"The role of the press is to hold power to account."
Downloaded from YTS.MX
Official YIFY movies site: YTS.MX
Mr. Wallace who is presently serving 10 years for manslaughter in an English jail
was known to have links with British Intelligence.
Wallace claimed he was an Intelligence Officer.
Wallace alleges he became involved in a black propaganda campaign by the security services.
There was no evidence to support the claims of Mr. Colin Wallace.
Until anybody can produce proper evidence there is no need to have an inquiry.
Colin Wallace had fractured Mr. Lewis’ skull with a karate style blow
after he was accused of having an affair with Mr. Lewis’ wife.
He hid his friend’s body in the boot of his car
and later dumped it in the river Arun.
He says he was the victim of an MI5 dirty tricks campaign.
The Man Who Knew Too Much
Northern Ireland 1969: Violence erupts between Protestants loyal to the British Crown and Catholics.
Information Policy: An information warfare department is established inside the
British Army’s Northern Ireland headquarters at Lisburn, comprising Army psychological warfare and
the Information Research Department (IRD), a clandestine department in the British Foreign Office.
The IRD as a Foreign Office department had to justify their position
in Northern Ireland and they justified it by emphasizing
the international links of the IRA. By saying this is to do with Ireland, this is to do with the Communists
and oddly this is to do with the Vatican City as well, playing up the Catholic angle.
The IRD tended to work through newspapers.
They would draft articles in London and then
distribute them through friendly journalists to slip into foreign newspapers.
They worked with publishing houses,
where they would write some book about communism
and then it would be distributed or published through a private commercial company.
Hugh Mooney of the IRD was sent as an adviser to Information Policy.
Northern Ireland was the most surveyed country in the world.
Every citizen probably had a file,
every household was under surveillance. Down to minute things, like,
extra pint of milk,
just bought a new TV where has the money come from, like that.
Colin Wallace, a 27-year-old press officer was asked to assist the psychological warfare unit.
Because I grew up in Northern Ireland, because I knew a lot of the background, I was then asked to
explain some of the significance in terms of emblems, in terms of labels and so on so forth.
I was really bringing into the PsyOps team
the Irish dimension as it were, in terms of history, emotion, symbols, sounds.
Maurice Tugwell the head of the Army’s psychological warfare school
and a veteran of Britain’s colonial counter-insurgency campaigns
commanded the PsyOps unit.
Maurice Tugwell believed that, "all information agencies in Northern Ireland
should speak with one voice:"
any organization critical of British policy was an IRA front.
Information Policy, PsyOps was a highly sensitive activity
and it really needed some form of cover, that gave its officers access to the public and the press.
Information Policy was in the same building, on the same corridor, as the press office.
So, a visiting journalist going down the corridor to the press office
would almost see the whole corridor as part of army public relations.
Where as a key part of that had no bearing on public relations per se.
On the 9th of August 1971 the British government approved the internment of dissidents without trial.
Many of those imprisoned were not terrorists, but civil rights activists and Irish nationalists.
The perception at that stage was a bad one globally.
And of course,
the IRA were very good from PsyOps point of view, they used that to make Britain look bad.
Reports of torture surfaced in the Irish press.
Where there were allegations of brutality,
the Information Policy unit planted with selected journalists
the fact that the techniques used by the security forces
in questioning detainees were actually less
demanding than the techniques we used on our own soldiers
when we were teaching them how to avoid
or deal with interrogation if they were captured by the enemy.
Stories of torture and arbitrary imprisonment without trial fanned feelings of historical injustice
and with that the popularity of the IRA increased.
The violence from all sides escalated.
In 1972, 479 people were killed and almost 5000 injured.
Each day the psychological operations team would look at
the violence of the past 24 hours.
Some activities would require a quick response, we needed to do something that day.
But sometimes there were themes developing, that
for example some type of terrorist activity was creating a problem
and therefore we would have to take a more strategic look at that.
A theme was a broad issue that Information Policy identified as a concern.
Major themes included community support for paramilitary organizations,
who were portrayed as organized criminal groups
that intimidated and exploited local communities.
Information Policy attempted to spread uncertainty and conflict in target groups.
The international perception of the conflict was another major theme.
Themes were used to color events with a message
that supported Information Policy’s long term PsyOps campaigns.
When journalists visited or phoned the Army Press Office,
they would be passed through to Colin Wallace and his colleagues.
We then from a PsyOps point of view either had an agreed
position which we would take on this, feeding in the various themes that we wanted to put across.
Or in certain cases we had a number of journalists who were much more
pro the role of the armed forces in Northern Ireland and we would then call them direct
and explain the background that we wanted to put across.
The propaganda was deliberately designed to create conflict,
to disorientate the IRA to unnerve them and to again to separate them
from the community whose support they needed in order to remain a viable organization.
We discovered at one stage they were using
nitrobenzene to mix with fertilizer to make their bombs more effective.
We discovered that nitrobenzene had a carcinogenic quality
and therefore there was a real danger
that people mixing these explosives unless they were protected properly
were likely to develop cancer at a later stage.
This was a scientific fact. But
exactly how much exposure etcetera we had no idea.
But because there were sufficient scientific hooks with that,
we circulated that information to the press.
And the good thing about it was lots of experts from the scientific world
agreed with the conclusion, that nitrobenzene was a carcinogenic.
Newspapers picked up the story and quoted an anonymous army spokesperson,
who was none other than Colin Wallace,
who claimed that "symptoms of nitro poisoning are difficult to spot.
