The View From MI5

👤 Robin Ramsay  

Colin Wallace and ‘Clockwork Orange 2’

In 1974, while working for the British Army’s Northern Ireland psy-ops unit, Information Policy, Wallace was asked (told) by an MI5 officer to work on a psy-ops project, ‘Clockwork Orange 2’. Wallace’s job spec. for CO2 was to produce a document, a first-hand narrative, apparently written by a supporter of the Republican forces in Northern Ireland. In this narrative a number of Westminster MPs were to be smeared with various illegal and/or politically or socially embarrassing allegations. (Wallace got the job as the only Northern Ireland-born psy-ops officer then in the British state’s employ: only he could get the ‘feel’ of such a document right.)

For reasons that have been elaborated in Lobster 11 (and, more recently, in the interview I did with Wallace and Holroyd in Tribune 23 January 1987), the project never got beyond its initial stages. But I have a copy of Wallace’s first notes for CO2 and they offer an unprecedented insight into MI5 thinking. For to produce his narrative Wallace was given MI5 information – files and briefing documents – on a wide variety of British politicians, political parties and groups. From these sketchy notes of Wallace’s – and they are little more than preliminary musings and jottings – something of what the content of MI5 information gathering (and misinformation generation) actually looked like is visible. Wallace made these notes between the two general elections of 1974 and it is the anticipated second election which hangs over them.

The central theme is MI5’s claim, that the Labour Party of 1974 was under the influence of the Soviet Union: “It is estimated that between 20 and 30 Labour MPs are members of the Communist Party.” And there is a list of Labour politicians “who are belief to be communists and who hold positions of influence”; viz. Labour MPs Benn, Mikado, Owen (David), Heffer, Hart (Judith), Driberg, Castle, Foot and Stonehouse.

The obvious question, “Does MI5 really believe this stuff?” is probably answered by the presence on the list of Tom Driberg, who in 1974 had been an MI5 informant for nearly 30 years, and David Owen, even then hardly a “man of the left”.

Let no-one accuse MI5 of misplaced subtlety: “Civil unrest, political violence and industrial disputes in Britain engineered by the Soviet Union through Labour Party activists and left-wing organisations”.

The actual reasons for MI5’s hostility to the Labour Party are probably contained in a list in these notes viz: “Labour policies which endanger Britain:-

  1. Defence budget cuts
  2. Nuclear weapons
  3. South Africa
  4. Anti Arab
  5. Anti South Africa-Rhodesia (growth of Soviet influence there)
  6. Arab terrorism in Britain
  7. Increased strikes/union power
  8. Communist Party members in government
  9. Freedom of Information Act and repeal of OSA
  10. Withdrawal from Common Market
  11. Lack of financial confidence – less investment in Britain”

Discounting No 8, which is bullshit, and ignoring “repeal of OSA” which I don’t understand, the rest is pretty much the standard picture – although Arab terrorism in Britain sounds very much like an anxiety specific to MI5.(They have to do the work.)

The focal point of much of this anti-Labour activity is, of course, Harold Wilson.

  • Wilson “can be shown” to be under Soviet control through Dick Vaygauskas. (Note the use of “can be shown” rather than “is”: it crops up again, below.)
  • Wilson “received approximately £60,000 from East German sources for campaign funds”.
  • Wilson “has a friend in the Soviet government”
  • Wilson is “pro Israel”
  • Wilson “bowed to the pressure (of the Communist Party members who are MPs) by removing the embargo on CP membership for members of the Labour Party.”
  • Wilson had as a “close confidant” Wilf Owens MP, a Czech agent.
  • Wilson “shielded John Stonehouse”
  • Wilson ignored MI5 advice on what to do about Soviet agents in Britain.

Another recurring theme is the alleged link between Labour MPs and groups alleged to support the IRA – the Campaign for Democracy in Ulster, Anti-Internment League, Troops Out Movement, British Withdrawal from Northern Ireland Group, Irish Political Hostages Release Committee and the Campaign for Social Justice are all listed as “Labour’s New Left in Northern Ireland” – an interesting if wholly misleading and barely intelligible description.

