Never mind Peter Wright, he was obviously lying in Spycatcher anyway. Wallace is a vastly more important source: he doesn’t tell lies, for one thing; and he’s got bits of paper, evidence, some of which concerns his dealings with the late Airey Neave after he was thrown out of government service. At the time Neave was Mrs Thatcher’s mentor, campaign manager and, by all accounts, her closest political colleague. These Neave letters got a little attention last summer after being shown on Channel 4 News, and Ken Livingstone has been banging on about this ever since. Who knows? They may even get some serious attention. Here’s one of the letters. ‘Ulster – a state of subversion’ refers to a document Wallace wrote at Information Policy, one of the spin-offs from the Clockwork Orange 2 project. He gave a sanitized version – all the names deleted – to Neave.
LONDON SW1A 0AA
31 August
Dear Mr Wallace,
I enjoyed our talk last week, but I fear it was shorter than intended. I would like you to ring me at 01 219-3509 (the House) or 01 387-9393 on Thursday or Friday morning.I read your material with great interest and wonder if it could be updated to form the basis for a speech on 10 September.Yours sincerelyAirey NeaveI refer to your own resumé – Ulster – A State of Subversion.
Gregory Vosey writes:
A hitherto unnoticed British connection is in Labyrinth (Taylor Branch and Eugene M. Propper, Penguin 1983), the book about the 1976 assassination of Chilean opposition leader, Orlando Letelier.
In mid-1975 General Pinochet ordered the Chilean intelligence service, DINA, to gather compromising material on the human rights situation in other countries. DINA dispatched an anti-Castro Cuban, Virgilio Paz, to Belfast to obtain photographs of British military installations in Northern Ireland and, in particular, pictures of prison and interrogation facilities for political offenders. Paz ‘somehow gained entry to restricted military installations as well as the Maze prison’. (p 304)
Later in the year Chile came under pressure from the British government for detaining and torturing a British nun, Sheila Cassidy. Pinochet counter-attacked with a speech criticising Britain for hypocrisy and one of Paz’s photographs was used to illustrate an article about Pinochet’s speech in the Chilean press.
In 1978 Michael Townley, an American DINA agent resident in Chile, was expelled to the United States for questioning about the Letelier assassination. He subsequently turned state’s evidence and testified about his key role in the conspiracy. Townley’s significance is that he was one of DINA’s most important agents and many of the DINA operations described in Labyrinth are written from his point of view. The account of the Northern Ireland incident, for example, tells how he developed Paz’s photographs and how disappointed he felt about the one chosen for publication. It is not known how Paz obtained these photographs but the book refers to “DINA contacts in Britain”.