By the time they are visible it is too late to treat the victim.
Vomiting and a coma follow and later the glands and liver break down."
The Guardian reported: "Children finding it stored in a derelict house
or people forced to store it by the Provisionals could suffer from the poisoning."
On occasion bombs would go off prematurely
and quite often the people transporting the bomb would be killed.
And where we got a bomb going off prematurely, although we knew the reason
from the subsequent examination of the device
why it had gone off prematurely,
we would quite often try to shift the reason for that onto something else.
In campaigns of a political nature army PsyOps worked with Hugh Mooney of the IRD.
One of the themes the IRD used in its propaganda was trying to link the IRA to the Soviet Union
and the broader communist
threat.
And so one of their plans involved telling journalists or leaking a story
that Soviet submarines
were dropping subversives, who had been trained by the KGB, off the coast of Ireland.
IRD acquired at one stage some photographs that the Royal Air Force had taken
of a Soviet submarine off the coast of Scotland.
A dossier was then built up by IRD, creating a credible story that
this submarine which then
had moved off the coast of Donegal rather than Scotland, from the story point of view,
that this was
clear evidence that the Soviets were directly involved in the violence in Northern Ireland.
So IRD set up a meeting with the News of the World in London.
We took across photographs, various other documents
and material to substantiate the story.
This was given to the News of the World, who ran it as a front page lead.
It was a huge story and it got wide circulation again around the world.
Hugh Mooney identified himself to the journalist as a member of the Foreign Office.
The Foreign Office was a cover for the activities of IRD
and therefore he was listed as a senior member of the Foreign Office
and that is how they knew that he was a genuine official.
We would try to manipulate the terrorist organization simply by information.
Just to delay and get them to lose faith in what they were doing.
But at the other end of the scale there may be a technical intervention, where
again one would try to get
for example a weapon to misfire or to explode or something of that nature.
On one occasion the IRA was struggling with using heavier weapons such as bazookas.
And it turned out that they were using them with the safety cap still on.
The IRD decided to conceal this explanation and instead
issue a dummy army order suggesting that the shells be tested electronically.
The IRD hoped
that this would result in explosions going off in the hands of IRA members.
In Northern Ireland, a clandestine unit, the Military Reaction Force, dressed up as civilians
and injured and killed numerous Catholics in drive by shootings.
Information Policy would point out to journalists
that the weapons used were those that the paramilitary groups carried.
As a result, the press attributed the attacks to the paramilitary groups.
In one incident the police discovered
that an undercover army unit had injured a group of people
at a bus stop in a drive by shooting on the Glen Road in Belfast.
The police wanted to press charges.
PsyOps dissuaded the police by threatening to reveal that the ammunition used
had been given to the army by the police.
Information Policy established close relationships with journalists
and their publications.
The whole thing is about knowing the target audience
but also knowing the journalists as well.
Sometimes you know the relationship was
very good and it was almost at a humorous level.
And journalists might ring me up, say "look Colin I'm quoting you as saying this,"
and I would say: "but I didn't say that,"
and they said "I know but we knew you would say that."
And it was at that level, and unless
that quote was really way off mark, I would be quite happy with that.
99% of the work I was doing was un-attributable,
and then you also have off-the-record information, which
you know, journalists would know but couldn't actually
report on. So literally that would just be built into their story
without any reference to where it came from.
Professional journalists are very good, because they realized
that if they didn't actually stick by what was a journalistic agreement after all,
then probably we would not cooperate with them in the same way in the future.
How important was it for PsyOps to be believable?
The press quite often said that PsyOps was largely about propaganda and
using disinformation.
But in the vast majority of cases we were working on real intelligence.
See, real intelligence is much more powerful, because
when the terrorists check out their own sources
it has to be credible. They have to be able to stand it out.
If they can show it is false, then of course it is a waste of time
and really does not go anywhere.
So most of the material that we used, the most effective stuff,
was genuine intelligence,
and had to be credible
not just from a journalist point of view, but it had to also be credible from a terrorist point of view.
On the 5th of August 1973,
an article in the Belfast Sunday News reported
that sheep had been sacrificed in a black magic ritual
on Copeland Island Beach North East of Belfast.
It was a front-page headline in the Sunday News, which lots of people read.
The story was that sheep had been ritually killed and mutilated, that was the story,
and that it was Satanists who had done this.
As a would-be anthropologist, an undergraduate at the time,
it tweaked my interests and I
began to pay attention as other news stories appeared in other the local papers.
The more I looked the more I found and I began to be really surprised
at the degree to which this had been a local news paper story in Northern Ireland.
From August 1973,
stories of witchcraft and black magic
began to surface in many local newspapers.
The first thing that I had to do was try and understand
what witchcraft would look like.
We had no idea so I bought a book on the subject.
Then the whole idea
of the sacrifice of animals or whatever it might have been,
we got blood from the cook house from the army cook house
and we would scatter that over the
makeshift altars that were there.
Some of that material then we left
and it would be discovered by local people and then eventually
they would talk about it to the press and
gradually the story built up and build up over a period of months.
This was a way of really
getting the interest of the press, getting rumors going around and therefore
doing the things that we really wanted to happen.
The ritual sites were often located in old graveyards and abandoned properties.
You have to remember
that this was a time in Northern Ireland when all kinds of unusual things were happening.
Assassinations were a very regular thing, some of them were particularly bloody and brutal.
Torture, mutilation, using knives and blades and things like that.
