By David Burke.

Introduction: the fish rots from the head.

The United Kingdom is paying a ghastly price for the decades during which the State turned a blind eye to a wide spectrum of sexual offences committed by the elite of British society.

At least three forces became the instruments of amoral politicians and their spymasters for various nefarious purposes: the Metropolitan Police in London, the Sussex Constabulary, and, in Northern Ireland, the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC). Senior officers were asked to bend the rules and a turn blind eye to all sorts of wrongdoing. This brought forward the worst impulses lurking inside opportunists who were prepared to do the Establishment’s bidding. Many were rewarded with promotions and awards they might not have obtained in normal circumstances as a reward for their dishonesty.

A scheme to cover-up child sex abuse and ‘assassinations’ has slipped out of Britain’s archives. It was sent to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in 1989 by her defence secretary, Tom King. There are, undoubtedly, others like it. It affords us a powerful insight into how Britain worked then – and possibly – works now.

The corruption that infected the police spread to all ranks. The general malaise is now becoming apparent to the public: a cohort of officers exploited their status to rape and abuse women and children. And they did so for decades.

Chapter 1.

The public reaps what the government sows.

001.  A Licence to Rape.

A scandal has erupted in Britain involving alarming numbers of police officers who enjoyed free rein to rape and abuse women.

Sir Mark Rowley, Chief Constable of the Metropolitan police, told the Police and Crime Committee of the London Assembly at the end of January 2023, that two to three officers were likely to face charges each week for months yet to come. In 2022, he acknowledged that hundreds of Scotland Yard officers were effectively ‘criminals in uniform’ and deserved to be sacked.

The assaults took place over decades. As one victim put it on Channel 4 News recently, ‘it is not a few bad apples’ rather an entire ‘bad tree”.

Constable Wayne Couzens of the Metropolitan Police, who kidnapped, raped and strangled Sarah Everard on 3 March 2021, is but one of many police offenders.

David Carrick is another. He served in the Metropolitan Police for nearly twenty years. He had been reported for violent behaviour towards women on numerous occasions. Yet, he was promoted and provided with a firearm. He was not arrested until 2021. When the police burst in upon him, one of the first things he said to them was that he was a police officer, as if this offered him some form of immunity. In January 2023, he admitted forty-nine sex offences including twenty-four rapes against a dozen victims.

Mohamed Al Fayed, the billionaire owner of Harrods, died in 2023. After his death, it emerged he had committed at least 40 rapes and sexual assaults, between 1979 and 2013. Al Fayed used his security chief, John MacNamara, an ex-Met detective, to threaten Al Fayed’s rape victims. Al Fayed died in 2023 without facing any charges.

MacNamara also bribed Met officers for information and favours.

McNamara intervened in the Met’s investigation into Jill Dando’s murder. Dando was a BBC TV presenter. MacNamara paid a bent Met Police detective for confidential information about the BBC star’s death.

In July 2022, William Redwood of the Surrey Police, pleaded guilty to the possession and taking of illicit images of children and teenagers between 2016 and 2020. The victims, who were both male and female, were aged between 12 and 17. Redwood resigned from the force in December 2020 ahead of an internal misconduct hearing, after the images were found on his phone.

On 8 March 2023, PC Thomas Andrews was sentenced to 16 months and received a restraining order after shoving a woman to the ground. He was suspended from duty and now faces a misconduct hearing.

On 9 March 2023, Jack Addis, 63, from Perthshire, Scotland, and Jeremy Laxton, 62, from Grantham, Lincolnshire, went on trial. They were charged with conspiracy to distribute or show indecent images of children between January 2018 and July 2021. Both were ex-Met officers.

Their former colleague, Richard Watkinson, 49, was found dead in Princes Risborough, Buckinghamshire, on January 12, 2023, the day he was due to appear in court over alleged child sex offences.

The Crown prosecutor said: ‘Police found indecent images of children on a number of devices. The Metropolitan police investigation found a great number of category A images, still and moving, which could be best described at the high end of category A. Officers found a hard drive, and that is the centre of the conspiracy charge where all three defendants were bringing in material to be shared on to it.’

In December 2021 Denis Jaffer and Jamie Lewis of the Met’s Charing Cross police station were jailed for photographing the bodies of murdered sisters at a crime scene in 2020, and transmitting horrific messages about them on Whatsapp to 40 colleagues.

Also in March 2023, a West Midlands arms officer was arrested, bailed and suspended for filming himself having sex with women without their knowledge. He sent the footage to police colleagues.

Across in West Yorkshire, William Loyd-Hughes, who was stationed at Huddersfield Police Station, was charged with a terrorism offence after allegedly publishing images on social media in support of the Ulster Defence Association, a proscribed group, contrary to the Terrorism Act 2000. He also faces three charges under the Communications Act 2003 of sharing grossly offensive messages on Twitter.

Also in March, Matthew Shaw, a Derbyshire PCSO, was sentenced to 14 years. He videoed children believed to be as young as six in swimming pool changing rooms and a Center Parcs in Nottinghamshire. He admitted that he may have done it around 100 times. He spoke to seven girls aged between 11 and 15 from  while posing as both a teenage girl and boy, asking for and sending sexual images and videos on Snapchat. He incited one victim to perform sexual acts on a dog and attempted to incite others to perform acts involving their younger siblings. He was in the force for 15 years.

PC Lee Parker was in the West Yorkshire Police for 20 years. In January 2023, Manchester Magistrates’ Court heard how he went to Roxy’s Ballroom on a work night out in December 2021. Around 10.40 p.m., he entered a karaoke booth at the club and stood up with his ‘penis exposed’ in front of fellow clubbers. Later, he sexually assaulted two women. One of them was slapped on her bottom. He grabbed a second one by her head and pulled her face towards his and kissed her fully on the lips. Parker pleaded guilty to two charges of sexual assault and a charge of outraging public decency. District Judge Bernard Begley handed Parker a 32 weeks sentence, suspended for two years, saying ‘drink is no excuse for these kinds of offences’.

PC Liam Boshein of the Met was sentenced to 42 weeks in prison on 17 March 2023. He sent a pornographic picture of two men having sex with a woman’s decapitated body to a colleague. Portsmouth Crown Court also heard how Boshein transmitted a message to a trainee officer, saying the decapitation sex scene was ‘still not as bad as [another image of a] pregnant bird’ depicting a woman giving birth alongside an erect penis.

That same day Joy Hendricks rang James O’Brien’s LBC radio show in London. She was a black woman who had joined the police in 1989. Nothing reported in the news about the police thus far had surprised her. She explained that as ‘a black woman you have a target on your back’ from day one. Officers had sneaked into her bedroom and watched her change after a shower. After she joined the Riot police, she was asked by a white officer if she went out with white men and was asked to describe the type of underwear she wore. She was victimised on a daily basis. Complaints and pleas for help made to her superiors fell on deaf ears. Her colleagues gave her white face paint, sexually assaulted her, set her uniform alight and directed racist abuse at her. Officers called her ‘groid’, short for negroid, and also ‘bif’, short for ‘black ignorant fucker’. She was falsely accused of assaulting an officer who she believed was about to assault her with a pool cue. She punched him in self-defence. She retired with post traumatic stress disorder. She ultimately received £500,000 compensation for the damage she had suffered.

The Met paid former PC Sarah Locker £1,000,000 in 2000 after years of sexual and racial discrimination. ‘Most days it was the most gross abuse. You’d go in and they’d say “Did your husband fuck you last night? Are you wearing stockings? Come and sit on my cock”.’ She found pornography in her in-tray. On one occasion: ‘I was on the phone and there was a man kneeling under my desk simulating oral sex in front of the rest of the office.’

Another officer, Belinda Sinclair, won a total of £500,000 for sexual discrimination.

On 24 March 2023, PC Farnhan Ghadiali of the Central West Command Unit, was convicted of sexually assaulting a child in September 2019, at a party held in Buckhurst Hill, Essex.

In May 2023, another serving Met Police officer, PC Callum Utley, attached to the West Area Command Unit, was charged with rape.

Also in May 2023, a pair of Met officers were arrested on suspicion of kidnapping, beating and raping a woman they met at a nightclub.

During the remainder of 2023, and well into 2024, there were multiple additional criminal prosecutions. One related to Warren Arter, a Met detective, who drugged his wife Rebekah. She was then gang raped while unconscious. She was found dead in a blood-drenched hotel room two weeks before he took his own life in prison.

According to an analysis carried out by The Observer newspaper, one in 100 police officers faced criminal charges, including for sexual offences, in 2022 alone.

The Police Federation acts for officers who have been accused of disciplinary and criminal charges. They were asked deal with 1,387 claims in 2022. The federation represents around 140,000 serving and former officers in England and Wales.

In Northern Ireland (NI) twenty-six PSNI officers have been investigated for sectarian misconduct during the last five years.

