MI5 MISCHIEF

22 July 1996
The Guardian
Colin Wallace's celebrated case against secret service dirty tricks took him 15 years to prove. Tomorrow in the Court of Appeal he tries to establish his innocence in the last part of the jigsaw - his conviction for the manslaughter of Jonathan Lewis. Paul Foot recalls a sinister case of black propaganda.
NEARLY 10 years ago, on December 5, 1986, Colin Wallace emerged from Lewes prison after serving more than six years of a 10-year sentence for the manslaughter of his friend Jonathan Lewis. Tomorrow he goes with his lawyers to the Court of Appeal where he hopes to prove what he has always ferociously maintained: that he had nothing to do with Lewis's death.

He was met outside the prison that bleak December morning by a group of about 60 journalists, all of them anxious to discuss the astonishing allegations which had circulated while he was in prison. In essence, these were that he had been an expert in black propaganda and dirty tricks for the British army and the intelligence services in his native Northern Ireland.

His work had brought him quick promotion. In 1974, aged 30, he was the youngest senior information officer in the Ministry of Defence, and the youngest ever to have been recommended for the MBE. His central claim was that this glittering career was suddenly and cruelly cut short by the army and intelligence officers he had served. He had, he said, been sacked from the army in 1975 because he refused to co-operate with MI5 chiefs who wanted him to join in a dirty tricks campaign against recently-elected Labour ministers, supporters of Edward Heath in the Conservative Party and all Liberals.

For at least a year until he found work as a council information officer in Arundel, West Sussex, he claimed, all his attempts to get another job had been mysteriously thwarted.

Few of the journalists outside Lewes prison that morning believed a word of this fantastic story. It had been almost exclusively confined to Lobster, an occasional magazine which specialised in intelligence matters and was run on a shoestring from Hull by Robin Ramsey and Stephen Dorrel.

Back in his Arundel home, where his wife Eileen had spent his time in prison trying to survive on "potatoes", Wallace gave a long interview to BBC television, which was promptly shelved. Yorkshire Television, whose researcher had been to see Wallace in prison, decided against producing a programme about him.

Despite this almost universal incredulity, Wallace determined to go on telling his story. In that same year, 1986, two books were published which suggested that his allegations were not as absurd as they sounded. Spycatcher, by the former MI5 officer Peter Wright, ended with an allegation that rogue right-wing elements in MI5 had harassed the Wilson government from 1974 to 1976. John Stalker's extraordinary story alleged that he, a deputy chief constable appointed to inquire into killings by the Royal Ulster Constabulary, had been summarily taken off his inquiry and subjected to a campaign of disgraceful dirty tricks and smears.

When I first visited Wallace for the Daily Mirror in May 1987, I, like many other journalists was put off by his slickness. His prompt answers to every question, coupled with his past career as a professional deceiver of journalists, made him a dubious source.

My doubts were reinforced when I returned to London and rang the Ministry of Defence press office. Was it true, I asked, that Wallace had worked in Northern Ireland under a secret job description which involved "psychological operations"? Did those operations include inventing stories which would damage the IRA, and planting them on gullible journalists? Back came the weary and scornful replies: no, no. Wallace was a mere information officer. The suggestion that he'd taken part in psychological operations or worked with the SAS was ridiculous fantasy.

For the first time I heard the phrase which was to run through official responses on this subject for the next three years. Wallace was a fantasist, a Walter Mitty. I phoned him testily and challenged him with the Ministry's denial. At once, he came to London with a letter from his former boss at the Northern Ireland army information department, Peter Broderick, setting out Wallace's secret job description, which did involve psychological operations. At that point, I started to realise that if there were any Walter Mittys about, they were probably lurking in the Ministry of Defence.

Wallace's persistence, reinforced by his habit of meticulously keeping documents, started slowly to convince others. When Ken Livingstone was elected to parliament for Brent East in the 1987 general election, he devoted his maiden speech to the allegations of Wallace and Fred Holroyd, a former army intelligence officer in Northern Ireland who had the same sort of grievance against the intelligence services which he believed had got rid of him, and selflessly supported Wallace during his last three years in prison.

