Introduction
There are a couple of interesting chapters in Chapman Pincher’s recent The Truth About Dirty Tricks, (Sidgwick and Jackson, 1991), especially the one about Harold Wilson’s ‘spymaster’, the late George Wigg; but, despite the usual shower of interesting fragments, mostly it is junk. Pincher’s primary strategy is clear enough. During the mid 1970s bureaucratic wars between MI5 and MI6, Maurice Oldfield, Chief of MI6, used Pincher to denigrate MI5, notably via a couple of stories supporting Harold Wilson’s claims that he was the victim of operations by MI5. Unfortunately for Pincher, as a man of the political right, by 1987 he was being quoted by people like us against MI5, in support of the allegations of Colin Wallace. Pincher has attempted to solve this dilemma by retracting his pre-1987 claims about MI5 plots against Wilson. He began this in his The Spycatcher Affair:a Web of Deception, and continues in this new book. The Truth About Dirty Tricks also contains a staggeringly inaccurate chapter on the Colin Wallace Affair. After a life-time of recycling official ‘leaks’, Pincher was a sitting-duck when some of his old contacts in the Ministry of Defence fed him a barrow-load of nonsense about Wallace which he reproduces unchecked. Here is part of Colin Wallace’s response to that chapter.
Despite the fact that he makes generous use of the material contained in Paul Foot’s book Who Framed Colin Wallace? Pincher appears to be quite incapable of copying the facts correctly and happily substitutes assertion for fact where there are any gaps. Here are just a few examples.
p. 160 ‘Two years later [1968], when he was twenty-five and still working from his home in Randalstown, a senior Army officer who had spotted his enthusiasm asked him [Wallace] if he would like to work as an Army Press Officer….’.
I had moved from Randalstown thirteen years earlier, in 1955, and had not lived there after that.
p. 160 ‘In the following year [1973] the new Head of the Army Information Services, Peter Broderick, whom I had known at Defence Ministry headquarters, decided to allocate Wallace more definitively to what was known as Information Policy. This was the mutation moment in Wallace’s career. He was to engage in highly secret and controversial work….’
The use of the words ‘was to’ is thoroughly misleading in that it conceals the fact that I had been working for Information Policy from 1971. Peter Broderick’s re-organisation of the Army Information Services, which transferred me to Information Policy, was, as he told the Civil Service Appeal Board, simply making formal an arrangement that had existed on an informal basis for several years. The MOD and the security services had, therefore, three years experience of my work with that unit before I was formally transferred to it on promotion. It is significant that neither MOD nor the security services prevented that transfer.
p. 160 ‘Clockwork Orange attempted to link the IRA with the KGB and other foreign intelligence agencies supplying weapons and explosives. Wallace, for example, had the task of planting a false story that a submarine had been seen off the Irish coast and had landed three Russians.’
The Soviet submarine story was published in 1972, two years before the Clockwork Orange project was created.
p. 162 ‘I have not been able to establish whether Ministers were told about Information Policy’.
Merlyn Rees has repeatedly stated in Parliament and in the media that during his time as Northern Ireland Secretary and Home Secretary he was not aware that Information Policy existed — i.e. at least five years after it was formed. To make matters worse, Mr Rees is on record as saying that when my case arose in early 1975 he was told by a senior MI5 officer at Stormont that I was a ‘filing clerk’. Similarly, Roy Mason has repeatedly denied that he was aware of Information Policy during his time as Defence Secretary or Northern Ireland Secretary.
p. 162 ‘Information Policy was largely an Army and Defence Intelligence Service operation.’
Information Policy was staffed by the Army and the Information Research Department. During my time at HQ Northern Ireland none of the staff belonged to Defence Intelligence. Pincher’s failure to mention the IRD involvement is very interesting because of the key input the department made to the unit and the fact that its presence there has been widely reported over the past years.
p. 163 ‘It is certain that Wallace was involved in the rather crude concoction of a diary of a disaffected IRA man, supposed to have been secured in a raid on an IRA house.’
The above comments indicate that Pincher does not understand even the basic parts of my story. The ‘diary of a disaffected IRA man’, to which he erroneously refers, was in fact the first part of Clockwork Orange. That particular episode was accurately reported in ITV’s This Week programme on 26 April 1990.
p. 167 ‘His files apparently contained a copy of a forged letter to Merlyn Rees implicating him, quite incredibly, in contributing to the IRA fund Noraid. He showed it to journalists but there is no evidence that it came from any British official source.’
