In the first years of the Troubles, the Army propaganda drive enjoyed much success. Internment altered everything. The IRA, divided into Officials, the original organisation, and the more militant Provisionals who broke away to wage a more high-profile conflict against the security forces and the ‘Orange statelet’ of Northern Ireland, began to get the upper hand. The intelligence services and the Foreign Office therefore began to send in high-powered fixers to direct the information – and disinformation – effort. Army Information Policy also went in for deception operations, such as running a laundry in republican west Belfast from which clothes were tested for traces of explosives, and massage parlours to pick up operational information. In 1974, the year the Tories lost two general elections, Wallace also became intimately involved in Operation Clockwork Orange, a scheme to undermine terrorists in Northern Ireland with disinformation spread to media contacts. The operation swiftly extended and Wallace was fed ‘facts’ about the private lives of some, mainly British, politicians. At first he was not alarmed: like many army officers in the field he felt that the actions of certain politicians, mainly Labour, were effectively aiding and abetting the enemies of the Crown by questioning the behaviour of the security services. However, the psy-ops campaign went way beyond events in Ulster, right to the top of the Conservative and Labour parties. Wallace’s notes for the period include an analysis of the ‘personality factor’ in the first election of 1974, and suggest that ‘every effort’ be made to exploit character weaknesses, such as financial, sexual or political misbehaviour, in ‘target subjects’. A list alongside mentions Edward Heath and a number of other leading Tories, together with Harold Wilson, Merlyn Rees (‘suspicion’) and the usual left-wing suspects: Benn, Foot, Eric Heffer, Barbara Castle and Tom Driberg. Wallace later insisted: ‘The note did not express my personal view in any way. My handwritten notes were nothing more than extracts from documents passed to me in connection with Clockwork Orange.’16 In the run-up to both elections, various alleged scandals involving most of these ‘target subjects’ were leaked to the press, without materially affecting the outcome, but the campaign continued long after Wilson won a tiny majority in October 1974. It is still today regarded by experienced commentators on security affairs as influential both in the downfall of Edward Health and Harold Wilson’s decision to quit the premiership in 1976.
Before he was dismissed from Army Information Policy on trumped-up charges in 1975, a disillusioned man, Wallace wrote a paper for his superiors in Information Policy entitled ‘Ulster – A State of Subversion’. It argued that the British government’s effort in Northern Ireland was vitiated by a lack of moral courage, not simply lack of resources or will. Therefore there must be ‘deep-rooted causes behind this sinister abdication of responsibility’. The Wallace paper further urged a major rethink of the handling of the situation in Northern Ireland, adding that ‘that is most unlikely until the present government is defeated by public opinion’. Its solution was simple: ‘Terrorism must not end; it must be defeated and seen to be defeated.’17 Wallace later insisted again, that the paper was part of the Clockwork Orange operation and did not reflect his own opinion: he had acted as a sub-editor in drawing together the material which in his view had clearly not emanated from Northern Ireland.18 Whatever its origin, the paper’s analysis chimed well with Neave’s assessment.
Wallace also subsequently linked the activities of the intelligence services in Northern Ireland with the general aims of the groups with which Neave found himself in sympathy during this period. MI5’s increased role in the province, he said, coincided with growing industrial unrest throughout Britain; he continued that certain elements within the Security Services saw the situation as part of a worldwide Communist conspiracy. ‘The intelligence community saw the Irish situation as the front line of the left’s threat to the UK, and of a great conspiracy by the Communist bloc to undermine the whole of the UK.’19 Evidence of Soviet involvement in Ulster has always been hard to find, but it does exist, most notably perhaps in the seizure at Schipol Airport by Dutch police in October 1971 of a consignment of Czech arms destined for the Provisional IRA. This was, according to Brian Crozier, the international expert on terrorism, ‘another indication of clandestine [Soviet] support for revolutionary violence’. Crozier also logged Moscow Radio’s report on 15 August that year represented the conflict in Northern Ireland as a conflict between Ulster workers defending their rights against an ‘oppressive colonialist regime’. Russian journalists who wished to see the situation at first hand were treated with suspicion and followed if they were given permission to visit the province. Crozier insists to this day that the subversion threat was real. ‘In the early 1970s, the USSR directly helped the IRA considerably, with arms and ammunition,’ he claimed.20 More to the point, he convinced Margaret Thatcher of his views. ‘Broadly speaking, she did share my views. I saw her quite a lot before she came to power. It is almost as if I gave her a course in these things. She believed me about the IRA and the USSR. Of course, once she was in power, she had access to all the secret intelligence.’
