Episode 161: The Northern Irish Satanic Panic (Part 1)
1970s Belfast. A psy-op specialist turned whistleblower. A grisly murder. Accusations of witchcraft. This episode is part one of Annie Kelly's two-parter on the Northern Irish Satanic Panic in the 70s, which evidence shows may have been stoked by British Army Intelligence. Includes interview portions with Professor Richard Jenkins, author of 'Black Magic and Bogeymen: Fear, Rumour and Popular Belief in the North of Ireland 1972-74'; and Annie Kelly's dad, who was a teenager in Belfast in the 70s.
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Welcome, listener, to Chapter 161 of the QAnon Anonymous podcast, the Northern Irish Satanic Panic episode.
As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rokitansky, Annie Kelly, Julian Fields and Travis View.
This week we're heading to Belfast, Northern Ireland in the 1970s, a period and place defined by violent sectarian struggle over national independence, often referred to as the Troubles.
And just when tensions between Ulster Loyalists and Irish Republicans were at their height, a satanic panic broke out among the population with rumors of secret rituals, animal sacrifice, and even murder.
But was British Army intelligence involved?
And if so, what were their political motives?
This episode is part one of a two-parter prepared by our UK correspondent Annie Kelly, whose father was a teenager in Belfast at the time, so I'm assuming he's gonna ghostwrite this, right?
This is all him.
Yeah, it's my dad's podcasting debut.
The second episode for premium listeners will delve into the life and trials of Colin Wallace, the British Army intelligence officer at the center of this, who turned whistleblower and claims to have been a key player in these psychological operations in Northern Ireland.
But before all that, For my main story this week, Cyber Ninjas releases the results of the Maricopa County audit.
Now, we finally got the results of this long-awaited audit from Cyber Ninjas, whose CEO Doug Logan was in touch with Ron Watkins.
So unsurprisingly, the QAnon community has been very interested in seeing how this all turns out.
Ron Watkins himself, back in June, hyped up the audit as supremely important.
And he declared that every other event, every other news item that you could see in any outlet was merely a distraction.
He said this on Telegram.
If the auditors in Arizona end up proving significant fraud occurred in Maricopa County, the entire perfect election narrative goes out the window.
Other states and counties will immediately start their own audits.
Won't be long before critical mass is achieved and all the dominoes come crashing down.
All eyes on the audits.
World War 3.
Distraction.
Alien invasion.
Distraction.
Fauci created COVID-19.
Distraction.
Gaza Strip land invasion.
Distraction.
Orbital energy weapon destroys RV camper in the middle of the city.
Distraction.
The last one really takes a turn.
Yeah, save the best for last.
Seriously.
So if there are orbital lasers that are just burning holes in the middle of cities, that's merely a way to distract from the supremely important Maricopa County election audit.
Yeah.
And what's crazy is it's like so much effort for so little reward because I'm assuming they're talking about that bomb around Christmastime that like the guy who blew himself up in the RV, right?
That news cycle lasted like a couple of days at most.
Yeah.
So it finally came time to announce the results after months of work and millions of dollars spent.
In testimony to the Arizona Senate, Doug Logan stated what his report found.
The original election results were basically right, and the audit actually added some votes for Biden and lost some for Trump.
If we take a look at the presidential race, Trump actually loses 261 votes from the official votes.
Biden gains 99 and Jorgensen loses 204 votes.
These are all, you know, very small numbers when we're talking about 2.1 million ballots.
These are very small discrepancies.
So we can say that the ballots that were provided to us to count in the Coliseum very accurately correlate with the official campus numbers.
The ones that were given to us.
Already setting up the next credibility dig that he's trying to do.
It's like, well, the ones they gave us added up just fine.
In fact, we were even more wrong than we thought.
So yeah, in a healthy world, that would mean that the matter is basically settled and the health of democracy would be just fine moving forward.
But in our world, the headline findings were more or less ignored by the general conspiracists and QAnon community, and they focused instead on the fact that the audit team claimed that they found two critical issues with the vote count and several smaller anomalies.
Now, I'm not going to talk about All the little anomalies, because that's going to be exhausting.
But I will highlight the two supposed critical issues.
Now, first, the audit says that approximately 23,000 mail-in ballots came from voters who voted from a prior address.
And second, they claim that approximately 10,000 potential voters voted in multiple counties.
So a deeper dive into those claims reveals that they're not quite as nefarious as they appear.
So starting with the claim that there are 23,000 votes cast in supposedly illegal mail-in ballots from the wrong address.
So that finding is based on Cyber Ninjas comparing voter rolls to a commercial public database of addresses, which is called Melissa.
The problem is that this Melissa database is incomplete and therefore isn't actually very useful for verifying voter addresses.