Although the letter to which he refers was reproduced in Paul Foot’s book, Pincher does not even get the name of the alleged organisation correct. The letter purported to come from the ‘American Congress for Irish Freedom’ and not Noraid, as he claims. Also, I did not show it to any journalist, and I would challenge Pincher to name any reporter who was shown it by me during the 1970s. In fact, I only obtained a copy of the letter from a press source in 1988. For good measure, Pincher claims that the document could have been an IRA forgery. Not surprisingly, Pincher fails to explain why the IRA should have wished to discredit Merlyn Rees at a time when Mr Rees had initiated various political changes, including the release of internees and political dialogue with Sinn Fein, approved of by the IRA. I cannot recall any instance during my seven years at Army Headquarters when the IRA produced forged documents, let alone one of the qualities of the one referred to. It is surprising, therefore, that Pincher does not comment on the origin of the other forgeries such as the ‘Bloody Sunday’ one listing MPs David Owen, Stan Orme, Tony Benn, Paul Rose and Merlyn Rees; the one purporting to be Dennis Healey’s opinion of the Common Market; or the purported Labour Party election pamphlet. All of these were produced to a standard far beyond the technical or professional abilities of the Army Information Services in Northern Ireland.
p. 168 ‘One note expressed his [Wallace’s] view that the next general election would be dominated by personality factors, and that every effort should be made to exploit character weaknesses such as financial, sexual or political misbehaviour. It was followed by names including Wilson, Heath, Maudling, Pym, Rees, Benn and Foot.’
The note did not express my personal view in any way. My handwritten notes were nothing more than extracts from documents passed to me in connection with Clockwork Orange. As Pincher himself admits, he has never met me and, therefore, has no idea what my personal view of the named politicians was. It is, therefore, nothing short of disinformation for him to claim otherwise.
p. 171 ‘Evidence of Wallace’s state of mind is contained in an essay ‘Ulster — a State of Subversion’, which he admits he wrote himself. His own conclusion was that….’
The ‘essay’ to which he refers was part of Clockwork Orange and did not reflect my own thinking. Indeed, the documents from which the ‘essay’ was constructed are still in my possession and it is clear that the original material did not emanate from Northern Ireland. In other words, my role in the production of the ‘essay’ was similar to that of a sub-editor. The ‘essay’ was later used by Airey Neave to form the basis of a speech which he gave at Seaton Delaval, Northumberland, on 10 September 1976.
p. 172 ‘The commanders involved at the time, General Sir Peter Leng, who was keen on psyops operations, and General Sir Frank King, have been quoted by a Ministry of Defence spokesman as saying that they were not aware of anything called Clockwork Orange.’
Although Pincher is keen to quote the anonymous MOD spokesman, he deliberately ignores (or is unaware of) the report which was published in the Sunday Times on 18 February 1990 and withdrawn from later editions following the intervention of the Ministry of Defence. Below are extracts from the tape recorded telephone conversation between Barrie Penrose of the Sunday Times and General Sir Peter Leng which led to the story. The telephone call begins with Penrose reading to the General an extract from page 28 of Paul Foot’s book, in which Foot refers to General Leng and the Clockwork Orange project.
- Penrose: … And how many people would have known about Clockwork Orange? Would it… I am just wondering…
- Leng: Well I think the senior intelligence officer would have known. Broderick [Chief Information Officer] would have known. Mike [Len] Garrett [Chief of Staff HQ Northern Ireland]…
- Penrose: … The actual operation, I mean Clockwork Orange, when it was first mooted was in fact Denis Payne — several people have mentioned that — who was at NIO [MI5 — Chief of Intelligence Northern Ireland].
- Leng: That’s right. There was of course that branch as well. NIO would come in and cross-fertilise if they wanted to keep something from the RUC ….
- Penrose: …. No, of course. It’s just to see how, if you would forgive me, how the bureaucracy works. So Clockwork Orange in this case comes from Denis Payne’s office, so it’s Intelligence to Intelligence, and you’re shown it…
- Leng: I’m not always shown it. Only if they need to involve someone at a higher level. Penrose: Right …. Clockwork Orange was policy. This sounds like a statement rather than a question, but a statement asking for confirmation. Leng: And Clockwork Orange was policy.