At this point, Wallace comes into the Neave story. Out of work and his security clearance withdrawn, Wallace found it difficult to find a job in defence-related industry or public service, but he maintained contact with his old comrades in the information service. In late July 1976, he was approached by a former colleague asking if Neave had been in contact with him. He had not. The information officer, untraceable today, said Neave was anxious to get in touch. Wallace was pleased to hear that a Tory politician of such standing wanted to talk to him and offered a meeting immediately. Neave responded with equal celerity and they met in early August. Wallace fed his eager listener with material gathered in the Clockwork Orange operation, stressing the alleged Communist links of the Provisional IRA, particularly with Palestinian terrorists and Colonel Gaddafi. This was what Neave wanted to hear. Within days, he had given the material an excursion in a speech to the Young Conservatives in Brighton: ‘Communist agitators are sowing seeds of despair and encouraging withdrawal of the army. They know such action would lead to civil war in Ireland, and delight in the Soviet Union.’ His remarks were praised by the pro-Unionist Daily Telegraph as ‘a new theme’ and Neave pursued it with surprising vigour. He met Wallace twice more that month and on 31 August wrote to him saying: ‘I enjoyed our talk last week, but I fear it was shorter than intended. I would like you to ring me on Thursday or Friday morning. I read your material with great interest and wonder if it could be updated to form the basis of a speech on September 10.’
Neave was clearly much taken with the analysis contained in ‘Ulster – A State of Subversion’, and Wallace put considerable effort into the ‘update’ required of him. Speaking in Seaton Delaval, Northumberland, Neave accused both wings of the IRA, but especially the Officials, of having ‘increasingly Marxist aims’, adding: ‘The first is the creation of a socialist republic in Ireland for which Cuba is the model. They also work to end the links between the UK and Northern Ireland and the overthrow of the Irish government in Dublin.’ He told his audience that the IRA was linked into a worldwide network of ‘subversive organisations’. This was very much the global conspiracy so much in vogue on the far right of the Tory Party and its allies. Neave was thrilled with his new theme and continued to meet Wallace during the autumn. He also met Neave’s assistant, Grattan de Courcey Wheeler, at the Turf Club. Neave proposed that Wallace should contribute an article on his analysis to the Daily Telegraph, edited by Neave’s friend William Deedes, a former Tory minister himself. Wallace promptly obliged. The article, headlined ‘Ulster’s Two Basic Needs’, based on Clockwork Orange material, appeared on 26 October. It restated the by now customary intelligence view, and condemned previous British governments for failing to come to grips with the Irish problem. He concluded: ‘But it now appears that the present Conservative leadership is prepared to give the problem the time it requires to solve it.’ This congratulatory note fits neatly with the
view that Thatcher’s election to the leadership was welcome to, if not part of the plans of, the intelligence community. Wallace was paid £70 for his article.
