Wallace, why not kill him? It may be that Wallace's allegations about MI5 officers being involved in activities verging on the treasonable were widely known - so if any harm came to him the finger would point directly at them. I have tried repeatedly in the House to get an adjournment on the conviction and will continue to do so." In 1987, a former senior Ministry of Defence official, Clive Ponting, was quoted on Channel 4 News about high-level meetings he had taken part in with MI5 officers regarding Wallace's case. There was never any suspicion that Wallace was making these stories up or that it was totally unfounded and very easy to rubbish. It was very much a matter that, OK the story was being contained at the moment because he was in jail, but that in a few years' time he would be back out again and could be expected to start making the allegations again and then that would be a serious problem. After Dark In 1987 Wallace appeared on the first programme of the Channel 4 discussion series After Dark alongside Clive Ponting, T. E. Utley, Peter Hain and others. Government re-examination 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. 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'. Remarkably, 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. I am confident that we could rely on him to approach these very sensitive issues with complete discretion. It would be important to restrict his terms of reference to that handling of Mr Wallace’s CSAB appeal,