By David Burke.

Chapter 8.

Framing Colin Wallace for Manslaughter.

113. The Home Secretary (former NI Secretary) and Deputy Prime Minister.

On 7 July 1980, Jeff Edwards of London’s Evening News, revealed the Metropolitan police had passed files to the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP). Twelve men faced up to 350 sexual offences including allegations that they had ‘obtained young boys for politicians, prominent lawyers and film stars’. The youngest victim was six-years of age.

A few days later, Edwards was summoned by the police to an interview and threatened with prosecution under the Official Secrets Act.

Mysteriously, the prosecution of the twelve men did not proceed.

Edwards’ source, a serving Metropolitan police officer, was disciplined and fined for leaking the story.

It is believed that the then Home Secretary and de facto Deputy Prime Minister, William Whitelaw, ordered a senior Metropolitan Police officer to quash the investigation. Whitelaw was the political master of MI5 at this time and must have acted in concert with them in quashing the prosecution.

Whitelaw was very close to the intelligence services. He had served as NI Secretary of State in Belfast, 1972-73, where he had worked cheek by jowl with them. MI5 and MI6 worked in the same building as him, Stormont Castle. He spent much of his time drinking late into the night with Allan Rowley of MI6, the first DCI (overarching NI spymaster) after the introduction of Direct Rule. Whitelaw used MI6 to arrange face to face truce negotiations with the IRA in 1972.

It is inconceivable that DCI Rowley did not know all about the Kincora operation. The odds are high that Whitelaw learnt about it as a component of Operation Clockwork Orange too as he was central to the Sunningdale negotiations and was in receipt of frequent briefings from Rowley about the opposition to the Power Sharing Executive by Loyalists. Whitelaw left NI in December 1973, shortly after the agreement was signed.

114. Men with a lot to lose.

Whitelaw’s deputy in 1972-73 was William Van Straubenze MP. It has since emerged that he was a paedophile.

In the early 1970s, the orphans and abandoned children at Kincora, Williamson House and Bawnmore stood no chance of rescue from their sexual enslavement with the likes of Heath (a paedophile) as prime minister, Whitelaw (a protector of abusers) as NI Secretary and Van Straubenzee as his deputy, aided and abetted by MI5 and MI6.

Two of the most senior NIO officers in the 1970s, Peter England and John Imrie, were abusers too. Peter England abused boys ensnared by the paedophile ring that MI5 and MI6 was protecting. One of them, JLB, described his ordeal to the BBC. England had a conviction for exposing himself in a toilet in London, as did Imrie.

A lot of very powerful people had – and continued to have – a vested interest in concealing the truth about Kincora.

115. Wallace talks to the Irish Times shortly after the Kincora scandal erupts.

Colin Wallace was about to walk into the lion’s den.

In January 1980, three members of the staff at Kincora, William McGrath, Joe Mains and Raymond Semple, were suspended after The Irish Independent exposed the abuse at Kincora on the front page of the newspaper on 24 January 1980.

Mains, McGrath and Semple were charged on 3 April 1980.

Wallace was unaware of the Kincora shock waves that were reverberating around Northern Ireland as he had taken up residence in England after his dismissal from the British Army in 1975.

He did not become aware of the development until February 1982 when he was named in Parliament by Gerry Fitt as someone with information about the scandal.

In March 1980, David McKittrick, the Northern editor of The Irish Times, contacted Wallace. He was one of those who knew about McGrath:

A British Army Intelligence operative told me in 1975 [sic] that William McGrath, one of the figures in the Kincora boys’ Home case, was a homosexual. He and other sources also told me that McGrath was the head of Tara, a shadowy extreme Loyalist organisation. .. My information came from Colin Wallace, who was at that time chief civilian, press officer at Army headquarters in Lisburn, Co Antrim, and who had links with Military Intelligence. … My notes of a conversation with Wallace in army headquarters in 1975 show that he said McGrath was head of Tara, and organisation of evangelical Protestants which had called for the banning of the Catholic Church and for all education to be carried out by evangelical Protestants. He also gave me McGrath’s East Belfast Address and his telephone number. [Irish Times 17 December 1981]

[Wallace actually provided the information in 1974.]

When he contacted Wallace in March 1980, McKittrick said he wanted to come over to London to talk about the contents of a book written by Colonel Robin Eveleigh who had served with the Army in NI.  Wallace met him at the Washington Hotel in London. 

McKittrick did not mention Tara or Kincora.

McGrath, Mains and Semple were charged on 3 April 1980.

McKittrick called Wallace again in early April 1980 and said that he wanted to come back to meet him for a further discussion on the Eveleigh material. 

During the April 1980 discussion, Wallace provided McKittrick with some information about intelligence rivalries in NI and the plotting against Harold Wilson in the 1970s which McKittrick included in an article on British intelligence in the Irish Times on 22 April.

It would not have been difficult for MI5 to have figured out that Wallace was one of McKittrick’s sources. They routinely tapped journalists’ phones and had access to flight records. They now knew Wallace was prepared to talk to the media about intelligence matters, including the anti-Wilson plotting. In their eyes, Wallace stood as a lethal threat to their reputation, especially as suspicion about an intelligence dimension to Kincora was gaining traction with the press.

Wallace could talk to a journalist about Kincora at any given moment.

The worst case scenario was that one of the journalists who knew about the 1973 Tara press briefing, would contact him about the Kincora scandal.

MI5 was blessed with luck that McGrath was not on McKittrick’s horizon. Nonetheless, they must have feared that McGrath’s name might yet ring a bell with McKittrick, especially with forthcoming court appearances.

116. Two men with dark secrets who had risen to positions of great power: Willie Whitelaw and Howard Smith, the former UK Representative to NI, 1971-72, who was now D-G of MI5.

Unfortunately for Wallace, MI5 was now commanded by two individuals who were as ruthless as any of their predecessors: Howard Smith, the Director-General of MI5, 1978-81, and his deputy, John Jones.

Space does not permit a thorough review of Smith’s career. For present purposes, it is worth noting that in the 1960s, while in the Foreign Office, he had recommended the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the Prime Minister of the Congo to the British government. Ted Heath was a minister at the department at the time, and on the distribution list of Smith’s assassination recommendation. Lumumba was murdered in 1961 in a joint CIA-MI6 plot.

Smith spent most of 1971 and some of 1972 as the British government’s envoy, or UKREP, to NI, and was undoubtedly aware of what had taken place at Kincora. His neck was now on the line in a very real way. As luck would have it, his political boss in 1980 was William Whitelaw, the Home Secretary, whom he knew well from Belfast where the pair had worked together during 1972. Smith was the first man Whitelaw met in NI as Secretary of State. Smith had collected Whitelaw from the airport on his first trip in his new proconsular capacity.

Whitelaw is an overlooked figure in the Kincora scandal. Thatcher appreciated his ability to fix difficult problems. He was her ‘Minister for Banana Skins’. ‘Every prime minister needs a Willie’, she once said. Whitelaw’s main task was to scan the political horizon for problems that could blow up into crises and recommend early action to avoid them. He had developed this skill as Tory chief whip in the 1960s when he had exploited the Whip’s ‘Dirt Book’ to blackmail MPs who were refusing to toe the party line. (See section 007.) Some of those in the dossier were paedophile MPs.

Is it likely that MI5 withheld their strategy for dealing with Kincora from Whitelaw?

117.  John Jones, the man who took care of MI5’s dirty work.

 John ‘Jack’ Jones was the man who took care of MI5’s dirty work at this time.

According to Christopher Andrew  –  the official historian of MI5 – Howard Smith, was perceived inside MI5 as someone who had a ‘distaste’ for some of the operations MI5 were carrying out. One of his senior officers told Andrew that Smith was resented for the manner in which ‘he kept far away from A Branch and left it all’ to his deputy, John Jones, who was a former Director of A Branch. According to this source, Smith regarded ‘it all as dirty work’.

A Branch was responsible for surveillance. It had been involved in the observation and sexual blackmail of a Soviet diplomat called Oleg Lyalin.

Jones undoubtedly knew about the various ‘kompromat’ operations in NI. They had been conducted in the early 1970s while he had been stationed there. Jones and Peter Wright were probably responsible for the surveillance of the Clockwork Orange paedophiles, including the bugging of the bedrooms in the Park Avenue Hotel in Belfast where Joe Mains and John McKeague lured surveillance targets to bedrooms where they had sent boys.

118.  Framing Wallace for the death of Jonathan Lewis.

Wallace might have been murdered by one of the Loyalist assassins at MI5’s beck and call – such as McKeague – but for an opportunity that arose, apparently out of the blue, to demolish his credibility: Jonathan Lewis, one of his friends, went missing on 5 August 1980. His body was recovered from the river Arun three days later.

