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Mr. Brooke : No, I am having a drink.
Mr. Dalyell : I must make it clear for the record that the Secretary of State is drinking water.
Page 16 continues :
"LENG : That's right. There was of course that branch as well. NIO would come in and cross fertilise if they wanted to keep something from the RUC-- dont't quote me again.
PENROSE : No, No. No."
Page 18 of 27 reads :
"PENROSE : No, of course. It's just to see how, if you would forgive me, how the bureaucracy works. So, Clockwork Orange in this case comes from Denis Payne's office, so it's Intelligence to Intelligence, and then you're shown it
LENG : I'm not always shown it. Only if they need to involve someone at a higher level.
PENROSE : Right
PENROSE : Clockwork Orange was Policy. This sounds like a statement rather than a question, but a statement asking for confirmation.
LENG : And Clockwork Orange was Policy.
PENROSE : Yes. And so Denis Payne sends the file over and this is Policy from NIO.
LENG : I wouldn't have thought he would even send a file over if I may say so because the less that was committed to paper the better." I am not convinced that that is in the honourable tradition of the Grenadier Guards. People do not say that things should not be committed to paper unless there is some reason for that.
Page 19 of 27 reads :
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"PENROSE : Oh, of course, I'm sorry, of course.LENG : And I think there would be discussions because certainly Intelligence and Intelligence are meeting continually.
PENROSE : Yes. So fine, so it comes from there. Your job is of course you have to OK Peter Goss, the senior Intelligence officer, and Tony Holman and others, to release information to the unit, to the Information Policy unit."
I see that my hon. Friend the Member for Leicester, South (Mr. Marshall) is getting restive. I do not want to annoy him but the debate can go on until 11.30 pm, so we have time.
Page 19 continues :
"LENG : Yes, to the Information Policy unit or down to the units of the Army.
PENROSE : Yes.
LENG : As the case may be.
PENROSE : So, you knew obviously there was a five [MI5] involvement in Clockwork Orange, but you obviously wouldn't have known LENG : The detail.
PENROSE : The detail.
LENG : Correct."
I do not want to start criticising individual officers, but it seems to me that General Officers Commanding should not pass by on the other side of a very awkward road. If such things happen, it is up to commanding officers to get themselves involved.
Page 19 continues :
"PENROSE : Right, and the other thing is that--which is obviously very important--is that as you didn't see the file that was kept at Lisburn, you wouldn't have known obviously its contents because there would have been no need for you to know.
LENG : Right."
The principle of the need to know is all very well but General Officers Commanding in Northern Ireland should be a bit inquisitive about what goes on in the north of Ireland.
Wallace then said to the Prime Minister :
"I think even you will agree from the above extracts that General Leng does not deny :
(a) He was aware of the allegations of homosexuality at the Kincora Boys Home ;
(b) He was aware of a project known as Clockwork Orange', albeit not the full content of it.
(c) There was MI5 involvement in the project.
Not surprisingly, Mr. Miller totally ignores virtually all of the other documents which I sent to you"--
the numerous documents that had been sent to the Prime Minister at No. 10 Downing street--
"He makes no comment on the forged bank account purporting to belong to the Rev. Ian Paisley, nor does he attempt to explain why the Security Forces should have been collecting documents such as the one containing the homosexual smear about Edward Heath."
As an Opposition Member, I am outraged by the document that I have seen carrying the imprimatur of the headquarters in Northern Ireland in which allegations are made about the Prime Minister of this country. Years later, that is still quite unacceptable. Wallace continued :
"The key question which the Government refuses to address is : Did those documents exist at Army Headquarters Northern Ireland during the mid 1970s, and if so for what purpose were they created or collected?' Given the many false assurances provided by Ministers in the past, the Government has a duty to tell Parliament the truth about these issues. For example, I enclose with this letter a selection of pages from a document which was typed during that period for the Information Policy unit by Mr. C. T. T. Whitehead, until recently Deputy Chief Press Officer at the MOD and currently with the Home Office, and which contains information designed to smear Irish Prime Minister, Charles Haughey. It should be a very simple task for your advisers to check if this is correct or not."
