1. France came to terms with its most shameful military scandal, the framing of Capt. Dreyfus. Britain still clings to the wreckage of its attempt to destroy Capt. Wallace after 50 years of lies and deception. L’Affaire Dreyfus convulsed France for over a decade, 1894-1906. The scandal has come to symbolise an injustice perpetrated by a state against an individual, characteristically a whistle-blower who has exposed state malfeasance. L’Affaire Dreyfus began in December 1894. Capt. Alfred Dreyfus, a 35-year-old Alsatian French artillery officer, spent five years imprisoned on Devil’s Island in French Guiana for allegedly spilling State secrets to the Germans. The real culprit was Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy, a treacherous French Army major. When evidence emerged against Esterhazy, the military was obliged to convene a trial against Esterhazt, but acquitted him after two days. The Army then laid additional charges against Dreyfus, based on forged documents. Subsequently, Emile Zola produced his celebrated denunciation of the scandal, J’Accuse! It ignited public fury. A new trial of Dreyfus resulted in another conviction for the innocent captain and a 10-year sentence. This, however, did not wash with the public and eventually Dreyfus was pardoned and released. Finally, in 1906, he was exonerated and reinstated as a major in the French Army. He died in 1935. Colin Wallace was also a captain in the military. False evidence was concocted to blame him, inter alia, of leaking military secrets which had been spilt by others. He was unfairly dismissed from his Army post in 1975. He was later accused of murder. As in L’Affaire Dreyfus, the prosecution relied upon perjury to secure the conviction. Dr Ian West, a Home Office pathologist, used his time in the witness box to disgorge one lie after another. Wallace spent six years in prison, a year longer than Dreyfus. Like Dreyfus, his conviction was eventually overturned. One of Wallace’s supporters in the British media was the late Paul Foot. He wrote of Wallace in April 1987 that the ‘most fantastic thing about Colin Wallace’s fantastic story is that every time you check it against the facts, it fits them’. The same cannot be said about the outpourings of Her Majesty’s Government (HMG). Despite repeated humiliations, the British Establishment is still swearing that black is white. 2. Wallace exposed PSYOP dirty tricks. HMG said he was lying. When proof of dirty tricks emerged, HMG had to rewrite its lies. HMG lied about the work Wallace carried out while at HQNI at Lisburn. One of Wallace’s tasks was to plan psychological operations (PSYOPs). In 1987 and 1988 when Wallace’s case became a cause célèbre in Britain, HMG assured the Commons that Wallace had never had a PSYOPS role. HMG also denied the existence of a particularly sinister programme run under the rubric of ‘Operations Clockwork Orange’. Clockwork Orange fed lies to the media about British parliamentarians such as Harold Wilson, Denis Healey, Tony Benn and others. Then, in 1989, files emerged which proved that Wallace had indeed served as a PSYOPs officer; moreover, that Clockwork Orange files existed. Defence Secretary Tom King conspired with Margaret Thatcher to push this particularly embarrassing genie back into the bottle. Rather than hold a wide ranging inquiry, as certain civil servants had expected, King curtailed the terms of what became the Calcutt Inquiry. David Calcutt QC turned out to be an honest man. He confirmed that Wallace had been dismissed unfairly, but little else. This was not Calcutt’s fault. His terms of reference were narrow and restrictive. Wallace was paid £30,000 compensation. 3. Wallace raised the spectre of collusion and was accused of being a Walter Mitty. Now HMG is doling out millions to victims of collusion. What had Wallace discovered during his time as a PSYOPs officer? Wallace came to suspect the existence of collusion long before this became an accepted fact for which HMG has compensated many victims such as the families and survivors of the Miami Show band atrocity. Yet, when Wallace raised the spectre of collusion between the British state and Loyalist paramilitaries, he was denounced as a liar. In addition to the payment of compensation to victims of State-Loyalist collusion, a string of enquiries including that of the Police Ombudsman for Northern Ireland, the Historical Enquiries Team, along with the publication of various books, have confirmed that British agents were working inside Loyalist paramilitary organisations. The most infamous of these killers was Robin ‘The Jackal’ Jackson. He was one of the gang which bombed Dublin and Monaghan in 1974 murdering thirty-three people. Wallace has maintained for decades that there were reasons to believe the State had colluded with the UVF gang that bombed Dublin and Monaghan in 1974. Various British government have refused to release their files on the twin atrocity. 4. Wallace said the State knew about the child abuse at Kincora. He was vilified for decades. In 2022 the Police Ombudsman criticised the RUC for having failed to act on knowledge it had of the scandal. What else did Wallace reveal only to be traduced as a Walter Mitty type fantasist? Wallace has told the truth about the infamous Kincora Boys’ Home child sex abuse scandal. All of the inquiries set up by HMG have ordained that the only abuse suffered by the residents of Kincora was that perpetrated by the staff members at the home. This is entirely wrong. In recent decades countless former victims have come forward with detailed accounts describing how they were abused by people from outside of the home. HMG still libels the victims as liars and fantasists. One of the victims, Richard Kerr, is trying ti get his case heard in Belfast. He has become frustrated at one delay after another in the case. Wallace has produced contemporaneous records which prove that he and others in the Army knew about the abuse at the time. RUC records prove that the police knew about it too in the 1970s. In 2022 a report by the Police Ombudsman for NI acknowledged this and criticized the RUC
![]()