2 February 1990
The Independent - London
Colin Brown, Mark Urban and Phil Reeves.
After a total of 100 minutes of questioning in the Commons, Margaret Thatcher and Mr King were warned by some of their own Tory backbenchers that the controversy would not go away.
Mrs Thatcher rejected repeated demands by Neil Kinnock, the Labour leader, for the inquiry into the sacking of Mr Wallace, a former army press officer, to be broadened to cover allegations of a campaign by security officers to smear leading politicians.
Mr Wallace said yesterday that he would give evidence to a "properly constituted" government inquiry or parliamentary committee. He dismissed as untrue government claims that Operation Clockwork Orange, the black propaganda campaign run by the security services in Northern Ireland, was not "cleared". It came from the top, he said. Written material was supplied to the Army's information office in Belfast by M15 in London.
Mr King surprised the Commons by telling MPs that the file which provoked the reopening of the Wallace controversy this week had been discovered early last year. It is believed that the file was found during a routine "weeding" exercise by a comparatively low-ranking Ministry of Defence civil servant.
The file contained references to Operation Clockwork Orange, which the Government admitted for the first time this week was a campaign of disinformation directed against the Provisional IRA. Mr Wallace alleges that it was extended to smear British politicians, but the Government denies any evidence has been found to substantiate his claims.
The same file contained Mr Wallace's job description. The civil servant who found the papers recognised their importance and it is understood they were then sent to a Ministry of Defence department called Directorate HQ Security. Senior civil servants then told ministers about the documents. It is unclear why it has taken a year for ministers to share their discovery with Parliament.
MPs believe that Sir Michael Quinlan, the Permanent Secretary at the MoD, was responsible for insisting that a thorough search for more papers be carried out. The search led to the Prime Minister admitting this week that she had misled MPs in her earlier denials of some of Mr Wallace's allegations. Mrs Thatcher yesterday stood by her earlier assurances that there was no evidence to support Mr Wallace's allegations of a disinformation campaign against the Wilson government, MPs or Protestants, and of a security services cover-up of homosexuality at the Kincora boys' home in Belfast.
But former Labour ministers, led by Merlyn Rees, the exSecretary of State for Northern Ireland, protested that they had been the victims of a smear campaign and said their names would not be cleared by the inquiry under David Calcutt, QC, into the narrow issue of Mr Wallace's dismissal in 1975 for leaking a classified document to a journalist.
Some opposition MPs angered the Government's supporters by accusing the late Airey Neave, Mrs Thatcher's campaign manager for the leadership of the Conservative Party, of being behind the "dirty tricks" campaign. David Steel, the former Liberal leader, said some of the smears had been directed at himself and three Liberal colleagues, who were "pivotal to the parliamentary arithmetic" which kept the Wilson government in power in the mid-1970s.
The majority of Conservative MPs were last night fully supporting the Government. One described Mr Wallace as "a Walter Mitty character" and many pointed out that the events had taken place six years before Mrs Thatcher took office. But some Tory MPs, such as Rupert Allason, the author of books on the security services, said the issues went beyond the Wallace affair to democratic control over the security services.
Mr King said disinformation in Ulster against individuals had been stopped in the mid-1970s, but confirmed that disinformation by the Army was still going on "where it is necessary to protect lives and for sound and honourable security reasons".
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