The state in politics: Wallace, Holroyd and Lobster Colin Wallace’s 1980 conviction for the manslaughter of Jonathan Lewis was quashed on 9 October 1996. Considering the size of the political iceberg beneath that little tip, with the notable exceptions of the Guardian and Channel Four News, the response of the media on mainland UK was pathetic, if hardly surprising. The BBC even got John Ware of all people, one of the co-authors of the notorious 1987 Independent smear-job on Wallace and Fred Holroyd, to give the first comment on Radio 4’s the World At One. Duly delivering himself of the opinion that he still didn’t think much of Wallace, Ware gave every sign of remaining unwitting of the fact that he was duped by his sources in the state.
The quashing of Wallace’s conviction – and the implicit admission that the trial was rigged – added to the Calcutt finding that his appeal at the Civil Service Appeal Board was also rigged,(1) are about as comprehensive a vindication of anyone who went up against the British state – and its media assets – as I can think of. And it only took sixteen years, hundreds of letters, thousands of hours and hundreds of thousands of words! It has been a staggering achievement by Wallace.
It was Steve Dorril who was first interested in the Colin Wallace story, writing about in Lobster 1 in 1983 in the context of the Kincora Boys Home scandal. In 1985 Fred Holroyd was trying to get the media to take an interest. Duncan Campbell, then at the New Statesman, had written a series of pieces about Holroyd’s account of illegal military and intelligence operations in Northern Ireland. Wallace read them in prison and made contact with Holroyd who went down to Arundel, examined the scene of Jonathan Lewis’ death, concluded that Wallace had indeed been wrongfully convicted, and took up his case. Holroyd took the Wallace story to Duncan Campbell, but after some months passed and Wallace case had still to make its way to the top of Campbell’s agenda, he looked for someone else to work with. He contacted Lobster, Steve went down to visit him, read through Holroyd’s material, went on to see Wallace in prison, and returned with some of Wallace’s early written accounts of the events in Northern Ireland which led to his incarceration. We began ripping through our libraries trying to make sense of Wallace’s account. It quickly became apparent that we had been handed an enormous – and enormously complicated – story. But in the midst of this research, Dorril was contacted by Anthony Summers who offered him the chance to be co-author of a book on the Profumo Affair, which became Honeytrap. Dorril abandoned Wallace and Holroyd and I wrote Lobster 11, an attempt to make sense of some of Wallace’s allegations.
We had a press conference in the House of Commons, hosted by Kevin McNamara, my MP, who had written a cautious endorsement of the thesis in Lobster 11. Fred Holroyd should have been there, but, by one of those ‘coincidences’, flat broke as he was – hitch-hiking to visit Wallace in prison – he was offered some security work abroad and didn’t make it. We gave out copies of Lobster 11, talked briefly, answered one or two questions, said this story of covert manipulation of British politics was the British Watergate – that was the heading on our press release – and got back on the train. I thought that would be that. The journalists would read the thing, see the enormity of the story I had sketched, and start investigating it. The story needed a lot of money spending which we didn’t have. I went back to the dole and Hull University library and continued what I had been researching before Wallace and Holroyd hove into view – the British Right, about which I, like almost everyone else on the British Left, knew very little. The next issue of Lobster, some four months later, no. 12, contained not a word about Colin Wallace or Fred Holroyd.(2) I assumed Lobster’s part was over. Wallace came out of prison later that year, was met by a posse of journalists, did some interviews – the major one, for BBC2’s Newsnight, being spiked, as Wallace himself had predicted – and that was that. To my amazement, the story seemed to be about to die.
My clearest memories of events over a decade ago are of first meeting Fred and Colin after taking over corresponding with them from Dorril. I encountered Fred in the Newsnight office just before Wallace was released from prison. Fred walked in, in his military civies, every inch the proper English army officer, carrying two suitcases. He plonked them down, stacked the scrap-books and ring-binders they contained on the table, lit his pipe, and said to the Newsnight journalists, ‘I think you journalists are all wankers.’ He’d been lugging the files round the London media for weeks trying to get someone to read them.
Wallace I met quite soon after he came out of prison. I persuaded Phil Kelly, then editor of Tribune, to pay my train fare to Arundel where Wallace lived. It was winter, snow on the ground, but the Wallaces couldn’t afford to put the heating on til the evening. So I sat in my overcoat, in their front room, with them, Fred and his wife, Marie-Claire. At one point I said something like this: ‘So on one side there’s the MOD, MI5 and all their media assets, and on the other there’s us, with hardly a penny between us.’ Everybody laughed. We laughed a lot in those days. Whoever was tapping our phones heard lots of laughter.