Sir Mark Rowley, Chief Constable of the Metropolitan police, stated in April 2023 that there were 161 officers with convictions serving in his force, some of them for sexual violence.

Overall, the picture that is emerging is one of a cohort of men who feel that being a police officer affords them a licence to behave as they please.

002.  Undercover police officers fathered children.

The rotten tree has many branches. In the 1980s, the Metropolitan Police set up units which assigned undercover officers to infiltrate anti-nuclear protesters, animal rights campaigners and other activist organisations. Some of these officers entered relationships with members of the target campaign groups. A number of them fathered children. They deserted the mothers and children as soon as they were withdrawn from the field without a trace.

Some of the victims were awarded compensation in 2014 One of them, ‘Jacqui’, was an animal rights activist. She had a son with one of the undercover officers.

The child, now a 37-year-old man, received an ‘unreserved apology’ from Scotland Yard in 2020 for the ‘fundamental deceit’ he had suffered.

003.  Prince Andrew was not interviewed about Virginia Roberts by the Metropolitan police.

The Metropolitan Police failed to investigate Prince Andrew’s abuse of Virginia Roberts, in London when she was seventeen. Roberts was a victim of trafficking.

Some of the abuse took place at the London residence of Ghislaine Maxwell. She is now in prison in the US serving a twenty year sentence.

Jeffrey Epstein, the organiser of the vice ring which ensnared Roberts, apparently committed suicide in prison in New York in August 2019 at the Metropolitan Correctional Centre in New York. He was awaiting trial for sex trafficking.

004.  The Prime Minister’s private secretary was a prolific paedophile.

The long arm of the law rarely extends to senior politicians in Britain. Sir Peter Morrison MP was Margaret Thatcher’s private secretary. He was also a prolific child abuser.

Morrison died from a heart attack on 13 July 1995, aged 51. Three years later, Nick Davies, an investigative journalist with The Guardian, reported that Morrison had received a caution for cottaging with underage boys in public lavatories. He was never charged for any of his crimes. 

One of his more serious offences was the rape of a 14-year-old in 1982. The child was taken to Elm Guest House in London and escaped shortly after the assault. The crime was reported to Scotland Yard by the boy and his family within hours of his ordeal. He gave a statement and was examined by a doctor.  A few months later Scotland Yard contacted the boy’s father and told him that the man had been sent to prison for the assault and that the matter was closed. Nothing of the sort had happened.

The boy and his family did not realise precisely how important Morrison was at the time. When they did, they made enquiries about him and discovered they had been duped by Scotland Yard. Morrison had not been charged, let alone sent to prison.

In October 2012, Rod Richards, a former MP and ex-leader of the Welsh Conservatives, implicated Morrison in the abuse in Wales.  He maintained that between 1974 and 1990, approximately 650 children from forty children’s homes had been sexually, physically and emotionally abused. Morrison and another high-profile Conservative politician were implicated as regular visitors to the child care homes. One of the institutions he exploited was Bryn Estate care home in Wrexham, North Wales.

In July 2014, Thatcher’s former bodyguard, Barry Strevens, revealed he had told Thatcher that Morrison hosted sex parties at which under-age boys were abused. Strevens said that despite passing on the allegations to Thatcher, she later promoted Morrison to the position of deputy chairman of the Conservative party. Thatcher’s private secretary, Archie Hamilton, reportedly took notes of what was said at the encounter.

Norman Tebbit, a former Chairman of the Tory Party, has revealed that ‘rumours had got to my ears’ that Morrison was a paedophile more than a decade before the truth was exposed.

In 2002, Edwina Currie, the former Tory minister, published account in her diary reciting that he had been a ‘noted pederast’. She understood he regularly had sex with 16-year-old boys – whilst the legal age of consent at the time was 21.

Morrison might have become a cabinet minister had Thatcher not fallen from office in 1992.

The most senior officials in Whitehall knew about him too. On 4 November, 1986, Antony Duff, Director-General of MI5, 1985-88, wrote to Robert Armstrong, Cabinet Secretary, after allegations of child abuse had been made by separate sources against Morrison. At this juncture, Morrison was serving as Conservative MP for Chester and Deputy Chairman of the Conservative Party. Duff opined that Morrison was only a minor ‘security danger’. The spymaster felt the MP did not have access to valuable government secrets. By this time, he had served Minister of State for Trade and Industry, Minister of State for Employment, and Lord Commissioner of HM Treasury. One would be forgiven for thinking that with a resume like that, he would have had access to plenty of economic secrets. Nonetheless, Duff concluded: ‘At present stage … the risk of political embarrassment to the Government is rather greater than the security danger’. There was no consideration of the ongoing risk posed by Morrison to children.

The reference to the ‘risk of political embarrassment’ implies an assumption that Morrison was not going to be reported to the police. If two senior officials were aware of child abuse, the word ‘risk’ should not have entered the equation. It should have been taken for granted that a report would be furnished to the police automatically.

After the Morrison memo came to light in July of 2015, Armstrong (famed for his use of the phrase ‘being economical with the truth’), defended his inaction thus: ‘Clearly, I was aware of it … but I was not concerned with the personal aspect of it, whether he should or should not be pursued. That was something for the police to consider. My concern was implications of national security and international relations.’ [1]

Morrison was never reported to the police by Duff or anyone in MI5 either. Clearly, MI5 did not believe his denial of wrongdoing because they rated him as a risk. Had they believed he was innocent, he would not have been susceptible to blackmail and hence could not have been perceived as a ‘security danger’, of any significance. Morrison went on to become Thatcher’s private secretary and would receive a knighthood. He had been one of one of the first backbench MPs to support her bid for the leadership of the Tories in 1975.

Morrison’s successful upward career trajectory could not have been sustained without the sanction of MI5 who vet all high-level political appointments.

005.  The Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse ignored evidence of VIP sex abuse.

Parliament urged the establishment of an inquiry into VIP sex abuse and begot the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) in 2014. It issued a series of limp reports, the last of which was published in 2022. Despite the fact that the inquiry was established to inquire into VIP abuse of children, it ignored a mountain of evidence about these offences. There was no inquiry into the activities of Lord Louis Mountbatten and others of his ilk.

006.  Jimmy Savile is innocent – if you follow the logic of the British tabloids.

In July 2019 Carl Beech, a former NHS manager, was found guilty after a ten-week trial at Newcastle Crown Court of 12 counts of perverting the course of justice and one count of fraud over a £22,000 criminal compensation pay-out he received for sexual abuse he claimed he had suffered. He was sentenced to 18 years imprisonment. Beech’s deceit related to the existence of a fictitious VIP paedophile ring he had reported to the police. He alleged it had revolved around Westminster and involved Jimmy Savile.

The national newspapers and TV stations presented Beech’s conviction as vindication of the former British prime minister, Ted Heath, 1970-74, among others.

Beech claimed he was a survivor of an ‘establishment group’ which included politicians, military figures and spies. Absurdly, he claimed the group had kidnapped, raped, tortured and murdered boys in the 1970s and 1980s with impunity. This triggered an ill-fated £2million-pound Scotland Yard inquiry that ended without a single arrest being made.

There were multiple blatant indications that Beech was lying, yet they were ignored for years by the police while Beech received enormous coverage in the mainstream press.

The police have yet to explain why they took Beech seriously.

The police have not investigated the mysterious benefactor who gave Beech approximately £100,000 while he was spewing out his lies.

The police have not investigated how Beech was able to open bank accounts in false names and travel around Europe on false papers. He was about to take up residence in Scandinavia before he was finally arrested.

No one suggested that Beech’s conviction meant that Jimmy Savile was innocent of child abuse simply because he had been named by Beech as one of his alleged tormentors. This was so because there were many other credible independent witnesses against Savile. The British media, however, presented Beech’s conviction as a vindication of Heath although there were other credible witnesses who had suffered at his hands.

The case against Heath was made out by the Wiltshire Police. In August 2015 the force launched ‘Operation Conifer’ into allegations that Heath was a paedophile. In 2019 the force announced that grounds existed to suspect him of child abuse. As a matter of law, the force was not entitled to reach any conclusions about the potential guilt of Heath as he was dead and, hence, it did not. The furthest it could go was to state that if Heath were alive, he would have faced further questioning about the accusations levelled against him. Mindful of this, the force revealed that Heath would have faced questions under criminal caution relating to:

• 1 incident of rape of a male 16;
• 3 incidents of indecent assault on a male under 16;
• 4 indecent assaults on a male under 14;
• 2 indecent assaults on a male over 16.

The investigation spanned the period 1956-92. None of these incidents took place while Heath was PM, 1970-74.

Many of the police officers involved in the Carl Beech fiasco were promoted.

Why?

The combination of the Beech debacle and the apathy of the IICSA ended the public’s interest and concern about historical VIP sex abuse of children.

007.  The Tories, the masters of the sex crime cover-up.

Heath was a sexual blackmailer.

