A Not-So-Secret Service

"It is of the essence of a secret service that it must be secret, and if you once begin disclosure, it is perfectly obvious . . . that there is no longer any secret service." That wisdom, intoned by Sir Austen Chamberlain during his tenure as Foreign Secretary from 1924 to 1929, has long been the motto of British governments. Indeed, officials traditionally denied the very existence of a secret service.

No longer. Peter Wright, a disgruntled former deputy director of MI5, Britain's counterintelligence agency, has angered officials as high as Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher by planning to publish a book that alleges that MI5 engaged in some less-than-savory operations.

Wright accuses the late Sir Roger Hollis, who headed MI5 from 1956 to 1965, of having been a double agent for the Soviet Union. He charges the service with bugging friendly French and West German embassies in London and breaking into Soviet consulates abroad. Wright also says MI5 was involved in a plot to assassinate Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser during the 1956 Suez crisis. The accusations are not new: since retiring in 1976, Wright has pursued a campaign to make his charges known. Moreover, other authors have published similar allegations.

The Thatcher government has obtained legal rulings barring the entire British media from publicizing excerpts from the book. In addition, Britain is pursuing a civil suit in Australia, Wright's home since 1976, to prevent a subsidiary of the British publishing house Heinemann from issuing the book there. The government argues that publication could cause a loss of confidence in MI5's "ability to protect classified information."

The government response has served mainly to renew debate over the tough British laws that allow authorities to ban publication of almost any material deemed harmful to national security interests. Of course, the flap has focused attention on Wright's accusations. After the press was barred from reporting the book's charges, Labor M.P. Dale Campbell-Savours used his parliamentary privilege to state the charges before the House of Commons, which the press reported.

The media can also report whatever is said on the record in the Australian proceedings. To head off extensive disclosure, the British government earlier this month asked the court to "treat the allegations made in the book as being true." But the government stressed that "except for the limited procedural purposes of this action," it was not conceding the truth of the charges. Still, the Guardian crowed, BRITAIN ADMITS MI5 ALLEGATIONS. Such headlines dismayed some intelligence agents. Said one operative: "They may end up making Wright's book a best seller."