The Court of Appeal heard that scientific evidence used to convict Wallace was false and that the Home Office pathologist involved in the case admitted that he had received it from an anonymous American security source.
Journalists from foreign news organisations would be given briefings and shown forged documents, which purported to show that politicians were speaking at Irish republican rallies or were receiving secret deposits in Swiss bank accounts.
There had been an effort to try to stir up trouble for Wilson then, largely because the Daily Mirror tycoon, Cecil King, who was a longtime agent of ours, made it clear that he would publish anything MI5 might care to leak in his direction.
In the run-up to the election which, given the level of instability in Parliament, must be due within a matter of months, MI5 would arrange for selective details of the intelligence about leading Labour Party figures, but especially Wilson, to be leaked to sympathetic pressmen.
People named in Colin Wallace's notes as having been targeted in this manner included Harold Wilson, Edward Heath, Merlyn Rees, Cyril Smith, Jeremy Thorpe, Tony Benn and Ian Paisley.
"[12] On 20 March 1975, Hugh Mooney, a member of the top secret Information Research Department run by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, wrote a memo to his superiors claiming that the former Head of Army Intelligence in Northern Ireland told him that Wallace "had been one of his best sources."
MI5 accused Wallace of leaking information to the press about William McGrath, the leader of the Loyalist paramilitary group Tara, who had been sexually abusing children at the Kincora Boys' Home.
The Sunday Correspondent report said: Mooney also admitted that Mr Wallace had told him about the above sex scandal at the Kincora boys home in Belfast - casting further doubt on Government claims that the security forces had no knowledge of the long-running rape and buggery of children in care.
'[14]On 21 February 2019, Wallace wrote to the then Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Karen Bradley MP, and provided her with documentary evidence that three of the official inquiries into the abuses at Kincora had deliberately misled Parliament.
Kincora Boys’ Home Part 2 - pages 150 and 151 paras 411 and 412) Wallace resigned from the Ministry of Defence in 1975 in order to avoid disciplinary action, ostensibly for privately briefing journalists with classified information.
Wallace always claimed that this action was consistent with his secret duties as a member of the Intelligence Services and that the real reasons for his dismissal were related to his refusal to continue working on the Clockwork Orange project in October 1974, and his exposure of a child abuse scandal at the Kincora Boys' Home.
[3] In his report, published on 20 January 2017 into the Kincora Boys Home sex scandal, Sir Anthony Hart was highly critical of the disciplinary procedure initiated by the MoD against Colin Wallace in 1975.
[17] Clive Ponting, a former senior official in the Ministry of Defence, told the Sunday Times that he had attended meetings with MI5 officers at the MOD to discuss how to prevent Wallace and Holroyd from making allegations about 'dirty tricks' in Northern Ireland.
"[20] After the Kincora story was initially exposed in the press, the Northern Ireland Secretary, James Prior, asked Sir George Terry, the Chief Constable of the Sussex Police, to carry out an investigation into the affair.
John Cushnahan, a spokesman for the non-sectarian Alliance Party of Northern Ireland, was indignant: he found one of the most disturbing aspects of Terry's conclusions was the complete dismissal of any possibility that military circles knew about the scandal.
[25] Despite these assurances given by Prior, Judge Hughes made it clear in his report: "The conduct of the police, or elected representatives, or clergymen, or military intelligence or any other persons who may have been in receipt of allegations, information or rumours relating to Kincora or any other home, was not under scrutiny in this Inquiry.
In July 2014, Exaro News reported that the late Lord Havers, as Attorney General in 1984, limited the terms of reference for the Inquiry to exclude politicians and other key categories of people from investigation.
[28] Later that year, Wallace was promoted to Senior Information Officer and, shortly afterwards, he wrote a lengthy memorandum to his superiors complaining that no action was being taken to stop the sexual abuse of children at the Kincora Home.
[3] Former BBC journalist, Martin Dillon, who has written several books on the Northern Ireland conflict, says: One of the ghastly aspects of what became known as 'The Kincora Scandal' was that McGrath and [John] McKeague (another Loyalist paramilitary paedophile), as Intelligence assets, were agents of the State.
Figures like John McKeague spring to mind, and there are other documented episodes like the Colin Wallace affair and the case of Brian Nelson to suggest strongly that British Intelligence had penetrated and was manipulating the loyalist paramilitary underground from the early 1970s onwards.
"[4] Two months later, Mr Carlile was quoted in the Sunday Today newspaper saying: I believe there are many people in high places and within the security services who feel ill-will towards Wallace for exposing their activities.
On 12 December 1989, the then Defence Secretary, Tom King, wrote a memo, classified 'Secret', to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher regarding an internal MoD investigation which examined the nature of Wallace's clandestine role in Psychological Operations in Northern Ireland.
[36] That investigation, initiated by Sir Michael Quinlan, the then PUS at the Ministry of Defence, found that Government Ministers had misled Parliament on a number of occasions when answering questions about Wallace and his role in what is referred to as 'the dirty war'.
Instead of publishing the findings of the MoD's own investigation, King suggested to Thatcher that the Government should create another, much more limited and less damaging, inquiry to explain away why Parliament had been seriously misled for a period of years.
In his memo, King said: Mr David Calcutt QC, the Master of Magdalene College Cambridge, has carried out a previous sensitive inquiry most satisfactorily and, if you agree, I would approach him to see if he would be willing to undertake this investigation.
[38]Later that same day, in the House of Commons, the Government made a very limited admission that Ministers had "inadvertently misled" Parliament over Wallace's role and confirmed that he had been involved in disinformation activities on behalf of the security forces and that he had been authorised to supply, on occasions, classified information to journalists.
As King had suggested to Thatcher in his memo of 12 December 1989, that account fell far short of any admission regarding the abuses of children at Kincora, 'Clockwork Orange', or other really contentious issues such as attempts to discredit leading politicians during the 1974 General Elections.
Papers which have now come to light indicate that, when the case was made to establish Mr. Wallace's post, it was proposed that its duties should include responsibilities for providing unattributable covert briefings to the press ; and it was stated that the incumbent would be required to make on-the-spot decisions on matters of national security during such interviews.
[39]The inquiry undertaken by Calcutt confirmed that Wallace had, indeed, been working for the intelligence services during the 1970s and that his enforced resignation from the Ministry of Defence had been made on the basis of a false job description designed to conceal his covert role in psychological warfare.
Though he has reasons enough to be bitter - the abrupt and unjust ending of a promising career in Northern Ireland, five years spent in prison on a conviction which has since been quashed - he displays no outward signs of resentment towards individuals or institutions.