Tribune 21/28 August 1987
JOHN WARE is an investigative reporter, widely regarded, by his peers, as one of the best television journalists working in this country. He worked with World in Action and is now with BBC’s Panorama. It was to John Ware that Panorama entrusted its investigation into the Wilson-MI5 plots after the BBC embargo on the subject was lifted a couple of months ago.
Like all the other journalists interested in this story, Ware went to see Colin Wallace, eventually spending four days going through Wallace’s biography, his allegations, and photocopying some of his documents.
Then three things happened. First, the little group of journalists interested in the story began picking up rumours that Ware and Panorama were actually planning a hatchet job on Wallace. What this would consist of wasn’t at all obvious.
Then, some weeks later, the Panorama investigation of the MI5 plots was scrapped by management.
Thirdly, John Ware, with his investigation knocked on the head, wrote an article for The Listener (August 6, 1987) on the whole Wilson-Wright-Wallace-MI5 story. In this Ware does the hatchet job on Wallace he was said to be preparing for the camera, and a very strange job it is. Ware does two things: he makes elementary errors, and he creates insinuations. First the errors.
- Wallace “was fired from his job as a civilian Army information officer.” This is not true: after appealing, he was allowed to resign.
- Wallace “claims …that his prosecution (for manslaughter) was aided and abetted by MI5”. This is not true. Wallace may suspect this – I certainly do – but there is no evidence to substantiate one’s suspicions and, to my knowledge, Wallace has never alleged this.
- “In an account he claims to have written in 1976 as evidence of his intimate involvement in the intelligence world, Wallace talks of an MI6 operative he knew. In fact that document reveals an event – the death of a policeman – that actually occurred in December 1981.”
I think I’ve read most of Wallace’s output and the only document I can think of from the period Ware is talking about is an essay on the work of “Bunny” Dearsley. There is no mention of a dead policeman in this document. I talked to Wallace: he is equally baffled as to the document Ware is referring to. I challenge Ware either to name or to produce this document.
- Wallace was “on the press desk with a background briefing role which, inevitably, gave him limited access to intelligence people”.
This is the big lie. In a statement to the Civil Service Appeals Board in 1976, when Wallace was appealing against his dismissal from the Army (appealing successfully), his former boss, Peter Broderick, Head of Army Information Services, said of Wallace: “He had constant and free access to information of high classification and extreme sensitivity.”
Ware is able to make this preposterous claim only by completely ignoring the fact – which he must know very well – that Colin Wallace worked for the secret psychological operations unit, Information Policy. Broderick’s 1976 statement to the Civil Service Appeals Board mentioned Information Policy, letting the cat out of the bag. As a result his career in the civil service came to a halt.
As well as these elementary errors of fact, Ware also delivers a number of potentially damaging innuendoes.
- He calls Wallace “a civilian Army Information Officer”. This is technically true, but Ware omits the information that Wallace was a commissioned officer in the Ulster Defence Regiment, working for it part-time, in addition to his Information Officer and “psy ops” roles; was commander of the Army’s free-fall squad, The Phantoms; and lived for part of the time in Northern Ireland in barracks. Wallace was a soldier, not a civilian.
- Ware says that “Wallace’s reputation in Ulster was as something of a Walter Mitty”, and that he has “harvested a rich crop of fantasies”.
As evidence for these claims, Ware offers the story of the 1976 document (discussed above) and Wallace’s allegations of an operation called Clockwork Orange Two.
Through General Sir Peter Leng, Ware confirms the existence of a “Clockwork Orange One” (“hare-brained”, according to Leng), but tells us that “today, in Wallace’s mind, ‘Clockwork Orange’ has become a more sinister Mark Two which … went beyond destabilising the IRA; it was aimed at mainland Labour politicians – which just happens to dovetail with similar allegations, raised in Parliament from an entirely independent source, namely Peter Wright.”
This really is extraordinary. In the first place, Wallace talked to Steve Dorril, and gave him documents about Clockwork Orange Two, when Dorril visited him in prison in 1985 and 1986, before anyone had heard of Peter Wright. (Indeed, Lobster 11 and the Tribune adaptation of it, both about Clockwork Orange Two, appeared before Peter Wright’s allegations had been made public.)
The insinuation in Ware’s last sentence that Wallace cobbled this together to fit Wright’s allegations is completely false – and Ware knows this. In the second place, Wallace’s allegations about Clockwork Orange Two go far beyond Ware’s “mainland Labour politicians”. As Ware must know, Wallace claims that MI5 wanted him to smear Labour, Liberal and Tory politicians in Clockwork Orange Two.
Ware can get away with this disgraceful distortion only by completely ignoring the Wallace handwritten notes – based on MI5 information – which, as he knows, were confirmed forensically as being written in or around 1974. Pooh-poohing Wallace’s allegations, Ware can’t even bring himself to report them accurately.
The final irony is that, unwittingly, Ware has assisted Wallace’s campaign in the long run far more than his smears will damage it. Quoting General Leng as confirming the existence of “Clockwork Orange”, Ware has taken the story a long way forward. For, before Ware’s article, apart from the luckless Peter Broderick’s statement in 1976 (discussed above), no Ministry of Defence official at any level had confirmed the existence of psychological operations in Northern Ireland, let alone the name of a specific operation.
What Ware doesn’t seem to be aware of is the nature of the underlying problem Wallace presents to the British state. In 1976, when they were trying to get rid of him, the British state decided to deny the existence of both the Information Policy “psy ops” unit and Wallace’s job in it. With the exception of the Broderick statement, that has remained the official line ever since. Wallace and Information Policy were “deniable” – and have been denied. But having no official existence, Wallace can hardly be prosecuted for revealing official secrets: officially such secrets don’t exist.
It is this awkward position which has forced the British state to attempt to discredit Wallace. The “Walter Mitty” theme established during his trial is the logical response of the British state to the situation. Since (officially) the “psy ops” unit and Wallace’s job in it didn’t exist, Wallace must be making it all up – a “Walter Mitty”.
This Orwellian line had survived, battered but intact, from 1976 until General Leng’s blunder was reported by the uncomprehending John Ware. Nice one, John.