On his way up the greasy pole, he served as Tory chief whip, 1956-59. This was when he began to engage in sexual blackmail. Most Tory whips were blackmailers – it was simply part of the job. Heath brought a professionalism to the task by assembling what became known as the Dirt Book, an encyclopaedia of embarrassing information about his colleagues, designed to stop them stepping out of line. It was exploited during the Suez Crisis to stem dissension in the Tory ranks.

When the Labour Party took over, Edward Short (later Deputy Leader of the Labour Party) became the new Chief Whip. He was repelled by the ‘dirty book’ and discontinued the practice.

Meanwhile, William Whitelaw, a future deputy prime minister, stepped into the post of Chief Whip for the Tory opposition. He unashamedly confessed that he continued the practice to the BBC in 1995: ‘”The Dirt Book” is just a little book where you write down various things you know or hear about people that may or may not be true. I think you could make a very good guess what sorts of things it contains.’

We know exactly what it contained: one of Whitelaw’s successors, Tim Fortescue MP, who occupied the post of whip, 1970-73, when Heath was prime minister, made it abundantly clear on camera to the BBC: ‘Anyone with any sense, who was in trouble, would come to the whips and tell them the truth, and say, ‘Now I’m in a jam. Can you help?’ It might be debt, it might be …  a scandal involving small boys, or any kind of scandal in which …  a member seemed likely to be mixed up. They’d come and ask if we could help, and if we could, we did”.

Fortescue’s reference to ‘small boys’ implies that blackmail material was gathered about MPs who were having sex with boys who were probably a lot younger than 21, the then legal age of consent. He also confessed that ‘scandalous stories’ were of great assistance to whips. ‘When you are trying to persuade a member to vote the way he didn’t want to vote on a controversial issue – which is part of your job – it is possible to suggest that perhaps it would not be in his interest if people knew something or other – very mildly’.

008.  The 2020 Westminster ‘Dirty Dossier’.

A modern equivalent of the Westminster Dirt Book emerged in 2020, the so-called Westminster Dirty Dossier.

It was a computer generated spreadsheet which contained the names of forty Tory MPs, including six serving Cabinet ministers. They were accused of all sorts of misbehaviour.

Katie Perrior, who served Theresa May’s Head of Communications, stated that the type of  information in it was ‘deployed by whips to enforce party discipline’.

One veteran Tory backbencher was accused of being ‘perpetually intoxicated and very inappropriate with women’. 

A prominent female MP was described as having had extramarital sex with young male researchers. 

Two MPs impregnated their mistresses.

Other MPs were noted to have visited prostitutes.

A male MP asked his male researcher to clean his kitchen in his underwear following a boozy night at the House of Commons.

Perhaps the most salacious entry was about an MP who appeared in a video with ‘three males urinating on him’.

009.  A history of police criminality, brothel keeping and bribery.

The intelligence services often avail of the services provided by the underworld. When plain old-fashioned corruption is added to this mix, the result can be calamitous. This was certainly the case in London in the 1950s, 60s 70s and possibly well into the 1980s (if not till the present day), where the pimps and spooks found mutual ground.

John Cornwell, who worked for MI5, and wrote novels as ‘John Le Carre’, described to his biographer how he once took a foreign delegation to a house of ill repute during their visit to London in the 1950s. This was undertaken as part of his official duties.

In the 1960s and 70s, Frank Mifsud was one of the most successful pimps in London. He was a former Maltese police officer. He had many Metropolitan police officers on his payroll, all of whom turned a blind eye to his empire of sleaze. Meanwhile, his partner, Bernie Silver, murdered at least six of the women working for them.

Silver helped British intelligence establish brothels in NI in 1970. When Silver was subsequently put on trial for the murder of a London gangster, Thomas ‘Scarface’ Smithson, Chief Superintendent Kenneth Etheridge, the deputy head of Scotland Yard’s Fraud Squad, gave evidence on his behalf. He explained how Silver had assisted in the enquiry into the death of three soldiers in Belfast. What Etheridge did not spell out was that the source of the information that assisted the enquiry was a prostitute who had wheedled information from one of the customers of a brothel Silver had set up in Belfast.

010.  The British police in the colonies.

Sir Arthur Young, the Commissioner of Police of the City of London, was sent to Kenya in the 1950s to oversee police operations in the country. He was so repulsed by what he saw, he returned home.

The British campaign against the Mau-Mau in Kenya in the 1950s was merciless. In 1953, Gen. George Erskine, commander-in-chief of British armed forces in Kenya, reported to the Secretary of State for War, Anthony Head, that in the early days there had been a ‘great deal of indiscriminate shooting by the Army and Police’ and he was ‘quite certain’ that prisoners had been: 

Beaten to extract information. It is a short step from beating to torture, and I am now sure, although it has taken me some time to realise it, that torture was a feature of many police posts. The method of deployment of the Army in the early days in small detachments working closely with the police … had evil results. … I very much hope it will not be necessary for [Her Majesty’s government] to send out an independent enquiry. If they did so they would have to investigate everything from the beginning of the Emergency and I think the revelation would be shattering.

Men were whipped, clubbed, subjected to electric shocks, mauled by dogs and chained to vehicles before being dragged around. Some were castrated. The same instruments used to crush testicles were used to remove fingers. It was far from uncommon for men to be beaten to death. Women were sexually violated with bottles, rodents and hot eggs.

This all took place against a background of curfews, intern­ment and capital punishment. Over 1,200 Kenyans died dangling at the end of a noose.

What were these ‘evil results’, the revelation of which would have been ‘shattering’? In Cruel Britannia, A Secret History of Torture, author Ian Cobain summarises some of the atrocities in Kenya:

One of the torture victims was Hussein Onyango Obama who had served with the British army during the Second World War in Burma. When released after six months in detention, he was emaciated, suffering from a lice infestation of his hair and had difficulty walking. He died in 1979. His wife informed journalists that he had told her that the British had ‘sometimes squeezed [his] testicles with parallel metallic rods’. They had also ‘pierced his nails and buttocks with a sharp pin, with his hands and legs tied together with his face facing down’. Hussein Onyango Obama was the grandfather of Barak Obama.

A British officer, quoted by David Anderson in ‘Histories of the Hanged’, revealed just how brutal the campaign became. He described how a police officer was interviewing three suspects:

… one of them, a tall coal-black bastard, kept grinning at me, real insolent. I slapped him hard, but he kept on grinning at me, so I kicked him in the balls as hard as I could … when he finally got up on his feet he grinned at me again and I snapped. I really did. I stuck my revolver right in his grinning mouth … and I pulled the trigger. His brains went all over the side of the police station. The other two [suspects] were standing there looking blank … so I shot them both … when the sub-inspector drove up, I told him the [suspects] tried to escape. He didn’t believe me but all he said was ‘bury them and see the wall is cleaned up’.

011.  Toleration of child rape.

The culture of brutality, blackmail and criminality among Britain’s politicians and police is deep rooted, especially in London and Belfast where their depravity extended to the toleration of VIP sex abuse of children and underage teenagers. As noted earlier, a blind eye was turned by the police to the abuse perpetrated by people like Sir Peter Morrison MP. There were others who benefited similarly such as Sir Cyril Smith MP and an array of celebrities including Jimmy Savile. The blind eye turned to Prince Andrew’s abuse of the seventeen year old Virginia Roberts, is simply a more recent example of this tradition.

Another example is that of the Anglo-Irish vice ring which abused children on both sides of the Irish Sea. Lord Louis Mountbatten and Sir Anthony Blunt were members of it. Many of the victims were procured from care homes. Some were as young as eight years of age. Since the police never broke it up, shades of it may still exist in one form or another.

The UK’s intelligence services knew full well what was afoot but did not intervene either.

012.  Child Abuse now: the provision of illicit drugs to children and faux counselling services.

In the past, paedophile networks infiltrated schools, religious orders, scouting organisations, sporting groups (especially swimming bodies) and local authorities which ran care homes. Robust safeguards have been put in place to deter abusers. The modern parent is more aware of the threat posed by paedophiles and therefore more alert. Nonetheless, paedophilia is still rampant in society. The modern offender exploits minors who are addicted to drugs. In some cases, the paedophile is the one who introduces the minor to illicit substances to create a financial dependency. Once addicted, sexual favours are extorted for drugs or the money to pay for them, or to discharge drug loans to vicious criminals.

Another ruse is to set up counselling service for drug addicts. Eric Witchell, a former Franciscan monk who was convicted for child abuse in the 1980s, presently resides in London. He attempted to set up such a service in the last two years. As a young man, Witchell was part of the vice ring which swirled around Kincora Boys’ Home and Williamson House in Belfast. Witchell ran Williamson House from where children were trafficked to VIPs. The Metropolitan police do not monitor Witchell.[2]

Drugs have never been more prevalent in society than they are now. Drug addicts are not credible witnesses, have poor recall and many die from overdoses. 4,561 addicts died in 2020 in England and Wales. While no figures are available which indicate how many of these had been abused while underage, it stands to reason that a proportion of them must have been.

