Colin Wallace
John Colin Wallace is a British former member of Army Intelligence in Northern Ireland and a psychological warfare specialist. He refused to become involved in the Intelligence-led 'Clockwork Orange' project, which was an attempt to smear various individuals including a number of senior British politicians in the early 1970s. Wallace also attempted to draw public attention to the Kincora Boys' Home sexual abuse scandal several years before the Royal Ulster Constabulary intervened.
He was wrongly convicted of manslaughter in 1981, for which he spent six years in prison, until 1987. The conviction was later quashed in the light of new forensic and other evidence that raised serious questions about the dubious nature of the evidence used to convict Wallace initially. The Court of Appeal heard that scientific evidence used to convict Wallace was false and that the Home Office pathologist involved in the case admitted that he had received it from an anonymous American security source. The journalist Paul Foot, in his book Who Framed Colin Wallace?, suggested that Wallace may have been framed for the killing, possibly to discredit the allegations he was making. This view was similarly expressed by Alex Carlile QC, who later speculated that this may have been the motive not just for the alleged frameup, but also for murder.
Early life
Wallace was born in Randalstown, Northern Ireland, in 1943 and educated at Ballymena Academy. He was initially commissioned into the Territorial Army in 1961, and later became a marksman in the Ulster Special Constabulary, or 'B Specials'. A former cadet officer in the Irish Guards, he was commissioned in 1972 into the Ulster Defence Regiment, part of the Regular Army, and was immediately granted the rank of captain. He became the Regiment's Psychological Operations officer. He was seconded to the New Zealand SAS before working for British Intelligence as a psychological warfare officer. During the early 1970s he ran the British Army's free-fall parachute display team in Northern Ireland, taking part in a variety of 'Hearts and Minds' projects throughout the Province. Several members of that team were also members of the Special Air Service or the Intelligence Corps. In 1969, The Irish Guards Association Journal carried this reference to Wallace: "He is a great training enthusiast and is never happier than when he is on top of one 3,000-foot peak busily engaged in plotting his hop to the next one. He will eventually achieve great fame as he will, no doubt, be the first Brigade officer to visit RHQ without getting salute at the main gate - as knowing him, he will surely parachute in."Information officer
Wallace joined the Ministry of Defence on 15 March 1968 as an assistant information officer for the British Army at its Northern Ireland headquarters at Thiepval Barracks in Lisburn. He became an established information officer from 14 December 1971, and a senior information officer with effect from 27 September 1974, having first held this latter post on temporary promotion from 1972.In the years following his appointment to the Information Policy unit, Wallace received high praise from the senior staff at Thiepval. In 1971, his Annual Confidential Report concluded: 'This is an officer of the highest calibre. Totally dedicated to the Army, he demonstrates this by a devotion to duty that is truly remarkable.' The counter-signing officer scribbled underneath: 'I heartily agree.' In 1972, the Chief of Staff wrote 'Continues to demonstrate that his talents are of the very highest standard.' Wallace's former boss, Major Tony Staughton, confirmed that by 1973 he had twice recommended Wallace for the MBE, and could not understand how and why the recommendations were turned down. "I've never known such a deserving case," he told journalist Paul Foot.
In February 1975, Ian Cameron, senior MI5 officer attached to Army HQ Northern Ireland, wrote in a report on Wallace's role in Northern Ireland:
Clockwork Orange
In 1973 and 1974, Wallace was involved with an operation called Clockwork Orange. Wallace alleges that this involved right-wing members of the security services in a disinformation campaign aimed not at paramilitary organisations in Northern Ireland, but at British MPs. He was supported by a covert specialist military troop. This group was shrouded in secrecy. Journalists from foreign news organisations would be given briefings and shown forged documents, which purported to show that politicians were speaking at Irish republican rallies or were receiving secret deposits in Swiss bank accounts.On 16 March 1976 the British Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, retired suddenly without any apparent reason. In the days leading up to his resignation there had been no hint that he was about to go. Two months later, on 12 May, Wilson invited two BBC reporters, Barrie Penrose and Roger Courtiour to visit him at his home at 5 North Street, near Parliament. He told the reporters that he believed members of MI5 had been involved in a plot to undermine his Government. He said that he had called in the head of MI6, Sir Maurice Oldfield, who told him that there was a section of MI5 that "was unreliable" and that he was "going to bring it out". Wilson also said that he had called in the head of MI5, Sir Michael Hanley, who confirmed the existence within his service of a disaffected faction with extreme right-wing views. Later, the two reporters interviewed Hanley at his home and asked him if there had been talk of a coup to overthrow the Wilson Government in the mid 1970s. The former head of MI5 replied: "I think it is generally accepted. Yes".