In the light of his enthusiasm for Wallace and his conspiracy theories, it might be asked if Neave had checked out his new-found intelligence contact, and if not why not. A few questions in the right place – and few were in a better position to ask them – would have shown him that Wallace was persona non grata to civil and military authorities alike. Indeed, Wallace had told him his side of the dismissal story in the hope of extracting a better deal from the Ministry of Defence. Neave listened sympathetically to his story but did nothing to help. There is no evidence to show that Neave, longing to believe what he was hearing, ever made enquiries, but it is unthinkable that he did not do so. More likely that he did and that the intelligence services were quite happy to allow Neave to float his Communist conspiracy theories. That, in fact, is Wallace’s view: the intelligence services were a party to the great game. ‘I suppose I was useful to them because I was no longer working officially for the government, and was what they would call “totally deniable” if anything went wrong. I am sure now that I was deliberately put in touch with Airey Neave so that the stuff which had been fed to me through Clockwork Orange would see the light of day without involving an active intelligence officer.’21 Technically, of course, the pair of them were in breach of the Official Secrets Act, Wallace for giving the information and Neave for receiving it, but in the confines of the secret state this was a side issue. After Wallace moved to Arundel in Sussex, where he finally found employment as a press officer to Arun District Council, the contacts tailed off and finally ceased. In 1981, Wallace was sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment for the manslaughter of a friend, Jonathan Lewis, whose battered body had been found in the River Arun in August the previous year. He served six years but the conviction was quashed by the Court of Appeal in 1996 and Wallace renewed his claims that the intelligence services had been behind the prosecution to shut him up.
Roy Mason’s attempt to join the fight against terrorism met with Neave’s approval. As 1976 closed, a debate on funding for Ulster found him lamenting the ‘grave economic situation’ in the province and promising not to create difficulties for the government. On 17 December, in a debate on the renewal of the Northern Ireland (Emergency Provisions) Act, the Christmas spirit extended to support for ministers’ ‘robust attitude’ to security problems. However, Neave complained that after seven years of terrorism which had claimed 1,700 lives, little was understood about the central problem: the mind of the hard-core terrorist. On a visit to Belfast, two years earlier, the RUC told him the young people they were now arresting ‘are among the hardest people they have ever seen’, as witnessed by the cruel murders of young children and cripples. He welcomed the Peace Movement gathering momentum at the time and increased recruitment to the police, but argued that the terrorists’ ultimate belief in their own success had to be destroyed. He continued to attack talks with Sinn Fein, insisting that there had to be a psy-ops programme against terrorism. There had indeed been a psychological campaign but it had been directed against British politicians through men like Colin Wallace and it had benefited his protégée, Margaret Thatcher. Instead of deadpan news reporting on death, injury, destruction and sorrow, Neave urged, there ought to be a concerted attack on ‘these mindless barbarians’ through the media. Newspapers and television should drop their ‘lame attitudes to this terrible war’ and give full support to the government, he added. Most newspapers already did so; it was clearly television he had in mind.
In 1976, 296 people died in the Troubles and 2,632 were injured. New Year 1977 brought an unexpected shift in policy by the Tories. Neave deplored the political no-man’s-land in the province and promised to bring forward ideas for a Council of State. Evidently he had in mind a body that would act as a sounding board for opinion, ‘a political forum that can discuss the subject of Ulster’ rather than devolved government. He criticised Mason’s failure to take a political initiative, and suggested a White Paper setting out the government’s plans and the prospects for Northern Ireland over the ensuing five years. Mason flatly rejected his proposal as inopportune. Neave did not give up. In early February, he met John Hume’s SDLP to reassure the nationalists that the Conservatives had not abandoned power-sharing. On 21 February, he visited Northern Ireland with Margaret Thatcher and in the Commons two days later envisaged the end of terrorism in 1977. But on 3 March, the day that Ulster Unionist leader Brian Faulkner died in a riding accident, he was back at the dispatch box asking a Private Notice Question on a series of assassinations in the province and requesting that more SAS troops be sent. Neave was keen to be seen to be ‘doing something’ on Ulster but his real political mission was more surreptitious. Behind the scenes, he was courting the Ulster Unionists under their new leader James Molyneaux. The small, disparate band of Northern Irish MPs was also being wooed by leading Labour figures, including Merlyn Rees and Michael Foot, who saw them as a potential reserve force in the event of the failure of the Lib-Lab pact. The Dublin government got wind of these overtures and was alarmed. In these early days, Labour’s efforts proved abortive, though they were later to bear fruit.