I taped a long interview with Fred and Colin that day which appeared as a double-page spread in Tribune – and then the first dribs and drabs began to leak out of Australia about a book by a former MI5 officer called Peter Wright in which he apparently mentioned plotting against the Wilson government; and my telephone began to ring. Lots of journalists wanted me to explain the story. And no wonder, looking back on it. The Wallace narrative was very difficult to become adept at – even if you believed that the story was true.
Fred and Colin, with their tales of covert operations in Northern Ireland, political hanky-panky and internecine squabbling among the state’s agencies in the province, came along at the right time for me. For I had reached the point where I knew just enough about the role of the state in domestic politics to see the importance of their experiences. In what passes for the theory of liberal democratic states like ours, there is no such political role – the state is neutral. There are interests in society aligned to parties, which fight elections to form governments, which take over the neutral state machinery to implement policies. This appears still to be the basic assumption of most academic teachers of politics, most of the mass media, and, I fear, most of the Parliamentary Labour Party. The importance of Wallace, Holroyd, Peter Wright, Cathy Massiter et al in the 1980s was their falsification of this theory.
MI5, the FBI and the Communist Parties of Britain and America
In The Clandestine Caucus(3) I referred, in a footnote, to the extraordinary penetration of the Communist Party USA by the FBI. I mentioned this only in passing there because I could not then obtain from the library the book which contained the details, David J. Garrow’s The FBI and Martin Luther King, Jr.: From “Solo” to Memphis.(4) Garrow was the first to describe how the FBI recruited the brothers Jack and Morris Childs in the early 1950s. The Childs had been in the CPUSA, Morris Childs rising to become editor of the US Daily Worker, but they had quit in 1947 after an internal dispute, and moved to the right. At the FBI’s behest they rejoined the CPUSA in the early 1950s, quickly became significant figures again in the party, and ended up as the financial conduit between the Soviet government and the CPUSA: Morris Childs received the suitcases of dollars from the Soviets.(5)
Garrow comments:
‘From [CPUSA head] Gus Hall Jack and Morris learned virtually everything that was occurring within the American Communist Party. Thus the FBI and the U.S. executive branch knew the full story of the American party and witnessed first-hand the contacts of the domestic party with foreign powers.’ It was ‘virtual control of the American CP…..too valuable to be sacrificed for a public relations coup.’ (p. 38)
In the UK, as Peter Wright first told us in Spycatcher, something similar pertained: MI5 knew who the conduit to Moscow was and allowed the money to continue. Wright’s identification of the CPGB’s link, Reuben Falber, was later confirmed by Falber himself. (Falber also believes the state knew about the money.) In effect the FBI and MI5 ran their respective Communist Parties as ‘honey-traps’ for the US and British Left. While the American Communist Party does not seem to me to have been of much political importance, vis-a-vis the British Left, the significance of MI5 in effect ‘running’ the CPGB since the mid-1950s would hard to be exaggerated. Which is why I have returned to this subject again.
MI5 and the Labour Party
The Sunday Times,18 February 1996, ran a long story about KGB – and MI5 – attempts to recruit Betty Boothroyd, now Speaker of the House of Commons, thirty years ago. In 1965 Betty Boothroyd worked as the personal secretary to Lord Walston, one of the junior Ministers at the Foreign Office of the then Labour government. She had already been an unsuccessful candidate for MP. A KGB officer in London tried to recruit her using the one of the standard KGB tactics of the period: send a good-looking man romancing among the political lower orders. The KGB man, under cover at the Soviet embassy, bought her lunch, then he bought her lunch again and asked her to get some documents for him, Labour Party policy documents, the kind that would have been sent to the Soviet Embassy on request. Betty Boothroyd told her boss; her boss called in MI5. But the MI5 officer misread her, and tried to recruit her to spy on some Labour MPs. She refused. MI5 did what they do so well: they bad-mouthed her at the Foreign Office and she was banned from working there. (The head of MI5 told Harold Wilson that she had been having an affair with the KGB officer.) Betty Boothroyd is quoted now as saying, ‘I don’t care a monkey’s what they think of me.’ But back then, like all the other Labour Party people who were smeared by MI5, she took her fucking in silence.