013.  The abduction of child refugees.

There are open slave markets in Libya where children can be bought and exploited for sexual gratification as well as unpaid labour.

Children are being abducted in Africa, the Middle East and Europe. Albania is a severe problem.

Many of these victims will not survive to adulthood, either due to sexual injuries inflicted by adult perpetrators, murder or suicide.

Not all children who make it to Europe from Africa and the Middle East are guaranteed protection from abusers.

Sadly, not even Britain – the nation that led the abolition of slavery – is a safe haven for these children.

In January 2023 it emerged that 200 asylum-seeking children who had been placed in hotels run by the Home Office, had disappeared. Some, but not all, were traced.

On Monday 23 January 2023, Simon Murray, a minister at the Home Office, told the House of Lords, that children had gone missing from care. They included one girl and at least thirteen children under the age of 16.

The revelations came after the Observer newspaper reported that a whistle-blower from a hotel retained by the Home Office in Brighton had claimed that some children had been abducted off the street outside the facility and bundled into cars.

Elsewhere, a whistle-blower claimed to have witnessed children he believed were being trafficked from another hotel run by the Home Office, in Hythe, Kent, estimating that 10% of its young people disappeared each week.

The Sussex police disclosed that they had arrested two men on suspicion of human trafficking after children staying in a hotel were seen getting into their car.

No doubt, similar abductions are taking place across Europe.

Murray told the Commons that: ‘The Home Office have no power to detain unaccompanied asylum-seeking children in these hotels and we do know that some of them go missing. Many of them that go missing are subsequently traced.’

Philip Ishola, the Chief Executive of the anti-child trafficking organisation, Love146, had warned that it was unacceptable to place unaccompanied children in hotels. He told the Guardian that he had provided the warning ‘more than a year ago and it was obvious then that there were serious concerns about the safety of young people in these hotels. Since then, the Home Office has been warned, repeatedly, that children are going missing, potentially to be trafficked and exploited, yet these concerns have been ignored.’

Since the Home Office began housing asylum seekers in hotels in Brighton and Hove in July 2021, 137 unaccompanied children have been reported missing. Of these, 60 have been located and 76 cases remain under investigation.

It emerged in October 2022 that the hotels being used to house unaccompanied children were using staff who had not been checked by the Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS), as is required by government rules. Staff had access to master keys while young refugees stayed in the building.

In a further development, the children’s commissioner, Rachel de Souza, wrote to Suella Braverman, the home secretary, to ask for reassurance that all protocol for missing children were being followed:

I am deeply concerned by the risks facing unaccompanied asylum-seeking children placed in hotels from those determined to exploit them,’ she said. ‘We must treat them as the vulnerable children they are and support them properly from the moment they set foot on our shores. I have been seeking assurances that appropriate care and advocacy is made available to these young people from the point of arrival, including through visits to these hotels and intake units in Kent to understand children’s experiences. We cannot expect children who have faced the worst trauma to be left to look after themselves as independents – they should be given the care and protection of the state from day one, until they turn 18.

Chapter 2. Murder and Child Sexual Abuse

014. A blueprint for the cover-up of child rape and ‘assassinations’.

A ‘SECRET’ report dated 12 December 1989, has emerged from Britain’s National archives. It was written by Tom King, a Conservative MP, who served as Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, 1985-89, and as Defence Secretary, 1989-92. He is still alive. It reveals that Margaret Thatcher was a party to the cover-up of {i} child abuse and {ii} smear campaigns perpetrated against politicians elected to Westminster, Stormont (in Northern Ireland) and Dail Eireann (in the Republic of Ireland) {iii} ‘assassinations’ in Ireland.

King’s ‘SECRET’ 1989 report refers specifically to the child sex abuse scandal involving Kincora Boys’ Home in Belfast.

It also mentions ‘assassinations’ which took place during the 1970s.  For decades the Northern Ireland Office (NIO) has denied that MI5, MI6, and military intelligence ran a sectarian assassination campaign in collusion with Loyalist terrorist groups in Ireland. This lie has been exposed repeatedly in recent years, inter alia, by the fact the British government has handed over millions in compensation to the families of the victims of collusive murder. The survivors and relatives of the Miami Showband are perhaps the most high-profile of those compensated thus far. Members of the Miami showband were murdered in 1976 by a UVF gang directed by Captain Robert Nairac, an undercover British soldier. The British media has largely failed to report these settlements.

015.  The wisdom of the former Police Ombudsman.

The ghost of King’s 1989 report still haunts the House of Commons. Rishi Sunak’s government is pressing ahead with the implementation of the Northern Ireland Troubles (Legacy and Reconciliation) Bill. If enacted, it will thwart the prosecution of many of the offences committed during the Troubles. The provisions are wide-ranging and include those committed by the police, army, the intelligence services and their respective agents in the UVF, UDA and Red Hand Commando.

During a debate in the House of Lords on Wednesday, 23 November 2022, Baroness O’Loan, the former NI Police Ombudsman, said:

Our history is very complex. Somehow, a situation evolved in which the police, the Army and MI5, having successfully infiltrated terrorist organisations, lost their way. There grew a time when many of the agents of the state currently under investigation were allowed to carry on their involvement in terrorism to preserve them as agents. People died because of this, and it should not have happened.

A compelling argument can be made that O’Loan understated the case. The reality is that far from having lost its way, the state purposefully chose to confront Republican terrorists with a programme hinged on collusive murder. The architect of this policy was Brigadier (later General Sir) Frank Kitson a counterinsurgency expert who had served in Kenya, Malaya, Oman and Cyprus before arriving in Ireland in 1970.[3] (The foregoing is not a criticism of O’Loan who was not supplied with the true files on State-Loyalist collusion by the NIO, MoD and Home Office. O’Loan is outstanding figure possessed of immense commitment, courage and integrity.)

King’s ‘SECRET’ 1989 report affords an insight into a sordid political manoeuvre designed to conceal the truth about a whistle-blower called Colin Wallace. Wallace knew about the Kincora Boys’ Home scandal and other crimes. Over time it has emerged that MI5 (attached to the Home Office), MI6 (attached to the Foreign Office) and the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) were involved in the scandal.

016. The kidnap and dismemberment of a 10-year old boy, Brian McDermott, and other crimes.

King sent his ‘SECRET’ report to Thatcher outlining how a cover-up could be implemented. King’s proposals were clearly accepted by Thatcher as they were deployed in full.

The rest of this book will focus on the deeds King’s ‘SECRET’ plan set out to conceal. They include:

{i} the abduction, murder and dismemberment of Brian McDermott, a ten-year-old boy in Belfast by chief suspect, Alan Campbell (a member of the Kincora child rape network, an associate of the leadership of the DUP, and one time Secretary to the DUP);

{ii} the exploitation of paedophile networks by the NIO, MI6 and MI5 including Kincora Boys’ Home, Williamson House, Bawnmore and Portora Royal College;

{iii} collusive murder on the part of the British State with the UVF, Red Hand Commando and UDA;

{iv} bombing atrocities;

{v} smear campaigns;

{vi} the manipulation of the media;

{vi} the forgery of witness statements;

{vii} police corruption;

{viii} perjury;

{ix} illegal gunrunning;

{x} malfeasance in public office; and,

{xi} the ongoing deception of the British parliament, the House of Commons.

016A. The boy who disappeared from Ormeau Park on Sunday, 2 September, 1973.

On Sunday 2 September 1973,  ten-year-old Brian Douglas McDermott left his home at Well Street, South Belfast, to go and play in nearby Ormeau Park with some friends. He went there at 1 p.m. The park was a ten minute walk away. His parents told him to be home by 2:30 p.m. for his Sunday lunch. He was due to return to school the following Tuesday.

He was the youngest of five children (three boys and two girls). He was described as quiet, timid, and ‘very, very deep’. He was bullied quite a lot at school.

Some of his friends were playing in the park. One of them was walking his dog. He described Brian as being his normal, happy self when he bumped into him. An hour later, he was seated on a swing. A friend asked him if he wanted to play. He seemed unhappy, shook his head and walked off through a gap in a wire fence towards an area of shrubs and trees.

He was never seen again.

When he failed to return home, his father, Edward, alerted the RUC.

The RUC searched the area close to his home, including derelict buildings.

Six days later, a witness reported having seen what might have been a body in the nearby River. A search led to the discovery of a hessian bag with the charred remains of his body inside it close to the Annandale embankment. Both of his legs were missing, as well as one of his arms. The body was so badly burned that fingerprints from the hand of the remaining arm had to be used to identify the body. The fingerprints matched those on his school books and confirmed that the child was young McDermott.

The authorities lowered the waters to the river’s tidal weir in a search for his missing limbs, but to no avail.

016B. Alan Campbell, chief suspect in the McDermott murder case.