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The Minister may recall that the matter was referred to last Friday on page 3 of The Independent. I mention that in passing ; I do not wish to go over the whole of Mr. Anthony Bevins's contribution. But if Ministers think that I am talking about something in the distant past of purely academic interest I would point out to them that it is strange that the political editor of The Independent should decide to deal with the matter on page 3. Heaven knows, there was enough news. The article referred to the fact that Mr. C. T. T. Whitehead, who apparently had no information about those matters or that they were going to be raised, now holds the very important and sensitive post of press officer to the prisons department of the Home Office. Is it true that he typed all that stuff? The Prime Minister has copies of all that. What have the Government done to check with various other people to whom the documents were sent to discover whether they are false? There is a good deal of potential corroborative evidence around. Or have the Government simply, as my hon. Friend the Member for Brent, East and I suspect, pulled the shutters down and adopted an attitude like Henry to Thomas a'Becket--"Who will rid us of these people?"--and done nothing about it?To be blunt, we are going to use every parliamentary stratagem to stop that happening. This matter refers to Parliament as a whole. Parliament has a right to be inquisitive about such matters. That is why I have spoken at great length and have read out the letter to the Prime Minister. It is clear that she had no intention of answering it. What can we do about that other than to put everything on the parliamentary record and badger her day after day until she produces some kind of an answer?
In his letter Mr. Miller refers to the draft of the first part of Clockwork Orange which was sent to the Prime Minister. He claims : "I am aware of no substantive evidence that such drafting received any official sanction."
If that is the Prime Minister's view, Colin Wallace says that he would be grateful if she would explain who authorised and instructed a member of MI5 to type that draft. What was Mr. Whitbread, Penny Sadler or anyone else doing drafting those documents? They did not draft them simply because they wanted to. Those things do not happen out of thin air like alchemy. Someone, somewhere issues instructions that they should happen. They do not happen by chance.
Many serious people are interested in this matter. I will quote from an unprompted letter from Laura Grimond, the granddaughter of former Prime Minister Asquith. She wrote to me on 12 June from Orkney :
"Just a line to thank you for sending me the most interesting correspondence re Colin Wallace, and also the Hansard of your extremely effective speech in the Army Debate 5 June."
Laura Grimond may think it was effective, but I have not had much of an answer from the Minister of State for the Armed Forces. He did not say anything. Speeches are effective only if they achieve something. Therefore, I do not think that my speech was particularly effective. She continued :
"The fact that predictably it was ignored by the Government says much and simply underlines the continuing cover-up on as much as can be covered up in matters relating to Colin Wallace and the conduct of the Security Forces in Northern Ireland. Apart from Inspector Byford's letter in the Times of 8 June 1990 I haven't seen any
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come back from the Yorkshire TV Film, but don't see the full coverage of the National Press up here. If no replies to the questions you put are provided there must be further reactions." She then says that she is sending copies of the correspondence to a number of people with personal contacts. [Interruption.] The hon. Member for Staffordshire, East (Mr. Lightbown) should not be dismissive about this matter because the Lord Chancellor is not. The Lord Chancellor has offered me an interview. I have known him for many years and I regard him as a most serious and honest man. I hope that all these matters will be brought before him before he is prepared to grant me an interview.Wallace says :
"My comments about the Calcutt Inquiry are equally valid. If, as has been shown above, the Ministry of Defence is determined to continue providing false and deliberately misleading information about my case then it is clear it will do so to the Calcutt Inquiry. Furthermore, given the obviously evasive nature of Mr. Miller's letter to me and the fact that you allowed such an inadequate reply to be issued in your name, the Calcutt Inquiry seems utterly pointless."
That is not my view, because David Calcutt has his own reputation to safeguard. Some people, including some of his fellow academic lawyers, will be intensely interested in the rigour of Calcutt's inquiry. I hope that he will uphold his considerable reputation--I do not know how he has time to do all this--by going in detail into what he was asked to do. I was pretty unhappy when I heard him describe his narrow terms of reference on the radio.
For reasons that the Secretary of State knows, I shall not refer to another inquiry tonight, but everything depends on the terms of reference of inquiries. If Calcutt comes up with a narrow report, the Secretary of State should not think that that will shut up the growing number of hon. Members who are concerned about the case of Colin Wallace.
Wallace says :
"Although the Inquiry was set up more than three months ago, my legal advisers and I still do not know what official documents we will be allowed to have access to ; what witnesses, if any, we will be able to interview or cross-examine ; or whether or not we will be able to see any of the evidence submitted by other witnesses. Even worse, although the Ministry of Defence has unlimited access to legal advice, I have still been refused counsel's opinion unless I pay for such advice myself."
That is one of the reasons why some of us have gone on and on about Colin Wallace's case. The set-up in this country means that the very rich can afford some defence, but people who cannot pour out a great deal of money in legal fees encounter great difficulty. Of course Colin Wallace will not get legal aid. He says :
"It would appear, therefore, that half of the inquiry will be able to have unlimited funds and assistance from the taxpayer, but any help I receive will be strictly limited."
I will send a copy of this speech to the Master of Magdalene and I hope that he will take it into account, because it is a serious problem for him.