People were talking about ritual murders and all kinds of things. So,
all of a sudden all of the moral certainties
no longer seemed to be quite just as certain.
Information Policy sent fake Readers’ Letters to the local press
to help fan the rumours.
Quite often on different subjects we would write to local newspapers
drawing attention to something or criticizing something
and then the newspaper would publish that. It would
usually be about a local issue and it was very much done at that local Level.
But then we would pick up the publication of those letters and
we would then circulate those letters more to the national press,
to reflect what would be portrayed as local views.
Don't forget that
we were not just influencing the press. The press is only one way of influencing the public.
We had to be able to influence all sorts of other people who were
you know communicating with the public.
The churches then
in the 70s had much more influence of course than they have today
and therefore this involvement of witchcraft was quite important.
The key thing we wanted the Protestant,
sorry we wanted the clergy to do, I think was just
to try and go back to reject all types of violence
and questionable behavior. And whether that was drugs or witchcraft or terrorism,
it was to say that these activities really have no
place in the society that we were trying to create.
And because
at that stage people's world was dominated by the fear of terrorism,
we were directly linking a lot of these things together. It was important to look at
evil bad and terrorism all within one package.
They were particularly interested in
getting at the Protestant population and getting them to believe in this stuff.
They were trying to scare the bejesus out of the local population
and to attach that fright to the terrible things that going on ergo the paramilitaries.
That is I think what the core job of what they were doing was.
They were trying to discredit the paramilitaries. They were trying to associate them with
bad things, drug dealing, dodgy financial dealings, etc. Etc.
We were just saying, look, the
fact that the community has now sort of dissolved into this violence,
which is becoming more and more sadistic in terms of sectarian assassinations,
you know, where do you draw a halt as a community.
I think it helped to bring home to people, that
there was something going on in their community that really
was not good for them as a whole.
That is a strange way thinking,
because you know you are part of the army and the idea is that you are fighting a war.
But you are saying the witchcraft campaign was about
bringing a sense of morality back to the community,
you wouldn't really have thought that the army would think about that?
Probably not but I think you see it is a war but it is not a conventional war.
Terrorism is fundamentally a propaganda war that is backed up by armed conflict.
So, it was just I think going back to
say to people "you know you have grown up as I did in Northern Ireland with a very strong belief
in the community and in our own church, whatever that religion was,
and surely we have drifted a long way from that
as a result of the violence of the last five six years."
On the 8th of September 1973
the burnt and mutilated body of 10-year-old Brian McDermott
was discovered by the river Lagan in Belfast.
People began to speculate: "was this a black magic killing" and
it certainly contributed towards one of the threads and the rumors and fears
that autumn, which was that Satanists were looking for children to abduct.
Newspapers reported rumours that "a boy or girl under seven would be sacrificed."
The police actually issued
a statement saying they believed that the murder may have involved witchcraft,
that was a concern for us at that stage because bearing in mind that we were creating this concept.
At that point we stopped using witchcraft as a concept.
But that was in September
and according to Richard Jenkins the witchcraft scare continued
all the way to the beginning of 1974?
I think that's right, and one of the points we were making is that when you create a story
it gathers momentum over a period of time and I think although we stop doing things,
there were lots of other stories and rumors going around. There may also have been people,
you know, creating these things for fun really.
But we certainly stopped after Brian McDermott’s death. There's no doubt of that.
I’m absolutely clear. But it may well be that the aftermath of that was still going on
for a period of sometime, even to the beginning of the following year.
From early September to December 1973,
there were more than 70 articles referring to black magic and witchcraft.
By the beginning of the following year the topic had almost completely vanished from the press.
When the British Prime Minister Harold Wilson visited Northern Ireland, he was briefed by Colin Wallace.
Would the Prime Minister have been aware
that you were in fact in military intelligence?
Oh, I don't believe they would have been. I’m sure he saw me simply as an army press officer.
Did you yourself have a brief for when you interacted with him?
Yes, what happened was that there were certain key things that we felt
the Prime Minister should know. So, the idea is that
you don't want him to be wrong-footed by not being able to answer
the basic questions about security in Northern Ireland.
Influencing the press, the clergy and key decision makers
was one aspect of psychological warfare, another was influencing persons of interest directly.
Quite often we were trying to influence people where we had no direct access to them.
And so when you are trying to move somebody or change somebody's thinking,
sometimes you had to target them through one or more sort of relays of other people. So,
it is never straight communication.
A lot of information we were disseminating was not through the media,
it was also through people,
and therefore it had to be cut out so that the person handling it quite often
didn't realize who the originator was.
And that made it all the more credible, when that person who was known to the target
was passing this information on to him.
Information Policy created profiles of persons of interest and people in their social networks.
The key thing was that
when you knew a lot about a person and the people they worked with,
like any other part of society,
there were people who didn't like each other,
there were people who were jealous of each other.
Because we had the relevant intelligence,
if we could plant it the right way,
you could for example if one person was suspicious of another for some reason,
you could increase that suspicion,
by feeding information in that would tend to reinforce their own views of that individual.
So, it was that type of activity.
Could you explain more about
the kind of techniques you used to create psychological conflict?
I have to be careful with that because
what I don't want to do is actually share techniques that are still having impact.
And so there is a Grey area there.
But it is basically along the lines that we are saying, first of all is to identify
relationships, look at how toxic those relationships may or may not be,
and then try to maneuver them by planting information in, to have that effect.
You build up quite a comprehensive profile
of that person and their associates.