There are two interesting features to this story. The first is that this episode did not surface during the 1986-90 period when Masssiter, Wallace, Wright and others blew the whistle on MI5, and we learned of several Labour MPs who had run-ins with MI5 during the Wilson years. The second point of note is really an extension of the first: why did the story emerge now? The answer, I think, is to be found in the veiled complaints in the last year or so from the Conservative Party that Boothroyd, qua Speaker of the House of Commons, was prejudiced against them. The charge has no foundation as far as I am aware: it was simply an attempt to put pressure on Boothroyd. We are entering General Election year; there are lots of stinky scandals in the Conservative political closet; they don’t want a Speaker too keen on airing them in the House of Commons. My guess is that MI5 – a supporter of the Conservative Party, no matter what its new management may say to the contrary – has leaked the story of her lunches with the man from the Soviet Embassy. This KGB story will be behind the rumblings in the Conservative ranks: the threat of the smear to try and keep her in line. But, intelligent lady, she appears to have known – or was advised – to get her version of the story into the media first.
MI5 asking Boothroyd to inform on four MPs was just one of many contacts between MI5 and the Parliamentary Labour Party in the sixties. Four years earlier George Brown, then Deputy Leader of the Labour Party and Chair of the Party’s Organisation Sub-committee, its policing function, approached the journalist Chapman Pincher and told him that the leadership of the Labour Party – then led by Hugh Gaitskell – wanted evidence from the security services on the assumed Soviet links of a dozen Labour MPs. The PLP leadership wanted the evidence to enable them to expell them from the party, thus providing a defence against the crypto-communist charge liable to levelled against the party in the next general election campaign. Pincher duly relayed the message to MI5. In the event, when George Brown went to see MI5 Director General Hollis, he was given no such information. Peter Wright says in Spycatcher that MI5 refused for fear of blowing MI5’s sources in the Labour Party. But this is manifestly not the case. Brown, Gaitskell and Patrick Gordon-Walker, the trio who sought the information, wanted proof of Soviet contacts with the MPs – not the kind of information which could be obtained by sources within the Parliamentary Labour Party, but by phone-taps, surveillance etc. It is much more likely that MI5 refused to help the Party leadership expose left-wing MPs links with the Soviets – presuming that there were any – for the same reason that they did not expose the secret Soviet funding of the CPGB. They wanted to retain the crypto-communist weapon; they wanted Labour MPs to continue contact with the Soviet bloc; they wanted a pro-Soviet group within the Parliamentary Labour Party.
This is visible in the way MI5 handled reports of contacts from Soviet bloc officials it received from Labour Ministers and MPs in the first Wilson government. The fact that junior Minister John Stonehouse reported the approaches of the Czech intelligence officer Husack to the MI5 officer attached to his Ministry did not prevent MI5 later using those contacts to try and portray Stonehouse as an agent of the Soviet bloc. Charles Laughlin MP reported contacts from another Czech official but MI5 did not tell him that the official was an intelligence officer and left him exposed.(6) The same thing was done to Tony Benn who was also meeting Czech embassy officials. He was not informed of their intelligence activities, and thus it was possible, six or seven years later, for MI5 to tell Colin Wallace, working in the British Army’s Information Policy Unit in Northern Ireland, that Benn had ‘contacts with Czech intelligence’.(7)
Ten years after
And ten years after the public beginnings of the ‘Wilson plots’ story? Nothing’s happened. The leadership of the Parliamentary Labour Party was never anything but nervous about the secret servants of the state and now has given up on the subject completely. If it ever crosses the consciousness threshold of the dozen or so people who are ‘New Labour’, it is as just another potentially embarrassing source of ‘unreliability’ vis-a-vis their target audiences in the City and the Whitehall establishment.
Take the Parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee created in 1994. This has turned out to be the joke everybody on the left of the intelligence-watchers expected. You don’t even need to read the cuttings; the early headlines told the expected story: ‘Intelligence service watchdog “lacks teeth”‘ (Guardian, 13 April 1994); ‘Tories will dominate “toothless” security services watchdog’ (Guardian, 15 December 1994); ‘Tories block inquiries into past spying’ (Guardian, 27 March 1995). There are a few MPs who know something of the intelligence services: Tam Dalyell and Rupert Allason spring to mind; and others willing to ask awkward questions. None of those were appointed by the leaders of the two main parties to the committee. It would have been simple for the Labour Party to expose the committee as nothing but a piece of Whitehall information management.(8) All they had to do was consistently present subjects which the Tory majority on the committee would refuse to examine. The committee would have been reduced to farce in a few months. But nothing so uppity was contemplated: forelock tugging remains the order of the day. For the present it looks as though the democratic process in this country is incapable of taking on the secret state.(9)
Northern exposure
Not that having an apparently more thorough-going system of parliamentary accountability is any guarantee that the spooks won’t proceed as per usual. In the years preceding the introduction of the government’s intelligence legislation in the 90s, the Canadian system was often touted as the model to copy.(10) But recent events in Canada have shown that even their apparently much tougher system of political oversight of the secret services has failed to stop the political police getting up to the old tricks. In August 1994 it was revealed that Grant Bristow, one of the founders and leaders of Canada’s then fastest-growing racist group, the Heritage Front, was a full-time, salaried agent of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service. Bristow had been providing tax-payers’ money to expand and develop the Heritage Front, had given money to US racist groups, had infiltrated one of Canada’s mainstream parties etc etc.(11) A major political fracas developed in Canada, official inquiries were initiated and the Canadian oversight body, the Security Intelligence Review Committee, investigated and reported. In the event the SIRC report was a damp squib at best and whitewash at worst;(12) and the Canadian political system apparently shrugged and went back to sleep.