- Penrose: ….So, you knew obviously there was a five [MI5] involvement in Clockwork Orange, but you obviously wouldn’t have known…..
- Leng: The detail.
- Penrose: The detail. Leng: Correct.
p. 172 ‘While the Information Policy exercise was in progress, the Chief of Public Relations at the Ministry of Defence in London, John Groves, had not been regularly informed by the Army about it. When he got wind of the way his staff were abusing their contact with journalists to plant disinformation he objected, verbally and in writing, to the Civil Service chief at the Defence Ministry, Sir James Dunnett and to the Secretary of State for Defence, Lord Carrington……At that stage, both Dunnett and Carrington declined to interfere. Groves was to persevere with his objections…. (p. 173) John Groves has assured me that he had never heard anything about it [Clockwork Orange]…. (p. 174) In the middle of September [1974], Sir Frank Cooper, the Civil Service chief at Stormont, had taken a decision that Information Policy must stop and, in particular, that Wallace must be removed. Cooper had been under sustained pressure from John Groves, the Defence Ministry’s Chief of Public Relations, and had also received reports about Wallace’s conduct from Army Security. He held a meeting with Sir Michael Carey, the Defence Ministry’s Permanent Secretary, and Groves, in Carey’s office in London; agreement was reached that the Army should revert to its proper role in support of the civil power and that it should not be allowed to do on “doing its own thing, in the disinformation field.”‘
In the three extracts quoted above, Pincher gives the impression that for at least a year before I was finally moved from Northern Ireland, the Head of MOD PR was greatly concerned about the activities of Information Policy in general and my role in it in particular, yet was totally unable to control or move his own staff. That is pure fantasy. Had Goves wished to move me out of Northern Ireland at any time he could have done so without any warning and certainly without having to consult either the Defence Secretary or the Defence Permanent Under Secretary. In any event, he had accepted the reorganisation of Army Public Relations in Northern Ireland in 1974 in which Information Policy was incorporated into the Army Information Services for the purposes of cover. Part of that reorganisation included the creation of my new post and the publication of my false job description.
Moreover, when I was promoted to Senior Information Officer in September 1974 to fill a long-term psychological operations post in Northern Ireland, my promotion was approved by John Groves and without objection from the security services. Had Groves or the security services wished, they could have filled the post with another officer, refused to establish it, blocked my appointment or withdrawn my security clearance. During the period when Groves was allegedly wringing his hands in despair about what action to take to stop Information Policy, I was twice recommended by Army Headquarters at Lisburn for the MBE for my work. Pincher’s account of Groves’ role in the case has the distinct smell of disinformation about it; and this becomes more obvious when one reads a report which was published in The Observer on 4 February 1990 in which Peter Broderick, Deputy Director of Army Public Relations at the MOD in 1974, is quoted as saying:
‘A few days before Wallace’s Appeal, the chief of public relations for the MOD [Groves] in London spoke to me on the phone. He told me: “You know this Wallace chap is an active member of a militant volunteer force. He is an active terrorist, a member of the Ulster Volunteer Force.” The suggestion was laughable — that sort of thing would have been known about.’
p. 174 ‘His [Wallace’s] telephones at home and in his office were tapped.’
It would have been physically and technically impossible to tap my home telephone for the simple reason that I never had a telephone installed there. Moreover, I had not lived at my home from 1970 until I left the Province in 1975.
p. 174 ‘Some of the leaks seemed so pointless that Major General John Woodrow, another friend of mine who was in charge of Army Security at the time, was concerned about Wallace’s motives.’
Like many of Pincher’s alleged sources in Intelligence and Security, Major General Woodrow is now dead and cannot therefore confirm Pincher’s claims. It is interesting however, that Pincher fails to mention that General Woodrow had previously been Director of Army Public Relations and had played a key role in the setting up of the psychological operations unit in Northern Ireland. Even more interesting, is the fact that one of the most senior officers in the Directorate of Army Security at that time had joined the Directorate from Northern Ireland where he had worked closely with MI5. In particular, he ran an agent named James Miller, who infiltrated Tara, the Loyalist paramilitary group linked with the Kincora child sex scandal. Last year, the BBC’s Public Eye programme broadcast details of how MI5 had covered up the sex assaults on children in the Home and had refused to co-operate with the government inquiry set up under Sir George Terry. In an interview with the Sunday Times in 1987, Miller admitted that his Intelligence handlers had instructed him to help foment the Ulster Workers Council strike in May 1974 as a means of discrediting Harold Wilson. If General Woodrow did make the comments attributed to him by Pincher, he may well have had very good reasons for doing so, reasons which had nothing to do with my alleged motives.
p. 174 ‘He [Wallace] says that he became concerned about the salacious material he was receiving about Wilson and Marcia during the election in October and handed over his Clockwork Orange files to his MI5 contact, whom he never saw again.’