On 19 May 1976, The Daily Telegraph published a story under the headline: "Campaign in US to smear MPs". The story claimed that "persistent efforts have been made in recent months to discredit leading members of the three major British political parties by planting derogatory stories about them in news agencies in Washington". One of the news agencies to be given such information said: "So far this year we have been offered similar matter about some eleven MPs, a Conservative, two Liberals and eight Labour".
In his book, Spycatcher, former senior MI5 officer, Peter Wright said:
The information appears to bear a striking similarity to some of the material contained in the notes which Colin Wallace had been instructed two years earlier as part of the 'Clockwork Orange' project. People named in Colin Wallace's notes as having been targeted in this manner included Harold Wilson, Edward Heath, Merlyn Rees, Cyril Smith, Jeremy Thorpe, Tony Benn and Ian Paisley.
Despite repeated denials in more recent years by the heads of MI5, it is now clear that members of MI5 did make attempts to undermine Harold Wilson and his Government in the 1970s. The former Cabinet Secretary, Lord Hunt, conducted a secret inquiry into the allegations and, in August 1996, he said to journalist, David Leigh:
"There is absolutely no doubt at all that a few, a very few, malcontents in MI5... a lot of them like Peter Wright who were rightwing, malicious and had serious personal grudges – gave vent to these and spread damaging malicious stories about that Labour government."
On 20 March 1975, Hugh Mooney, a member of the top secret Information Research Department run by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, wrote a memo to his superiors claiming that the former Head of Army Intelligence in Northern Ireland told him that Wallace "had been one of his best sources." MI5 accused Wallace of leaking information to the press about William McGrath, the leader of the Loyalist paramilitary group Tara, who had been sexually abusing children at the Kincora Boys' Home. However, official records later showed that he had been instructed by his superiors to draw the attention of the press to McGrath's activities.
Mooney also gave an interview to the Sunday Correspondent on 18 March 1990 about Wallace's attempts to expose the sexual abuse at Kincora. The Sunday Correspondent report said:
On 21 February 2019, Wallace wrote to the then Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Karen Bradley MP, and provided her with documentary evidence that three of the official inquiries into the abuses at Kincora had deliberately misled Parliament. He also queried why the investigations had failed to interview key, identified witnesses from the Intelligence Services. His comments and questions remain unanswered.
After HQNI
Wallace resigned from the Ministry of Defence in 1975 in order to avoid disciplinary action, ostensibly for privately briefing journalists with classified information. Wallace always claimed that this action was consistent with his secret duties as a member of the Intelligence Services and that the real reasons for his dismissal were related to his refusal to continue working on the Clockwork Orange project in October 1974, and his exposure of a child abuse scandal at the Kincora Boys' Home. He claimed his allegations were blocked because the leading perpetrator was both a leading member of a loyalist paramilitary group and an undercover agent for MI5. The government later admitted that Wallace had the authority to take decisions on the release of classified information in support of psychological operations.In the 1980s, to support his claims, Wallace produced a collection of documents, including a series of handwritten notes on material which formed part of the Clockwork Orange project. The notes were later subjected to an independent forensic analysis by Dr Julius Grant, and the results were consistent with the notes having been made contemporaneously during the 1970s.
