[A-List] UK secret state: Wilson plot

["Keaney Michael" <Michael.Keaney@xxxxxx>]

Here's something I've found in an online journal, Variant, from 3 years
back.

See http://www.ndirect.co.uk/~variant/Issue8.html

Written by the editor of Lobster, Robin Ramsay, it's a good summary of
various issues I've tried to cover concerning the British secret state
on the list.

A point worthy of note: Professor Paul Wilkinson, now at St. Andrews
University, was a prominent pundit for BBC World in the aftermath of
September 11 last year. His work on terrorism is regularly cited by
rightwingers working in the area.


The Wilson plots
Robin Ramsay
Variant, issue 8
Summer 1999

The 'Wilson plots' is a portmanteau term for a collection of fragments
of knowledge about intelligence operations against the Labour
governments of Harold Wilson and a great many other people and
organisations. 'The Wilson plots' are about a good deal more than Harold
Wilson and his governments.
The British state -and the secret state -had never trusted the British
left and had always worked to undermine it. The Attlee government came
out of the war-time coalition and was considered mostly safe and
reliable by the state: and by safe and reliable I mean it did not seek
to challenge either the power of the state nor the assumptions about the
importance of finance capital, the British empire and Britain's role as
world power which underpinned it.
Harold Wilson, a most conservative man, made one large mistake while a
young man as far as the state was concerned: he was not sufficiently
anti-Soviet. During the 1940s and 50s, while many of his Labour
colleagues were accepting freebies from the Americans and going to the
United States for nice holidays, Wilson was travelling east fixing trade
deals with the Soviet Union. He was perceived by the secret state -by
some sections of the secret state, notably but not exclusively, sections
of MI5 -to be someone who, in the words of the General Sir Walter
Walker, 'digs with the wrong foot'.
In short,Wilson was perceived by some to be a dangerous lefty and his
arrival as leader of the Labour Party was thought by some of the
professionally paranoid Cold Warriors in the British and American secret
states to be deeply suspicious. Wilson had been to the Soviet Union many
times: was he a KGB agent, they wondered? Had he been entrapped and
blackmailed?
Asking that question was enough for MI5 to begin obsessively
investigating Wilson and his colleagues and friends. Nothing was found.
But to the professional paranoids, nothing found simply suggested it was
better hidden than they first thought. And so they carried on.
Meanwhile, the left in Britain was on the rise: trade unions got more
powerful. The professional paranoids, noting the influence of the
Communist Party of Great Britain in some trade unions, began to see the
shift left-wards in the UK in the sixties and early 1970s as somehow
under Soviet control. In 1974 Conservative Prime Minister Heath had his
fateful show-down with the miners union -and lost -and the Tory right
and their friends in the secret state began a series of operations to
prevent what they believed -or pretended to believe -was an imminent
left revolution in Britain. Some of these operations were done by the
secret state; some by people close to but not in the secret state. Bits
of the CIA also shared this view and got involved. The South African
intelligence service (BOSS) was running parallel operations against
Labour and Liberal politicians it perceived as South Africa's enemies,
notably the Liberal leader Jeremy Thorpe and the then leader of the
Young Liberals, now the Labour MP, Peter Hain. It is worth noting here
that similar operations were being run in this period against mild,
reformist, leftish parties in New Zealand, Australia, Germany, in Canada
against the Quebec separatists, and, most famously, in Chile.
This extraordinarily complex period of British history saw covert
operations of one sort or another involving serving or former personnel
from MI5, MI6, the CIA, Ministry of Defence and the Information Research
Department, plus assets in the media and the trade unions, plus allies
in the Conservative Party and the City. That it tends to get summarised
as 'MI5 plots against Wilson' is due to the way the information about
these areas emerged in 1986-88, through former Army Information Officer,
Colin Wallace, and the former MI5 officer, Peter Wright. They both
talked about MI5 as the source of plotting against Wilson (though
Wallace's allegations were much wider than that) and for much of the
left-liberal media and politicians in this country this fitted straight
into their vague understanding of the intelligence services and British
domestic history which told them that the bad guys were MI5. By the time
we had educated ourselves sufficiently to understand what Wallace and
Wright were saying, the perception -the false perception -that the story
was just MI5 plotting against the Labour government had been
established.