Through 1988 and 1989, others of Wallace's allegations began to get a hearing in the media and in Parliament. He had, he said, taken part in a black propaganda campaign called "Clockwork Orange", which started as an anti-terrorist offensive but ended as an effort to spread the smear that senior Labour Ministers were part of a communist/republican plot to subvert Crown and state. He had kept his "Clockwork Orange" notes which forensic tests proved had been written in 1974.

While in the army, he had, he said, been approached twice by Belfast citizens worried about allegations of child abuse at Kincora, one of the city's residential homes for boys in care. His questions about Kincora and his insistence to his MI5 controller that he would no longer take part in any propaganda offensive against his elected Ministers combined, he argued, to bring about his dismissal on the extraordinary charge that he had leaked to a journalist an entirely false "classified" document which he himself had concocted.

Interminable questions about these claims from Ken Livingstone and Tam Dalyell led to interminable, and increasingly irritable denials. The government tone was set by Brian Mawhinney, then Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Northern Ireland now chairman of the Tory Party, who replied to Ken Livingstone's maiden speech on July 7, 1987, as follows: "I reject his conspiracy theories, and remind him that the allegations made by Messrs Wallace and Holroyd over the years about the conduct of the security forces in Northern Ireland have been fully and carefully investigated since they left the Province in 1979. No evidence has been discovered to substantiate any of these allegations."

Roger Freeman, then Parliamentary Under-Secretary at the Ministry of Defence, now cabinet minister in charge of government information, wrote to Ken Livingstone and Tam Dalyell on August 1, 1988: "Mr Wallace has directly and through various intermediaries written to or petitioned all the departments concerned in this case, and I am satisfied that due consideration, in the light of course of earlier correspondence, has been paid to all the replies given and nothing of any substance was ever raised to cast doubt on the outcome of previous investigations."

The allegations continued, and so did the denials. For a time, it looked as though the stalemate would continue for ever and that Wallace's strange story would never be properly tested. Then, suddenly, on January 30, 1990, the whole scene changed. Something happened in the Ministry of Defence to provoke a further search of papers about the Wallace case. The resulting discoveries forced a volte face of quite extraordinary proportions.

The junior minister who was obliged to somersault in public was the under-secretary at defence, Archibald Hamilton MP. In a long answer to a planted written question, he dealt with Wallace's allegations about a secret project called "Clockwork Orange" which his fellow ministers had systematically denounced as the product of Wallace's feverish imagination.

"Two documents have been found," he admitted, "dating from 1975 which contain brief references to a proposed project with that title ... the documents show that Mr Wallace was involved in that project. The documents also state that the project was not cleared."

What about the secret job description which had been equally vigorously denied? Hamilton conceded: "The papers which have now come to light indicate that, when the case was made to establish Mr Wallace's post, it was proposed that its duties should include responsibilities for providing unattributable briefings to the press." These duties, moreover, "may have included disinformation".

The two central government denials were now reversed. On the same day, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher wrote to senior Tory backbencher Terence Higgins about questions he'd asked about the Wallace case. "I regret to say," she wrote, "that a re-examination of departmental papers has brought to light information which shows that there were a number of statements in my letters ... which were incorrect."

It was Apology Day all round. Hamilton wrote to Ken Livingstone "to clarify and where necessary to correct" answers to previous questions which were wholly false. For instance, the Ministry of Defence had contemptuously denied Wallace's allegation that he had organised a mock raid on Aldergrove airport, or that his department had forged CIA cards. Both allegations, Hamilton now admitted, were entirely true.

The government set up an inquiry under a senior Ministry of Defence official, David Heyhoe, to find out why these papers had lain hidden for so long. Heyhoe reported on May 14, 1990. He had discovered that an official in the division of the Ministry of Defence responsible for Northern Ireland had by accident come across a file marked "Clockwork Orange". As a result "other papers" had been found.

The fact that the papers were not available to ministers when answering questions about Wallace meant, Heyhoe recorded in a sentence of classical civil service obscurantism, that ministry staff had "to deal with a personal case on a basis of incomplete records and a total discontinuity of collective memory".

