I began writing this at the beginning of August. It was then some 8 months or so after Colin Wallace’s release from prison. Some kind of summing up seemed appropriate.
A great many journalists have now looked at his allegations – a handful in some detail – and, so far, they have all stood up. Not a line of his allegations has been falsified. The documents he claimed were written in 1974 (some of them were discussed in Lobster 13) have been forensically examined by Dr. Julius Grant, the leading ‘paper and ink’ person in the world and turned out to have been written in or around 1974. His claims to have been working with Airey Neave on anti-Labour speeches have been substantiated: the letters between them and press reports of the speeches Neave made with Wallace’s material were shown on Channel 4 News.
Despite being unable to find holes in his story some journalists remain suspicious of him. They accuse him of being ‘too professional’, or ‘too pat’, ‘too well rehearsed’ and so on. What they seem to forget is (a) he was once a P.R. man for the British Army, and was a good one by all accounts, and (b) he has now told the same stories to literally hundreds of journalists. Of course it sounds well rehearsed. How could it not do so? Other journalists have found him disconcertingly open, talking to anyone and everyone who comes to see him. Nobody gets exclusive access (not even if they offer money: neither he nor Fred Holroyd have taken more than bare expenses from the press in the past 8 months of intensive dealings with the media). There is also a perceptible dis-ease engendered in British journalists by the simple fact that he is a willing informant from inside the British secret state. There hasn’t been one before, least not of Wallace’s significance. I suspect they can’t quite believe its real.
This anxiety occasionally surfaces in public. Take the Leigh/Lashmar piece in The Observer (5 July 1987). Having reported that Wallace’s handwritten notes had been confirmed by Dr. Julius Grant as being written in or close to 1974, as Wallace had claimed, the Leigh/Lashmar team then overlay this with a great dollop of paranoia about him, going so far as to quote a single (unnamed) British Army source in Desmond Hammil’s dreadful book about Northern Ireland, Piggy In The Middle, to the effect that Wallace was running amok in Northern Ireland; and also describing him as a “self-confessed fantasist”! Neither claim is true and, on one of their better days, no doubt Leigh and Lashmar would acknowledge the fact. It may just be a coincidence of course, but this Observer piece appeared just after the rumour ran through the little group of journalists then working with Wallace that the BBC Panorama team were going to do a hatchet job on him. Chances are that Leigh and Lashmar were just hedging their bets in case Wallace turned out to be a ‘wrong ‘un’. In the event, the Panorama piece was dumped and the journalist leading that investigation, John Ware, had to unload his hostility to Wallace in the pages of The Listener, making a complete fool of himself in the process. (See the Tribune article reprinted at the end of this section.) This animus against Wallace may not be totally unconnected with Ware’s time in Northern Ireland working on The Sun. If Ware persists in these baseless attacks on Wallace we may be forced to spend a morning in the Colindale Library digging out Ware’s articles on Northern Ireland.
One of the oddities about all this has been the fact that Wallace has been the subject of far more professional scepticism and paranoia on the part of our journalists than either Cathy Massiter or Peter Wright. This I find curious. Cathy Massiter was never available to the press: access to her was always tightly controlled and these days she is wholly unavailable. She gave up very little in real terms: some information on surveillance which anyone not asleep at the wheel has taken for granted for years; some fragments on the MI5-MOD-Tory Party operations against CND; and one (conveniently dead) alleged MI5 agent, Harry Newton. Yet no journalist to my knowledge has ever got paranoid about her, seriously wondered if she was part of some wider operation. (I don’t think this, incidentally.)
All of which is true of Peter Wright. As I write this I still haven’t read Spycatcher, but I did have a quick flip through the section on the 1970s plots to see if they were different from the extracts printed in the Sunday Times. They aren’t. And even on a quick skim those extracts are clearly dubious. Wright’s account of an unwilling MI5 having James Angleton’s paranoia about Harold Wilson thrust upon it wouldn’t withstand an afternoon’s research by any of the journalists who have so enthusiastically recycled Wright’s allegations. And are we really to believe Wright’s ‘Three Wise Monkeys’ act when confronted by the MI5 officers plotting against Wilson? Are we alone in finding that totally incredible? And how interesting it is that despite the evidence from other people – Wallace, Gordon Winter – and the evidence of the events themselves that the mid 1970s operations were directed not only at the Labour Party but also at the Liberals and the Heathite Tories, that Wright refers only to the anti-Labour Party end of things. Wright claims to have learned of the operations by reading newspapers. If so – and I don’t believe this for a minute – how could he miss all the anti-Liberal activity (Thorpe, Hain, for example)? Wright manifestly isn’t telling us the truth yet he has been treated as if he were totally reliable. Dale Campbell-Savours MP, the Parliamentary end of the Wright-Greengrass-Observer chain, has cheerfully rehashed Wright’s allegations in the House of Commons without any means of verifying them, but has yet to even talk to Wallace.
In the mid 1970s there was some discussion here about how a Watergate-type situation would be handled. As I remember the discussions, the conclusions were that the British media would do OK but such a situation would never arise anyway, what with the secrecy of our society, the Official Secrets Act etc. In reality, of course, a Watergate-type situation was going on, the Prime Minister of the day (Harold Wilson) said so, and nobody believed him. Now that the original mid 1970s story is finally leaking out we can actually see how the British system has handled it. Only the Observer, Sunday Times, Guardian and Channel 4 News can be said to have taken the story even half seriously. More importantly, what has been demonstrated so far is that the British political system is incapable of dealing with something like this. As a number of people have pointed out, were this America there would be half a dozen Congressional Committees, with large budgets and subpoena powers chasing down the details. In this country. after more than a year of stuttering revelations (Lobster 11 was April 1986) neither of the opposition parties – as institutions – have yet shown any evidence of even being aware of what the story is.
This is particularly galling, if unsurprising, to me as a member of the Labour Party. It isn’t surprising because politics is about power: the truth is neither here nor there, and, to date, no-one has managed to persuade the Labour Party leadership that this story isn’t (a) complex (and who needs more complex material?) and (b) difficult (and liable to backfire on anyone trying to use it). The chorus of abuse from the Tory Party and its friends in the media which greeted Ken Livingstone’s speech on this subject will hardly have encouraged the grey middle-aged men in the Labour Party Shadow Cabinet that this is an area they should be getting into.
Livingstone’s speech is reproduced below. He may have been met with howls of execration but not a word in this speech was falsified. But then Ken Livingstone had done his homework, and it shows. It is hardly new material: most of Fred Holroyd’s allegations were made nearly 4 years ago in the New Statesman and on Channel 4’s Diverse Reports.
There is a major whispering campaign going on against Colin Wallace. One journalist working on the story has heard variations of the “Wallace as Walter Mitty” theme from 5 different sources, only one of them definitely a British spook. How far this campaign has penetrated the Palace of Westminster I just don’t know. The major sub-theme in these whispers is about the Ulster Citizens’ Army. This is what the British state seems to be relying on to finally discredit Wallace. And it is quite a clever smear, difficult to check out without effort and some fairly specialised knowledge (or access to it). Hence what follows.