The chief suspect in the McDermott murder case was Preacher Alan Campbell. The RUC was about to arrest him but was ordered to stand down.

Campbell was never arrested. It does not appear he was ever questioned, even informally by the police.

Campbell was perceived by many as an MI5 asset. During his life, leading journalists such as Henry McDonald, referred to Campbell in print as the ‘Demon Preacher’, and asserted he was a British Intelligence asset.

Campbell certainly knew all about the paedophile network of which Kincora Boys’ Home was a part. A key figure in the network, William McGrath, was an MI5 agent, as was the terrorist John McKeague. Another agent was Joseph Mains, the Warden of Kincora. Campbell was a friend to all of them.

Instead of pursuing Campbell, an attempt was made to frame one of his brothers who was coerced by the RUC into making a confession in 1976. He later retracted it.

017.  Colin Wallace, the man who knew too much.

Dirty tricks were deployed in 1975 to oust Colin Wallace from the British Army’s HQ at Thiepval barracks, Lisburn, (HQNI). He had attempted to draw the media’s attention to a number of issues including the activities of William McGrath, the paedophile housefather at Kincora Boys’ Home. McGrath was a prolific and brutal child rapist.

Wallace was also deeply concerned about the abduction and murder of Brian McDermott.

Overtly, Wallace was a public relations officer serving with the British Army, covertly he worked for the Army’s psychological operations unit (PSYOPS). The PSYOPS arm was known as Information Policy Unit (IPU). It was based at HQNI.

Peter Broderick, the former Head of the Army Information Services in NI, oversaw the Army’s ‘overt’ PR. He was aware that Wallace had a covert role.

On 13 May 1985, Broderick, furnished the British police with a statement saying that Wallace ‘had tremendous leeway and freedom and was not accountable to him’ for the PSYOPS in which he engaged.

Colonel Geoffrey Hutton of the Royal Artillery and others directed the work of the IPU during the 1970s.

018.  Dublin and Monaghan bombings.

As an important figure in the murky world of intelligence, Wallace was privy to insider gossip about a multitude of state sponsored crimes.

He learned of the collusion between the State and Loyalist paramilitaries.  Dark whispers passed along the corridors of the intelligence community at HQNI about collusion after the UVF’s bombing of Dublin and Monaghan in May 1974. 33 people perished during those attacks.

Wallace learnt the names of the UVF bombers shortly after the twin atrocity.

Many years later he would appear on a documentary made by ITV, The Hidden Hand – the Forgotten Massacre documentary. It was broadcast on 6 July 1993, Wallace said:

The difficulty I think with the Dublin bombings is that there was really no follow-up, no major offensive, no determination to find out whether these people had been responsible or not. And it was the lack of interest I think that concerned us, that it was a departure from normal procedure because the outrageous nature of the bombing would have justified a greater interest and that just didn’t seem to be present at that time.

NARRATOR: Wallace says he knew, through intelligence briefings, the names of the bomb suspects by September of 1974. One year later, he wrote to a former colleague, naming eight of them including Mulholland, Hanna and McConnell.

The programme makers submitted Wallace’s letter to a leading forensic analyst. His analysis revealed that it was consistent with having been produced in the mid-1970s. The letter went on

to make an even more startling claim. He writes that some of the Dublin suspects ‘were working closely with INT – intelligence – at that time.

There is more evidence of MI5’s involvement in the Dublin and Monaghan bombings which will be examined in a later section.

019.  Knowledge of child abuse.

MI5 and MI6 oversaw the repugnant ‘honey trap’ operation that exploited the residents of Kincora Boys’ Home.

British military intelligence was not involved – certainly not those who worked with Colin Wallace at HQNI.

Some of the Kincora residents were used as bait to ensnare Loyalist politicians and paramilitaries who were paedophiles.

British military intelligence knew that abuse was taking place and the identity of a key member of the vice ring. He was William McGrath, a leading Orangeman and friend of Ian Paisley. Acting on orders from his military superiors, Wallace tried to interest the media in the grotesque truth about McGrath.

McGrath was a friend of John McKeague, the leader of the Red Hand Commando (RHC). McKeague was a serial killing sadist and paedophile. One of McKeague’s victims has revealed that McKeague was a terrifying and violent rapist. MI5 was able to blackmail McKeague on account of his abuse of the boys at Kincora. In turn, McKeague lured other paedophiles into bedrooms which were bugged by MI5, including one man who later became a DUP Westminster MP. The bait was a boy from Kincora.

The Army also knew a lot about Joseph Mains, the warden of Kincora who was also close to McKeague.

020.  The victims.

Richard Kerr was placed in Williamstown House where he was abused at the age of eight. Kerr was sent to Kincora at the age of 14, in 1975. He was the youngest boy at the home.

He was subjected to abuse by a string of men. While he was at Kincora, he was spirited out of Ireland to Manchester, London and Venice, among other destinations.

The photograph shown here is of Kerr in Venice. According to the State, Kerr was in Belfast at the time of this photograph. On its own, the picture makes a nonsense of all of the enquiries that have taken place into Kincora, namely Terry (1982), Hughes (1984) and Hart (2017) and Northern Ireland Police Ombudsman (2022).

Many of the children who were raped became drug or alcohol addicts. A number committed suicide. Most, if not all, yearn for one thing: recognition that they were fed into a meat grinder by the State for its own nefarious purposes and an apology to enable them to heal.

Instead, they are vilified as liars and fantasists.

As long as their experience is denied, they will suffer psychological torment. Quite a few committed suicide. Others have died prematurely from stress and ill health. Few have made a success of their lives.

It is now too late to see justice done for Clint Massey. He died in February 2018. Massey recalled a lot of ‘suits’ arriving at Kincora, often in the evening. ‘In those days, there were loads of people over from London. I have always assumed they were senior figures from Whitehall. I certainly heard English accents,’ he once revealed. Mike Nesbitt, the then leader of the Ulster Unionist Party, described how Massey had had ‘to live his entire adult life carrying the burden of abuse which was forced upon him through no fault of his own, by those who were charged with protecting him. His story is one of ultimate failure by the State and those acting on the State’s behalf. Yet Clint not only waived his right to anonymity in his efforts to secure justice for fellow survivors, he spoke publicly without an ounce of self-pity’.

James Miller [4], has described how Joe Mains, the Warden of Kincora, trafficked him and other residents to a hotel in Bangor. He had to wait in the van outside the hotel while, one after another of the boys returned to it. He recalls they were sobbing after the ordeal they had suffered inside the building. On this occasion, Miller was lucky not to be sent inside. His evidence was presented to the Historical Institutional Abuse inquiry (HIA), chaired by Judge Anthony Hart, in 2016.  No one doubted he was telling the truth, nor challenged his credibility. Hence, Miller presented a serious problem for Hart as he undermined the narrative Hart had latched onto at an early stage i.e. that the abuse at Kincora went no further than the home itself. Since there was no way to undermine Miller’s credibility, Hart’s solution was to simply to ignore him.[5]

021.  Eric Witchell, a wolf in a monk’s habit.

Eric Witchell was a key figure in the NI vice ring. He ran Williamson House. He is currently living in London, safe in the knowledge that what he and associates did in Belfast, London, Manchester and Liverpool, will be ignored by the UK police.

In 2023, Witchell defamed Richard Kerr by claiming that he was a liar, a slur propagated by the Hart Report. Witchell, a convicted paedophile, and his ilk are the only people who now dare cite the Hart Report as a persuasive authority. Ironically, they, more than any other group in society, know that it is a travesty of the truth.

Witchell, who hailed from England, was born in 1948. He became a Franciscan at the age of 19. Before his appointment to Williamson House, he had been a housefather in an English boy’s school attached to the Franciscans. He became the Officer-in-Charge of Williamson House in May of 1975, at the age of 27. The small boys Witchell abused were abandoned, vulnerable and powerless waifs. A select few were later sent to Kincora where they were used as bait in a series of MI5 ‘honey trap’ blackmail operations.

The Williamson House scandal is worse than the outrage at Kincora insofar as younger children were abused at it. Witchell supplied very young children to VIPs including Enoch Powell MP.

The Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) which was set up to investigate allegations of child abuse by VIPs including Westminster MPs, ignored Witchell although he was living in London where it sat.

Witchell is one of the most important living witnesses to the existence of a VIP vice ring.

Witchell did not appear before the Hart Inquiry either.

Witchell secured the post at Williamson House despite the fact his tutor at the National Children’s Home Training College in England had advised the appointment panel of Belfast’s Welfare Department that at ‘this stage I would have some doubt in commending him to be the Officer- in-Charge… I would commend him to you for employment, but I would not commend him to you for employment as Officer-in-Charge’.

It was fortuitous for the vice ring that Witchell secured the post because he was the vilest sort of paedophile, someone who was prepared to farm out the children in his care to an array of child molesters. This suited MI5 because it enabled them to manufacture blackmail opportunities and ensnare Loyalist politicians, paramilitaries and Orangemen in their clutches.

