That was as far as it got. On 6 April 1965, British Prime Minister Harold Wilson’s Labour government announced the cancellation of the TSR.2 program, making the day one of the most dismal in all British aviation history. The TSR.2 had completed only about 13 hours of flight tests. Another TSR.2 prototype was to fly the same day as the cancellation but never left the ground, and most of the rest of the initial batch of nine prototypes were in various stages of completion.
The project was dismantled with what has been described as “indecent haste”, with almost everything burned, scrapped, or discarded. The single flying prototype met a humiliating end, being gradually blown to pieces over a period of years as a ground gunnery target hulk, while most of the other prototypes in various stages of assembly were scrapped. The only saving grace of the whole sad situation was that two prototypes were rescued, with one now on display at the Aerospace Museum in Cosford, and the other on display at the Imperial War Museum in Duxford.
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which raises my initial suspicions that the russians shut the thing down
Background
Soviet defector Anatoliy Golitsyn is said to have told Alec MacDonald, who set up safe houses where Golitsyn could live, that Wilson was a KGB operative and that former Labour Party leader Hugh Gaitskell had been assassinated by the KGB in order to have the pro-US Gaitskell replaced as party leader by Harold Wilson. David Leigh, however, claims that Golitsyn was guessing. Christopher Andrew, the official historian for Britain’s MI5, has described Golitsyn as an “unreliable conspiracy theorist”.
Former MI5 officer Peter Wright claimed in his memoirs Spycatcher that he had been told that Wilson was a Soviet agent. Wright states that after Wilson was elected Prime Minister in 1964 the CIA’s head of the Counterintelligence Division, James Angleton, had told him that he had heard from a source (whom he did not name, but who was probably Golitsyn) that Wilson was a Soviet agent. Angleton said he would give further information if MI5 would guarantee to keep the allegations from ‘political circles’. The management of MI5, according to Wright, refused to accept Angleton’s restrictions on the use of his information and so Angleton did not tell them anything more.
According to Wright by the end of the 1960s MI5 had received information that the Labour Party had ‘almost certainly’ been penetrated by the Soviets. Two Czechoslovakian defectors, ‘Frolik’ and ‘August’, had fled to the West and named a list of Labour MPs and trade unionists as Soviet agents.
MI5 repeatedly investigated Wilson over the course of several years before conclusively deciding that he had no relationship with the KGB, having found no evidence of Soviet penetration of the Labour Party. Wilson claimed he was a staunch anti-communist.