I withdrew from Clockwork Orange in September 1974 before the General Election was even announced. My main objection was that more and more of my time was being diverted into political disinformation rather than fighting terrorism. Only a minute quantity of Clockwork Orange related to Harold Wilson or Marcia Williams.
p. 175 ‘The RUC sent detectives to see Wallace in London, where he was spending a few days acquainting himself with his new position. The confrontation took place in Grove’s office and Wallace was rather shattered when told about the documents.’
As the official records prove, this is a complete distortion of what took place. RUC statements show that I was never interviewed in London. I was interviewed by an RUC officer and an officer from the Lancashire police at Army HQ North West District in Preston on 6 February 1975. On that occasion I could not supply the officers with information about my work because of the security implications. Subsequently, I sought and was granted a private interview with John Groves on 11 February to find out how much information about psychological operations I could give to the RUC. Contrary to what Pincher claims, no police officers were present at that meeting — or any other meeting — I had with Groves. I then contacted the Head of Lancashire Police Special Branch the following day and gave him details about the background to the incident.
p. 176 ‘He [Wallace] should have remained at home, but continued to frequent the office to the annoyance of those Army men who knew the circumstances.’
During the time I was suspended from duty, I continued to live, at MOD’s request, in the Officer’s mess at Army HQ, North West District. The Headquarters was then located in an old country house known as Cuerdon Hall and comprised the headquarters offices, the officers’ mess and the GOC’s residence. The MOD asked me to remain there for two reasons: to give the appearance of normality to journalists inquiring about my whereabouts; and to enable me to avoid having to return to my home in Northern Ireland where I would have had easy access to the Press. Even Pincher must realise that it would have been very easy for the Army to exclude me from the Headquarters had they really wanted to do so.
p. 176 ‘Seemingly unable to desist from meddling, Wallace says that in July 1976 he wrote to Airey Neave, the MP who was later assassinated by the IRA in the precincts of Parliament. He claims that speeches which Neave made were based on material which he supplied.’
As Airey Neave’s letters to me show, I contacted Airey Neave at his request in 1976. I do not simply ‘claim’ that Mr Neave used my material in speeches: a letter to me from Mr Neave in August 1976 requested me to update one of the Clockwork Orange disinformation papers, ‘Ulster — a State of Subversion’, for use by him in a political speech on 10 September that year. I still have the original handwritten letter sent to me by Neave. Press cuttings relating to the speech show that Mr Neave did use this material. Similarly, an examination of further disinformation documents shows that other material from my collection was used in a speech by Mr Neave at the Young Conservatives in Brighton on 6 August 1976 and in a Conservative Party paper about Northern Ireland issued in September that year. Furthermore, as Mr Neave’s other letters to me show, I continued to do work for him during the following year until I moved from London to Sussex. Pincher does not explain why, given Airey Neave’s excellent contacts with the Intelligence Services, he continued to work with me and use my disinformation material at a time when, according to Pincher, I was regarded as a security risk by MI5 and others with whom Mr Neave was in regular contact.
p. 177 ‘On 5 August, after reading the row caused by my report of the alleged bugging of 10 Downing Street, Wallace wrote to Lord Wilson assuring him that his fears that MI5 were trying to discredit him and undermine his position were justified, and claiming that he had been part of the plot. He gave examples and claims that he asked for an interview with Wilson. He received no reply.’
I wrote to Sir Harold Wilson, as he then was, on 2 August 1977 following the publication of an article in the Sunday Observer (not by Pincher) about the former Prime Minister’s concerns about MI5. Marcia Williams (Lady Falkender) wrote to me on 5 August asking for details of my allegations which she could forward to Sir Harold who was then on holiday in the Scilly Isles. I did forward the details to her and she confirmed that she had received the material. More recently, in a letter to me dated 23 February 1987, she wrote: ‘I did indeed reply to you in 1977 but I am afraid your letter to Lord Wilson has now gone into storage with all his papers.’
p. 179: ‘The Ministry had also failed to disclose the full nature of Wallace’s authorised work at the [Civil Service Appeal Board] hearing. The briefing document giving the full description of Wallace’s tasks was classified because it mentioned his involvement in disseminating disinformation, though without any mention of Clockwork Orange, and the Board members did not have the security clearance to read it.’