After Witchell took over the home, he moved into an apartment in the attic. It had a TV, sofa, sleeping quarters and a drinks cabinet. This was where he abused the young boys. He would usher his chosen victim upstairs and lock the door behind them. Physically, he was tall, thin and imposing. He wore glasses and had black longish hair. He was an exceptionally cruel and violent man with an insatiable sexual appetite. His preference was for prepubescent boys but he assaulted teenagers too. His taste ranged from masturbation to anal rape.

To a child, anal rape is indistinguishable from torture, especially where damage is occasioned to internal organs. Oral rape can inflict profound psychological damage. At least three of Witchell’s victims would never recover from the assaults he and his associates meted out to them. They committed suicide. Another two attempted to kill themselves.

022.  Pressure for the truth.

A number of people attempted to stop the abuse at Kincora during the 1960s and 1970s. They ranged from associates of William McGrath, members of Ian Paisley’s church such as Valerie Shaw, to military personnel working at HQNI. One of the most determined was Colin Wallace.

Wallace paid a high price for trying to do the right thing. In 1975, he was unfairly dismissed from both his overt and covert positions at HQNI. This was done at the behest of senior MI5 officers, including the Director-General of MI5, Sir Michael Hanley. As part of the conspiracy against him, MI5 denied that he had ever had been assigned a covert PSYOPS role and hence had not been entitled to provide classified documents to journalists. Later, his reputation was destroyed after he was sent to prison for six years for a crime he did not commit. Dirty tricks and perjury were used to secure his conviction.

In 1989, a series of files emerged at the MoD in London which confirmed that Wallace had been telling the truth about his covert duties. This presented a problem for Thatcher and others who had misled Parliament about his role in NI. The politicians could claim they had acted in good faith while making their pronouncements. Silence and inaction, however, would now amount to an endorsement of the fiction they had promoted. Retractions, corrections and some sort of a probe were becoming unavoidable.

The key passage in the Tom King’s 1989 report addressed how he felt it was going to ‘be important to restrict’ the ‘terms of reference’ of the forthcoming inquiry’ into the handling of the case ‘so that [the investigator] could avoid getting drawn into [the] Kincora [child rape scandal], “Clockwork Orange” [6] [and] alleged assassinations, etc’. (Clockwork Orange will be addressed in detail later in this book. It involved, inter alia, smear campaigns against politicians on both sides of the Irish Sea.)

023.  Implications for the Patrick Finucane case.

The British state continues to resist a judicial enquiry into the murder of Pat Finucane, a Belfast lawyer killed in February 1989.

In February 2019, the Supreme Court in London expressed the opinion that an adequate investigation had not taken place. It stopped short of directing a public inquiry, ruling it was a matter for the government.

The Finucane assassination was perpetrated by UDA assassins controlled by the RUC’s special branch and, above them, MI5. The killers included Ken Barrett and William Stobie.[7] Peter Cory, the retired Canadian judge who carried out an enquiry into Finucane’s murder, ascertained that it had been discussed at Cabinet level.

The fact that Thatcher was prepared to ignore possible evidence about the ‘assassinations’ King alluded to in his 1989 report, adds to the suspicion that she had foreknowledge of the Finucane murder; worse still, she was the ‘Cabinet level’ figure who sanctioned the shooting. If this sounds extreme, it is open to 10 Downing Street to convene the judicial enquiry the Supreme Court has urged it to hold and thereby clarify the matter once and for all.

024.  Kompromat and blackmail.

The British State has denied for decades that it was involved in the collection of what Soviet intelligence officers used to call ‘kompromat’, i.e., damaging material, often of a sexual nature.

There is a difference between kompromat and blackmail. Blackmail involves a threat to release damaging information unless a victim agrees to obey the demands of a blackmailer. In the case of ‘kompromat’, the information is released to undermine or destroy the target, not withheld to get him or her to obey a command. Hence, a typical target might be photographed in a compromising situation, yet not learn that he had been placed under surveillance until a picture of him is circulated to his family, employer, or to the media, without warning or demand.

025.  Cancerous bombs and explosive underwear.

While MI5 and MI6 were collecting ‘kompromat’ about politicians, Wallace was engaged in IPU-run PSYOPS designed to undermine and unnerve the IRA. One notable success was to deter female supporters of the IRA from transporting explosives for the organisation. Wallace put a story into circulation that the static from the typical female pair of nylon knickers generated sufficient electricity to cause the bomb materials being transported to explode. As a result, there was a great reluctance to move explosives.[8]

In reality, the prospect of an explosion being caused by static electricity was minimal.

Similarly, the PSYOPS unit put it about that the use of nitro benzene in home-made explosives was potentially carcinogenic.  This claim is supported by the United States Environmental Protection Agency who considered nitro benzene a likely human carcinogen. See “Nitrobenzene CASRN 98-95-3 – IRIS – US EPA, ORD”. 

026.  From Russia with rocket launchers.

The IPU was the military’s PSYOPS wing. It worked with three civilian services: MI5 (attached to the Home Office), MI6 (attached to the Foreign Office) and the Information Research Department, or IRD, (also attached to the Foreign Office) from time to time.

The top IRD official in NI was a man called Hugh Mooney. Mooney and his colleagues manufactured links between the IRA and the KGB. One story included an ingeniously crafted yarn that Soviet submarines were supplying guns to the IRA. A photograph taken between Scandinavia and Scotland was published in the British press with a claim it had been shot off the Donegal coast during an operation to arm the IRA. Wallace helped plant the story on the front page of the News of the World.

IRD-inspired newspaper reports also claimed that Arab terror groups such as Black September, were arming the IRA.

027. The Supreme Court judge with a high regard for Colin Wallace.

Mr Justice Henry Barron was asked by the Irish government to produce a report on the Dublin and Monaghan Bombings of 1974. He interviewed Wallace about them and formed a favourable opinion of him: 

Colin Wallace is an important source of information about the workings of the intelligence community in Northern Ireland during the period preceding and following the bombings in Dublin and Monaghan on 17 May 1974. His work for the Information Policy unit [IPU] gave him access to information denied to all but a few. In addition, his service as a UDR captain, together with the fact that he is a native of Northern Ireland, gave him a depth and breadth of understanding which many of his colleagues lacked. This is confirmed by the then Chief Information Officer who in giving evidence to the Civil Service Appeals Board on Wallace’s behalf, said:

He also had knowledge of the Irish situation which was totally unique in the Headquarters and surpassed that even of most of the Intelligence Branch. As time progressed, he was not only the main briefer of the press, but also the advisor on Irish matters to the whole Headquarters and – because of his personal talents – contributed much creative thought to the Information Policy Unit. In order to do his job he had constant and free access to information of high classification and extreme sensitivity.

Barron added:

In person, Wallace comes across as intelligent, self-assured, and possessed of a quiet yet unwavering moral conviction. Though he has reasons enough to be bitter – the abrupt and unjust ending of a promising career in Northern Ireland, five years spent in prison on a conviction which has since been quashed – he displays no outward signs of resentment towards individuals or institutions. He remains intensely loyal to his country and to the Army: insofar as he has a quarrel, it is with individuals rather than the institutions concerned. He says he believes that much of the propaganda work undertaken by Information Policy was justifiable in the interests of defeating subversives and promoting a political solution to the Troubles.

When speaking of matters directly within his own experience, the Inquiry believes him to be a highly knowledgeable witness. His analyses and opinions, though derived partly from personal knowledge and partly from information gleaned since his time in Northern Ireland, should also be treated with seriousness and respect.

Chapter 3.

Vilification.

028. Clockwork Orange

Tom King referred to ‘Clockwork Orange’ in his 1989 report to Thatcher. What was it?

At the end of 1973, Operation Clockwork Orange came into existence. This happened shortly after Denis Payne, a senior MI5 officer became the overarching spymaster of Northern Ireland, the Director and Co-ordinator of Intelligence (DCI) of NI.[9]

According to Wallace, Clockwork Orange:

was originally conceived at the end of 1973, or early in 1974, during a meeting at the Northern Ireland Office attended by Denis Payne, a senior member of MI5 who had recently become the Director and Co-ordinator of Intelligence in the Province. I recall the occasion because I had never met Denis Payne prior to that, and think I only saw him again at one subsequent meeting. I do not think he was the originator of the idea – he only contributed to the discussion about how it would be managed. Contrary to what the MoD has asserted, ‘Clockwork Orange’ was not a single activity. It was an umbrella title for an open-ended project aimed at using Psy Ops more strategically to address major ongoing issues such as racketeering, sectarian assassinations, arms trafficking etc. The so-called ‘IRA defector’ story was one of the early ploys approved for implementation.

Numerous files were opened. Hence, Clockwork Orange 1, 2, 3 and 4 came into existence.