Now it may be that some of those associates
are totally innocent of any involvement in terrorism whatsoever.
They just happen to be good friends from school days and so on and so forth.
It is really creating a picture
of that person so you almost know
what their response will be to something that you do.
This is a very different use of psychology
and I think a lot of people wouldn't be aware that this knowledge exists
and that people study psychology for these kinds of purposes?
I think that's true, but you have to be careful because we did do lots of things
that had a positive psychological effect.
Like for example we ran youth clubs, we ran community relations.
I was the Army's Father Christmas going around schools and hospitals at Christmas.
We actually provided funds for projects. We took kids away from
the really bad areas of Northern Ireland,
from opposite sides of the fence,
Catholic and Protestant together, we took them away to the mountains camping.
Colin Wallace was refused clearance to target high-ranking protestant paramilitaries
in psychological operations.
These individuals who at times colluded with the British army were on an excluded list.
A number of protestant clergy and politicians on the other hand were legitimate targets.
Psyops targeted individuals who were not members of terrorist organizations,
but who had influence in communities of interest to PsyOps.
In the Catholic community,
personal conflicts were the most common reason for a person to become an informant.
We couldn't admit to what we were doing, the army didn't admit to what we were doing and so on so forth.
A senior figure political or military might ask us to do something
and then for political reasons usually
they would say it would be a really good idea if X happened
but then they would quite often say but
I don't want you to tell me how you go about it because I may have to deny it,
and that was a classic example so in other words the person doesn't want to lie that they were involved.
Senior figures were deliberately kept in the dark about the specifics of campaigns,
so that they could deny involvement should they be called upon to answer questions.
At the age of 29 Colin Wallace was the youngest Senior Information Officer in the MOD.
During his time in Information Policy
he was put forward for New Year’s Honors 3 times by his superiors.
In 1973, the IRD was withdrawn from Northern Ireland.
The IRD focused on framing conflicts both at home and abroad as part of a clash of ideologies,
between Communism and the West.
Army Intelligence saw the IRD as involved in political propaganda of limited relevance
to their anti-terror and counter-insurgency campaign.
The military feared that
having the IRD in Northern Ireland was undermining the credibility
of their own PR campaigns
and Lisburn and the army headquarters was becoming known as the Lisburn lie machine.
Not long after the departure of Hugh Mooney and the IRD,
a meeting was convened at Stormont Castle, the HQ of MI5 in Northern Ireland.
At this meeting a campaign code-named Clockwork Orange was launched.
Colin Wallace was asked to liaise with an operative by the cover-name, John Shaw.
He never came to army headquarters at any time when I was there.
All the meetings I had with him were at the White Gables Hotel.
I think the idea with that was that there would be no direct link,
particularly with some of the information that we were using, between him and the army.
Colin Wallace alleges John Shaw supplied him with material that included smears
on politicians from the three main political parties in Britain.
Why were you given that information, considering the sensitivity of it?
As I say, this was background, because if we are looking
for example at the increase in violence,
that has to be put in context,
particularly if you are briefing journalists in depth or foreign journalists.
You have to explain at that stage what led up to the violence.
So, in other words, the violence was really the activity,
but the background was coming from the briefing papers that I was given.
Some of the forgeries that Information Policy and MI5 and IRD
concocted in Northern Ireland came into my possession.
To Merlyn Rees, who at one point was the Minister for Northern Ireland.
This is apparently from the American Congress for Irish freedom, 1971.
This was an IRA front in America. This is a letter apparently thanking Merlyn Rees for his support,
which of course Merlyn Rees didn’t support it, but there you go.
According to Stephen Dorril
some of the smears Colin Wallace received from John Shaw
were already in circulation in Britain.
Britain had a very sophisticated system
whereby there were scores of people around the country
whose job it was just to sit in bars, coffee bars,
talk to people, go to clubs and spread rumors
and gradually kind of build up this idea about someone or some operation.
It was smears about sex,
accusations that Wilson had affairs.
The British Prime Minister, Harold Wilson,
had been sexually compromised on a trip to Moscow.
There were accusations about, which is again kind of
interesting in retrospect, about him being too close to Jewish people.
So, there were kind of anti-semitic smears.
That Wilson was corrupt that he had secret bank accounts …
A few years ago the son of a MI6 officer
contacted me and said
"You've written about my father, but did you know that
when he retired in 1970 he went into the City of London and he started a newsletter
and spread rumors through this newsletter and smears about Wilson."
Here's another fake - A Swiss account supposedly held by
Edward Short, who was the
leader of the House of Commons at the time I think, another Labour MP,
a fake bank account showing he had 30,000 pounds.
A journalist who trusts somebody like Colin can easily be manipulated.
He would say to somebody: "okay, yeah, I think I know so-and-so,
talk to that person or I can supply you with this bit of information
or I have this document I will allow you to look at
which will back up what I am saying or what this person has told you."
It is a very sophisticated kind of system.
This is thought out about what it is you want to achieve with this particular story.
This might be part of a chain. It might be part of an operation that is ongoing,
with the idea that you kind of sway the argument or you
change the view of something, smear somebody.
In October 1974 at a meeting with John Shaw,
Colin Wallace demanded proof of political clearance for Clockwork Orange.
He never saw or heard from John Shaw again.
Colin Wallace turned his attention to
undermining the Republican support network in the US and Ireland.
He created a dossier that linked fundraisers and businessmen
supportive of Republicans to weapons smuggling.