I ought also to refer to one or two extracts that bother me and some of my colleagues from Northern Ireland, if I may call them that.
Mr. Molyneaux : Yes, the hon. Gentleman may.
Mr. Dalyell : The leader of the Ulster Unionists says that I may, and I thank him. He, too, has seen the documents, and he wonders where they came from. We wonder whether the Government know where they came from.
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The document says :"In Belfast, the need was for arms immediately. The commander had been interned the previous week but the acting commander became the established representative of the IRA in Belfast. In response to his cry, an assortment of arms of varying antiquity and condition from a variety of sources started to materialise. A Mr. Naughton, an executive of the GEC factory in Dunleer claimed to represent a body that could supply £150,000 with no trouble, although he personally would not be a supplier. He also made it clear that the money would not be handed out freely as Haughey had done. He asked questions as to the IRA's socialist policies and political involvement in the South and to what use the guns bought with this money would be put. The IRA man recognised the situation and gave the correct answers, answers that pleased Naughton as well as Padraic Faulkner who was behind Naughton. Faulkner had been appointed to the Committee on the previous day and £100,000 had been allocated for the relief of victims. Mr. Naughton offered £3,000 to the IRA leadership through Paddy Devlin and Paddy Kennedy. He handed over £1,000 and promised a further £2,000 which never came. His Committee appeared to think that the rebels cause was a better investment."
Who on earth typed that? I should like to know whether it was paid for by the British taxpayer. Who gave authority for it to be typed? Those documents are in the hands of Downing street, and it had better reply. It goes without saying that Mr. Haughey is only the Taoiseach. What exactly happened ought to be established, because those matters are widely known.
The document goes on :
"The same people except for Blaney met on September 18 at Charles Haughey's home. The IRA officer said that there would be no problem in obtaining arms provided £50,000 was forthcoming. It was suggested that he open a bank account so that the money could be paid in. This he did in Dundalk the following morning with a £5 deposit. No further money was paid in. The Dublin Cabinet was realising that it would not be so easy to take the IRA over. A new IRA could be quicker and cheaper.
Meanwhile, the Director of Army Intelligence had met Haughey to talk about intelligence moves in the North again. They decided to use the relief centre at Monaghan as a clearing house for information from the North--Army I.O. John Duggan and Finbarr Drohan had already advised on its suitability. It was agreed that the £100 a week should cover running expenses and the cost of producing a weekly newssheet which would help establish contacts in the North.
Seamus Brady had produced a booklet called Terror in Northern Ireland'--an account of the August fighting in Belfast--for the Central Citizens Defence Committee in Belfast. The Government Information Bureau paid for the book, and over a thousand copies were given to Paddy Devlin to distribute at the Brighton Labour Party Conference. Two thousand copies were kept for distribution overseas, and the rest went to the CCDC to sell at 2/6d a copy. Hugh Kennedy became the PRO CCDC for CCDC and began to build the image of Tom Conaty, a wholesale fruit importer whom it was planned to make Chairman of the CCDC in place of Jim O'Sullivan."
I would like to know where all that sort of stuff came from. I believe that the hon. Member for Upper Bann (Mr. Trimble) has views to express on that subject, so I shall give way if he wants to intervene.
Mr. Trimble : The hon. Member for Linlithgow (Mr. Dalyell) showed those typescript pages to me earlier. I wondered whether they were extracts from a document that was published in Dublin round about 1975, by members of the Official IRA, as it was called then, giving its account of the formation of the Provisional IRA. It was subsequently declared a subversive document under the Republic's emergency legislation and is now extremely difficult to get hold of.
Column 1198
It is certainly consistent with accounts that appeared elsewhere, notably at the arms trial in which Blaney, Haughey and others were defendants. A short version of the thesis that lies behind it is to be found in Connor Cruise O'Brien's introduction to Martin Dillon's recent book.Mr. Dalyell : It raises serious questions which deserve an answer. I am not in a position to begin answering them. However, it is high time that we had the truth. Ministers can find out, though I admit that there may be difficulties. I am to some extent a little embarrassed because all that happened a long time ago, but there should be records.
If Ministers really wanted to find out the truth, they could ask Mr. Whitehead certain questions. He is a very senior official. I will tell the House what he was reported as saying in The Independent on 29 June this year :
"The Prime Minister was urged yesterday to reply to an allegation that a civil servant was involved in a 1970s attempt to smear Charles Haughey, the Irish Taoiseach, with an IRA connection. The allegation was made in a letter to Margaret Thatcher from Colin Wallace, a former Army press officer in Northern Ireland, on 10 June. But in the Commons yesterday, Tam Dalyell, Labour MP for Linlithgow, asked Sir Geoffrey Howe, Leader of the Commons, for a full response to the letter, containing a document, which may well have been a smear, typed by Mr. Christopher Whitehead, currently head of public relations of the prison service, linking Charles Haughey with the IRA'."