Neave offered the government full support from the Opposition when hard-line loyalists tried on 3 May to repeat the success of the 1974 workers’ strike, this time in protest at security policy and in favour of a return to Stormont-style Unionist majority government. Mason insisted that the government would not be coerced, and Neave concurred that a repeat of the previous mayhem would ruin the Northern Ireland economy. In the event, the militants did not get their way. Some workers, particularly in the mainly Protestant engineering industries, stayed away and the port of Larne was closed, but most public services operated in near normal fashion. Neave paid a warm tribute to the courage and good sense of the Northern Ireland working people, and to the ‘splendid calibre of the RUC and the way in which it has become an effective and impartial police force’. He was more than a little premature in the latter judgement: a quarter of a century later, the RUC was still not perceived as impartial.
In a volte-face later that month, and to rumbles of satisfaction in the Unionist camp, Callaghan announced the setting up of a Speaker’s conference to consider more MPs at Westminster for Northern Ireland. This was one of the central demands of the Unionists in parliament. Not only would it strengthen their numbers, such a move would also copper-fasten Ulster into the United Kingdom, making the prospect of a united Ireland yet more remote. On a different political level, it would also make the Unionists beholden to Labour, and therefore less inclined to join with Neave in bringing down the precarious Lib-Lab coalition. Neave was obliged to welcome Mason’s announcement of the initiative on 30 June, and the government’s decision to restart discussions with the major political parties on constitutional arrangements in the province. Direct rule must be made ‘more sensitive to public feeling’, he urged, reiterating his call for a political forum. Few of Ulster’s politicians shared his enthusiasm for such a body. It looked too much like a talking shop and Northern Ireland already produced more rhetoric than it could consume. Neave also proposed a Commons Select Committee on Northern Ireland, an idea which eventually did come to fruition, and the restoration of a Queen’s representative in the province, which did not. The prospect of a cockaded plenipotentiary in regal uniform and a sword by his side evoked more mirth than serious consideration.
Meanwhile, the murders continued and Neave gave his standard rant about ‘the hundred or so godfathers of crime’ pitted against the vast majority of the population, who wished only for peace, order and reconciliation. ‘The terrorists have no realistic political cause,’ he contended. But they had, and the British army had privately told the politicians that they could not defeat the IRA militarily. They could not, in Neave’s words, ‘gain victory over the murder gangs of the IRA and the loyalist thugs at war with the state’. The terrorists on both sides were t
oo deeply entrenched in their communities to allow such straightforward extirpation. Neave, however, remained convinced that, correctly deployed, the security forces could defeat terrorism.
A change of government in Dublin in the summer of 1977 slowed down the pace of political activity. Apart from a visit by the Queen to Ulster in August, when the royal progress was unimpeded by minor IRA bomb attacks, a season of inertia ensued. It was late September before the new Irish Prime Minister, Jack Lynch, met Callaghan in Downing Street. Two months later, Roy Mason floated a new political initiative. On 24 November, he told MPs his intention was to bridge the gulf between district councils in the province. He would devolve ‘real powers’ back to Northern Ireland, but not legislative authority. A new Assembly could be formed, elected by proportional representation, with a consultative role on legislation but devolved powers on issues such as transport, the environment and planning would be exercised through committees. The Unionists were sceptical, and Neave, while offering warm approval, was also dissatisfied, demanding a ‘constitutional plan’ and more democracy in local government. The vagueness of his proposals suggests that he was caught off guard, but this could scarcely have been the case as the Opposition was routinely informed of important government moves through ‘the usual channels’. More likely, Neave did not want to open up too much ground between himself and the suspicious Unionists. The year ended with another debate on 8 December renewing the Emergency Provisions legislation. Neave had just returned from an ‘inspiring’ visit to Ulster, inspecting the security forces in action at Forkhill, Crossmaglen, Bessbrook and Newry. He also visited police stations where he was shocked by the ‘fixed look of malevolence’ in the photographs of the faces of wanted men. Those of young girls he found even more terrible. ‘It is perfectly true that no military operation by itself will alter the existence of these hardened young monsters,’ he admitted. Nonetheless, he suggested that terrorist killing should be redefined and made a capital offence – two decades after the abolition of hanging.
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