Wallace was probably the first member of the security forces to attempt to draw public attention to the sexual abuse of children at the Kincora Boys' Home in East Belfast. In 1973, at the request of his superior officers, he gave several journalists the name of the loyalist paramilitary leader running the home, together with his address and telephone number. He also pointed out that the man was "a known homosexual" who blackmailed people into homosexual activities which he himself initiated. On 19 July 1976, the New Statesman published a story by Robert Fisk of The Times and based on Wallace's allegations about the sexual allegations surrounding William McGrath, one of the Kincora staff. Although Wallace's superiors later confirmed that they had authorised Wallace to disclose that information, a senior MI5 officer, Ian Cameron, accused Wallace of a breach of security. MI5 later refused to allow the police to question Cameron about Kincora.
None of the newspapers he briefed published the story and the abuse of children continued unabated for several years before the police were finally forced to take action following revelations in the Irish Independent.
In his report, published on 20 January 2017 into the Kincora Boys Home sex scandal, Sir Anthony Hart was highly critical of the disciplinary procedure initiated by the MoD against Colin Wallace in 1975. He said:
“411 We consider that the fact that National Security was involved did not excuse the approach that was taken.
412 What happened in this instance was that the processes of the Board were deliberately interfered with by the Ministry of Defence in order to ensure that the outcome of Mr Wallace’s appeal was unsuccessful. We criticise all of those involved in what occurred in the strongest terms. Mr Wallace’s observation in his letter to the Inquiry of 9 September 2016 that the outcome of the Inquiry was “rigged” was entirely justified.”
Several commentators have pointed to the coincidence that the events which led to Wallace being wrongly convicted of manslaughter took place shortly after Kincora was finally exposed in the Irish Independent.
Writing in the New Statesman in 1986, Duncan Campbell said that, at about the time Wallace was charged with manslaughter, intelligence officers wrote to Sir Frank Cooper, Permanent Under Secretary of State at the Ministry of Defence, warning him that "Wallace had both the information and the motivation to reveal the story behind Kincora".
Entries in intelligence notebooks kept during 1974 by former Special Military Intelligence Unit Officer, Captain Fred Holroyd, who had met Wallace in Northern Ireland at that time, refer to the Kincora hostel by name, and say of leading Protestant politicians that they are "all queers", as British Army and RUC intelligence officials had had no difficulty coupling information about homosexual Protestant extremist politicians to Kincora. Holroyd is also quoted as saying that, while being trained for his Northern Ireland duties, he was told that the Tara organisation was in effect controlled by British intelligence, and was not a real security threat, implying that William McGrath, a former house-father at Kincora and leader of Tara, had come under intelligence control before 1973.
Clive Ponting, a former senior official in the Ministry of Defence, told the Sunday Times that he had attended meetings with MI5 officers at the MOD to discuss how to prevent Wallace and Holroyd from making allegations about 'dirty tricks' in Northern Ireland. Ponting said that MI5 were "genuinely worried about what Wallace might say".
In March 1987, a former MI5 agent, James Miller, told the Sunday Times that he knew Wallace when he was working in Northern Ireland during the 1970s. Miller said that his first task for MI5 was to spy on McGrath. He said that his MI5 handler told him to leave McGrath to them and he understood that "they used his information to recruit McGrath as an informer."
After the Kincora story was initially exposed in the press, the Northern Ireland Secretary, James Prior, asked Sir George Terry, the Chief Constable of the Sussex Police, to carry out an investigation into the affair. Terry's full report was never shown to Parliament. In a summary of the report, Terry said: "Military sources have been frank, and I am satisfied there is no substance to allegations that Army intelligence had knowledge of homosexual abuse at Kincora." This inexplicable conclusion almost certainly misled the British Parliament. Moreover, Terry failed to inform Parliament that MI5 had refused to allow one of their senior officers, who had blocked prior military investigations into Kincora, to be questioned by his investigators.
It was, therefore, no surprise that Members of the Northern Ireland Assembly ridiculed the report. John Cushnahan, a spokesman for the non-sectarian Alliance Party of Northern Ireland, was indignant: he found one of the most disturbing aspects of Terry's conclusions was the complete dismissal of any possibility that military circles knew about the scandal. He then referred to a number of people as having been interviewed by British Army people for British military intelligence about McGrath and Kincora. Cushnahan concluded by saying that it was misleading and blatantly dishonest for Terry to claim that the whole matter had been fully ventilated.
