518 • SPYCATCHER
return to London, he was appointed the CPGB’s national organizer.
Identified as the espionage contact of Olive Sheehan andOrmond
Urenin 1942, Springhall was arrested at his flat in the King Street
headquarters of the CPGB and sentenced to seven years’ imprison-
ment. To distance the party from the embarrassment, Springhall was
expelled from the CPGB and his wife lost her job on theDaily
Worker. Upon his release from prison, Springhall traveled to China
and died in Moscow.SPYCATCHER.In 1981Peter Wright, a disaffected formerMI5of-
ficer, collaborated with journalist Chapman Pincher on his expose ́
Their Trade Is Treacheryand then took a ghostwriter, Paul Green-
grass, to produceSpyCatcherin 1986. The government’s timid re-
sponse to the first book, which was never the subject of any legal
action against either the author or his source, encouraged Wright to
take a second bite of the cherry, with catastrophic consequences for
the Security Service—which was forced to travel to Sydney to seek
an injunction enforcing the tort of breach of confidence in an Austra-
lian court against an Australian citizen, as Wright had taken up resi-
dence in Tasmania and acquired Australian nationality. Although the
action failed in Australia, the House of Lords upheld the principle of
‘‘a lifelong duty of confidentiality,’’ but by then the genie was out
of the bottle andSpyCatcherhad become a worldwide best-seller,
containing a wealth of highly classified information, including doz-
ens of authentic code names. TheSecret Intelligence Service(SIS)
had been caught up in the debacle because, among the many SIS op-
erations referred to, the existence of the international Canadian,
American, New Zealand, Australian, and Britishcounterintelligence
organization (CAZAB) was revealed, requiring it to be renamed and
restructured. While the main damage of Wright’s disclosures was
sustained by MI5, there was inevitably a considerable adverse impact
on SIS as a sister service, and both organizations came belatedly to
realize that disgruntled staff had the potential to wreak havoc, how-
ever compartmented the structure.
STAFF COUNSELOR.The 1989Security Service Actprovided for
the appointment of a staff counselor to offer confidential advice to
MI5personnel who want an opportunity to express concerns about