A second inquiry was set up into the treatment of Colin Wallace. This was undertaken in private by David Calcutt QC, Master of Magdalene College Cambridge. The short Calcutt report, published on September 13 1990, was even more extraordinary than Heyhoe's. Although he'd been instructed by the then Defence Secretary, Tom King, only to publish his conclusions, Calcutt reported: "I nevertheless take the view that a bare expression of my conclusions, without more, would possibly be open to misnterpretation, and that some reasoning, however brief is needed."

There then came the following devastating passage: "After wide reading and consultation I have reached the clear conclusion that the hearing which took place before the Civil Service Appeal Board on 17th October 1975 was unsatisfactory in two material respects.

"First, I am satisfied that shortly before the hearing took place representatives of the Ministry of Defence were in private communication with the chairman of the hearing with regard to Mr Wallace's appeal. Such communications should not have happened; and I believe that what occurred affected the outcome of the appeal. Secondly, I am satisfied that the full range of Mr Wallace's work was not made plain to the Appeal Board. In my view, the Board needed to know the full range of his work if it was to adjudicate justly on his appeal ...

"In my view neither dismissal nor resignation was within the range of penalties which would have been reasonable for the isolated incident which gave rise to the disciplinary proceedings ... To this extent I am of the opinion that an injustice was done to Mr Wallace, and so I advise."

David Calcutt concluded that Wallace was entitled to compensation and recommended a sum of #30,000. The ministry's cheque for that amount was delivered to the Wallace home in Arundel that same afternoon by despatch rider.

Thus within four years of his release from prison the substance of Colin Wallace's remarkable allegations had been confirmed by the authorities which had mocked them. The decisive judgement of the Master of Magdelene had in a few sentences disposed of a decade of official denials and prevarications. All sorts of questions still protruded. Who from the Ministry of Defence had nobbled the Appeals Tribunal? What did they tell the tribunal chairman, Sir Leslie Williams, about Wallace which had such an impact on the tribunal's decision effectively to uphold Wallace's dismissal? Why had so many vital official papers been overlooked?

The Commons Defence Select Committee decided to find out. Their questions to the Ministry of Defence were systematically side-tracked and obstructed on the grounds that Wallace's job had been "sensitive". In a pathetic report two years later the committee complained that they could not get the information they needed to answer the questions, and abandoned their inquiry high and dry.

Wallace's allegations that he had been obstructed in his demands for an inquiry into the most revolting abuse at the Kincora boys home continued to be denied by Ministers. But a book published earlier this year on the Kincora affair by BBC correspondent Chris Moore revealed that William McGrath, the chief abuser of boys in care at Kincora, had for at least 15 years before his imprisonment in 1981 been an MI5 agent. Moore produced substantial proof to show that the security services had obstructed all inquiries into Kincora to protect their agent there.

Colin Wallace was, of course, delighted by the vindication of his allegations. Soon after leaving prison he'd got a junior post at the British Airports Authority at Gatwick, which required him to rise every morning at 5am and get home late at night. He buckled down. Once again his capacity for hard work and his cheerful demeanour commended him to his workmates, and earned him quick promotion. By 1992, he was a senior manager at BAA's management training centre at Pease Pottage. He continued to complain about his treatment by the authorities.

Suddenly one afternoon in March 1992 he was told he was redundant. There was no criticism of his work, nor any other rational explanation offered. He was 49, unemployed again, hunting for work and refusing as ever to claim a penny benefit. For six months, he and Eileen were back on the potatoes. Eventually, he and some former army colleagues started their own management training firm. He now works, as usual far away from home, near Tunbridge Wells.

Wallace's main story about his victimisation in Northern Ireland has been officially confirmed. Throughout, he has continued to campaign to establish his innocence of the killing of Jonathan Lewis. Three years ago his lawyer, Jim Nichol, submitted a petition to the Home Office calling for the Lewis case to be re-opened. Nearly two years later, in January last year, the Home Secretary referred the case to the Court of Appeal.

Tomorrow morning, with the new Lord Chief Justice presiding, Michael Mansfield QC will start to review the evidence.