Colin Wallace traced the serial numbers of weapons captured in Belfast to arms dealers in the US.
He identified a leading fundraiser and major benefactors.
The story was intended as an exclusive for a major publication.
The Irish Joint Section of MI5 and MI6
reported in a telegram that "The Managing Editor of the Daily Telegraph
was prepared to give the article wide coverage…"
Colin Wallace was asked to supply additional photographs.
Information Policy ran a photography department that gathered images for intelligence purposes.
These images could be used as supporting material in press briefings.
The Daily Telegraph published a special investigation. Reporter Christopher Dobson, wrote:
"I have spent the last two months investigating the way in which the IRA gets its money.
I have traveled to the United States and Ireland
in tracking back the serial numbers of arms captured in Belfast,
and I have looked into the lives of the paymasters of terror."
The press helped Information Policy to target individuals and organisations
to which PsyOps had no direct access due to their geographic location.
The article provided no evidence of the funding or smuggling of arms,
however the reader was left with the distinct impression
that the individuals and organization highlighted were responsible.
William McGrath was a prominent individual in loyalist politics, the Church and the Orange Order,
and the head of an organization called Tara.
I was asked to encourage the press to look at what Tara and McGrath were all about.
Tara was an organization
that was really designed to prepare for a doomsday situation by loyalists.
If there was an IRA Campaign,
or in fact as McGrath said the Irish Army might even invade the North.
Attending the meetings of Tara
there were members of the Ulster Volunteer Force,
which was then a proscribed loyalist paramilitary group.
There were also police officers attending it.
In 1973 McGrath issued a proclamation,
that was designed to make the Roman Catholic Church illegal.
William McGrath was also the housemaster of Kincora,
a home for boys from troubled backgrounds between the ages of 11 to 18.
Colin Wallace issued 3 separate briefings on McGrath, the press did not follow up the story.
The Army was informed by Special Branch that
if they moved against McGrath it would be a great propaganda coup for the IRA
and significantly damage the political structure in Northern Ireland.
In December 1974, Colin Wallace was summoned to the Ministry of Defence in London.
Everything as far as I was concerned, in terms of my job,
how I was regarded by annual performance reports, all those things were perfect.
And so I was a bit surprised to be told then by
the senior MOD official who saw me that because my life was in danger
I had to be moved out of the province.
A farewell party was organized.
A prominent cartoonist recorded Colin Wallace’s departure.
I moved to my new post and
a day after that a police officer from Northern Ireland arrived
with a Special Branch officer
and said that they were investigating the fact that
I had given a restricted document to a journalist.
For the past six years I had been supplying,
you know, as part of my job description, highly sensitive information
to journalists from different countries around the world.
Unbeknown to Colin Wallace, MI5 had made an assessment that he was disgruntled and a security risk.
The disciplinary hearing that followed concluded that Colin Wallace should be dismissed.
But, that he could keep his pension if he resigned voluntarily.
Peter Broderick, a colleague of Colin Wallace’s in Army Public Relations, tried to support him
and was informed that Colin Wallace was a member of a terrorist organization.
Peter Broderick was then transferred out of the Ministry of Defence.
When my disciplinary hearing was finished and I realized that
clearly it had been rigged,
I then engaged a solicitor purely for personal protection to tell him what had happened to me.
He said that he was involved
in dirty tricks against politicians in Northern Ireland
and he also said that this had now started to move over onto the mainland.
That he was involved in a dirty tricks campaign
against mainland politicians and in particular he mentioned Harold Wilson.
Colin Wallace moved to South-East London
and began to speak out about his work in Information Policy,
he lobbied MPs, supplied information to the press and wrote to the former prime minister.
Harold Wilson already held suspicions that MI5 had undermined him and his government
and had communicated this to two journalists.
He thought they had mounted a campaign of denigrating him personally,
of using official material that had been gathered and then misused by leaking it to newspapers.
They released a book, which was largely ignored.
In 1977 the IRD was quietly closed down.
After an internal investigation into the plot against the former prime minister.
I corresponded with Lord Hunt.
He was asked to carry out the investigation into the alleged plot against Harold Wilson
and he spoke to a number of people including the heads of MI5 and MI6.
He said that there was a plot,
that there were dissident elements within both organizations.
He wrote that report which went to the new Prime Minister
and a copy of it was supposed to have been deposited in the Cabinet Office.
I asked the Cabinet Office where was the copy and they said they could not find one.
Colin Wallace unaware of the demise of the IRD began a new life in West Sussex.
In January 1980
the Irish Independent published an article on the abuse of boys at the Belfast boys home Kincora.
The Housefathers William McGrath, Joseph Mains and Raymond Semple
had been sexually abusing the boys in their care.
Politicians in Northern Ireland demanded a full inquiry.
Did you see this man in Arundel between 6:15pm – 11:30pm on Tuesday 5th August 1980?
The body which was found last Friday in the river
had head injuries.
This is a matter for the pathologist who is making his examination,
to find out whether in fact the person died as a result of drowning or as a result of the head injuries.
Colin Wallace had fractured Mr. Lewis’ skull with a karate style blow
during a meeting at his house after he was accused of having an affair with Mr. Lewis’ wife.
He hid his friend’s body in the boot of his car and later dumped it in the river Arun.
Colin Wallace was charged with the murder.
The prosecution alleged he was infatuated with Jane Lewis the deceased’s wife.
He was found guilty of manslaughter and sentenced to ten years on the 20th of March 1981.