Wallace had nothing to do with the death of Lewis, yet he ended up on trial for it.

Dirty tricks were used to secure his conviction.

When Lewis’ body was found in the Arun, his skull was damaged. At least some, if not all, of the injuries were inflicted by the propeller of a boat which had become entangled with the corpse. Dr Ian West, a Home Office pathologist, performed the initial post mortem on 8 August and failed to detect anything untoward. The post mortem reported: ‘No foul play suspected’.

On 12 August West changed his mind. He now discovered an injury to Lewis’ nose which he had apparently missed despite the fact it was – quite literally – staring him in the face.

On 18 September Wallace was charged with murder by the Sussex Police.

His trial opened on 3 March 1981. The key piece of evidence against Wallace was provided by Dr West. He now alleged that the blow which had killed Lewis had been administered by a martial arts technique Wallace had learnt as part of his military training. West later confessed that an American security source had fed the notion to him. Yet, in Court he presented it to the jury as if he had expert knowledge of the topic.

MI5 is a department of the Home Office, the same parent body which employed West.

The American ‘security’ official was undoubtedly an American intelligence officer. US intelligence works hand in glove with British intelligence. American intelligence officers had been involved in the anti-Wilson plot back in the mid-1970s, and this would account for their interest in Wallace.

119. Amanda Metcalfe.

Amanda Metcalfe saw Jonathan Lewis in the pub where she worked on the day he died. Lewis was in the company of a man, but he was definitely not Wallace. Crucially, this meeting took place after the time the police claimed Wallace had killed Lewis. She was able to describe perfectly the clothing Lewis had worn.

On 20 March 1981, the jury, however, was persuaded that while Wallace was not guilty of murder, he had committed manslaughter.

120. The mysterious figures from Kaymar.

Wallace was portrayed in the press as the ‘Karate Chop Killer’. Photographs of him in military attire were furnished to the press. The mystery about these photographs has never been resolved. In 1979 Wallace had been asked to pose for a series of photographs in his parachute uniform and equipment for Kaymar Studios. The photographs surfaced at his trial to reinforce the image of him as a soldier and martial arts expert. The people who commissioned the photographs had disappeared. No one knows who they truly were.

121. Paul Foot.

In June 1998, a former Special Branch officer who was familiar with the Wallace case wrote to Paul Foot, author of the book, ‘Who Framed Colin Wallace’, saying: ‘I sincerely believe that Colin Wallace was ‘fitted up’ by members of the Establishment embarrassed by the events described in the early part of your book [i.e., Kincora and smear campaigns]. I do not suggest for a moment that any Sussex Police officer involved in this enquiry was corrupt, because I do not believe they were, but I feel there was a hidden agenda, and that the senior officers knew a lot more about the matter than they would ever care to reveal.’

The most senior of these officers was Sir George Terry. A few months later, he was asked to conduct an ‘independent’ inquiry into Kincora.

122.  Rivals in the antiques trade.

If Lewis was murdered, as it appears he was, his slaying might have been perpetrated by rivals in the antiques trade. Evidence which pointed in this direction was suppressed by Terry’s officers.

If Lewis truly died due to foul play, it follows that Sussex Special Branch and MI5 helped his killer, or killers, get away with murder by diverting the police in the direction of an innocent man.

123.  Det. Superintendent Gordon Harrison.

Det. Superintendent George Harrison was one of the senior Sussex Police officers who investigated Wallace during the Jonathan Lewis inquiry. He was subsequently asked by Terry to help him carry out his inquiry into Kincora.

As noted earlier, Terry and his team had asked the MoD to let them talk to Cameron but were rebuffed. In his written report, Terry claimed that he had received the full cooperation of the MoD during his investigation. His exact words were that the military had ‘been very frank’ with his inquiry. That lie was exposed in 2017 by the Hart Report.

Harrison does not seem to have made any protest about the misleading allegation about the MoD in his superior’s report.

It is not known what Chief Inspector Dick Flenley, another Sussex police officer on Terry’s team, made of the lie.

124.  The man at Fort Monckton.

The operation to frame Wallace for the death of Lewis was probably overseen by Ian Cameron with the assistance of the Deputy D-G of MI5, John Jones.

D-G Smith was undoubtedly aware of what was afoot but, if he remained true to character, left it to Jones and his subordinates to carry out the dirty work.

Cameron was stationed at MI6’s training school, Fort Monckton, in 1980, and available to help, if not direct the anti-Wallace campaign.

125. In MI5, crime pays.

In 1981, Thatcher and Whitelaw chose John Jones to become Director-General of MI5.

As D-G, Jones once extended a slimy invitation to a senior Garda officer to go on a ‘tour ‘ of the red light district of Soho in London. Thankfully the invitee, an assistant garda commissioner, declined. Had the Irishman accepted the invitation, it is likely that Jones would have given the green light to an operation to lure him into the clutches of prostitutes with photographers on standby. This is exactly what the Garda officer believed was afoot. He felt that Jones was sleazy and untrustworthy. The experience reinforced the Irishman’s preference for dealing with Scotland Yard which had responsibility for countering the IRA in Britain.

This was hardly the first time Jones extended such an invitation to a visiting VIP.

Chapter 9.

No Muzzles on the Dublin Media

126.  Frank Doherty visits Wallace in prison.

The Kincora scandal was broken by The Irish Independent, a newspaper in the Republic of Ireland in 1980.

A cover-up was designed by the NIO, MI5, MI6 and the RUC to plug the leaking Kincora dam. One of the aims was to hoodwink the public into believing that the boys at Kincora had been abused by the staff – and exclusively by the staff – who had worked there and never fed out to a wider ring.

Chris Moore, author of The Kincora Scandal, learnt that the State’s paramount concern was that the links between Kincora and Britain would be exposed. Allegations that Lord Louis Mountbatten was involved in the abuse of boys in NI have since emerged. Other VIPs such as Sir Anthony Blunt, Keeper of the Queen’s Pictures, and Peter England and John Imrie, both senior officers at the NIO, were implicated too.

Moore discovered a document about personal security which linked Peter England to Kincora.

Frank Doherty wrote for the Sunday World, Magill magazine, the Phoenix and the Sunday Business Post. He was one of a number of journalists who dug beneath the surface of the story. Others included Ed Moloney, Andy Pollock, Paul Foot and, of course, Chris Moore.

Doherty reported in The Phoenix on 16 September 1983 that:

The Karate Chop killing seems more like fiction than fact. Capt. Colin Wallace, as a key figure in the British  intelligence  Psy Ops  (psychological  warfare)  unit, was responsible  for much of the black propaganda passed to  newsmen in the Seventies. Among  those who  have admitted  that he was a source for their  material  are lrish  Times former  Northern  Editor  David McKittrick   (Wallace was the  source for his lengthy  Irish  Times series, ‘British  Spies in Ireland’,  April  1980) and  former  Daily  Mirror   man in Belfast,  Kevin  Dowling,   now with  the Daily  Mail  in Fleet  Street. Wallace told both that a homosexual  vice ring was operating at Kincora  and of its  links with  the Orange Order and the Unionist  Party in 1975. It was the final piece of information he passed on. Sacked from his intelligence job in Lisburn, he moved to England.

127. Wallace is accused of a second murder.

Most of the reports about Wallace in the early 1980s were hostile. The first edition of Lobster magazine appeared in England in September 1983. It accused Wallace of an earlier killing. The purported victim was a school teacher called Ron Horn with whose wife Wallace had supposedly conducted an affair. Not a word of this was true. According to Lobster, Wallace had set Horn up by pretending the teacher had written inflammatory leaflets in the hope the UDA would murder him. The article alleged that:

 In 1974 Wallace was involved in another black propaganda exercise producing a series of leaflets from the socialist grouping ‘The Ulster Citizen’s Army’. One stated that a secret faction existed within the UDA. They sent a communique to the press stating: ‘The Ulster Freedom Fighters operate under the control of the SAS. Numerous sectarian killings have been perpetrated by the SAS using the name of the UFF. Consequently the UCA threatens to launch retaliatory actions against British interests if this state of things does not cease.’

