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Concept
Peter Wright (MI5 officer)
Summary
Peter Maurice Wright CBE (9 August 1916 26 April 1995) was a principal scientific officer for MI5, the British counter-intelligence agency. His book Spycatcher, written with Paul Greengrass, became an international bestseller with sales of over two million copies. Spycatcher was part memoir, part exposé detailing what Wright claimed were serious institutional failures he investigated within MI5. Wright is said to have been influenced in his counterespionage activity by James Jesus Angleton, counter-intelligence chief of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) from 1954 to 1975.
Peter Wright was born at 26 Cromwell Road, Chesterfield, Derbyshire, the son of (George) Maurice Wright CBE, director of research for the Marconi Company, who was one of the founders of signals intelligence during the First World War. Wright was educated at Bishop's Stortford College, an independent boarding school for boys in Bishop's Stortford, Hertfordshire, and St Peter's College, Oxford.
Wright graduated shortly before the Second World War and soon followed in his father’s footsteps, taking a job at the Admiralty's Research Laboratory. He remained there throughout the war and in 1946 began work as a Principal Scientific Officer at the Services Electronics Research Laboratory.
According to his own account, Wright’s work for MI5, initially part-time, started in the spring of 1949 when he was given a job as a Navy Scientist attached to the Marconi Company. According to Spycatcher, during his stint there, Wright was instrumental in resolving a difficult technical problem. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) sought Marconi's assistance with a covert listening device (or "bug") that had been found in a replica of the Great Seal of the United States presented to the United States ambassador in Moscow in 1945 by the Young Pioneer organization of the Soviet Union. Wright determined that the bugging device, dubbed The Thing, was actually a tiny capacitive membrane (a condenser microphone) that became active only when 330 MHz microwaves were beamed to it from a remote transmitter.
Official source
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