through Australia's courts -- the Thatcher government lost the first round but has appealed -- several British papers mounted a legal challenge. After U.S. editions of Spycatcher began filtering into Britain this summer, a high-court judge lifted the ban on reporting details from the book. But in late July, the Law Lords, Britain's highest court, once again barred accounts of Wright's charges.

Fleet Street reacted with derision. The Daily Mirror published upside-down photos of the three Law Lords who sided with the government above the caption YOU FOOLS. British editions of The Economist ran an otherwise blank page with a box explaining that a review of Spycatcher was appearing in all 170 countries where the magazine has subscribers, except one. "For our 420,000 readers there," the editors wrote, paraphrasing Mr. Bumble in Oliver Twist, "this page is blank -- and the law is an ass."