In fact, the Cyber Ninjas report even conceded that the database that they used to check the voter rolls was off by tens of thousands.
Oh great, so like the reference point is off?
Yes, the reference database that they're using is incomplete and isn't even really made to be used to check for this kind of thing.
I'm beginning to question the professionalism of these so-called cyber ninjas.
Here's what the report said.
86,391 individuals were found with no record in the database for either their name or anyone with the same last name at the address.
It is expected that a number of these individuals are in fact real people with a limited public record and commercial presence, but it is unclear how large that number is.
Besides that, there are many reasonable explanations for address changes, like if people are forwarding their mail to a vacation home or if they're back from college or they're temporary caretakers of sick people in the midst of this pandemic, they might use a different address than they usually use for voting.
So it's not really a huge cause for concern.
Cyber Ninja's other supposedly critical finding was that there were 10,000 potential double voters.
Now, they claimed to have found these double voters by comparing the roughly 2.1 million Maricopa County voters to voters in other counties.
Their analysis found more than 10,000 records with the same name in birthday.
The problem is that the analysis the audit team did didn't actually compare birthdays and months, just birth years.
And in a data set this big, there are statistically bound to be many, many people the same name and the same birth year, obviously.
I have some questions about what the purpose of this entire thing was, because if it was to sow, you know, kind of more discord and kind of doubt, it took a long time and produced very little.
This almost feels to me like if we could put their rage on snooze, like around February, and just keep it there until like September, then we'll feed them something incredibly complicated.
You know, if anything, this, yeah, this kind of serves, like, just to diffuse, I think, some of the very, kind of, direct and physical rage that, like, had people mobilizing.
You could just tell them, Maricopa, Maricopa, don't worry, it's coming, it's coming.
It's interesting to see what the effect of this was, because it can't possibly be what was intended.
Yeah, I know.
I remember thinking that even, yeah, way back at the start of the year, actually, that so much hope was being put on these kind of incredibly, like, lengthy and incredibly tedious sort of, like, audits and reassessments and bureaucracy.
I do remember having the same thought, actually, that, like, it was quite a good way to, I suppose, like, stop that kind of tipping point of violence and rage and what have you, because you're always just waiting for the next date, you know?
Well, I mean, the purpose, I think, in part was to sow doubt and sort of give a pretext to people who feel enraged and feel like the election is stolen, who feel like there's no way that Trump could have lost.
And we can see that in the way that, for example, Wendy Rogers, the Arizona senator who was one of the primary cheerleaders for the audit, Recently, right outside where the testimony to the Senate was happening, she just screamed, um, de-certify at the top of her lungs.
We call on each state to de-certify!
De-certify!
USA!
Of course, Trump himself commented on the audit.
At a rally in Georgia, the former president disparaged the press for accurately reporting what the findings were.
Yesterday, we also got the results of the Arizona audit, which were so disgracefully reported by those people right back there, and the headlines claiming that Biden won.
That Biden won are fake news and a very big lie.
You know, they like to, do you ever notice when they write about that, they would say, while the election results are a big lie, every reporter, it's like, it's just total misinformation.
While they're totally unfounded, everything's unfounded, big lie, not correct.
While Trump has no reason to say this, I mean, we got piles and piles of information, affidavits by the thousands and thousands.
It's a disgrace.
We won on the Arizona Forensic Audit yesterday at a level that you wouldn't believe.
I mean, he's gotta be joking at this point.
It's gotta be a bit that he's doing for his homies, you know what I mean?
Like, he goes and does a rally, it gets broadcast, and like five super rich guys in living rooms are like, oh man, oh dude, Donnie.
I guess the answer to all of the Maricopa County stuff is literally, it doesn't matter.
The conclusion is it doesn't matter, because Trump will still go up and say whatever he wants.
It literally doesn't matter.
It never mattered.
And I guess we knew that, but now it's clear because Trump just goes up and goes, well, we won, you know, there's thousands of, insert word, and it's outrageous!
And like, he would have said that whichever way.
It doesn't matter.
And so, yeah, so many people are calling to decertify the vote, including Ron Watkins on Telegram, which is not a thing.
There's not a legal way to decertify the vote in Arizona.
There's no legal mechanism.
You're just playing pretend now.
The real loser is anyone who paid attention.
If you fucking paid any attention, including us, writing about it, looking at it, wondering about this guy and these morons, We lose!
It's like, they go in, they do their bullshit fucking thing, and everybody, you know, the conservative media and the liberal media, like, fucking, you know, surround them, just being like, oh, you know, you got the conservative media being like, oh, this is the beginning of, this is the beginning of overturning the fraudulent election, and then the libs are like, look at these crazy idiots, like, none of this matters, it's fake, it's frauded, but like, we're gonna cover it anyways.