The civilian agencies developed operations directed against mainstream politicians. Wallace always felt the focus should have been exclusively on the paramilitaries.

029. The Mysterious John Shaw.

Hugh Mooney left NI at the end of 1974. After that, a man called ‘David’ arrived. ‘David’ adopted the pseudonym ‘John Shaw’. Wallace met him at an office at the NIO:

At the time of the NIO meeting, Hugh Mooney, the former Foreign Office IRD official who had been based at Army HQ, had recently left Northern Ireland and there was a discussion about how we were going to replace the IRD material he had access to. Denis Payne said that he would find someone at the NIO to liaise with me and provide appropriate material of a similar nature to what Hugh Mooney had done in the past. During a subsequent visit to the NIO, I was introduced to a person who was to take on that role. On that occasion, the contact and I agreed that he would use the name of a known journalist when he attempted to contact me at Army HQ NI. The reason for that was that when I was out of my office at Army HQ, or otherwise unavailable, telephone calls for me were re-routed to the Army Press Office as part of my cover role. The name my contact and I selected for him was ‘John Shaw’ because a Press Association journalist by that name visited Northern Ireland from time to time during the 1970s. However, when my contact’s telephone calls to me were answered by the Army Press Office, he would ask the officer on duty to inform me that he was calling from ‘The White Gables’ hotel near Lisburn. That latter piece of information enabled me to know that it was not the real John Shaw who was calling me. In recent years, MI5 have stated that ‘John Shaw’ was not one of the official cover names used by their members. That denial is totally irrelevant in the circumstances I have referred to above. Indeed, as MI5 were aware, the fact that ‘John Shaw’ was a name that he and I agreed on was made clear by Paul Foot in his book ‘Who Framed Colin Wallace’. Was MI5’s claim about cover names just more deception? To the best of my knowledge, ‘John Shaw’ never visited me at Army HQ in Lisburn. On the few occasions when we had face-to-face meetings they took place at ‘The White Gables’.

‘Shaw’ was of medium build, in his late thirties, with a full head of straight dark brown hair, a pale complexion, an English accent (middle class, possibly Home Counties), and was about 5′ 10′. He lived in a flat or a house between Lisburn and Belfast, on the Lisburn side of Belfast. Wallace found him pleasant to deal with.

030. Wallace’s Clockwork Orange notes.

Shaw provided Wallace with information which he placed into the various Clockwork Orange files. It was not long before events began to move in a more sinister direction. ‘Shaw’ began to supply him with dirt’ about all sorts of politicians, including Westminster MPs.

Some of the material I was given by ‘John Shaw’ was of a similar political nature, but I did not disseminate any of it while I was at HQ NI. Indeed, I returned all such original material to him in around October that year. I did, however, retain the handwritten notes which I had compiled from his material. In July 1987, the press (The Observer and Channel 4 News) commissioned a leading document forensic examiner in London, Dr Julius Grant, to report on the likelihood that my handwritten notes were compiled in 1974. Dr Grant concluded that they were consistent with being written in that year. Obviously, I cannot say for certain which Government agency ‘John Shaw’ worked for. Some of the material which he passed to me was not of a political nature, but some of it was very similar to the material which emanated from the IRD in 1972/73. In my experience, the Army did not collect, or have access to, such information. Similarly, I have good reason to believe that the material did not come from serving members of MI6. By a process of elimination, the two remaining sources were either IRD or MI5. Given that it was a senior MI5 officer who initially suggested that he would arrange for someone to liaise with me regarding suitable material for ‘Clockwork Orange’ the balance of probabilities points strongly to ‘John Shaw’ being part of MI5.

One of the files related to William van Straubenzee, a Tory MP. He had served as deputy Secretary of State for NI under William Whitelaw, 1972-74. According to Shaw, he was vulnerable on account of his sexuality. Van Straubenzee, a lifelong bachelor, was later named in child abuse files unearthed by the Cabinet Office in July of 2015.

Others politicians in the Clockwork Orange files were categorised as vulnerable because of their political beliefs, for example if they had once had communist leanings.

More again were vulnerable due to financial misconduct.

The smearing of mainstream politicians did not commence with Clockwork Orange. Hugh Mooney of the IRD had been involved in these types of manoeuvres long before he left NI in December 1974. All told, politicians such as John Hume, Charles Haughey and Ian Paisley, along with an array of Labour MPs at Westminster were attacked. The British officials used a polite euphemism to describe this activity, ‘disinformation’.

Wallace was bewildered by the lengths to which civilian PSYOP officers went to discredit politicians such as Haughey. He felt their efforts were a distraction from the war against the paramilitaries.

031. Smearing John Hume.

Colin Wallace is sometimes linked erroneously – and unfairly – to some of the nastier political black propaganda operations that unfolded in the early 1970s. Significantly, Wallace was not involved in MI5’s  treacherous plotting against the government of Harold Wilson. It involved the dissemination of smears and fictitious stories about Wilson and his colleagues.

John Hume was also the victim of a campaign of character assassination in the early 1970s. It was spearheaded by Mooney.

Mooney and his IRD associates sought to depict John Hume:

• as part of a communist conspiracy intent upon transforming Ireland into Europe’s Cuba;
• as a supporter of the IRA;
• as a fundraiser for the IRA;
• as a thief who stole charitable donations;
• as a man for whom a warrant had been issued for his arrest in 1972.

Hume visited the US for a number of reasons. One of these was on behalf of the Northern Ireland Resurgence Fund (NIRF), a charity which raised funds to encourage employment and self-help projects in Belfast. Hume was its chairman. One of its early initiatives had been to raise money to re-build Bombay Street, which rampaging Loyalist mobs had torched in 1969.

The IRD and MI6 claimed some of the money raised by the NIRF had been diverted to the IRA while Hume had carved off a slice for himself.

The IRD forged a bank account purporting to show theft from var­ious US charities. The IRD showed a briefing paper to a select group of American reporters. It (a) linked Hume with IRA fundraisers, and (b) hinted that he had stolen money which had been donated by the Ancient Order of Hiber­nians (AOH) in America. According to it, Hume ‘received 10,000 dollars’. Scribbled alongside this in red ink was ‘see bank a/c’.

The smear oozed its way into The Christian Sci­ence Monitor, an international publication which, while it was available on subscription, was also distributed free to influential political figures throughout the world. The story festered and spread until Hume was obliged to denounce it.

In April 1987 Barry Penrose of The Sunday Times confronted Mooney with the briefing paper. At first, he denied he had written it, or had seen the forged bank account. Later, he conceded the handwriting on the briefing ‘could be’ his.

It is likely that the briefing paper and the fraudulent bank account statement were shown to Irish-American politicians by British diplomats in Washington in 1972. The British ambassador at the time had a background in banking, Lieutenant-Colonel George Rowland Stanley Baring, 3rd Earl of Cromer.

The British Ambassador to Ireland at the time was Sir John Peck. He ran the IRD in the 1950s.

032. Smearing the Civil Rights Movement.

Mooney and the IRD had another swipe at Hume by attempting to portray the civil rights movement, of which he was a leading light, as a violent communist conspiracy.

Mooney generated press briefings which were shown and/or given to journalists. They were also shown to politicians by British diplomats in places such as Washington. Some of them linked the civil rights movement to the Soviet Union and the IRA as part of a Soviet conspiracy. According to it, the civil rights movement was part of a: 

murder and sabotage plan, fronted by the IRA, which basically seeks to create in Ireland a socialist republic on Cuban lines. This achieved, the next step would be the drive for a British Workers’ republic.

The ‘Civil Rights movement’ was described as being ‘IRA and Communist controlled’.

Mooney also claimed that:

Communist involvement in Irish political violence has been slow to reach the firm control it now exercises, but it was always there…. Soon it was staging militant demonstrations, using the front of demands for civil rights, and when the demonstrations led to street disorders the IRA came into the picture as escort for their parades.

The overall picture depicted by Mooney was that:

militant students, the civil rights bodies, the IRA, and the various Citizens Defence Committees which came into existence in Catholic areas, all had the same objective. In the words of one of their leaders ‘We don’t want reform of Northern Ireland-we want a revolution in Ireland.

033. Vilifying Charles Haughey.

The IRD also attacked Fianna Fail politicians in the Republic including Charles Haughey. These sought to portrayed him as the mastermind behind Provisional IRA bombings in Belfast. The IRD also took copies of pamphlets produced by the Official Republican movement and republished them with additional entries designed to vilify Haughey. The smears had little impact as Haughey became leader of Fianna Fail in 1979 and served as taoiseach on a number of occasions.[10]

034. Smearing Labour luminaries.

In 1973, the Foreign Office was in the process of reducing the role of the IRD. Mooney and his colleagues saw the conflict in Northern Ireland and the industrial unrest in the UK as an opportunity to avoid those cutbacks. His document, ‘Soviets gain control over British Communists’, was an attack on the British Labour Party led by Harold Wilson in the run up to the General elections in 1974. In IRD’s view the Miners’ Strike and the ‘Three Day Week’ crisis were Communist inspired.