The Pencourt Investigation

It is largely now forgotten that the first attempt to get 'the Wilson
plots' story going was made by Wilson himself.
Wilson was aware of the various attempts to get the media to run smear
stories about him and his circle, and aware of the stream of burglaries
afflicting himself, his personal staff and other Labour Party figures in
the 1974-76 period. But he chose to do nothing in public while he was in
office. In private he tried to get the Cabinet Secretary, Sir John Hunt,
to do something, though quite what Hunt did is still unknown.
It seems clear now that Wilson did nothing publicly for four reasons.
The first was that he didn't have anything substantial to goon -merely
suspicions and a lot of little whispy bits and pieces of rumours and
tip-offs. The second reason for his inaction was his distrust of MI5.
Had Wilson instructed Whitehall to do an inquiry, it would have turned
to MI5; and it was MI5 that Wilson and his personal secretary, Marcia
Williams, suspected of being at the root of their troubles. The third
reason Wilson did nothing while in office was his knowledge in 1974 when
he won the election, that he would only serve two more years and quit.
Wilson, we now know, was afraid of Alzheimers' disease: it had afflicted
his father and he told his inner circle in 1974 that he was going to
resign in 1976 when he was 60. In 1975/6 ensuring a smooth hand-over of
power to his successor -and Labour was a minority government, don't
forget -was a much greater priority than finding out who was behind the
burglaries of his offices and the rumours about him. Wilson was a loyal
member of the Labour Party to whom he owed everything. He didn't want to
make bad publicity for the party -and his successor. And the fourth
reason Wilson did nothing was his memory of the previous time he had
tried. In his first term in office, encouraged by George Wigg MP, he had
tried taking on the Whitehall security establishment in the so-called
D-notice Affair -and had got his fingers badly burned.
As far as we know Wilson had very little real, concrete information
about what was going on in 1976 when he retired. He knew that he and his
circle were being repeatedly burgled. He had watched the campaign being
run against Jeremy Thorpe, the leader of the Liberal Party, by BOSS, and
that is why he made his first public remarks not about MI5, the objects
of his real suspicions, but about BOSS. But those comments produced all
the negative reactions he feared -not surprisingly, since he had almost
no evidence -and he let it drop until he resigned.
He then waited a couple of months and contacted two journalists, Barry
Penrose and Roger Courtiour (who became mockingly titled 'Pencourt')
gave them the little he had and hoped for the best. But without any
decent leads into the MI5 material, Pencourt stumbled -or were led: it
isn't clear which -into the story being run by BOSS of Liberal leader
Jeremy Thorpe and his brief affair with Norman Scott -not the story of
MI5's campaign against Wilson. There was a brief flurry of interest by
the media, notably by the Observer which had paid a lot of money for the
serialisation rights to the Pencourt book, but nothing happened and the
story disappeared. Wilson tried to get his successor James Callaghan to
do something but Callaghan declined.
The story disappeared for two reasons. The only journalists or
politicians in the late 1970s who knew anything about the secret state
were currently or formerly employed by the secret state or were
mouthpieces for it. There was no investigative journalism in 1978 in the
UK worth mentioning; there were no former British intelligence officers
to show journalists the way; there were no whistle-blowers, no
renegades. There were no courses being taught in universities. There
were almost no books to read. In 1978 the British secret state was,
really was, still secret.
After the failure of the Pencourt investigation nothing happened for
five years. Harold Wilson became a Lord, presided over a long inquiry
into the City of London which was consigned to the recycle bin as soon
as it was published, and duly developed Alzheimers' as he suspected he
would. His personal assistant for 30 years, Marcia Williams, became Lady
Faulkender and has said nothing of consequence since. Barry Penrose and
Roger Courtiour made a lot of money. Penrose was last seen working for
the Express, telling lies for the British state about Northern Ireland.
Courtiour is in the BBC somewhere.