The UCA was largely disregarded by local newsmen who rightly attributed the leaflets to Army Intelligence, as they carried both the Loyalist red hand symbol and the plough and stars of the Official IRA. But it was difficult to ignore totally since some of the facts produced were true. The SAS were operating through and within these pseudogangs. The leaflets named up to 20 Loyalist politicians allegedly involved in these activities. The targets were those Loyalist politicians who seemed to be turning away from paramilitary activity towards a political role, and in some cases thought to  be talking to the Republican side. They were thinking of people like Andy Tyrie, the UDA’s senior spokesman, who was extremely annoyed by the leaflets. He informed some reporters that he knew the name of the leaflets’ author and there was pressure on  him to order the assassination of the alleged author.

What Tyrie didn’t know was that the alleged author, a school teacher named Horn, had been set up by Wallace, the real author of the leaflets. Wallace was having an affair with Horn’s wife, and may have hoped that this propaganda effort would lead to the death of the innocent Mr Horn. Tyrie had been given Horn’s name by another English journalist who worked in the Army’s Press Office and who was a friend of Wallace.

The article then proceeded to reinforce the myth that Wallace had been dismissed on account of his relationship with Fisk. There was no suggestion in the Lobster article that this had been a set-up by MI5.

By 1975 Wallace had gone too far with his black propaganda operations and was losing his value to the Army. He was drummed out after being revealed as Times reporter Robert Fisk’s informant at the Lisburn barracks. (He posted a batch of classified documents through Fisk’s door, and Fisk’s cleaning lady, whose husband was in the RUC, handed them over to the authorities.) Fisk fled to Dublin and Wallace was taken to Preston for an extensive debriefing before being dismissed. One of his last acts was to give an Irish Times reporter the names of four men he considered leaders of Tara. Two of them are now prominent Unionists, one in Paisley’s D.U.P and the fourth has been an editor of Paisley’s Protestant Telegraph. 

In later years the editors of Lobster realised their mistake and became supportive of Wallace. In 1987 they produced a special edition about the campaign against Harold Wilson in the 1970s.

128.  Wallace writes to Thatcher in 1984.

In 1984 Wallace delivered a package of documents about PSYOPS in NI to Downing Street for the attention of Thatcher.

Downing Street allegedly ‘lost’ the documents and nothing was done about them.

129.  More reports from Dublin.

The British Embassy in Dublin monitored the stories appearing in The Phoenix. Diplomats purchased copies of the magazine and sent photocopies to London. One of the articles sent to London was a 4 July 1985, report by  Frank Doherty entitled ‘DIRTY TRICKS’:

THERE HAS BEEN a deafening silence from the British Sunday papers which specialise in investigating scandal in the CIA and the KGB about claims that a dossier shows a dirty tricks unit in British intelligence tried to destabilise Jack Lynch’s Government and had been involved in the Dublin bombing of 1972.

Such claims have been made before, of course, and are usually dismissed as outrageous. When they are made, as they have been in this case, by the former Senior Information Officer at British Army HQ in Lisburn, Captain Colin Wallace, they are at least deserving of a passing mention. This they have been denied, even though Wallace claims to have documentary evidence, copies of which have been passed to Mrs Thatcher.

130.  Clockwork Orange is exposed in Dublin.

Captain Fred Holroyd, a former Special Military Intelligence Unit (SMIU) officer, who had worked with MI6, assisted Wallace in his campaign to clear his name.

On 14 February 1986, The Phoenix published a story which featured Wallace and Holroyd. It was entitled ‘EPILOGUE ON KINCORA?’

THE BRITISH intelligence community has high hopes that, with the publication of the Hughes inquiry report [into Kincora], the epilogue has been written  on its sordid activities in the Kincora  scandal. Their hopes may be dashed, however, now that erstwhile Special Military  Intelligence Unit  officer  and  spy-about-Dublin, Capt. Fred Holroyd,  has linked  up with  another man who  knows where the skeletons in the  Kincora cupboard are hidden, Capt.  Colin Wallace. Wallace, late of the Information   Policy Unit  (Black  Propaganda) Unit at Lisburn, is  presently a guest of her majesty in  Lewes Jail after his conviction for an  SAS-style karate killing.

The Kincora saga is a tortuous one.  Superficially about sexual abuse of boys in a Belfast council hostel over a period of ten  years, and a subsequent cover-up by the RUC Special Branch and British Intelligence after  it became known, the scandal goes much,  much deeper.

CLOCKWORK ORANGE

….  CLOCKWORK ORANGE was a massive scheme for re-directing lrish politics, North and South. Details of the operation have already been supplied to The lrish Times,  The Guardian and Mrs Thatcher’s office by  two of those indoctrinated in it –  Capts  Holroyd and Wallace-  but now some new facts are emerging. Papers sent to Thatcher’s office late last year on CLOCKWORK  ORANGE   are missing, according  to a letter  to  Capt. Holroyd  by Lord Trefarne, Under  Secretary of State  for Defence. The papers  were originals relating  to black  propaganda  and other dirty  tricks carried out on both  sides of the Border during the 1970s. …

VICE RING

CLOCKWORK ORANGE was the final phase of a long-running intelligence involvement with the Kincora Boys’ Home. Initially,  the discovery of an extensive vice ring which  involved leading loyalist figures was regarded as a windfall by British Intelligence when it  came to their notice in 1970. Among those  involved were: the late Sir Knox  Cunningham, South Antrim MP and mentor  of James Molyneaux, who as a bachelor  provided Sir Knox with unstinting service as  his constituency agent; Rev Robert Bradford,  later South Belfast MP; Joss Cardwell, a key  figure in the Unionist Party; and Belfast  councillor, John McKeague, founder of the  UDA and later leader of the  bogus Red Hand  Commando (setup as a pseudo-gang by  British intelligence); William McGrath, Orange  Leader and founder of the mysterious Tara  loyalist paramilitary group and father-in-law  of Paisley’s deputy, Peter Robinson[1]; and  various others of greater and lesser  importance. 

STRANGE DEATHS

Since the first details of Kincora were given to Gerry Fitt [MP] by a Catholic police  superintendent (name and address with editor)  and later leaked to the lrish Independent’s  Belfast hack, Peter McKenna, by the same RUC man, a number of those concerned have met strange ends. McKeague was shot dead at home [in 1982] the night before he was to be interviewed by the RUC about  Kincora, Rev Bradford was shot dead, Joss  Cardwell  was found  dead in a fume-filled  garage, Sir Knox  died from what is believed to  have been natural causes, and one of the boys  who made allegations to uniformed  police  in Liverpool  about the affair was put on a  boat for Belfast, from  which he disappeared  overboard and drowned[2]. After the early phase of using Kincora to  gather information   on Unionists, British  Intelligence moved, just before the strike  which brought  down the power-sharing Stormont executive, into the CLOCKWORK  ORANGE scheme, which was to be used to  break loyalist unity by unmasking the  pederasts who led them. However, intelligence bosses liked Harold Wilson’s Labour Government less than the Unionists, and saw  the downfall of Stormont power-sharing as a  chance to give him another headache.

131. Clive Ponting reveals the concerns inside the MoD.

In 1987, a former senior Ministry of Defence official, Clive Ponting, revealed that he had attended meetings with MI5 mandarins at which Wallace was discussed.

There was never any suspicion that Wallace was making these stories up or that it was totally unfounded and very easy to rubbish. It was very much a matter that, okay the story was being contained at the moment because he was in jail, but that in a few years’ time he would be back out again and could be expected to start making the allegations again and that would be a serious problem.

132. Enoch Powell visits Colin Wallace’s solicitor

Enoch Powell MP was a paedophile. See: https://villagemagazine.ie/suffer-little-children/

The officials at the MoD were not the only people concerned about Wallace. On 29 October 1986, Powell wrote to Wallace’s solicitor, James Morgan-Harris, on headed House of Commons notepaper, with a request to see him. Wallace was still in prison at this time. Powell could have spoken to the solicitor on the phone if he had wanted to. Instead, he journeyed all the way to West Sussex a while later for a face-to-face meeting. At it, Powell sought general information about Wallace and his case. He appeared most interested in learning about Operation Clockwork Orange. Part of Clockwork Orange had concerned the gathering of information about the private sexual activities of MPs. Wallace was not released until 5 December 1986, after the meeting between Powell and Morgan-Harris. Was Powell trying to find out what Wallace might have learnt about him and might yet pass to the press? As it transpired, Wallace knew nothing about his private life. Powell was defeated in the June 1987 British general election. He died in 1998.

133. Wallace is released from prison and the Phoenix magazine in Dublin releases details of a slew of dirty tricks.

The fears about Wallace talking to the media were realised upon his release at the end of 1986. The Phoenix magazine in Dublin ran a report on 19 December 1986, entitled ‘MI5 –   THE IRISH FILE’. It highlighted the fact that Wallace was claiming he was innocent.