Mooney and others would go on to smear an array of British Labour MPs, union officials and other left-wing groups. The victims included PM Harold Wilson, Deputy PM Ed Short, Denis Healey and Tony Benn.

Insofar as Ireland was concerned, Mooney’s main strategy was to demonstrate that the conflict in the North was Communist inspired. One of the smear tactics was to place an annotation on the front of a Sinn Fein Ard Fheis document which linked Sinn Fein to the British Labour Party.

The IRD also forged a Bloody Sunday commemoration leaflet designed to show that certain British Labour politicians were ‘sympathetic with the IRA’.

A colleague of Colin Wallace revealed in 1990 that he had read forged documents purporting to show that Merlyn Rees ‘had made financial contributions to the IRA cause’. Rees subsequently became NI Secretary and later again, Home Secretary. Needless to say, the allegation was malicious.

Edward Short was Deputy Leader of the Labour Party. A similar attack to that on Hume was launched against him, namely the forgery of a bank account showing the receipt of dubious funds.

The IRD also forged a document purportedly ‘signed’ by Denis Healey who served as Secretary of State for Defence under Harold Wilson. It was a forgery designed to make him look as if he was serving the interests of the Soviet Union. Healey also served as Chancellor of the Exchequer under Wilson.

035. Smearing the Cardinal.

Mooney also attacked Cardinal Conway in his John Hume finance document. This was probably done because MI6 and the IRD believed the Cardinal had failed to deal effectively with a priest who had allegedly been involved in the bombing of Claudy.

Conway also played a role in exposing the torture of internees. He discovered what had happened to the Hooded Men (hooding, death threats, white noise, beatings, stress positioningc etc) and flew to Downing Street where he confronted Heath. Heath then had to take steps to halt the abuse.

036. Smearing Ian Paisley.

Ian Paisley was another victim of smears. The IRD forged share certificates and a Swiss bank account in his name. The forgeries indicated the substantial purchase of shares in Canadian companies with mis­appropriated funds. ‘I’ve got no shares anywhere’, Paisley thundered in April 1987. ‘But I mean it’s common knowledge put out by the dirty tricks department that I have ranches in Canada and ranches in Australia’, he added sarcastically. ‘That has been common parlance for years’.

In 1990, Mike Taylor stated: ‘I can support everything Colin Wallace says and can confirm that the Clockwork Orange operation did include the smearing of British politicians. There were two Clockwork Orange files which were always in use during my period… I saw forged documents, for instance that the Reverend Ian Paisley had a bank account in Canada’. The forgeries were shown to gullible, lazy or compliant journalists.

037. Smearing William Craig.

Another target was William Craig MP, Leader of the Ulster Vanguard Party. It was alleged he had organised the kidnap of the Grundig executive, Thomas Niedermayer, in 1973, because he – Craig – was having an affair with Niedermayer’s wife, Ingeborg. In reality, Niedermayer was kidnapped by the IRA, who murdered him in December 1973. His decomposed remains were discovered in March 1980. One of the conduits for the Craig smear was a British Army major based at Lis­burn, but he was not acting for the IPU.

The smear reached the German newspaper Bild and prompted a headline which asked: ‘Did the consul die because of a romance?’ Craig and his wife sued Bild and received £8,000 in damages.

Colin Wallace had no hand, act or part in the Craig smear.

038. Sexual ‘kompromat’.

British intelligence ran brothels in Belfast such as the Gemini Health Studio where heterosexual prostitutes ensnared targets. The Gardenia was a trap for homosexuals. Men who liked underage boys were also targeted. They included Unionist MPs such as Enoch Powell, James Molyneaux, Sir Knox Cunningham QC, and at least one senior DUP politician who retains a significant influence over his colleagues to this day.

Heterosexual males were also routinely targeted by MI5. Peter Wright of MI5 described in The Spycatcher’s Encyclopaedia of Espionage that 

It is well-known that MI5 gained useful information by employing ladies who gave sexual favours to foreign diplomats and agents. It has been suggested that this means that we require our female agents to become prostitutes. This is rubbish. We recruited prostitutes as agents.

Anthony Cavendish, who served with both MI5 and MI6, has described how MI6 used children in entrapment operations in his book on MI6:

Then there is the [foreign] agent who is set up for blackmail from the beginning. The groundwork having been laid and the agent having been photographed in bed with a small boy or his boss’s wife, is then forced to provide information.[11]

039. ‘Kompromat’ to safeguard the NI Power Sharing Executive of 1974.

Prime Minister Edward Heath, 1970-74, was one of the key figures in securing the Sunningdale Agreement of 1973 which led to the Northern Ireland Power-Sharing Executive. Sunningdale had the support of the Tories, the Irish government, the Unionist Party and SDLP. An Executive was set up to run NI. There was, however, opposition to it which coalesced around the Ulster Workers Council (UWC).

British officials planned to release ‘kompromat’ to undermine the Unionist opponents of the Executive. The information MI5 and MI6 had gathered about Unionist politicians was political dynamite. The spies accrued more than enough dirt to destroy the top tier of Unionist leadership in NI.

They knew that Ian Paisley had been involved in at least one bombing during the campaign to topple the prime minister of Northern Ireland, Terence O’Neill, in 1969. In addition, that Paisley was a friend of William McGrath, the vicious Kincora paedophile and commander of a paramilitary group known as Tara.

The spies knew that James Molyneaux MP was a homosexual, something that was a crime in NI at the time. Molyneaux, as a member of Brian Faulkner’s party, was not someone who was in danger at this juncture because Faulkner and his party were participating in the Executive. The information about Molyneaux was something that could be filed away for use another day. Molyneaux’s homosexuality was something which would have shocked the typical Loyalist voter of the time. He went on to lead the dominant Ulster Unionist Party (UUP), between 1979 and 1995. He was also a friend of William McGrath. He too was sexually attracted to young males. Molyneaux mixed in the circles that revolved around Tara. When one young member left Tara, Molyneaux made inquiries to find out why he had departed from the organisation.

Molyneaux inherited his Westminster seat from Sir Samuel Knox Cunningham MP, QC, in 1970. Molyneaux had served as Cunningham’s constituency agent before the latter retired from Westminster at the 1970 general election. Cunningham once described the young Molyneaux as a ‘pretty little thing’. While at Cambridge, Cunningham had earned the nickname, the ‘Boxing Queen’ because of his homosexuality and prowess as a pugilist. He became a heavyweight boxing champion at the University. In later life he was elected as a Unionist MP. In the 1960s he represented South Antrim at Westminster. He served as Parliamentary Private Secretary to Prime Minister Harold MacMillan, 1959-1963, and as such routinely attended Cabinet meetings at 10 Downing Street. Cunningham remained an extremely influential figure inside the Unionist Party and the Orange Order during the early and mid-1970s.

Cunningham abused Kincora boys. There were other Unionist figures with embarrassing secrets, many of which were recorded in MI5 and MI6’s files.

Operation Clockwork Orange Volume 2 can be found here: Operation Clockwork Orange Vol 2.

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[1] BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme.

[2] See section 019 for more information about Witchell.

[3] See Kitson’s Irish War (2021) by the author for further details.

[4] The James Miller described in this section is not to be mixed up with a man with the same name who was an MI5 agent. His activities are described elsewhere in this booklet.

[5] Hart produced an error strewn report which has been criticised by many commentators with a knowledge of Kincora.

[6] Operation Clockwork Orange will be addressed in Part 3 of this booklet.

[7] Cory Collusion Inquiry Report: Patrick Finucane 1 April 2004.

[8] There was a scientific basis at the root of the story, as can be seen from a document entitled: ‘Ammunition and Explosives Safety Standards’. At pages 85-99 it stated: Explosives. The explosives or explosive mixtures that are sensitive to static discharge (electro-static sensitivity of 0.1 joule or less) when exposed are generally primer, initiator, detonator, igniter, tracer, incendiary, and pyrotechnic mixtures.

[9] His predecessor at DCI was an MI6 officer called Allan Rowley.

[10] Haughey served as Taoiseach, 1979-81; 1982; 1987-92.

[11] Cavendish, p. 4.

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David Burke is the author of three books published by Mercier Press: –

‘Deception & Lies, the Hidden History of the Arms Crisis 1970’, and;

‘Kitson’s Irish War, Mastermind of the Dirty War in Ireland’  which examines the role of counter-insurgency dirty tricks in Northern Ireland in the early 1970s, and;

‘An Enemy of the Crown, the British Secret Service Campaign against Charles Haughey’, which was published on 30 September 2022.

These books can be purchased here: 

https://www.mercierpress.ie/irish-books/kitson-s-irish-war/

https://www.mercierpress.ie/irish-books/an-enemy-of-the-crown/

https://www.mercierpress.ie/irish-books/deception-and-lies

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