This is simply nonsense. As the written statements made at the Appeal by the Deputy Director of Army Public Relations and the Institution of Professional Civil Servants show, the Board was told that I did have a job description which was classified ‘secret’ and that I was involved in disinformation or ‘black propaganda’. The members of the Board, as former senior civil servants, were cleared to receive classified information, but the MOD denied that any second classified job description existed! In other words, the MOD misled the Board to discredit the evidence provided by Broderick (DDAPR) and the IPCS, not because the true facts were classified, but because some psychological operations were unlawful and/or unconstitutional.
One of the most curious sections of Pincher’s assault on Wallace concerns Wallace’s 1972 ‘leak’ to the journalist Angus McPherson of the details of the British Army’s planned ‘Operation Motorman’, the move into the Bogside. Pincher comments:
‘Why had Wallace leaked it, and what would have happened to him had the authorities learnt (sic) what he had done?’
Here is McPherson’s memory of the event — and his evaluation of Wallace.
Mail on Sunday 4 February 1990
‘At the height of the Ulster violence, in the early 1970s. Colin Wallace was not just an Army press officer. He was the most extraordinary and voluble source of information abut the guerrilla war in Northern Ireland to be found on either side of the Irish Sea.
As a Defence Correspondent I spent hours being briefed on ‘deep background’ in his little office in Army HQ in Lisburn.
His information was a baffling mixture.
It was always highly printable but I didn’t always print it. I suspected some of it then and suspect more of it now. But much of it proved accurate and so highly classified it made my hair stand on end.
Government attempts since his disgrace to write him off as a ‘fantasist’ and a ‘Walter Mitty’ figure never held water.
I had no doubt at the time, and have none now, that his information – ‘dis’ or genuine – came from the very highest military and security levels. If and when Colin twisted the truth he would have considered he was lying for his country.
And I have no doubt that Wallace was uniquely trusted by generals and security chiefs, since they must have known what he was up to and made no attempt to stop him.
He was immensely hard working, totally dedicated and sometimes disconcertingly naive.
If he sometimes deceived journalists he also took enormous chances with genuine information he gave them.
No doubt he trusted his bosses with a similar singlemindedness. I can believe that he would have been bewildered and out of his depth if, as now seems possible, they resolved to get rid of him and shut him up.
Once, in briefing me on the strategy of the IRA he showed me transcripts of bugged conversations between known Republicans.
But they struck me as fakes. There was a remark about a shot soldier ‘crying out of him…’ – a phrase used in the plays of Sean O’Casey and J. M. Singe but not by any modern Irishman I’d ever met.
Disinformation material?
Now, I don’t doubt it. Colin never talked to me about politicians. My coverage was strictly military.
But I can recall emerging from a briefing with him at the end of July 1972 with sweating palms and a big problem.
Wallace had just given me full details – down to troop numbers and dates – of the top secret Operation Motorman.
At the time this was the most ticklish and dreaded operation the British Army had faced since the Second World War. Soldiers were to clear the No-go Bogside areas of Londonderry where the IRA were dug in, in force, behind anti-tank guns and missiles. If they stayed and fought, a bloodbath was certain.
I had a remarkable scoop on my hands. But could we be responsible for warning the IRA that 5,000 British troops were about to attack? My then editor, Sir David English of the Daily Mail, instantly ruled that we could not.
My story was not on the streets until the Centurion tanks and Saladin armoured cars were already warring into the Bogside.
The IRA knew anyway. They had almost all gone. So the Army’s fears were groundless and the only deaths were two snipers shot by soldiers.
Wallace’s briefing of me was, I believe, clearly part of a ‘psyops’ exercise – but using genuine information – to try and scare the IRA out.
We rather spoiled it by acting too responsibly.
But it was an operation that took a fearful chance. Knowing exactly what to expect, the Provisionals might have stayed.
Whether it was Wallace’s idea, or came from higher up, I have no idea.
But the man with the authority and knowledge to put it into effect was clearly no maverick Press officer.
Having known the man, I am convinced that his allegations about dirty tricks need to be taken extremely seriously.’