ANOTHER    CASUALTY    OF MI5’s by now legendary activities has emerged from prison with a litany of tales about that organisation’s doings in Ireland, North and South. Colin Wallace, serving 10 years for a murder he says he did not commit, was recently released on parole from Lewes Jail, Sussex, and one of his first initiatives was to  unburden his knowledge on Goldhawk [i.e. the Phoenix]. In an interview with Phoenix, Wallace has drawn up a list of 13 specific affairs which he claims resulted from the MI5 (Security Service) feud with MI6 (the Secret Intelligence Service) in Ireland in the 1974  –    1976 period, which is partly responsible  for the distressing washing of British  intelligence dirty linen which has been going  on recently in an Australian court.[3]

134. Cover-up at the BBC.

Long before December 1986, the BBC knew that Jimmy Saville was interfering with children. Yet, they continued to let Saville host programmes for children.

The Deputy Director-General of the BBC in the 1980s was Alan Protheroe. He not only tolerated Saville but helped MI5 safeguard the truth about Kincora.

When Wallace was released from prison in 1987, Protheroe moved to shut down a report on his case which was due to appear on Newsnight.

Protheroe actually knew Wallace and was familiar with his role in Northern Ireland. Protheroe had done his National Service in the mid-1950s after which he was commissioned into the Welsh Regiment. After his National Service he joined the Territorial Army. Within the BBC he was referred to as ‘The Colonel’. He was promoted to full colonel in the Territorial Army in 1984. He was awarded a military MBE in 1980 and appointed CBE (military) in 1991. In 1988, he became Managing Director of the Services Sound and Vision Corporation, which provides the Forces and MoD with radio and television broadcasting. He had also served as part of the MoD’s Information Pool of officers.

It is believed that he was also responsible for having a script for a television drama about Colin Wallace shelved. The script was an adaptation of Paul Foot’s book, ‘Who Framed Colin Wallace’.

At the time one of the directors of the BBC was Dame Daphne Park, a former MI6 officer. She had participated in the MI6-CIA plot to murder Patrice Lumumba in the Congo. She was no slouch when it came to dirty tricks. She admitted on camera to the BBC that while she had been in MI6 she had engaged in dirty trick operations.  ‘Once you get really good intelligence about any group, you are able to learn where the levers of power are, and what one man fears of another. .. You set people discreetly against one another. ..  They destroy each other, we [Intelligence] don’t destroy them.’

MI5 also maintained an office at the BBC’s HQ in London where it monitored and controlled executives and reporters.

It is not clear why Protheroe was prepared to intervene with Newsnight to protect child rapists. Nor is it clear what relationship he had with Jimmy Saville.

Chapter 10.

MI5 finds itself under siege from Colin Wallace, Peter Wright and Anthony Cavendish.

135.  Elements of the truth begin to emerge.

The British government responded to Wallace’s claims by portraying him as a fantasist.

MI5 gave ministers assurances that Wallace was not telling the truth. This in turn prompted some of those ministers to mislead Parliament in pronouncements about the Wallace case.

Then, in July 1989, a number of secret files turned up out of the blue when an official at the MoD was allegedly searching ministry archives for old job-application records. He stumbled on a document relating to ‘Clockwork Orange’. This led to further digging, during which additional linked documents with references to Clockwork Orange,  came to light.

The files presented a problem for Thatcher as she was an ardent supporter of MI5. They were merely the latest in a series of blows she, MI5 and MI6 had sustained in 1987 and 1988. The blows were administered by Wallace and Peter Wright.

Defence Secretary Tom King, a former NI Secretary, now faced a most unpleasant task: how could he contain a scandal which was gaining such momentum?

Capt. Wallace was beginning to look like the British equivalent to Capt. Dreyfus.

The files found in the MoD will be examined in detail after first looking at the trouble Wallace and Wright were causing Thatcher and Whitelaw.

136. The secrets Peter Wright chose to include and exclude from his multi-million selling book.

In 1987, Peter Wright CBE, now a retired MI5 officer, wrote a book called ‘Spycatcher’ which confirmed the plot against Wilson and a lot more besides.

Thatcher tried to injunct the book but the move boomeranged on her spectacularly. ‘Spycatcher’ eventually went on to sell millions of copies, due in no small part to the publicity generated by the legal action against Wright. The case was heard in Australia. Wright’s lawyer, Malcolm Turnbull, humiliated Britain’s cabinet secretary, Robert Armstrong during it. Armstrong had to admit that he had been ‘economical with the truth’ in the witness box. Turnbull became famous. He went into politics and rose to become prime minister of Australia, 2015-18.

‘Spycatcher’ cast MI5 and MI6 in a deplorable light: little more than organisations riddled with traitors and immersed in criminality.

When Turnbull published his own account of the affair, ‘The Spycatcher Trial’, he recounted how he had asked Wright at their first meeting if he thought the British government feared he might reveal other secrets. ‘They might,’ Wright replied adding mysteriously: ‘I spent a lot of time in Northern Ireland, you know. But I won’t reveal anything about that. Malcolm, it would be easy for me to make this book very sensational indeed.’

Wright had also cautioned Turnbull that: ‘I may never be able to tell you the truth about some things.’ When Turnbull asked him what he meant, Wright responded: ‘My work in Northern Ireland, for example. Satellite surveillance. A lot of things. This is a safe book compared to what I could write.’

137. Threats, counter-threats and a spy’s life insurance policy.

Wright had retired from MI5 in 1976 a disgruntled man. He and his wife Lois emigrated to Australia to live near one of their daughters, Jennifer, in Tasmania to raise horses. By the 1980s, he had decided to put pen to paper.

Wright had diabetes, was frail and generally in poor health. Before the Australian courtroom drama began, Turnbull visited London where he met with a senior legal figure acting on behalf of Thatcher’s government. Turnbull’s arm was seized by the lawyer and held in a ‘hard’ grip at it. ‘Well you tell [Wright] from me,’ the lawyer said ‘that he’d better seek some medical advice before he comes to court. He’ll get no quarter in the witness box on account of his ill-health.’ While this was clearly not a death threat, if this was how the occupant of one of the UK’s loftiest legal perches was prepared to conduct himself, what was to be expected from the more robust operatives in MI5? Wright had participated in at least one – if not multiple – MI5 assassination operations and knew perfectly well of what his former colleagues were capable. It probably crossed his mind that given half the chance they might, for example, arrange a road traffic accident along a dusty Tasmanian dirt track. To avoid this, he took out a life assurance policy, one that involved a threat to reveal his unpublished secrets if he was murdered.

The legal wrangling dragged on for a year. On 14 June 1988, while an injunction restraining British newspapers from publishing the contents of the book still in place but crumbling in the House of Lords in London, Wright made his threat public: ‘There are 10 major stories which I have not put in [‘Spycatcher’] and there are probably others if I thought about it. I may put them into a secret report or I may do nothing. I just haven’t thought it out yet.’ The next day, The Times of London reported that HMG had ‘always been aware that Mr Wright knew a lot more than he revealed in ‘Spycatcher’, particularly concerning his service as an MI5 officer in Northern Ireland’.   

From his home in Australia, Wright promoted the story by proclaiming that the real reason Thatcher had gone to such lengths to muzzle him was ‘because of the other things I know. But I said in the beginning I wouldn’t publish them and I haven’t done it. They have always been frightened of what I know…’ Just in case the message wasn’t clear, he told the BBC that his future course of action would depend on how Thatcher and her government ‘behaved themselves’.

Not a single British journalist pressed Wright to be more forthcoming.

Not a single British journalist asked him about Kincora or the 1974 Dublin and Monaghan bombings.

The international media was equally uninterested.

138. ‘I spent a lot of time in Ireland, and it was not pleasant.’

‘Spycatcher’ became an international bestseller shifting over two million copies and earned Wright a fortune. His ghost writer, Paul Greengrass, went on to great success as a film director. His credits include the Jason Bourne film series.

After his publishing success, Wright retreated into virtual seclusion on his small farm near the apple-growing centre of Cygnet. Whereas he had once courted the media, requests for interviews were now batted out-of-court by his wife Lois. ‘Sorry. He won’t talk to journalists or anyone else like that,’ she was quoted as saying. ‘He has nothing left to say’.

It was too late to follow up the ‘ten’ concealed secrets story.

What Wright now divulged was largely innocuous. On 12 August 1990, the Sunday Times reported that he was writing another book provisionally entitled ‘Tomorrow Is Another Day‘ about ‘a tamer topic that should unsettle no government’, the rearing of pedigree animals. But at least the proposed publication provided Wright with an opportunity to remind the British government to leave him in peace. ‘Peter does talk occasionally about writing down some post-Spycatcher reflections, but I fear they may never come to fruition,’ Sandy Grant, the managing director of Heinemann in Australia, was quoted as saying.

