This book by Peter Wright, former assistant director of England’s MI5, must not have been a best seller.  I bought a hard cover copy at the Westminster, CO library for a dollar as part of their campaign to clear out books no one had been reading.  The book chronicles the author’s quarter of a century in British intelligence.  It is not an easy or fun book to read, because it contains so many details of people, organizations, and events.  It is undoubtedly an excellent reference book for those reasons.

The book presents an astonishing contrast between the British and Soviet intelligence operations.  Seldom is there mention of any Soviet secrets being collected by the British unless the Soviets wanted the British to know the secret.  Practically every British secret of any importance was known by the Soviets, and Stalin often knew it before it had filtered through the British bureaucracy.  The British were a bit similar to the Soviets in their freedom to use any means to gather intelligence.  The author said it was made clear MI5 operated on the basis of the 11th Commandment, “Thou shalt not get caught.”

There are also astonishing indications that some events that were viewed as defeats for the Soviets based on the West learning their secret plans were in reality the outcome desired by the Soviets.  The Cuban missile crisis is one example.  Wright believed the Soviets intentionally allowed the United States to learn they had installed intermediate range missiles in Cuba to create the crises.  Their purpose was to get an agreement from the United States to cease in the attempts to assassinate or overthrow Castro.  The Soviets believed having a staunch ally just off the Keys from Florida was worth the perception the Americans had found their missiles and forced their removal.  

Much of the book is about the rings of spies who had penetrated the British MI5 and MI6 organizations.  The author refers to the time when he eventually began “…to search our well-born Englishmen who had become addicted to Communism in the 1930s.”

Wright joined MI5 just as the MI6 and CIA were beginning a tunneling operation under the Russian sector of Berlin in February of 1955 to place taps on the central communications of the Soviet Military Command.  The amount of raw data collected was staggering, and both organizations were swamped with the transcription and analysis.  The transcription was still progressing seven years later when it was learned a spy named George Blake had betrayed the tunnel to the Soviets from the very beginning.  Nothing was learned from the massive project the Soviets hadn’t wanted to be learned.

As one last accolade that Wright gave the Soviets, he wrote, “Lenin understood better than anyone how to gain control of a country, and, just as important, how to keep it.  Lenin believed the political class had to control the men with the guns, and the intelligence service, and by these means could ensure that neither the Army nor another political class could challenge power.”