Colin Wallace is an Irishman from the North
who was intimately involved with the British Army dealing with public relations,
propaganda and disinformation. He was well known to everyone in the
command structure and had their total confidence. He was the only man there who
was an Ulsterman and understood what was going on. Then it all went wrong. That
made him the subject of Paul Foot's book, Who Framed Colin Wallace.
Mr. Foot, RIP was very much a man of the left
and a first rate reporter. He was heavily involved with Private Eye, doing a lot
of their investigative journalism. Colin was a man of the right albeit not very
political; he was too involved in the Army for anything else. For Mr. Foot to
write him up is fairly surprising but he saw right wing plotters working against
left wing politicians like Heath and Wilson. The aspect that worried him is that
Colin was important in disinformation and an expert in passing off a mixture of
lies and truth. Colin's insistence was that if Paul doubted he was not to write
the book.
The message that Paul is sending is that right
wingers are unscrupulous and dangerous. The point that I take is that
governments are dangerous. He writes about
Ernest Mandel of the Fourth International as a nice sort of chap and perfectly reasonable. Heath he says was
a Tory. This true as far as it goes. Heath was also a left wing traitor with an
unwholesome interest in choir boys. Ditto for brown envelopes. Mr. Foot
says that Airey Neave was a man of hard right views. I do not agree.
Perhaps I am too much of a libertarian for that.