In 1991, he published a second spy book but it was a limp offering, little more than an A-Z of espionage terminology with a few stories thrown in for good measure. It was entitled the Spycatcher’s Encyclopaedia of Espionage. There was, however, a hint in it at the Irish secrets he intended to carry to his grave if the government in London behaved itself. ‘I spent a lot of time in Ireland’, he intoned, ‘and it was not pleasant. We also did a lot of things there which I am never going to talk about, because it would just cause more trouble.’ (114).

There is a possibility, albeit a wafer thin one, that Wright may have eventually let Turnbull have a peep inside his box of secrets. In his book, Turnbull was able to describe how Wright ‘had been privy to some of the weightiest secrets of the free world, he had spied on presidents and prime ministers, he was at the very centre of the fight against the …  IRA…’ (Turnbull 19). Perhaps one day Turnbull will clarify what – if anything – he learnt about Wright’s activities in Ireland and whether he knows anything about a secret dossier.

139. MI5’s Peeping Tom supreme.

When one considers what Wright included in ‘Spycatcher’, one shudders to think what was so volatile, he had to leave it out of the book.

By the 1960s, Wright had become MI5’s Witch-Finder General, a position he exploited to accumulate mountains of dossiers containing embarrassing secrets about the British Establishment. During the incessant mole hunts Wright undertook, he was granted access to any file he required in his search for treachery, real or imagined. His meddles ranged across universities, government departments – especially the Foreign & Commonwealth Office and Home Office – Buckingham Palace, and anywhere else that took his fancy. He even interviewed Airey Neave MP, who had escaped from Colditz, about the political leanings of his fellow non-British prisoners. According to Wright, MI5’s D-G, Roger Hollis, instructed ‘that I myself had to conduct any interview deemed sensitive, which normally meant it was with a lord, a knight, politician, top civil servant, or spy suspect.’

One of those Wright interrogated was the arch MI5 traitor, Sir Anthony Blunt. Blunt was prepared to betray many of his friends to preserve his position:

Blunt, too, loved to discuss the scandalous side of Cambridge life in the 1930s. .. I soon realised that the [Cambridge] Ring of Five stood at the centre of a series of other connecting rings, each pledged to silence, each anxious to protect secrets from outsiders. There was the secret ring of homosexuals, where loyalty to their kind overrode all other obligations; there was the secret world of the Apostles [a group of Cambridge intellectuals], where ties to fellow Apostles remain strong throughout life; and then there was the ring of those friends of Blunt and [Guy] Burgess who were not themselves spies, but who knew or guessed what was going on. Each ring supported the others, and made the task of identifying the inner core that much more difficult.

Wright personally interviewed and re-interviewed more than 100 people over a period of six years. By the end of it he could boast:

I had seen into the secret heart of the present Establishment at a time when they had been young and careless. I knew their scandals and their intrigues. I knew too much, and they knew it.

One of these was the former prime minister, Anthony Eden. All of this gave MI5 a power over the political establishment and provides one clue – among many – as to why successive governments have mangled their reputations by covering up the criminal activities of MI5. 

Many others had powerful Irish connections such as Blunt and Cunningham.

140. Formulating MI5’s policy for Ireland.

By the early 1970s, Wright had clawed his way to the top of MI5. He was close to its D-G, Sir Martin Furnival Jones. When Michael Hanley, the Deputy D-G of MI5 became D-G in 1972, he appointed Wright as his special adviser. Hanley asked Wright to formulate proposals about how MI5 should deal with NI after which he spent ‘a lot of time in Ireland’ and did the mysterious things which would have caused ‘more trouble’ if they were ever exposed.

The odds are overwhelming that Operation Clockwork Orange was a product of Wright’s earlier probes into the sex lives of men such as Cunningham and Blunt.

As MI5’s surveillance expert, Wright was probably directly involved in the bugging of the Park Avenue Hotel where Kincora boys were trafficked. In Spycatcher he described how he personally tapped the phones of Archbishop Makarios in Cyprus. Incriminating conversations between Makarios and his male lovers was later used to blackmail him.

141. Nerve gas and poison.

What Wright divulged in Spycatcher was hair raising enough. He described how he and an Irishman called Bill Magan had plotted to ‘neutralise’ General Grivas during Britain’s struggle against EOKA in Cyprus in the late 1950s.

He also disclosed the treasonous plot against PM Harold Wilson.

Then there was a description of how at the start of the Suez Crisis, MI6 had:

developed a plan, through the London Station, to assassinate [Egypt’s President] Nasser using nerve gas. [British PM Anthony] Eden initially gave his approval to the operation, but later rescinded it when he got agreement from the French and Israelis to engage in joint military action. When this course failed, and he was forced to withdraw [from Suez], Eden reactivated the assassination option a second time. By this time virtually all MI6 assets in Egypt’s had been rounded up by Nasser, and a new operation, using renegade Egyptian officers, was drawn up, but it failed lamentably, principally because the cache of weapons which had been hidden on the outskirts of Cairo was found to be defective’. (160)

Had the nerve gas plot proceeded, the collateral damage to Nasser’s secretarial and domestic staff, not to mention anyone happening to visit him would have been devastating. The gas would have asphyxiated the victims while melting their vital organs.

The gas MI6 had in mind to assassinate Nasser was undoubtedly developed by the British government at Porton Down. Wright described how he once visited it for a demonstration of a cigarette packet which had been fitted with a poison tipped dart by the staff of the Explosives Research and Development Establishment:

We solemnly put on white coats and were taken out to one of the animal compounds behind Porton by Dr Ladell, the scientist there who handled all MI5 and MI6 work. A sheep on a lead was led into the centre of the ring. One flank had been shaved to reveal the course pink skin. Ladell’s assistant pulled out the cigarette packet and stepped forward. The sheep started, and was restrained by the lead, and I thought perhaps the device had misfired. But then the sheep’s knees began to buckle, and it started rolling its eyes and frothing at the mouth. Slowly the animal sank to the ground, life draining away, as the white-coated professionals discussed the advantages of the modern new toxin around the corpse. (162)

The ten secrets that Wright withheld from ‘Spycatcher’ must include MI5’s role in supporting the UWC anti-Sunningdale strike, the Dublin and Monaghan bombings, and the Kincora scandal.

142. Anthony Cavendish: ‘lies, mutilation and even murder’ and photographing ‘small boys’ in bed with men.

Yet another whistleblower came out of the shadows, Anthony Cavendish. He had served with MI5 and MI6. He proposed to publish his memoirs. They eventually emerged in 1990 entitled ‘Inside Intelligence‘. According to Cavendish, deceit was the starting point of an officer’s career since he was destined to lie ‘from his first day in the Service‘.

Overall, Cavendish’s experience convinced him that as:

the years go by, the lies take over from the truth and morality accepts the other demands which are made on an officer to get the job done.

Cavendish also described the use of blackmail to control MI6 agents along with the use of ‘threats to the family of valuable informants‘.

Worse still, according to him:

theft, deception, lies, mutilation and even murder are considered if and when necessary.

Cavendish confessed that MI6 used children in sexual entrapment operations:

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.

143. More negative press for Wallace.

While the media tide turned in favour of Wallace and Fred Holroyd, they still received criticism in some quarters. The most prominent critic was David McKittrick who was now writing for the Independent. (This was the UK Independent, not to be mixed up with the Irish Independent, both of which were owned by Sir Tony O’Reilly.)

Although McKittrick had relied upon Wallace for material for his April 1980 Irish Times articles, he now began to attack Wallace. He had a meeting with Brian Blackwell, a former soldier, of the Law and Order Division of the NIO in March of 1987. Blackwell reported:

I had lunch today – with David McKittrick, Northern Ireland correspondent of the Independent newspaper. Our conversation ranged over the whole field of security and political issues related to Northern Ireland. However, I was not surprised when the conversation turned to Wallace and Holroyd and their revelations. I think you and (redacted – an MI5 officer) will be interested to know that in McKittrick’s view Wallace is a Walter Mitty fantasist who is clearly telling lies, embellishing them with any other ‘intelligence’ stories that are current such as the Peter Wright allegations. Holroyd, on the other hand, he sees as a more complex character who is almost certainly a clinical paranoiac who therefore cannot distinguish fact from fiction and may believe what he says is true. McKittrick has advised his newspaper not to run with the hounds, and to leave this story alone.