Named in this context as “key personalities” are Paul Rose (who gets lots of detailed attention) and Orme, Ogden, Owen, Delargy, Heffer, Miller, Brockway, Newens, Allaun and Cunningham, as well as those notorious left-wingers of the period, Brian Walden, Reg Prentice and Bob Mellish!

Edward Heath gets a lot of attention. He “can be shown to be under Soviet control through Lord Rothschild” (notice the “it can be shown” again). This, I presume, is a reference to the “5th man” story which surfaced in 1986 during the early fall-out and disinformation coming from the Peter Wright case in Australia and must be related, based upon Mr Heath’s appointment of Rothschild to head of the Central Policy Review Staff (the “think tank”). Heath is mentioned later in the context of “a homosexual link Heath/Thorpe” and in another section among MPs who can be controlled through “homosexual or other blackmail”. The others mentioned are Driberg, St. John Stevas, Van Straubenzee, Humphrey Berkeley and Harold Wilson – Wilson’s vulnerability alleged to be his relationship with Marcia Falkender, presumably all the rumours of their having had a sexual relationship.

Included in these notes is a fairly detailed analysis of voting patterns in the General Elections from 1964 onwards, and an analysis of the Tory Party leadership stakes when Heath goes. This last section is preceded by this sentence, fairly startling in what it takes for granted:

“The key issue is, therefore, whether there should be cosmetic treatment to help elect a weak government under Heath, or ‘major surgery to bring about a change of leadership before the next elections.” (emphasis in the original)

And in a prescient paragraph Wallace (presumably quoting MI5 estimates) notes:

“If Heath loses the next election and is forced to give up the leadership then the field is wide open and one of the ‘new’ faces may come to the fore to depose the ‘old brigade’. In that event there will certainly be a marked swing to the right.”

In the lines which follow that section James Callaghan gets the only positive reference of any of the 40 or so Labour MPs mentioned in these notes:

“He would be a good choice (as leader of the Labour Party) because of his role as Police Federation representative.”

But this is immediately followed by the snag:

“he also has ‘financial skeletons’ relating to the Welsh banking matter in his cupboard.”

This must be a reference to Callaghan’s relationship with the Welsh money-lender Julian Hodge which was first analysed in detail in the now defunct Welsh radical magazine Rebecca, and subsequently ripped-off by Hitchens and Kellner in their 1976 biography of Callaghan.

MI5’s analysis of the changes in the Tory leadership, after Heath goes, includes this list of “likely key figures”: Whitelaw, St. John Stevas, Pym, Wall, Mather, Knight, Mitchell, Boyson, Goodhart, Biggs-Davison, Churchill, Maude, Fox, Soref, Amery, Carlisle, Onslow, Buck, Baker and Powell.

Of this group, 10 – Neave, Wall, Mather, Knight, Goodhart, Biggs-Davison, Churchill, Maude, Soref and Amery – would be called ‘right-wingers’, with Wall, Knight, Biggs-Davison, Churchill, Soref and Amery (and possibly others) being members of the Monday Club. (And Onslow, of course, was/still is a spook, having worked for MI6/IRD.)

Other fragments of interest in these notes include:

  • the story about Marcia Falkender refusing to be positively vetted;
  • the story of the possible legal action by the widow of the civil servant Michael Halls who blamed the stress of working for Wilson and Marcia for the early death of her husband;
  • the story that Gaitskell was murdered by the KGB;
  • talk of engineering a split in the Liberal Party over the role of power-sharing with either of the other two parties;
  • talk of engineering a split between Harold Wilson and the NEC of the Labour Party.