65-year-old William McGrath seen here in the foreground.
He ran two bible study centres in Belfast in the 50s and 60s.
McGrath was also a founding member of the protestant paramilitary group Tara.
This man was one of McGraths victims.
He would come up when you were getting dressed and
then he would start doing things you don’t like.
There was one time I was bleeding. I told him to stop. It was unpleasant.
You couldn’t turn to no-one you know.
One of the Army’s former press officers at Thiepval Barracks in Lisburn, Colin Wallace,
is now a key figure in the Kincora investigation.
Mr. Wallace who is presently serving 10 years for manslaughter in an English jail
was also known to have links with British intelligence.
Kevin Dowling, exactly what did Colin Wallace tell you in 1973?
He certainly said that McGrath was a homosexual.
You must remember that the conversation I had with him was in 1973.
I don’t remember the conversation entirely clearly.
It has been suggested to me that McGrath was in fact some kind of an army informer
and that the police felt obliged to protect him in order
to bring to book greater criminals than he.
Exactly what part did British intelligence play
and were they aware that William McGrath was employed at Kincora.
British Army files relating to the Kincora Boys’ Home disappeared from army headquarters.
It was rumoured that William McGrath was an MI5 informant.
McGrath, Mains and Semple, who ran the Kincora Boys’ Home,
were sentenced in December 1981.
All were released in under 2 years.
Meanwhile, Colin Wallace was still only at the beginning of his 10-year sentence.
When I first got to know him,
he was in prison
and it was bizarre.
He was actually protected in prison.
Other prisoners believed him.
He actually had kind of bodyguards,
because they thought probably correctly that he might be
killed, assassinated in prison.
Clive Ponting was head of the legal department at the Ministry of Defence in 1983
and remembers a meeting with MI5 where Colin Wallace was discussed.
There was never any suspicion that
Wallace was making these stories up and that it was all totally unfounded and
very easy to rubbish.
It was very much a matter that the story was being contained at the moment
because he was in jail. But that
in a few years time, he would be back out again and
could be expected to start making the allegations again.
One evening in prison, Colin Wallace read an article about Fred Holroyd,
a former Military Intelligence Officer in Northern Ireland,
whose experience bore some resemblance to his own.
Colin wrote a letter to Fred asking for help.
When I got to the prison
I realized this was the same man
that I met in the secret corridor, who had an office in army headquarters.
The MOD repeatedly were refuting that he was anything more
than a civilian clerk with a Walter Mitty complex. And yet here he is with an office
in this secret corridor with the political officer MI5, MI6, all of the people
who were running the army were in that office.
I went on the same day that the murder was committed, at the same time.
You know you have got every man and his dog walking along that path.
You have fishermen overlooking at about a hundred yards away on a bridge.
You have all sorts of courting couples walking along and
the river boats going up and down the river.
The thing was, you know, it's Trafalgar Square on a Saturday.
The story that the police had put out was a lie.
I also discovered a witness who had seen the dead man
after he had allegedly been killed by Colin and the police persuaded her not to give evidence.
He was sitting by the window with the gentleman he was with.
A man approximately in his 50s with thinning grey hair combed back over the top of his head.
And as far as I remember, I think he was in a grey suite.
Whatever exchange came from Jonathan Lewis it was sharp and back to fiddling with his glass on his knee.
He looked far from happy.
She was frightened of the police. She thought the police were in on it.
Fred Holroyd door-stepped the boatman who had found the body.
And he didn't know who I was. They all get very frightened when I arrive
and start asking questions about things that they are worried about themselves.
And he said: "I can tell you that the buggers wouldn't let me give the evidence I wanted to give,
which was you know that I had reversed back and
my propeller had hit the guy in the face
and that is what caused the wound."
And I said: "Yyou are kidding," and he said: "No."
So I said: "Are you prepared to put that down in writing?" He said:
"Well if I have to, but the best thing would be to get me in a court and ask me questions and then
I have to answer in a courtroom and the police can't do me any harm."
When Colin was still in prison he was via his solicitor, he was sending
out various documents that he had written.
I was unemployed, and in those days in Hull,
in Mrs. Thatcher's Britain in a place like Hull with unemployment at 10 percent,
if you had something to do
and I did, the people on the dole would ignore you for years.
So, I carried on doing this journalism stuff.
Lobster, an obscure magazine made on a photocopier, with a circulation of 150,
co-founded and co-edited by Ramsay and Dorril,
may at the time have been the only publication in Britain
to take Colin Wallace’s allegations seriously.
I wrote this, which was you know 50 pages, an attempt to explain Colin’s story.
We printed quite a lot of these about a thousand copies
I think and we went to London and had a press conference.
So, two hicks from the sticks turn up carrying this big document and saying here's a big story.
The media were not impressed at all, virtually no response to it.
In January 1987 Colin Wallace was released from prison.
A journalist called Julian O' Halloran
went to Lewes Prison and actually filmed Colin Wallace as he stepped out of the prison gate
and interviewed him and it was going to be broadcast on Newsnight.
I was actually watching Newsnight when there was a great kerfuffle in the studio.
Something had happened and bits of paper were being looked at,
headphones were being checked.
What happened was the Wallace segment
had been yanked at the last minute by a man called Alan Prothero,
who at that point was deputy director of the BBC.
Prothero was a part-time army officer in the territorial army
and his speciality was media - military relations.
I went down to visit him and Fred
and it was in the middle of winter. We were sitting in Colin Wallace’s unheated house.