On 4 August 1987, Blackwell sent a ‘CONFIDENTIAL’ memo to a certain Mr Wood and to an MI5 officer stating that they would be:

interested to know that I had one of my regular meetings yesterday with David McKittrick. He tells me he has written a major piece rubbishing the revelations of Wallace and Holroyd. He hopes that it will be published in the Independent on Wednesday 12 August.

McKittrick had not entertained such doubts about Wallace after he had reported his revelations in the Irish Times in April 1980.

McKittrick’s article appeared on 3 September 1988. It made a number of allegations against Wallace which did not hold water and were demolished by Paul Foot in his book, ‘Who Framed Colin Wallace’. However, the Independent article had the immediate effect of seriously undermining Wallace and thereby dampening the interest of a number of journalists who were interested in his story.

One example will suffice to demonstrate how Foot eventually undid the damage. McKittrick had suggested that Wallace was jumping on Peter Wright’s bandwagon insofar as allegations about an MI5 plot against Harold Wilson were concerned. Yet, long before Peter Wright made his claims in 1987, Wallace had disclosed some of the anti-Wilson plotting to McKittrick. McKittrick had reported in the Irish Times on 23 April 1980 that:

Intelligence sources have now said that MI5 personnel in Northern Ireland were working against Wilson. MI5 objected both to Wilson being Prime Minister and to his government’s Northern Ireland police. They regarded him as being soft on the Provisional IRA … ‘It would be an exaggeration to say that 5 [MI5] saw Wilson as coming to power on the back of a Communist revolution,’ said a high-placed source. ‘But the exaggeration is only slight.’

Blackwell’s office was part of the Security and International Liaison Division of the NIO that co-ordinated the work of the security agencies in NI. This explains why his McKittrick memos were copied to MI5.

Blackwell had served as a major in the Royal Signals. He took over command of 233 Signal Squadron at Army HQNI at about the time of ‘Bloody Sunday’ (1972). He was posted from NI to the MoD in London and then became the Commanding Officer of 11 Signal Regiment two years later and was promoted to Lt Colonel in 1975.

He left the Army joined the NIO at about the time Sir Maurice Oldfield, the former Chief of MI6, was appointed Intelligence Co-ordinator at the NIO.

Back in the 1970s, Wallace played cricket with Blackwell on number occasions. Blackwell left the NIO in 2000. He died in 2018.

144.  Quinlan Puts the Cabinet Secretary on the spot.

Sir Michael Quinlan, the Permanent Under Secretary at the MoD, was a rare example of a high-level official who possessed a moral compass that still functioned, at least intermittently. Quinlan was advised about the discovery of the Clockwork Orange files in 1989, and took the view that they merited further investigation. As a result, the issue was referred to the Cabinet Secretary, Robin Butler, 1988-98. The files had been created in 1975.

On 14 September 1989, Butler held a meeting with senior representatives of the MoD, NIO, Home Office and MI5 to consider the MoD files. The participants now realised that documents existed which proved that the advice furnished to ministers in 1987 and 1988 about Wallace was wrong.

A memo marked ‘SECRET AND PERSONAL’ dated 14 September 1989, from T. A. Woolley, the Personal Secretary to Sir Robin Butler, Cabinet Secretary recorded the details for the meeting. It reads as follows:

Sir Robin Butler held a meeting at 9:30 am today with Michael Quinlan, Sir John Blelloch, Mr (redacted) Mr (redacted) and Mr Lyon (Home Office) to consider the case of Mr Colin Wallace.

2. Sir Michael Quinlan said that, as he had explained in his letter to Sir Robin Butler of 6 September, it had recently come to light that advice to Ministers from the Ministry of Defence (MOD) on the case of Mr Colin Wallace in 1987 and 1988 had not taken account of certain material originating in 1975. As a result, a letter from the Prime Minister to the Chairman of the Treasury and Civil Service Select Committee (TCSC) in 1987 had been inaccurate in certain respects. Michael said that he would set up an internal enquiry in the MoD to seek to establish how this had happened. The immediate requirement, however, was to decide whether or not it was necessary to set the record straight, and if so how. His own view was that it was necessary publicly to correct the inaccuracies, and that the best way forward might be to appoint an outsider to advise his Secretary of State whether, had  the information which had recently been uncovered been available to the Civil Service Appeals Board (CSAB) when it considered Mr Wallace’s appeal against dismissal in 1975, it would reached a different view.

3. In discussion, the following main points were made:

(a) A public correction of the inaccuracies in the Prime Minster’s letter should be made as soon as possible, in order to demonstrate that Ministers had acted with despatch as soon as the new information had been uncovered.

(b) At the same time, any public statement would have to be based on the comprehensive analysis of the files of Departments with papers relating to Mr Wallace, in case further relevant but previously unconsidered material was discovered.

(c) The timing of any announcement was complicated by the fact that the Home Secretary was proposing to answer an inspired Parliamentary Question after the summer recess in which he would announce that the book ‘The Framing of Colin Wallace ‘by Mr Paul Foot contains no new evidence to justify reviewing the conviction of Mr Wallace for manslaughter.

(d) Any outsider (such as a retired civil  servant) appointed to advise the Secretary of State on the Colin Wallace case would be unlikely to be regarded by the Government’s critics as genuinely ‘independent’. This pointed towards submitting the new material direct to the CSAB [Civil Service Appeals Board] and asking it to review its 1975 decision [about Wallace’s dismissal].

(e) A public announcement along the lines proposed would be particularly untimely in Northern Ireland, where it was likely to be used, however preposterously, to support allegations of collusion between the Security Forces and Loyalist Paramilitaries.

(f) Legal advice will be necessary to protect the Government against any risk of legal action by Mr Wallace or his supporters, possibly involving claims for the discovery of documents.

4. Summing up the discussion, Sir Robin Butler said that the Home Secretary and the Secretaries of State for Defence and Northern Ireland should now be alerted by their respective Permanent Secretaries of this latest development in the Wallace case. The Secretary of State for Defence should be advised subsequently to minute the Prime Minster with the background, proposing that a public statement should be made correcting the inaccuracies contained in previous Ministerial statements as soon as such a statement could be made with confidence that all new material relevant to the case had been uncovered. (This need not necessarily postpone the Home Secretary’s separate announcement.) The proposed statement would indicate that the Government passed all relevant new material to the CSAB with the request that it consider whether it would have affected the outcome of Mr Wallace’s appeal against dismissal without compensation in 1975. Meanwhile, officials in each of the Departments represented should now examine in detail all files relating to the case with a view to uncovering any documentation casting doubt on the accuracy of the Prime Minister’s letter to the Chairman of the TCSC, or of other Ministerial statements on the case, or on the evidence put by the government to the CSAB in 1975. This exercise will be co-ordination by the MoD.

145.  The buck is passed to Tom King.

The key points to note from the 14 September meeting were {i} a resolution was passed that Tom King, Thatcher’s Defence Secretary, should furnish Thatcher with a minute setting out the relevant background to the issue, and {ii} a public statement correcting the inaccuracies contained in previous ministerial statements should be released. The meeting also resolved that the statement should be made ‘as soon as the Government could be confident that all new material relevant to the case had been uncovered’.

In addition, it was agreed that officials in each of the departments represented at the meeting would examine all of the files in their possession relating to the Wallace case with a view to uncovering any further records.

Thatcher had sent a letter about Wallace to Terence Higgins MP, the Chairman of the Treasury and Civil Service Select Committee. The newly discovered files at the MoD now exposed her letter as misleading. Thatcher would become vulnerable to attack by the Labour Party in the Commons if she failed to correct herself.

Other ministers had made misleading statements about Wallace to the House of Commons.

146.  Thatcher is kept in the loop.

Tom King wrote a ‘minute’ to Thatcher on 25 September 1989.

Thatcher noted King’s ‘minute’.

She was not outraged that Parliament had been misled.

Instead, she made a rather bizarre comment to the effect that it would be better if her government took ‘no responsibility in things done under previous [Labour] administrations’.

No doubt the files that had been discovered by the MoD sparked many discussions between Thatcher and her spymasters about what to do. None of MI5’s files have emerged to reveal what D-G Patrick Walker of MI5 was telling her at his regular meetings at 10 Downing Street.

Chapter 11.

Misleading Parliament

147.  The scheme to corral the Calcutt Inquiry.

In the circumstances that prevailed, Tom King, Secretary of State for Defence, had no choice but to establish an inquiry, i.e., the one that would ultimately be conducted by David Calcutt QC. In the background, King was plotting to rig Calcutt’s terms of reference. Damage limitation had become the order of the day.