Colin Wallace & Peter Wright

By 1979 the extraordinary events of the 1974-76 period -events which
included The Times seriously discussing the right conditions for a
military coup in the UK, and a considerable chunk of the British
establishment wondering if the Prime Minister was a KGB agent -had just
slipped by, unexamined. In came Mrs Thatcher with her GCSE understanding
of economics and proceeded to wreck the British economy, creating 2
million unemployed in 18 months, and the entire story -or group of
stories we know as the Wilson plots -simply ceased to be of interest to
all but a handful of people.
One of that handful was Colin Wallace, who in 1980 began a ten year
sentence for a manslaughter he didn't commit. Wallace was interested in
the Wilson plots story because he had not only been a minor participant
in the plots, and had knowledge of other areas of secret activities, he
knew he was in prison to stop him talking about them. The other
interested party was the former MI5 officer, Peter Wright. He had also
been a participant in the plots and had also been maltreated by his
erstwhile employers in the secret state. Not framed and imprisoned like
Wallace, but denied a decent pension on a technicality after a
lifetime's service to the state.
Here is one of the outstanding lessons of this episode. The British
secret state is an astonishingly inept employer of people. None of those
who became well known whistle blowers in the 1980s and 90s, Wright and
Wallace, John Stalker, Captain Fred Holroyd, Cathy Massiter, David
Shayler and Richard Tomlinson wanted to be whistle-blowers. They were
converted into whistle-blowers by the stupidity of their employers in
the state. Wallace, Holroyd and Wright, for example, were loyal Queen
and Country men to a fault, right-wingers through and through.
Unfortunately, our secret state has only one response to internal
dissent or the possibility of public revelation of its own errors:
smash, crush, smear, destroy, frame, cover-up and lie. The secret state
perceives itself to be defending the national interest and in the
national interest anything is permitted.
In prison in the 1980s Colin Wallace began writing letters about his
wrongful conviction and accounts of his experiences working for the
British Army's psychological warfare operation in Northern Ireland. In
that capacity he had witnessed some of MI5's attempts to smear Wilson
and other politicians as communists, drug-takers, homosexuals etc. The
major media took no notice. Duncan Campbell at the New Statesman, did
take notice but had an enormous amount on his agenda and did nothing. So
Wallace ended up working with me instead.
Despite Wallace's allegations made while in prison and published by me
in Lobster and distributed all over the British media in the months
preceding his release from prison, the media took almost no notice. They
only sat up and paid attention when the first rumours about a book being
published in Australia by a former MI5 officer called Peter Wright began
circulating in the UK. One nut-case talking about the Wilson plots could
be ignored; two, apparently, could not.
We now know, from a senior civil servant called Clive Ponting -another
whistle-blower in the 1980s -that in the months before Wallace's release
from prison, the Ministry of Defence set up a committee, with MI5, to
deal with him. It is worth noting here that this committee did not
simply order his murder. Outside Northern Ireland our secret state seems
to kill people very rarely. But it is also worth noting that the
committee was was set up to pervert the course of justice. Precisely
what this committee did is not known, but its general remit was to
discredit Wallace and so discredit his allegations. Two of its
operations were detected and they show what can be done with
unaccountable power.
By mid 1987 despite the huge amount of space devoted to the allegations
filtered back from Australia from the Peter Wright book, Spycatcher,
there were only three groups of journalists actually trying to research
the complex tales Wallace told: Channel Four News, where I was briefly;
David Leigh and Paul Lashmar at the Observer;and, a bit later, Paul Foot
at the Mirror. Other journalists dropped in and out, did odd stories,
but only those three groups were seriously at it. We all had the same
basic problem: Wallace had been described as a 'Walter Mitty' by
Ministry of Defence briefings during his trial in 1980 and the Ministry
of Defence was simply denying that Wallace had the job he said he did in
Northern Ireland. Wallace claimed to have had access to secret
intelligence material in his capacity as a psy-ops officer for the
British Army. Since the psyops/ war unit was officially deniable, i.e.
officially didn't exist, the MOD line was that Wallace was simply a
press officer -his official, public role -and the rest was fantasies. We
were trying to establish the veracity not only of his claims about
events but also his claims about his own CV.