He had come out of prison and he couldn't afford to heat it.
So we were all sitting you know in our coats in Colin’s living room
and I remember saying something like,
"So your plan is that me and you two guys with no money between us
are gonna take on MI5 and the MOD?"
"Yes that's the plan," they said.
Irish broadcaster RTE picked up the story.
The record says that Colin Wallace killed Jonathan Lewis.
- Oh yes, absolutely. - Did you?
No, I didn’t, I had nothing at all to do with his death.
I wasn’t involved in any way.
But I mean if I am not calm about it. If I panic about it.
If I create a fuss. If I get excited about it,
that is not going to change the verdict
any quicker than if I stay calm and deal with it properly through the correct channels.
Eventually I was hired by Channel 4 News.
Colin had these hand written notes
that he claimed he had written down from this MI5 disinformation project
against Labour MPs.
Robert Parker of Channel 4 News went to a forensic scientist called Dr. Julius Grant.
What chances do you think there are that these notes are forgeries?
Well, from what I already said,
the chances that they are forgeries seem to be rather remote.
And thus these documents were in fact written, probably when Wallace said they were written.
While we were working together on bits and pieces about Wallace,
another journalist in ITN, who was one of their crime correspondents,
began feeding information he was getting from the MOD,
the Ministry of Defense, denigrating Wallace.
We were also getting similar stuff from professor Paul Wilkinson,
a terrorism expert, again denigrating Wallace and saying he's a fantasist and a liar.
Investigative journalist Paul Foot wrote a book about Colin Wallace.
Wallace began to appear in the British media more frequently,
including on popular ITV weekly debate show Central Weekend Live.
If you take the case of Mr. Wallace here.
As every body else who is ever convicted of any crime,
poor Mr. Wallace was framed. I don’t believe he was framed, it’s a fact.
Any responsible journalist in Northern Ireland in the early 70s knew what Colin Wallace was up to.
There was this gung-ho character
who was running around in the dead of night
shoving envelopes full of documents into the letter boxes of journalists.
And you would say there is Colin at it again.
I for one I was probably the first person in the CIA
who got into this dirty-tricks business. It wasn’t as dirty as a lot of people think it was.
A lot of people find it very objectionable.
Just a minute. To blacken someone is a hell of a lot better than killing them.
In World War 2 we killed people,
and now we got into the business
where we are simply playing dirty tricks, to prevent having World War 3.
You are the man that sparked all this off.
I did not join the security forces
to discredit the Labour Party, the Conservative Party or the Liberal Party,
and because I was deflected from my main job into doing political disinformation,
I was not actually doing the job I had joined to do.
Good evening, a civil servant sacked after making allegations about an MI5 dirty tricks campaign
has been awarded £30,000 compensation by the government.
Calcutt QC was asked to conduct an inquiry.
In his report he reveals that MOD officials
contacted Mr. Wallace’s disciplinary hearing beforehand, thus influencing the outcome.
The Defence Secretary Tom King asked Mr. Calcutt not to write a full report.
Labour’s Northern Ireland Secretary between 1974 and 76 said
he had been the victim of a dirty tricks campaign.
Who instructed Mr. Wallace
to do the job he and others did. That is what we have to know.
We want to be sure that this sort of thing never happens again. I feel very strongly about it.
Mrs. Thatcher having insisted there was no evidence to back such claims
was forced to admit in the Commons that she had been misled.
This followed the discovery of documents in the Ministry of Defence,
which related to a propaganda campaign code-named Clockwork Orange.
He is calling for the government to launch a full inquiry.
Injustice to me is really a minor matter.
The much more important matters are the allegations that there was an attempt to
influence the general election in 1974
and indeed the assaults on the children in Kincora during the 70s.
My aspect of the story is only a minor one by comparison.
The government specifically ruled out
the re-opening into the investigation of the alleged cover up
of the homosexual abuse of boys at the Kincora home in Belfast.
Information about homosexual behavior at the Kincora Boys’ Home
was used to blackmail prominent figures in Northern Ireland.
After I left Northern Ireland another intelligence officer came in called Brian Gemmell
he was told about the allegation surrounding the abuses at Kincora.
He wrote a report about it and he submitted
that report to a senior MI5 officer, Ian Cameron,
who then told him to stop investigating.
You know on the phone we have got phone calls of generals
who have said, "Yes I knew all about Kincora, I was told and
I took it to MI5 and they said it was none of my business and I left it to them. It was their business,"
and all this sort of stuff and you know the realization, like me the light is dawning
that we are not who we say we are.
Journalist David Leigh tracked down Denis Payne, the former head of MI5 in Northern Ireland,
to a sleepy village in the countryside,
and confronted him with the Clockwork Orange allegations.
I am under an obligation to say absolutely nothing. I can’t say anything at all.
I mean you have collected all the information, I can’t believe anybody is in the slightest bit
interested in it, but, I have nothing to add.
In 1996 Colin Wallace appealed his conviction for manslaughter.
Today, 15 years after he was jailed for manslaughter,
Colin Wallace from West Sussex, cleared his name.
He served 6 years in the 1980s after being found guilty of killing an antiques dealer
near his home in West Sussex.
During the appeal hearing,
the Home Office pathologist admitted that a Secret Service agent had suggested to him
that the injury was caused by a karate chop to the head and not from the propeller of a boat.
The hearing at the Court of Appeal focused largely on new medical evidence
about the injury Jonathan Lewis received.