King’s arrangement – if successful – would conceal the full extent of what Wallace knew about lawbreaking, treachery and dirty tricks.

148.  A key document is withheld from the Calcutt Inquiry.

There was proof that Wallace had been engaged in PSYOPS. The proof was contained in a ‘Job Justification’ document which had been approved by the Army Establishments Board at HQ Northern Ireland in Lisburn but it was too inflammatory to reveal, even to Calcutt.

Hence, it was withheld from him.

Instead, Calcutt was shown a one paragraph summary of the ‘Job Justification’ (referred to as the ‘job specification’) which excluded a description of the darker side of PSYOPS activities.

The ‘job justification’ document was four pages in length. The ‘job specification’ contained only one paragraph.

Suffice it to say, it would be easy to confuse the phrases being deployed here. The use of the term ‘job specification’ has all the appearances of a sleight of hand designed to mislead inquiring parties into thinking that it was the same document as the ‘job justification’. This ruse enabled the MoD to hide the four-page document which was packed with embarrassing information, yet which indicated that Wallace had been telling the truth about his knowledge of and involvement in PSYOPS all along.

149.  King recommends a cover-up to Thatcher.

On 12 December 1989, King submitted a nine-page ‘SECRET’ report to Thatcher. (This report is not to be mixed up with the ‘minute’ King sent to Thatcher on 25 September 1989.)

On this occasion, King conceded that Wallace had indeed been a PSYOPS officer. At paragraph 4 (I), King pointed out that Wallace:

claimed that there was a supplementary SECRET job specification for his post, setting out his undercover psychological operations responsibilities. He had no formal directive of that kind, so far as can be seen. But such a job specification was drafted to justify the establishment of his post and it is reasonable to assume that Mr Wallace was told what it contained, even though it was never endorsed at Ministerial level. MOD did not contest Mr Wallace’s evidence that such a job specification had been prepared; but nor did MOD acknowledge it or make a copy available.

Another part of paragraph 4 (1) is misleading: there was a written document setting out the parameters of his PSYOPS role. It was concealed from all and sundry by the MoD because it described the sensitive nature of the work Wallace had performed and, by extension, that of his colleagues. This was the four-page ‘job justification’ referred to earlier.

150.  Unfair dismissal.

Since King was communicating with Thatcher in secret, he did not have to pull too many punches, i.e., he could acknowledge frankly to her that Wallace had been unfairly dismissed. At paragraph 4 (ii) he explained that:

It is therefore arguable that the proceedings, which led the Appeal Board to conclude that Mr Wallace’s services should be terminated, but that he should be allowed to resign, were flawed. It seems extremely likely that, even if the Appeal Board had found in Mr Wallace’s favour, the Department would still have terminated his services, but then it would have been obliged to pay him compensation for doing so. We should consider whether this situation requires us to take action to remedy any injustice to Mr Wallace.

151.  The errors which King told Thatcher had to be corrected

King did not comment on the fact that countless people should have come forward to correct the misleading picture which had been presented to Parliament. They included people serving in the Cabinet Office, NIO, MoD, MI5, MI6, IRD and IPU.

King did not suggest that this army of mute officials be hauled over the coals, let alone receive a slap on the wrist.

 His advice was merely that:

(b) We need to correct some misstatements made, both by Ministers and in official correspondence, concerning the Wallace case. In particular: –

(i) Misleading information has been given about the nature of Mr Wallace’s duties in Northern Ireland;

(ii)  It has been stated incorrectly that all his allegations have been fully and carefully investigated and that none has been substantiated; and

(iii)  It has been stated that Ministers are aware of no evidence that a plan by the name of ‘Clockwork Orange’ ever, existed. Evidence of preparatory work on a plan by this name has now come to light; although it is clear that it was not approved and there is no evidence that it ever had the scope alleged by Mr Wallace.

152.  King still gets it wrong: Clockwork Orange had been activated.

Yet, Operation ‘Clockwork Orange’ had been activated. Vast amounts of­ ‘kompromat’ had been accumulated about a variety of Unionist and other targets. This was achieved at an extremely high price: the pain and suffering inflicted on boys and underage teenagers in care homes such as Williamson House, Bawnmore and Kincora. A number of the victims were so devastated by the physical and psychological trauma they suffered, they later committed suicide.

Overall, various operations involving disinformation had taken place. Charles Haughey, John Hume and Ian Paisley had been smeared by the IRD. A forged bank account in the name of John Hume had been brought into existence. Another forged bank account was manufactured to vilify the Deputy Leader of the Labour Party, Edward Short. William Craig was portrayed as the moving force behind the kidnap of a German industrialist with whose wife he was conducting an illicit affair. (The story was entirely untrue.) Various Labour MPs were linked to Sinn Fein and communist groups.

A bank account was also forged in the name of Ian Paisley. Rumours were circulated that he had misappropriated money which he had invested for his own benefit. It was whispered that he owned farm lands in Canada.

153. Two possible courses of action.

Returning to the King’s ‘SECRET’ 1989 report, King proceeded to say to Thatcher:

I therefore see two possible courses of action: –

I could pay [Wallace] compensation without any further investigation; or

I could appoint an independent arbitrator to review the papers relating to [Wallace’s] case, to hear representations from him (if necessary in person), to interview any witnesses that the arbitrator considered necessary to see and to make recommendations to me on what remedial action should be taken I doubt if the first of these courses would be regarded as satisfactory, once we had admitted that errors had been made. I therefore recommend the second.

King had someone in mind to run the inquiry: At paragraph 6:

The members of the Civil Service Appeal Board who heard the original case [in 1975] are no longer available and I do not think that a further hearing before the Appeal Board is the right way to handle this matter. But Mr David Calcutt QC, the Master of Magdalene College Cambridge, has carried out a previous sensitive inquiry most satisfactorily and, if you agree, I would propose to approach him to see if he would be willing to undertake this investigation. I am confident that we could rely on him to approach these very sensitive issues with complete discretion.

154.  King wanted an enquiry he could hold by a leash.

King was determined that the inquiry would not look at allegations that MI5 and MI6 had run a honey trap at Kincora, or were involved in smear campaigns, or collusive murder programmes. Hence, he next advised:

It would be important to restrict [David Calcutt’s] terms of reference to the handling of Mr Wallace’s appeal [against his dismissal], so that he could avoid getting drawn into Kincora, ‘Clockwork Orange’ alleged assassinations, etc.

This indicates – at the very least – that King was concerned about allegations that MI5 had been involved in {i} the Kincora scandal and {ii} assassination and {iii} various smear campaigns – otherwise why exclude them from the terms of reference?

Why was it ‘important’ to halt an enquiry into child rape, vilification and murder if there was nothing to hide?

155.  Assumed knowledge. 

It is also noteworthy that King did not have to explain to Thatcher what ‘Clockwork Orange’ was about. If this had been a figment of Wallace’s imagination, why did King assume that Thatcher would know anything about it? One possible answer to this is that King and Thatcher had discussed Clockwork Orange before and knew full well that it was not a figment of Wallace’s imagination.

156.  King dons belt and braces: ‘Mr Calcutt should not make a published report.’

King wasn’t going to take any chance that David Calcutt QC might provide an insightful report, even within the restrictive terms of reference that King was planning to use to hem him in. In anticipation of this unappetising vista, King went on to say:

I envisage that [Calcutt’s] recommendations and my subsequent decision should be published; but that Mr Calcutt should not make a published report.

157.  Contempt of Parliament.

No one disputes that the House of Commons was misled by the statements made by ministers in 1987 and 1988. Furthermore, Mrs Thatcher had misled Treasury and Civil Service Select Committee. Rather than allow a wide-ranging and transparent enquiry to establish the full extent to which Parliament and its emanations had been misled, King curtailed the probe as best he could.

It is arguable that King and Thatcher’s engagement of Calcutt to carry out a modified inquiry to cover-up the original findings of the MoD investigation, initiated by Michael Quinlan, was contempt of Parliament.

 Contempt of Parliament comprises, inter alia, of

any conduct (including words) which improperly interferes, or is intended or likely improperly to interfere, with the performance by either House of its functions. 

