Witchfinder: Andrew Williams
‘There are only three people listening’, Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson observed to a friend on his first day back in Downing Street in 1974, ‘you, me and MI5’. Wilson was so convinced the country’s Security Service was plotting against him he would turn on the taps in the Number 10 washroom to prevent bugs in the ceiling picking up his conversation. Staff thought he was paranoid, that his powers were failing, but we now know Wilson had good reason to be suspicious. One of MI5’s most senior officers had investigated the Prime Minister and believed him to be a Soviet agent of influence: That man was Peter Wright.
When I joined the BBC, thirty years ago, the court battle in Australia between the British Government and Wright was near the top of the running order. Limping to court on a stick, a genial smile for the cameras, Wright appeared to be relishing a contest that was viewed in many places around the world as one man’s struggle against state censorship. His memoir was a publishing sensation. Spycatcher: The Candid Autobiography of a Senior Intelligence Officer offered a remarkable insight into the workings of MI5 and purported to reveal a history of spies in high places. Such was the scale of the Soviet penetration he claimed to have uncovered, its publication seemed like a necessary breach of the Official Secrets Act, nothing short of a public service. That impression was reinforced by the ineptitude of the government’s case against him, summed up by an admission in court that it had been ‘economical with the truth’. Wright won the right to publish and died a millionaire.
But in the thirty years that have passed since the publication of Spycatcher a very different picture has emerged of Wright and the spy hunt he orchestrated in the 1960’s. The popular image of the spy catcher is of a patient, dispassionate man, a George Smiley, with the ‘cunning of Satan and the conscience of a virgin’. Peter Wright was a very different character. Reading his memoir again, the picture that emerged was of a man full of prejudice, paranoid, resentful of his superiors. The spy panic following the defection of Britain’s ‘greatest traitor’, Kim Philby, propelled him into a position of extraordinary influence within the intelligence services. He could count on the support of a powerful ally: the chief of counter-intelligence at the CIA, arch conspiracist and Cold War warrior, James Jesus Angleton. According to Angleton the West was losing because it was being subverted by large networks of Soviet spies on both sides of the Atlantic. Angleton had already begun a trawl for double agents in the United States and he encouraged Wright and his colleagues to do the same in Britain. What followed was the witch hunt for communists and ‘fellow travellers’ that is the subject of Witchfinder. Harold Wilson was just the most prominent of hundreds of public servants in parliament, the intelligence and civil services, academia and the armed forces, who fell under suspicion.
Bookshop shelves groan with stories of traitor-spies in the 1960’s, I wanted to write about the real ‘enemy within’. The question of who guards the guards, the watchmen, is one of the oldest in politics. For a time in the sixties, those charged with the secret defence of the realm acted as if they were democratically responsible to no one. ‘I certainly didn’t, and most people in MI5 didn’t have a duty to Parliament’, Wright admitted to an interviewer many years later. ‘It’s up to us to stop Russians getting control of the British government’. To that end a Prime Minister and members of his Cabinet were secretly investigated then defamed, careers were ruined, lives lost.
Witchfinder is, I hope, a timely reminder of the damage that can be done by a small self reverential circle – spy catchers or SPADs, in the intelligence services or Downing Street – when it’s convinced it knows what’s best for the people without recourse to the people or those elected to represent them.
Witchfinder by Andrew Williams is published by Hodder & Stoughton
Helter Skelter Hollywood: Tarantino and the Manson Myth James Riley
A love letter to a vanished Hollywood; a charming bromance; an ugly, post-#MeToo celebration of violence against women: Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon A Time in Hollywood (2019) has, unsurprisingly, divided critics and audiences. This is not just a matter of whether you ‘get’ Tarantino or not. For all its playful film-literacy and obvious technical expertise, there remains something singularly disturbing about this hymn to 1969, a heavily fictionalised take on the world of Sharon Tate, Roman Polanski, Charles Manson and his cult-like ‘Family’. Indeed, it is the level of fictional embellishment, the film’s fairy-tale quality, its very once upon a time-ness that I found so difficult, precisely because it was so delightful and so distressing at the same time.
I went in expecting a combination of Reservoir Dogs (1992) and Jim Van Bebber’s The Manson Family (2003); in other words, I was slightly dreading the prospect of having to sit through a long, agonising recreation of the events of 9 August 1969, when Tate and her friends were brutally murdered at the hands of Manson’s acolytes, Charles ‘Tex’ Watson, Susan Atkins and Patricia Kerwinkel. In the event though, Manson hardly featured and the violence – when it came – was straight out of a comic book, an appallingly misogynistic comic book, but a comic book nonetheless: Batman-esque punch-ups, superheroic flame-throwers, the good killing the bad with neither remorse nor consequence and the tragedy of the Manson murders happily, magically and impossibly, averted.
Tarantino’s film quite literally gives the Manson case a Hollywood ending. When compared to the Manson-related films that appeared in the early-to-mid 1970s like John Howard’s The Other Side of Madness (1971), Laurence Merrick and Robert Hendrickson’s documentary Manson (1973) and Tom Gries’ Helter Skelter (1976), we might readily applaud this positive vision. These early attempts to dramatize the Manson case are not without merit. Howard’s film, for example, is a monochromatic, impressionistic take on the murders full of long shadows and haunting images of swaying trees. Aesthetics aside, however, Manson emerges from each of these films as a mysterious, enigmatic figure. When this aura is coupled with snippets of his songs and the details of his bizarre ‘Helter Skelter’ philosophy, the films – consciously or not – shore-up Manson’s powerful cult of personality. Manson appears as a dangerous but beguiling anti-hero, harbinger and poster-boy for the Apocalypse Culture of the late-twentieth century. John Aes-Nihil’s film The Manson Family Movies (1984) is an explicit crystallization of this image. A deliberately lo-fi attempt to simulate the home movies allegedly made by the Family, Aes-Nihil’s film is chaotic, virtually plotless and revels in the violence of the Manson milleu. It’s a raw feed of the Family beamed directly into the punk rock mindset of the ‘blank generation’.
Tarantino all but exorcises this version of Manson from the promised land of Hollywood. Scorched out of existence, the Family and their threats ultimately disappear allowing Tarantino’s cherished actors to fix themselves another drink and join another party. Tarantino’s work often features protagonists who wish to become film in one way or another. In Once Upon A Time in Hollywood the next best thing is to be invited into the grand houses of the LA elite, the gatekeepers of film. As the Family vanish, Tarantino has this ascension take place in a surprisingly saccharine point of closure. While its refreshing not to have the Tate murders graphically fetishized yet again, Tarantino’s take nonetheless misses a crucial point. Manson’s myth is bound up with that of late-sixties Hollywood. Manson understood the aura of celebrity and the power of a resonant image. The fact that his crimes, moreso than those of the Zodiac Killer who roamed the Bay Area at the same time, are still remembered fifty years on speaks volumes about the public fascination with the likes of Sharon Tate, Roman Polanski and the dark side of Tinseltown. ‘Charles Manson’, the cult icon, would simply not exist were it not for Hollywood’s publicity engine and the American media’s voracious appetite for a villain. Expunging Manson from his map of the stars finds Tarantino making too simple a split between La La Land and its apparent underworld. The monster is inside the gates, but Tarantino can’t see him. More disturbingly, perhaps, he refuses to.
James Riley is the author of The Bad Trip: Dark Omens, New Worlds and the End of the Sixties. Out now from Icon Books.