Chucked into all this are two little groups of names from the British Right, from the context obviously there as some kind of allies. They are:

  • The Society for Individual Freedom,
  • G.K.Young (SIF member, ex MI6, Unison Committee for Action, Monday Club),
  • Gerald Howarth (now a Tory MP: at the time in SIF),
  • Francis Bennion (SIF, the brains behind the attempt to bring a private prosecution against Peter Hain),
  • Geoffrey Stewart-Smith (then a Tory MP, Foreign Affairs Circle, editor of East-West Digest),
  • Lord Salisbury (then Chair of the Monday Club),
  • Joseph Josten (now dead, then a Czech journalist and British intelligence agent, probably MI6),
  • John Slessor (Marshall of the Royal Air Force, backer of Walter Walker’s Civil Assistance and a member of the mysterious Resistance and Psychological Operations Committee – see Lobster 11 p11)
  • and Leonard Schapiro (ISC).

The role of these gentlemen in Wallace’s thinking in 1974 isn’t clear (and Wallace now can’t remember what it was) but I would guess they were there as probable conduits for MI5 misinformation. Put it this way: either Wallace noted their names down as possible contributors to CO2 or as possible recipients of the output of CO2, and of the two the latter seems infinitely more likely. (It is also of considerable interest to us that, with the exception of Lord Salisbury, all the other names are in Lobster 11. We were obviously on the right track.)

Included with these Wallace notes is a draft of a short essay written by him around this time (September 1974), “Ulster – a state of subversion”, in which some of MI5’s notes have been synthesised, albeit not in the form that CO2 would have taken. Nonetheless, in this essay, the essential causal picture MI5 were driving at is clearly visible.

Starting with the question, How do we explain the Labour Party’s lack of “moral courage in dealing with unrest?”, the essay proceeds through the following steps.

  1. “There must be deep-rooted causes behind this sinister abdication of responsibility” – viz. the desire of the Labour Party to see a “Red Shamrock Irish Workers’ Republic.”
  2. 1. above is connected to the presence of the 20-30 Labour MPs who are communists.
  3. 2. above is then linked to the presence of various KGB and GRU officers in Ireland; and from there we move to East German intelligence helping to fund the Labour Party’s 1974 election campaign.
  4. Increasingly tenuous, Ernest Mandel (of the 4th International) is linked to this. He visited Ireland in 1972 and met “extra-parliamentary socialist groups”. The point here is that many of these groups are, in turn, linked (alleged to be linked) to groups “which have close associations with Labour politicians involved in the Campaign for Democracy in Ulster and the Troops Out Movement”.

Thus, sliding across the causal terrain, we move from the Provos, via the KGB and Mandel, to the Labour Party.

Lobster readers even slightly aware of the British left’s history will be amused to see Mandel’s name looming so large in the scenario. But then, for MI5, his usefulness is simply his “link” – albeit twice removed – to the Labour Party. Indeed, one of the strongest impressions that comes off these MI5-generated notes is that if the Trotskyists/”revolutionary” socialists didn’t exist, then MI5 would have to invent them. The entire “new left” mentioned in these notes serves no apparent purpose other than as a stick with which to beat the Labour Party.

And if all this seems bitty, it is just unavoidable: Wallace’s notes are mere jottings, outlines, sketches. I have not bothered to list all the alleged “Soviet fronts” (although it is worth noting that IMG is included in the list!), or all the politicians – from all three parties – 73 MPs – whose names appear in these notes, mostly in hostile, “enemy” contexts. But I hope I have included enough detail to show that MI5 were, and presumably still are, engaged in massive domestic intelligence operations against legitimate British politicians and groups, from the Prime Minister of the day downwards. MI5 clearly believes that politics is too important to be left to the politicians. Indeed, if the comments about “cosmetic or major surgery” above are taken at face value, MI5 appear to believe they can control the direction of British politics.

Much of the content of the files is already familiar. The picture in this essay is not dissimilar to that presented in Lobster 11, drawn from Wallace’s prison recollections and from The Pencourt File and Pincher’s Inside Story, especially the latter. Pincher was obviously being fed the same derogatory material on British politicians, as was the Transworld Newsagency, in the United States, mentioned in The Pencourt File.

The significance of all this is hard to exaggerate. If it is too strong to say that Parliamentary politics is a sham, a cover for the real events going on elsewhere, it is quite obvious from these notes of Wallace’s, that MI5 are a considerable and unaccountable force in the land, a danger not just to the Labour Party but to all parties.

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