This includes:

– deliberately attempting to mislead the House or a committee (by way of statement, evidence, or petition)

158.  King wanted to ensure the future use of dirty tricks.

At paragraph 9 of his ‘SECRET’ report to Thatcher, King not only admitted that disinformation had been part of the armoury of Her Majesty’s spies, but that he wanted to ensure that it would remain available as a tool which they could continue to use:

A particular difficulty arises over your [i.e., Thatcher’s] statement in your letter of 10 March 1987 to Mr Terence Higgins that it was not part of Mr Wallace’s job to spread, false information. Although the draft covert job description does not confirm that Mr Wallace had such a responsibility, it is now apparent that he was engaged in various disinformation projects; and the available records suggest that some, although not all, of these were authorised within the Army Headquarters in Northern Ireland. Any correction of your statement will inevitably prompt further questions about the use of disinformation in Northern Ireland, both in the 1970s and today: some of these questions will not be at all easy to answer; since information about activities in the 1970s is sparse; and since it would be wrong to commit ourselves not to use disinformation in all circumstances today.

159.  King’s fear of a ‘wide-ranging public inquiry‘.

King was afraid that the Calcutt inquiry might lead to:

… renewed pressure for a wide-ranging public inquiry into Mr Wallace’s allegations about activities in Northern Ireland during the time that he was stationed there.

What was there to fear about ‘pressure’ to expose criminality?

If the allegations about child abuse and ‘assassinations’ were little more than a puff of smoke, surely it would have been desirable to put the minds of those troubled by these allegations at ease by establishing precisely what had gone on.

It is a shame that a wide-ranging public enquiry did not take place as it might have revealed the truth about {i} the role of RUC Special Branch agents in the Dublin and Monaghan bombings; {ii} the Anglo-Irish Vice Ring; {iii} the smear campaign against British and Irish politicians; and, {iv} the treacherous plot against Harold Wilson.

160.  King’s puzzling statement.

King knew full well that Wallace was alleging criminal activity on the part of MI5 and other State actors. What could be more criminal than the rape of children or the murder of thirty-three people in the Republic of Ireland? It is difficult therefore to understand precisely what was going through King’s mind when he added the following:

Unless there is reason to believe that criminal offences have been committed, or that there has been serious wrong-doing by Government servants, or that the Government has done substantial injustice to an individual, I do not consider that any purpose would be served by investigating operational activities which (it is fair to point out) allegedly occurred over ten years ago (for much of the time under a Labour Administration). [Paragraph 10.]

Surely the only way to reach a conclusion as to whether or not there was a ‘reason to believe that criminal offences [had] been committed’ was to carry out an honest and thorough enquiry.

161.  Kings sends the ‘SECRET’ report to the Director-General of MI5, the man in charge of MI5 during the murder of Pat Finucane.

At paragraph 13, King informed Thatcher that:

I am sending copies of this minute to the Home Secretary, and the Northern Ireland Secretary, and to Sir Robin Butler, the Director General of the Security Service (MI5) and the Treasury Solicitor.

Patrick Walker served as director general of MI5, 1988-92.

Walker must have been reassured by the tone of King’s report, i.e., that the Secretary of State for Defence was prepared to go to such lengths to prevent Calcutt inquiring into ‘assassinations’. This was because Walker was the only person inside MI5 who could have given the green light for the assassination of Patrick Finucane, an event that took place ten months earlier. It is inconceivable that junior MI5 officers plotted the murder behind his back.

Finucane was murdered by MI5-RUC Special Branch agents in the UDA including William Stobie and Ken Barret.

Chapter 12.

Damage Limitation

162.  Archie Hamilton’s statement to Parliament.

On 30 January 1990, the Minister for the Armed Forces, Archie Hamilton, admitted in Parliament that disinformation had been disseminated in NI, albeit only in the 1970s: ‘It has not since the 1970s been the policy to disseminate disinformation in Northern Ireland in ways designed to denigrate individuals and/or organisations for propaganda purposes’.

He next conceded that:

Papers which have now come to light indicate that, when the case was made to establish Mr Wallace’s post, it was proposed that his duties should include responsibilities for providing unattributable covert briefings for the press; and it was stated that the incumbent would be required to make on-the-spot decisions on matters of national security during such interviews. It seems that, in the event, the arguments for including these responsibilities in Mr Wallace’s job description were made orally rather than in writing to those who approved the establishment of the SIO post. But presumably Mr. Wallace was told what duties he was expected to carry out; and indeed it would appear that he had already been undertaking unattributable briefing activities of this kind, which may have included disinformation

There was a sting in the tail. Hamilton added that a project named Clockwork Orange had been drawn up and that it ‘contemplated’ the dissemination of an account of the organisation of the IRA. However, he claimed that no evidence had been found that it had been extended to cover Protestant organisations and individuals or to include Northern Irish and British politicians, throughout the 1970s and 1980s. This was simply not true.

163.  Disinformation before and after the mid-1970s.

Hamilton was wrong. Disinformation had been deployed from the early 1970s right up to the murder of Patrick Finucane ten months earlier.

A document disclosed to the ‘Bloody Sunday Inquiry’ shows that Major General Leng was the ‘Director of Psychological Operations’ and that ‘all operations will normally be approved by him’.

In his report to Parliament, in 2012, regarding the murder of Belfast solicitor, Pat Finucane, Sir Desmond de Silva QC, stated that MI5 officers had continued to engage in PSYOPs in NI until at least the 1980s. One of the aims was to unnerve Republicans:

15.14 Security Service [i.e., MI5] officers later referred to the dissemination of information within the loyalist community, in such a way that it would be likely to become known by PIRA figures, as having the potential to make an impact on the republican target’. However, whilst the focus of the propaganda was aimed at PIRA, it is also clear that the initiatives were not particularly focused or controlled. The initiatives certainly came to include within their scope individuals who were not members of terrorist organisations but prominent figures in the broader nationalist and republican communities.

164. The Finucane murder.

At paragraph 15.30 de Silva stated that

The precise methods used by the Security Service [MI5] as part of their propaganda initiatives (in the 1980s) remain sensitive. I accept that many of the technical details of such operations cannot be publicly disclosed in view of the normal requirements relating to the protection of this type of information. However, I have come to the view that an outline of this issue has to be published as part of this Report.

And at 15. 54:

I am satisfied that the dissemination of this propaganda could have served to further legitimise Patrick Finucane as a target for loyalist paramilitaries. Whilst the aim of these initiatives was to ‘unnerve’ people such as Mr Finucane (rather than to incite loyalists to attack them), the fact that the propaganda could have such an effect was, in my view, a consequence that should have been foreseeable to the Security Service at the time.

De Silva gave MI5 too much credit. If true to form, they would have withheld documents and lied to him. Finucane was murdered in February 1989 after propaganda was put into circulation that endangered his life. It is more likely that the propaganda was designed to create an atmosphere in which the public would not be surprised when a Loyalist gang murdered him.

165. Hamilton’s statement has never been corrected.

What is not in doubt is that in January 1990 – less than a year after Finucane’s death –  Archie Hamilton told the Commons that propaganda had not been deployed ‘since the 1970s .. in ways designed to denigrate individuals and/or organisations for propaganda purposes’.

Hamilton’s erroneous statement has never been corrected.

166.  An apparently wide-ranging inquiry is announced.

Tom King announced the Calcutt Inquiry in the House of Commons on 1 February 1990.  Hansard shows the following exchange took place between King and Dale Campbell-Savours MP:

Mr. D. N. Campbell-Savours (Workington) Will the inquiry deal with the question whether Colin Wallace had a written job description classified ‘secret’, relating to his undercover operations? If it were possible to establish the existence of a job description in one form or another, would the inquiry be able to examine the nature of the activities involved?

Mr. King. The hon. Gentleman knew the answer to his question before he rose to his feet. He has indulged once again his interest in parading all kinds of rumour and innuendo. .. Let me deal with the hon. Gentleman’s first question, about the job description. Let me make it clear – this is what I have come to speak to the House about – that I would expect it to be for Mr. [David] Calcutt [QC] to make the decision, within his terms of reference. I have absolute confidence in Mr. Calcutt: I am confident that he will seek to discharge his terms of reference to the full, and will take into account any relevant matter.’ [Hansard 1 February 1990 (Vol 166 cc446-68.)]

The House could only have assumed from this exchange that David Calcutt would get to see the four page job ‘justification’ document and that his inquiry would be thorough and wide-ranging in its ability to deal with ‘any relevant matter’. This is something that would not happen.

Thatcher, King, Walker of MI5, and others now hoped that Calcutt’s report would put an end to the haemorrhage of secrets from MI5.

Volume 4 can be found here: Operation Clockwork Orange Vol 4: The Never Ending Cover-Up. MI5 will never admit what it did in Ireland.

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[1] This was an error. McGrath was not the father-in-law of Robinson.

[2] This was a reference to Stephen Waring. He died in November 1977.

[3] This was a reference to the legal action the British government was taking against Peter Wright, a former MI5 officer, who was trying to publish him memoirs, Spycatcher.

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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