Jonathan Lewis was most probably attacked at the river bank and not at his house,
and he said there was no evidence that his body had ever been in Colin Wallace’s car.
He says he was the victim of an MI5 dirty tricks campaign.
Now Mr. Wallace is demanding a full investigation into his claims.
Even after Colin Wallace had received compensation his troubles with MI5 were not over.
While I was working at BAA,
MI5 contacted the head of security there
and then I was made redundant after that.
Now I can't say MI5 was responsible, but again
why were they still meddling in my case after all those years.
The media reported Colin Wallace’s appeal and aired his allegations,
but they did not ask themselves
what role they themselves had played in spreading fake news
and what lessons they could learn for their reporting in future.
Colin Wallace repeatedly called for a full investigation into his claims.
But there was to be no full investigation,
only an ever longer list of inquiries and legal disputes
spanning decades, as the allegations faded from public view.
We now look at
probably five inquiries that all failed totally
to do what Parliament assured the public that it would do.
Still to this day Colin is a problem.
There are major efforts to restrict what he says.
Kincora is a prime example, the boys home where it is alleged intelligence people
were involved recruiting people used people etc the inquiries into that
have been incredibly restricted.
And Colin on the one hand will be told: yes come and tell us your story tell us everything.
Then when it gets nearer you get a document from the minister that says
I am sorry you can talk about that area but no way he's going to talk about that
or MI5 … he cannot talk about this area because that gets him into an Official Secrets area.
So even to this day 40 years on they are still trying to shut him up.
The whole system you see is unaccountable and it's insidious
it's easy for MI5 to say no we don't do it
because nobody can prove what they did and they didn’t.
Today, the role the military and intelligence services can play
in manufacturing and manipulating the news
is considered a conspiracy.
Despite extensive press coverage of Colin Wallace’s allegations,
not a single person in a position of authority has been held to account.
When Hugh Mooney of the IRD was asked under oath at a public inquiry
about his PsyOps work,
he lied and claimed he was never involved in PsyOps,
despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
Hugh Mooney walked away,
no questions asked and became a successful businessman.
This is a very, very secretive society.
It runs through everything.
Secrecy is the British disease. It's not anything else, it’s secrecy.
If you believe in the democratic process there has to be oversight
and at the moment we don't have oversight.
Because vetting is an important issue for politicians who are looking for
ministerial appointments
and service people or police officers moving into the higher level,
you must have access to classified information.
If MI5 don't agree to you having that clearance,
if they take that clearance away from you, then your career is doomed.
So, you never know about it, it is an invisible threat that is hanging over people all the time
and therefore the danger is that MI5
has almost an invisible degree of influence that really is way outside what it should be.
And it is therefore virtually impossible to challenge MI5 on some of the decisions they make.
Politicians are careerists, most of them they want to go up the ladder, become ministers,
and if you start criticizing or investigating the army or the intelligence services,
this will not do your career any good whatsoever.
And this is also true for journalists, not a good career path. This is sticky stuff.
People are saying well why are you fighting
with the Army and the MOD, surely you are a part of that.
I am only fighting with the MOD because I was given no choice,
because the MOD didn't even talk to me.
If I hadn't fought when I did
I would probably still have a conviction
and I still wouldn’t have got the admissions out of the government that we have now got.
People realize that the full truth hasn't come out and although authorities think they may have been clever
and believable to dodge around the issue the public have a totally different view.
People are pretty aware of when things are not actually truthful
and they know at the moment they haven't had the full truth about
what has happened in Northern Ireland.
So, can you give an example of the areas of the troubles that are still closed?
I can't say precisely, because that would put me in jeopardy.
And it would put Colin in deep jeopardy.
But there are certain areas
of the troubles which have simply not been talked about at all.
There are things about,
there is a suicide in Northern Ireland
of a military intelligence officer, one of the key events. It is an official secret.
A suicide is an official secret and so far no one has written about it.
And some of the events around that are appalling, in that he ran agents,
agents, who were 14 and 15 year old Catholic schoolgirls.
This is how desperate the army at some stage became to get intelligence.
And you kind of say: "How do you run a 14 year old Catholic schoolgirl."
In the story of Colin Wallace
the press helps direct the present by spreading fake news
and the media helps digest the past by creating a discussion about the past.
The role of departments of the state in creating and shaping reality
is not acknowledged.
And even after the media has become aware of this,
it does not inform the public of the implications of that omission.
Power is not held to account, no key decision makers are held to account,
and they and their organizations make no admission of wrong-doing.
The files that would serve as proof of their actions either destroyed or hidden.
In this story the press serves as a complex mechanism
that helps to reinforce and legitimize power.
Allegations of wrong-doing and injustice
become lost in inquiries and legal disputes,
that drag on to this day and that most people
no longer understand or believe.
We are told that a free press will hold power to account.
But what of those individuals and institutions that will never be held to account
and have never been held to account. Should the press include that truth in its reporting?
Or are some truths destined to be nothing more than versions of fake news?
Former residents of the Kincora Boys’ Home are still fighting for justice.
The British Home Office, Foreign Office, MI5 and MI6 continue to engage in PsyOps.
The British Army’s psychological warfare unit is currently called "The 77th Brigade".
Together they target Britain’s perceived enemies, real and imaginary, with impunity.
Colin Wallace continues to participate as a witness in inquiries relating to his time in Northern Ireland.
He lives on the same street, in the same house, in the same village where
the unsolved murder of Jonathan Lewis took place over 40 years ago.