Military ‘lost or destroyed’ whistleblower files

Personal files relating to a military official who blew the whistle on a dirty tricks campaign in Northern Ireland and the cover-up of serious abuse at a boys’ home in Belfast have now been mysteriously destroyed or lost, Declassified has learned.

The missing service records included evidence that the whistleblower, Colin Wallace, served in the Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR) while he was also responsible for secret psychological warfare operations – “Psy Ops” – run by the British army.

He also revealed how abuse at the Kincora boys’ home in Belfast was covered up by the police and MI5. Its housemaster was William McGrath, founder of Tara, a shadowy far-right group known to MI5 and MI6 for many years. McGrath, who later pleaded guilty of buggery, gross indecency and assault and since died, was an informant for British intelligence agencies

With the files now missing, Wallace’s activities have been airbrushed out of Ministry of Defence (MoD) official history enabling it to deny his claims even though they have been corroborated by other documents and evidence the ministry desperately tried to keep secret.

Wallace’s lawyer, Kevin Winters, told Declassified that the revelation that Wallace’s file was lost or been destroyed did not come as any surprise.

Winters said: “It’s part of a wider systemic pattern of file destruction on anything which directly or indirectly challenges national security in so far as it relates in any way to the conflict [in Northern Ireland]”.

He added: “We have seen this happen repeatedly with inquiries; inquests; criminal investigations and civil actions. This latest news will form part of Mr Wallace’s pending high court civil action against the MoD for damages”.

The Ministry of Defence, which has spent decades trying to suppress evidence about how senior military commanders in Northern Ireland and MI5 were involved in a long-running cover up, said it could not comment on individual cases.

However, it is known that Wallace’s service file went missing in 2023 – the year Wallace’s lawyer began proceedings against the MoD.

In 2023 he wrote to David Williams, the ministry’s top official, saying their inability to give him a copy of his UDR service file was “inexplicable” and “totally absurd” since he had been given the General Service Medal for his UDR work. He did not receive a reply.

Wallace recently wrote to Tan Dhesi, the MP who chairs Parliament’s defence committee, saying “it would appear that the MoD’s ‘loss’ of my official Army records was designed to erase all traces of the covert work I was officially employed to do in N[orthern] Ireland. If that is true, then the MoD’s actions would be fraudulent and should be totally unacceptable to Parliament.”

‘Invaluable’

Even though he has copies of official documents which confirm his role in the army, Wallace has been told by the MoD’s Medal Office that it cannot “validate” his service number, including a record of service. It added: “This means that we are unable to issue” the Accumulated Service Medal or the army’s Veterans Badge.

One document dated 1975 – before the full nature of his role was publicly revealed – quotes an MI5 officer describing Wallace’s work in the army as “invaluable”. Senior army figures, including the commander of land forces in Northern Ireland, praised his work.

All changed when Wallace exposed the abuse at Kincora, a boys’ home in East Belfast.

In 2021, Declassified published an account of Wallace’s covert operations. The following year, Declassified described how British governments have for decades sought to prevent a full inquiry into an horrifically abusive boys’ home in Belfast which helped promote their intelligence agenda.

MI5 “consistently obstructed” police inquiries into sexual abuse at Kincora, an investigation revealed in 2023. Renewed and detailed claims that Lord Mountbatten (a cousin of Queen Elizabeth) abused a number of boys from Kincora at his castle in Sligo, were published this year in Kincora: Britain’s Shame, Mountbatten, MI5, the Belfast Boys Home Sex Abuse Scandal and the British Cover-Up, by Chris Moore, a former BBC journalist.

Wallace also revealed a secret operation, Clockwork Orange, an attempt to smear a number of senior British politicians and destabilise Harold Wilson’s Labour government. He was wrongly convicted of manslaughter in 1981, for which he spent six years in prison, until 1987.

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. His conviction was later quashed because false forensic evidence by a Home Office pathologist, Dr Ian West, now dead, had been used at the trial.

Evidence later emerged about how the MoD tried to influence independent investigations into his dismissal by the MoD after he blew the whistle. It continued to do so despite the then permanent secretary, the ministry’s top official Sir Michael Quinlan, discovering that Wallace was telling the truth about the covert operations and Margaret Thatcher’s principal private secretary, warning her that parliament had been misled.

A Historical Institutional Abuse Inquiry, led by a former judge, Sir Anthony Hart, criticised MI5 officers and the Royal Ulster Constabulary for consistently obstructing police and the destruction of MI5 files relating to Kincora.

Wallace told Declassified: “More than 1,400 soldiers were killed while serving in Northern Ireland and carrying out the will of Parliament. The use of deception techniques to disrupt the activities of those engaged in terrorism was wholly justifiable. However, the use of deliberate deception by senior figures in the MoD and elsewhere in Whitehall to manipulate parliament for questionable reasons is a threat to our democratic process and should be regarded as totally unacceptable.”

This long-running controversy, one of the most shameful episodes in the recent history of British military and intelligence operations, is far from over.