The jumping log book

Wallace was a sky-diving enthusiast and eventually the Army in Northern
Ireland began including sky-diving in its psychological operations.
Wallace formed a free-fall team which did displays all over Northern
Ireland and was used to try to create positive feelings about the Army
-basic hearts and minds stuff. Wallace's speciality was descending
dressed as Santa Claus and giving out presents to kids. Sky-diving in
this country is very tightly controlled: every jump is recorded by the
British Parachuting Association. As you do more jumps you get differing
kinds of licenses: beginners, intermediate, advanced. Wallace had an
advanced, 'D' license -or so he said.
In the summer of 1987 rumours began spreading through this little group
of journalists that Wallace's claims to have been a sky-diver were a
fake. He was a fantasist, a Walter Mitty. These rumours arrived at
Channel Four News via an old colleague of Wallace's who knew an ITN
journalist. The rumours seemed inexplicable at first: we had lots of
pictures of Wallace sky-diving with and without his Santa Claus outfit.
But when I finally rang the British Parachuting Association to check
their file on Wallace I found they had no record of him. Eventually Paul
Foot, also working on the story, discovered that a duplicate set of
records were held by the international parachuting body and Wallace's
records were there, confirming that he was what he said he was -as far
as sky-diving went, anyway. Undaunted by this, a journalist now with the
BBC called John Ware, still ran the 'Wallace-is-a-fake' parachuting
story some months later in a double page spread in the Independent
smearing Wallace and Fred Holroyd.
The point here is, we can now work out some of what this MOD-MI5
operation against Wallace consisted of. First, they picked one area of
Wallace's CV, his parachuting, and set out to discredit him with it. If
they could show he was lying here, they believed, journalists would not
believe his other claims. They burgled his house and stole his jumping
log book; they burgled the British Parachuting Association and removed
his file, substituting a fake file for the one with his number on it.
Then they began spreading the word through their press contacts that
Wallace was a fraud, knowing that Wallace didn't have his jumping log
and knowing that -eventually -some journalist would ring the British
Parachuting Association and ask about his record. Finding nothing,
because his file had been removed, such a journalist would consider the
allegation that he was a fantasist proven and would thus dismiss him as
the 'Walter Mitty' figure described at his trial. This operation was
certainly run at Channel Four News and John Ware, then working for the
BBC. In effect, the MOD tried to convert Wallace into the 'Walter Mitty'
they said he was. Unfortunately for the MOD, Paul Foot was a better
journalist than that and found the duplicate set. Without Foot we would
have been struggling to rebut the Wallace-is-a fantasist line. Another
disinformation project about Wallace was fed through Professor Paul
Wilkinson, then at Aberdeen University. A former RAF officer, Wilkinson
was ITN's official consultant on terrorism. Somebody in the MOD or MI5
fed him some material about Wallace which accused him of trying to get a
man in Northern Ireland killed so he -Wallace -could have the man's
wife. This smear story had been created just before Wallace left
Northern Ireland -presumably in case they ever needed to get at Wallace.
Wilkinson wrote a letter, passing this derogatory material on to ITN.
Fortunately, by this point,Channel Four News' management were pretty
sure Wallace was telling the truth and showed us journalists Wilkinson's
letter. The allegations it contained were refutable, and Wallace wrote
to the University authorities. Wilkinson was reprimanded and apologised
and lost his job as ITN's consultant on terrorism.
The point here is this: Wallace had already been framed for manslaughter
and convicted in a rigged trial. Having failed to shut Wallace up with
six years of imprisonment, the secret state then set about discrediting
him. If you could get to the people on the MOD/MI5 committee which
planned this and asked them why they were doing it, they would simply
say, it was in the national interest to prevent Wallace talking. In the
minds of the secret state the national interest -as defined by them
-overrides the competing claims of justice and democracy.