All that does not--or should not--come out of the blue, because the deputy Prime Minister said that he would draw the attention of the Northern Ireland Office to the fact that if I was called I would hope to raise those matters.
The Leader of the House said that my
"intervention would no doubt be taken into account when ministers replied to a Northern Ireland debate next Thursday.
Mr. Wallace said yesterday that the document, an extract from a 100-page original in his possession, was one of eight that he has submitted to Mrs. Thatcher. He said the documents substantiated his allegation that officials had carried out a disinformation campaign in Ulster in the mid-1970s. Mr. Whitehead, a Home Office chief press officer"
this is why I say to the hon. Member for Upper Bann that we must know whether or not the allegation is false--
"said last night"--
28 June, that is--
"that he had no response"
to the allegation that I had made. If he had said that he knew nothing about it, and that he did not do it, that is one thing, but to have no response to an allegation such as that--well, hon. Members must draw their own conclusions.
The article continued :
"The official, who was on detachment to the Army press service in Northern Ireland towards the end of 1973, said he had not been asked whether he had typed the document. I was not aware this had happened at all, he said."
This is why I am so angry, as I said when I intervened in the speech of my hon. Friend the Member for Brent, East. The Prime Minister has had the letter for 14 long days. No one has bothered to ask a man in a senior position in the Government service--in a key Department such as the Home Office--whether or not he had typed the document. It is a simple question.
The article went on :
" The Independent passed a copy of the document to an Irish official last night. There was no reaction, but the allegation is bound to worsen Mr. Haughey's already delicate relationship with the United Kingdom."
Things are now out in the open. I suspect that the matter was not exactly news to the Irish Government, who, I know, want the matter cleared up. The article added :
Column 1199
"Mr. Wallace's letter was prompted by a Ministry of Defence official who told him earlier this month :"--I refer to Mr. Miller's letter--
"You attached to your letter of 23 April seven documents which you suggested support your allegation of a smear campaign by Crown servants against Members of Parliament."
Have the Government bothered to try to find out about any of the other seven documents? If I am going on at inordinate length, it is because I want to suggest that I will do it again if I am given an opportunity, unless the Government bestir themselves.
Mr. Livingstone : May I help to put this in context? Many people will be surprised that we have not had a reply from the Prime Minister. She received a detailed file of all the most serious allegations from Colin Wallace at the beginning of the last decade, and nothing was done about it. For nearly 10 years those serious allegations have been in the Prime Minister's possession, and in all that time there has been not one serious response : they have been laughed off, brushed aside and denied.
Mr. Dalyell : My hon. Friend the Member for Brent, East and I have had the experience of being repeatedly laughed off. In 1986 I started off pretty sceptical, as I was told by Lord Mason not to touch this subject. However, other people said that I should examine the matter.
I was asked to start on this matter by a friend of the late Sir Maurice Oldfield, who was a mutual friend. I did not start with an attitude of destruction or of wanting to cause embarrassment. Frankly, I do not want to play party games in this matter. I am not sure whether I have pleased many of my colleagues--in fact, I am jolly sure that I have not. The article goes on :
" As to the remaining documents, it is not evident from them that any was written by a Crown servant with intent to smear Members of Parliament or that they were ever used for that purpose.' Mr. Wallace said that response ignored identifiable handwriting on the documents."
The question about the handwriting must be gone into. Again, that matter can be easily checked. Hon. Members from Northern Ireland are saying, "Yes," because they know the whole background.
I do not want to go on endlessly, but, on 4 June, there was a very direct letter. If the Minister's Parliamentary Private Secretary, the hon. Member for Lancashire, West (Mr. Hind), would like to help--his Minister is taking the matter very seriously--he could persuade his colleagues that they and my colleagues too will save themselves much time and bother by taking the letters seriously. What reply will the Secretary of State send to a letter dated 4 June? It states : "Dear Secretary of State,
I am writing to you once more about the Kincora affair in the light of the reported broadcast by the BBC2 Public Eye programme on 1st June 1990.
You will no doubt be aware that the contents of the programme cast into doubt previous claims that the issue has been fully investigated.
The programme alleged that the Security Service refused to co-operate with the enquiry conducted by Chief Superintendent George Caskey on behalf of Sir George Terry. In particular, it claimed that the following questions were put to the Security Services"-- we are back on the same matter that my hon. Friend the Member for Brent, East mentioned--
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