Despite the obvious and unexplained weaknesses of the Terry Inquiry, Prior told Parliament that a 1921 Act Inquiry was not justified. Instead, Prior proposed to establish a public inquiry under the powers contained in article 54 of the Health and Personal Social Services Order 1972 to examine the administration of Kincora and of young people's hostels in Northern Ireland. That inquiry would be led by a retired circuit judge, Judge William Hughes and it was decided that "It will be up to the Inquiry and the eminent judge who will preside over it to examine anything which is relevant to the particular boy's home, or to the other five boys' homes, and the circumstances which led up to the problems." When asked on The World at One if the inquiry would take evidence on the alleged activities of the intelligence agencies, Prior replied that if there was any evidence, it would.
Despite these assurances given by Prior, Judge Hughes made it clear in his report: "The conduct of the police, or elected representatives, or clergymen, or military intelligence or any other persons who may have been in receipt of allegations, information or rumours relating to Kincora or any other home, was not under scrutiny in this Inquiry." Wallace's evidence was, therefore, excluded from the Hughes Inquiry.
In July 2014, Exaro News reported that the late Lord Havers, as Attorney General in 1984, limited the terms of reference for the Inquiry to exclude politicians and other key categories of people from investigation.
In 1974, Wallace's Army Annual Confidential Report described his performance in Northern Ireland as "outstanding" and said that he had made "one of the most effective personal contributions of any to the standing and reputation of the Army in these troubles." The report was signed by the Commander Land Forces, Northern Ireland, Major General Peter Leng.
Later that year, Wallace was promoted to Senior Information Officer and, shortly afterwards, he wrote a lengthy memorandum to his superiors complaining that no action was being taken to stop the sexual abuse of children at the Kincora Home. A few weeks later he was removed from his job on the grounds that his life "was in danger", and posted to an Army HQ in England.
Former BBC journalist, Martin Dillon, who has written several books on the Northern Ireland conflict, says:
One of the ghastly aspects of what became known as 'The Kincora Scandal' was that McGrath and John McKeague| McKeague, as Intelligence assets, were agents of the State. What Wallace was unaware of was that McGrath and McKeague had virtual immunity from prosecution because of the information they were supplying to their Intelligence bosses. According to Chris Moore's investigations of McGrath, MI5 was the organisation that recruited and funded his political activities. They were fully aware of contacts he made with Rhodesian and South African Intelligence in order to acquire arms for Loyalists.
Chris Moore summed up the situation succinctly:
McGrath made it obvious to all those who heard him speak that he was acting on Intelligence. There was a higher authority; McGrath was not alone. Figures like John McKeague spring to mind, and there are other documented episodes like the Colin Wallace affair and the case of Brian Nelson to suggest strongly that British Intelligence had penetrated and was manipulating the loyalist paramilitary underground from the early 1970s onwards. Where was the democratic control over all this unquestionably illegal activity? Why have elected representatives, including MPs from Northern Ireland itself, been so reluctant to become involved in uncovering the truth?
In 1980, David McKittrick of the Irish Times, reported how he had been briefed by Wallace "many times" during the 1970s:
It was clear that he had access to the highest levels of intelligence data. He had a encyclopaedic memory, which he occasionally refreshed with calls made on his personal scrambler telephone to the headquarters intelligence section a few floors above his office.
Peter Broderick, Head of the Army Information Services at HQ Northern Ireland in 1973, said:
To my knowledge, he worked at least 80 hours a week: coming to his desk every day. He lived in the Officers Mess and regarded himself as always on duty. On my arrival, I found that he had taken virtually no leave for six years. He had a knowledge of the Irish situation which was totally unique in the Headquarters and surpassed that even of most of the Intelligence Branch. As time progressed, he was not only the main briefer for the press, but also the adviser on Irish matters to the whole Headquarters and - because of his personal talents - contributed much creative thought to the Information Policy Unit. In order to do his job, he had constant and free access to information of the highest classification and extreme sensitivity.