Politicians and the Secret State

I offer these anecdotes by way of introduction to some comments on the
relationship between the media, politicians and what we might call
historical truth. Many people vaguely assume, as I did at the beginning
of the Wallace affair, that politicians and journalists are concerned
with 'the truth'. This simply isn't the case.
Most journalists -at least 99% of those I have met -are interested first
in their careers, and aims subsidiary to that, such as getting a story
or doing better than their rivals, or having a good time or padding
their expenses. Journalist are just people doing a job. They have
mortgages and families to support; and theirs is now a very insecure
business. All the unions in the media were smashed in the past 15 years.
Contracts are short. You can be fired on the spot.
Politicians, most of them, are simply interested in power or aims
subsidiary to that, such as getting reselected, getting re-elected;
pleasing the whips to get promotion; or simply getting press coverage.
The pursuit of the truth is not on the agenda of most politicians; the
pursuit of the truth, when it means going against prevailing media
opinion, or the wishes of their party's leaders, or the wishes of the
state, is on the agenda of a handful. This is particularly true of
stories in the field of intelligence and security policy. Nothing makes
MPs more nervous than security and intelligence issues.
In the first place, if they've got half a brain, MPs simply won't go
near subjects about which they are ignorant -which is sensible enough.
And to my knowledge other than those who have worked for, or have been
close to, the security and intelligence services, there are no MPs who
have a decent knowledge of this field. Not even Tam Dalyell. In the
second place, MPs all have a healthy respect for the damage to careers
tangling with the spooks can inflict. You might think that MPs then have
a massive vested interested in bringing the security and intelligence
services under their control. But this hasn't happened yet and, in my
view, short of some massive,earth-shaking scandal, never will.
In the House of Commons in 1987 we got some help from Ken Livingstone,
Tam Dalyell and Dale Campbell-Savours. These days Dalyell is still at
it, as is Norman Baker a Lib-Dem MP, a new member of the so-called
awkward squad. Livingstone has moved onto other areas and
Campbell-Savours has become a Blair loyalist.
The British political and media systems are not equipped to deal with
major issues concerning the behaviour of the secret state.
In the political arena the Intelligence and Security Committee setup
under the Tories is a joke, without investigative powers. But it is a
joke useful to the secret state. When the House of Commons Foreign
Affairs Committee was conducting hearings into the Sierra Leone affair
last year it asked for an interview with the head of MI6. Foreign
Secretary Robin Cook denied them access on the grounds that that the
security and Intelligence Committee was the appropriate forum for such
questions. MPs are still unable to ask questions about the Security and
Intelligence services: the House of Commons Clerks simply will not
accept them. The secret state is still, officially, not accountable to
Parliament.
At its heart, the Wilson plots story was the attempt by a handful of
people to persuade the major print and broadcast media and parliament
that their view of the British political universe was false. I was
writing articles which implied: you -the media, the politicians -do not
know what you are talking about: the world isn't the way you say it is.
At the beginning, before the major media took any real interest in the
Wallace story, this was a peculiarly difficult message to sell. Who was
I to tell experienced journalists they didn't know what was what? I was
on the dole, living in the sticks, in Hull, producing a magazine with a
tiny circulation. In the weeks before Wallace came out of prison I had
circulated a great deal of material to the major media about Wallace,
his case and his explosive allegations. I got only one response, from a
journalist at Newsnight. As big-time journalists are prone to do, he
said, don't tell me over the phone, come down to London. So down I went
to Newsnight's office. It was my first exposure to the major media. I
delivered the spiel and the journalist was interested and said he would
take a camera crew down to the prison to interview Wallace when he got
out.
I had been told by Wallace that among the visitors to his secret psy-ops
unit, Information Policy, in Northern Ireland, had been Alan Protheroe,
who at the time of my Newsnight visit, was Assistant Director General of
the BBC. Nicknamed 'the Colonel' in the BBC, Protheroe was, and may
still be, a part-time soldier-cum-intelligence officer, specialising in
military-media relations.
But unlike the journalists I had been talking to up to that point,
Protheroe knew who Wallace was and what the Information Policy unit had
