[A-List] UK state: Northern Ireland

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

The final vindication

Paul Foot
Wednesday October 2, 2002
The Guardian

The first time I saw Colin Wallace was on television. A friend in the
BBC had got hold of a censored interview with him by Julian O'Halloran
shortly after Wallace had been released from Lewes prison. Unusually for
such interviews, he started by saying how many warm and friendly people
there had been in jail and how he would miss their company. He went on
to claim that he was entirely innocent of the killing of his friend
Jonathan Lewis, and had been framed for it. He had been convicted of
manslaughter in 1981, and had served six years.

I met him soon afterwards in the spring of 1987, when times were
exceedingly hard for him and his wife Eileen. Somehow, while he was in
prison, she managed to keep on paying the mortgage of their house in
Arundel. When he got out, he could not find work. He eventually got a
job with the then state-owned British Airports Authority. Not much
later, after BAA was privatised, he was inexplicably sacked, probably
because he continued publicly to protest his innocence and to embarrass
the Thatcher government.

Soon afterwards, I started to write a book about his case, and had to
get used to a tortuous, see-saw procedure. Wallace would tell me strange
stories about his experiences as an information officer specialising in
"psychological operations", in anti-Labour government forgeries and
black propaganda for the British army in Northern Ireland in the 1970s.
These would then be denied or ridiculed. I would go back to Wallace, who
would provide documents to prove what he had said.

Fellow journalists often warned me against this "Walter Mitty". But the
documents were on his side, and the criminal case against him was
riddled with inconsistencies. In 1990, to her intense embarrassment,
Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher had to admit that her government had
deceived parliament and public about Wallace's role. In 1996, the court
of appeal finally quashed his conviction. But he was still branded by
most of the media as a sinister manipulator.

So it was with a keen sense of pleasure that I read the transcripts of
his evidence last week to the Bloody Sunday massacre inquiry under Lord
Saville. Wallace was in the witness box over four days - longer than any
other witness - and was treated with great respect by all the lawyers
there, even the QC for the British army.

Wallace had been part of the army team preparing for the 1972 Widgery
tribunal into what happened on Bloody Sunday. Typically, he kept a
document that tells us as much about what happened that day as any
other. This was an excerpt from a draft of a book submitted to the army
by an officer in the Parachute Regiment. The officer had written about
Bloody Sunday as follows: "The first [that] one of our company
seconds-in-command heard of the impending operation was on the Friday
before, when his company commander came rushing excitedly into his
office after the commanding officer's orders group. 'We are really going
to have a go at them this time,' he shouted. He then went on to describe
with considerable relish how the hooligan element on the march was going
to be 'dealt with'. Later that day, the captain briefly explained to his
wife what the weekend's operations would be. He explained about the
Scoop Force, the paras and the gunmen. 'I can just see the headlines,'
she said. 'Londonderry's Sharpeville'."

Wallace was asked by Barry Macdonald, QC for the bereaved families:
"When you read that, you must have realised that what this captain in a
company in 1 Para had been briefed to do must have involved a plan to
shoot civilians as in Sharpeville?" He replied: "Certainly that was what
he was writing."

The revelation sent the inquiry into a bit of flurry. Who had written
and submitted this chapter of this unpublished book? Was the author
really an officer in the paras, and if so who? Counsel to the inquiry
admitted, rather shamefacedly: "It does appear the inquiry has not made
efforts to trace the individual concerned." A list of possible names was
hurriedly compiled and shown to Wallace, who could exclude only one of
them. The inquiry's agents are off on a hunt to find the officer who
wrote so excitedly about Britain's Sharpeville.

The Walter Mitty stigma has finally been removed from Colin Wallace. One
rather important question remains. Who killed Jonathan Lewis? As so
often, even after the most blatant miscarriages of justice, the Sussex
police are not in the least bit interested. Indeed, a senior Sussex
police officer responded to the quashing of Wallace's conviction by
announcing that it did not establish his innocence.