At the heart of all this is the belief of some of the state’s secret organisations that politics is too important – not least to their careers, pensions etc.(13) to be left to the politicians and the electorate. This seems to be a very common, if not near universal phenomenon. Think of the FBI, CIA; think of post-war Italy. Less well known examples are constantly being reported as the history of the Cold War is revealed. The invaluable Statewatch (May-June 1996) described an official report on the activities of the Norwegian Surveillance Police which showed how, since the 1940s, they had been surveilling the Norwegian left, often in cahoots with the Norwegian Labour Party. The recently published in-house history of the Netherlands’ internal security service, BVD, from 1949 to 1969, describes hundreds of ‘black bag’ jobs against the CPN (Communist Party of the Netherlands), multiple long-term buggings of CPN leaders and the creation of a fake Socialist Workers Party to stir up factional conflicts which eventually split the CPN in 1958 – much of this undertaken at the behest of the CIA.(14) We have reached the point, I suggest, where the onus is on those who want to claim that the spooks have not been manipulating any particular nominally democratic political system during the Cold War.
Wilson Plots
The tv programme on the Wilson plots in August in the Channel Four series Secret History, contained two little nuggets. On was the identification of Major Cabinet member, William Waldegrave, as the gofer between Chapman Pincher and the Heath government in 1974 when Pincher was told to proceed with some of the stories about Wilson then circulating. (Until then Heath had forbidden dirty tricks against Wilson or Jeremy Thorpe, the leader of the Liberal Party.) The other was the interview with Lord Hunt, who as Sir John Hunt, had been Wilson’s Cabinet Secretary. Hunt talked of a group of disaffected MI5 officers – confirming a part of the plot, albeit a very small part – and contradicting the official MI5 line that, as Director General Rimmington put it in her 1994 Dimbleby Lecture, ‘No such plot existed – as ministers stated and as Peter Wright himself finally admitted.’
The frequency with which ‘Peter Wright admitted there was no plot’ is now offered up – most recently by Mark Urban (see reviews below) – reinforces that little flicker of doubt about Wright. Consider the sequence of events. In the months after Colin Wallace gets out of prison, first there are stories in media, before Spycatcher appears, reporting what the book contains about the ‘Wilson plots’. The book finally appears and a lot of what is supposed to be there isn’t. Then what little there is gets withdrawn as John Ware interviews Wright for Panorama and Wright says, ‘OK, I made it all up’ – or words to that effect.
I can remember discussing with Colin Wallace the possibility that Wright had been brought into the situation to muddy the waters and distract from Wallace’s much more significant information. It never seemed likely and still doesn’t, but….
The Spectator of 5 October 1996 pointed out that the previous week’s issue of the re-launched Punch had reported what it called ‘a truly sensational piece of information….It concerned the days immediately after the February 1974 election. “If Thorpe joins the Cabinet and keeps the Tories in office,” Mr Haines quotes Wilson as saying, “then we will tell the Norman Scott story ….Wilson said he would get a former home office minister, George Thomas…. and the deputy leader of the party, Ted Short….who both knew about Scott’s relationship with Thorpe, to go public with it.”‘
With Wilson dead, we only have Joe Haines’ word for this. Should we believe Joe Haines? Why do I always get the feeling that Haines was a spook?
