Peter Wright in 1963 following what Wright refers to as a tip-off by "a fifth man, still inside", he became convinced that the KGB had penetrated the higher reaches of MI5. As claimed in "Spycatcher", Wright had come to believe that Roger Hollis was the highest traitor in MI5. Wright went so far as to begin to make, as he himself put it, "his own 'freelance' inquiries into Hollis' background" shortly before the latter's retirement. According to Wright, his initial, unspecified, suspicion was aroused by his analysis of how a Soviet 'illegal' Lonsdale's arrest in January 1961 was handled by the KGB
Peter Wright boys in the market town of Bishop's Stortford in Hertfordshire, followed by St Peter's College at the University of Oxford. Peter Wright was born in 26 Cromwell Road, Chesterfield, Derbyshire, the son of (George) Maurice Wright, who was the Marconi Company's director of research, and one of the founders of signals intelligence during World War I. During the Second World War, Wright worked at the Admiralty's Research Laboratory. In 1946, he began work as a Principal Scientific Officer at the Services Electronics Research Laboratory. According to his own account, his work for the UK intelligence, initially part-time, started in the