been doing in Northern Ireland. To Newsnight I therefore said something
like this: 'Protheroe's a spook; you'll have to watch him. He'll try and
block anything you do with Wallace in it.' 'Really, old boy,' said the
BBC people I was talking to, 'it isn't like that in the BBC'.
Their response was comical, really. It was then only just over a year
since there had been several weeks of intense media interest in the
revelation that the BBC actually had its own in-house MI5 office vetting
BBC employees (still there, as far as I know) -prima facie evidence
that, au contraire, the BBC was exactly 'like that'.
The Newsnight journalist, Julian O'Hallorhan, interviewed Wallace the
day he came out of prison and then had his piece yanked out of a
programme at the very last minute. I was actually watching Newsnight at
the time and saw the confusion in the studio as the running order was
rejigged while they were on air. We subsequently heard that Protheroe
had indeed blocked the Wallace interview, and when asked, the BBC denied
that they had ever interviewed Wallace. (Paul Foot has seen a bootleg of
the film-which-didn't-exist.) Protheroe's action in blocking the Wallace
interview was reported four months later in the Sunday Times and has
been confirmed since by a senior Newsnight staffer who has now left the
BBC.
Thirteen years later, have things improved? Yes and no. The media is
potentially more difficult to manage for the state than it used to be.
The Ministry of Defence employs 150 press officers to spin-doctor the
media and even MI6 has a media department whose job it is to wine and
dine journalists and editors to get the departmental line across. The
days when a quiet word in the ear of a handful of editors would ensure a
media black-out are gone. And there is a good deal more information
available than there was in 1986 -if journalists could be bothered to
read it -which, mostly, they can't. But the fundamental attitudes of the
media towards the state and secret state remain the same as far as I am
aware. British journalists -and, more importantly -British editors, do
not see themselves in an adversarial relationship with the state and
secret state. If the secret state says 'national security' to them, most
journalists and virtually all editors will still back away. And in some
ways the situation today is even worse than it was then. Investigative
journalism is expensive, offers no guarantee of publishable articles, or
broadcastable TV programmes, and there is less of it now than there was
then. There has been a visible dumbing-down of the few TV documentary
series, such as World inAction, into consumerism programmes. Not
counting the journalists who are simply mouthpieces for state, who go
under the titles of diplomatic or defence correspondents, there is
currently only one journalist in the whole of Britain who is seriously
interested in the intelligence and security field, and that's Paul
Lashmar at the Independent.
In 1990, I think it was, a resolution of mine, became the North Hull
Labour Party's conference resolution. It called for a full-scale public
inquiry into Northern Ireland, the dirty war there, the Wallace affair
and the Wilson plots; it called for the introduction of a system of real
parliamentary accountability for the secret state. The resolution went
to the Labour Party conference where it was passed without opposition.
As such, according to the rules of the Party, it became party policy. Of
course nothing happened, the whole thing has been forgotten and we are
where we were in 1986 before the Wilson plots story got going. Short of
a bug being found in Tony and Cherie Blair's bedroom with 'please return
to MI5' stamped on it, New Labour is not likely to challenge the secret
state -and maybe not even then.
Although Britain is a democracy in some senses, the 'will of the people'
has never been extended to cover the key areas of interest to a state
which was developed to run and service an empire. Defence, foreign
policy, security and intelligence policy -in none of these areas can MPs
or their constituents have access to official information or have any
input into policy. During both World Wars the state co-opted the mass
media of the day for its propaganda; and this continued to some extent
after the war in the Cold War with the Soviet bloc when large chunks of
the media were co-opted again to run anti-Soviet propaganda -this is
what is described in the new Paul Lashmar book about the Information
Research Department; and is presumably the reason it has been so widely
ignored.
At the end of the day, as the cliche has it, its down to the
politicians. As long as the politicians remain content not to have any
influence over foreign and defence affairs -and the intelligence
agencies which service them -the media will remain relatively impotent
and the subject will remain off the agenda. And, unfortunately, this
present intake of Labour MPs shows every sign of being at least as
supine before the state as those who came before it.