What with the new book, Rinkagate, and the ‘Secret Lives’ programme on Channel 4 in November on Jeremy Thorpe and Norman Scott, this is deja vue, already, again.(15)
It’s good to gloat
Professor Paul Wilkinson may be remembered by Lobster readers for his inept role in the state’s attempt to discredit Colin Wallace in the late 1980s. In his capacity as a ‘consultant’ to ITN he sent them a copy of an anonymous letter he claimed to have received which recycled the Ron Horn smear story about Wallace. (At the time Channel Four News in ITN was broadcasting pieces which substantiated some of Wallace’s allegations. On the Ron Horn story see Lobster 14) Alas for Wilkinson, his letter to ITN found its way to Colin Wallace: Wallace complained to the University which then employed Wilkinson; and Wilkinson had to apologise. (And he subsequently lost his job as ‘consultant’ to ITN.) See Lobster 16 p. 23, and the separate sheet which went out with it, for the details.
Much chortling, therefore, up at Lobster towers on seeing the Mail on Sunday piece of 10 November headlined ‘Terrorist expert in college cash riddle’. Wilkinson has just had to stand down as head of St. Andrews University School of History and International Relations ‘amid allegations of financial losses’. The School has run up a deficit of ‘close to £180,000’. The Mail commented that Wilkinson was ‘believed to work for the British security services and the CIA’.
Notes
- See Lobster 20 for the text of the Calcutt judgement
- But it did contain the rather naive account of my initial researches into the British Right.
- Advertised on page 32
- W.W. Norton, New York and London, 1981.
- Garrow estimated one million dollars a year were being supplied at one point, a figure confirmed later during the funding revelations at the end of the decade during the collapse of the Soviet Union.
- This is discussed in Smear!, Stephen Dorril and Robin Ramsay, (Fourth Estate, London 1991) pp. 196/7
- ‘Links with Czech intelligence’ was annotated in Wallace’s writing next to Benn’s name on the forged document Economics: Master or Servant of Mankind ‘authored’ by Denis Healey, Tony Benn and Stan Orme. In the top
right-hand corner of the front cover in Wallace’s writing is ‘Non UK’, meaning to be shown to non UK journalists. - This is the description used by Peter Gill in his interesting recent essay on the subject,’Reasserting Control: Recent Changes in the Oversight of the UK Intelligence Comunity’ in Intelligence and National Security, April 1996. Gill’s recent book, Policing Politics: Security Intelligence and the Liberal Democratic State, was reviewed in Lobster 27.
- This may reflect one of the core, unstated beliefs at the heart of the Blair ‘modernisation’ of the Labour Party. Modernisation equals pre-emptive capitulation.
- I seem to remember that the Canadian model was cited as an exemplar in a resolution on the intelligence services, accountability etc, written by me, moved by a delegate from North Hull CLP, and accepted, without opposition, at the 1992 Labour Party conference. (I don’t have a copy of the resolution and am relying on my memory.) Were the Labour Party still functioning as a political party and operating by its rules, this resolution would still be official party policy. But the New Labour clique is no more likely to challenge the secret state than it is to suggest that maybe membership of the European Union is a less than wholly wonderful idea.
- The best early summary of the affair was in Covert Action Quarterly, Winter 1994-5, ‘Canadian Intelligence Abets Neo-Nazis’ by Richard Cleroux.
- This is my interpretation of the account of the report in Reg Whittaker’s lengthy and excellent ‘The “Bristow Affair”: A Crisis in Accountability in Canadian Security Intelligence’ in Intelligence and National Security, vol. 11, No. 2 (April 1996). Whittaker is more circumspect but this is what he means. In the same volume, following Whittaker, is a piece by the Director of the Security and Intelligence Review Committee, Maurice Archdeacon, which begins by asserting that Whittaker’s talk of crisis ‘is to make a melodramatic mountain out of several vaguely discerned molehills’. To paraphrase Winston Churchill: Some molehill! Some mole!
- In his new book, reviewed below, Mark Urban notes at one point that the British spooks chose not tell their nominal political ‘masters’ that Soviet defectors in the 1980s had told them that the Soviet intelligence services were inept, incompetent, inactive, and in front of the TV or and in the pub a lot. A British TV film of about a decade ago, whose author and title I have forgotten, starring Ian Holm as a Soviet spy whose chief task was video-taping British TV programmes for the diplomatic bag to Moscow, seems to have been spot on.
- Statewatch, September-October 1995 p. 17. Thanks to Jim Iveson for reference. Fake Trotskyist groups to split the left? This couldn’t have been happening in the UK, could it?
- Although it contained some previously unseen footage from the 1970s, this programme, was a major disappointment. Although the narrator described the Thorpe afair as the ‘British Watergate’, virtually all of the intelligence material was omitted, not least Andrew ‘Gino’ Newton’s subsequent admission that MI5 were behind much of the Thorpe affair, including his role in it. What could have been a major reassessment of the affair turned out to be a routine re-hash of the received version.