Donald Allen
During 1987, when some of the London media were pursuing the ‘Wilson plots’ story, Colin Wallace, the only public source on the story at the time, was working with a Channel 4 journalist called Robert Parker. At one point disinformation about Wallace was being fed to Parker, through another journalist, from a former colleague of Wallace’s in Northern Ireland. (I know this man’s name but cannot prove that this was happening so will not name him.) At that time this man was working for the World Wildlife Fund, where he is now a major figure. Over the last 20 years there have been occasional stories in Private Eye speculating that the World Wildlife Fund was some kind of cover for intelligence personnel. This thought cropped up once again with the obituary of the former CIA officer Donald Aspinall Allan (Washington Post, 5 August 2006 ). Allan’s career included spells at the New YorkTimes, Newsweek, the Reporter and the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA), all known to be have been used as cover by the CIA. In 1983 Allan became director of information and education for the World Wildlife Fund.
Reuben Falber
An obituary of Reuben Falber appeared in the The Independent 31 May 2006. Falber had been the contact between the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) and the Soviet Embassy in London. Falber collected and disbursed the Soviet government’s secret subsidies to the CPGB from 1958 onwards. The obituary included the misleading statement that
‘The fact of the funding and Falber’s role in it only became public after Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika opened the books on the way the Soviet Union had been secretly funding Communist parties across Western Europe.
In November 1991 The Sunday Times was able to find a Soviet Central Committee ledger entry detailing how a “Mr Falber” had received two payments of £14,000 and £15,000 in 1978.’
In fact, as has been reported in these pages before, Falber’s role as the Soviets’ bagman was first revealed in Peter Wright’s Spycatcher in 1987. Falber’s role had been known by MI5 from the outset. MI5 for whatever reason chose to let the ‘Moscow gold’ continue.