And then, at the end of all of it, the fucking cyber ninjas are like, actually, I don't know!
You couldn't have a better PSYOP if you actually designed it to make people alienated, confused, bored, and disconnected.
America, highly armed, incredibly dangerous on the international stage, not worth actually looking into or paying attention to.
The content is bad.
Well, I thought it was a great story, Travis.
Thanks for sharing.
Yeah, my pleasure.
Yeah, why do you even do what you do?
Unsubscribe!
I mean, you're right, because it's like, you know, following all of, like, the stories about supposed election fraud, you had to follow, like, SharpieGate and the Italian satellite theories, and like... And the bamboo, the bamboo fucking... The bamboo thread shit, like, all debunked in this report.
You know, all just like, like, like, tears of the rain, just gone.
Like, all the brainpower I wasted thinking about this bullshit that was just sort of like, no one cares about anymore.
Just sort of poofed away.
The Northern Irish Satanic Panic.
Greetings, my charming little listeners.
It's your UK correspondent, Annie Kelly here.
It's been a while since I've been on the podcast.
As you may have heard, we've been experiencing a fuel shortage over here, meaning we can only use electricity for strictly essential activities.
Luckily, the powerful Podcasters Lobby persuaded the government that our business counts for this, meaning I'm back on your airwaves.
I can hear the generator in the background.
Today I'm bringing you something of a mystery from a very dark chapter in my country's past, the Troubles in Northern Ireland, in the 1970s specifically.
This story has become something of an obsession for me over the last month, and like all good obsessions, it's led me to some very weird places without many satisfying answers.
Time for me to virally transmit my brain worms to every one of you.
The mystery centres around a man called Colin Wallace, a former British Army intelligence officer who would turn into what some would call a whistleblower and others a fabulist, about some of the psychological operations he was involved in during his career.
According to Wallace, this would involve inciting a satanic panic in the Northern Irish press, circulating smears in order to weaken the acting British governments of the time, And perhaps most chillingly of all, allowing known child abusers to continue working at a Belfast boy's home while they remained useful informants.
But before we get to Wallace, it's probably worth giving you the background on the context that all of this took place in.
This will necessarily be a pretty short and simple version of Iris' history, so if you're an expert in this matter, I advise you turn your volume down for about a minute, and don't bother me about it.
While our story begins in the early 1970s, when it comes to understanding the context of the Troubles, we need to move even further back in time, to the Irish War of Independence, which finished in 1921.
The ceasefire between the British and the Irish Republican Army led to a treaty which, among other things, partitioned the landmass of Ireland into the independent Irish Free State in the South, later the Republic, and the British Territory in the six counties of the North East.
This was done for a number of reasons, but among them was the number of Ulster Unionists, mostly Protestants, who lived in the North and had even fought alongside the British Army during the war to remain part of the United Kingdom.
Many Catholic Republicans living in Northern Ireland, however, always felt that they had essentially been sold out.
While the Troubles can often get misrepresented as a simple Catholic versus Protestant religious war, the lead-up to the violence had a significant class and civil rights dynamic too.
In the Republic, Catholics enjoyed a comfortable majority.
In the North, though they made up about 40% of the population by the late 60s, they were ghettoised, gerrymandered into voting districts that ensured they would never have equal voting rights, and suffered from discrimination in areas like employment, housing and banking.
Here, it may be worth revealing that this is all a subject quite close to my heart.
My dad is a Northern Irish Catholic, and most of my family live over there still.
Since I'm sure at least one person will accuse me of bias, I should stress that, as is the case for lots of ordinary people in Northern Ireland, they are pretty proudly non-sectarian.
My dad, in particular, has been a great help to me researching this episode.
He was so helpful, in fact, that I decided to interview him to talk a little more about what Northern Ireland felt like to a Catholic teenager in the 70s.
Well, you were aware of the fact that you were a second-class citizen and that the state that you lived in was designed to keep you in your place and everything was very much geared towards if you were a Catholic then your chances of getting a job were less, your chances of Getting a house to live in were less, your chances of making your way in the world were that much harder.
So you found that you tended to live in the places where your fellow Catholics lived.
Every person who grows up in Belfast has a mental map of the city, of the places that are safe and the places that are not so safe.
And of course that changed That existed before the Troubles started.
There were places that you wouldn't go into.
But with the onset of the Troubles then, that became much more obvious in some places that you were not going to be welcomed.
The tensions rose.
Classics were not welcome in more and more areas, and ditto Protestants couldn't go up the Falls Road with any degree of safety.
So that was very much added to by the troubles.
So you were always conscious of sticking to places that you know.
It's harrowing.
It's much like how the unvaccinated are forced to live now.
The troubles began when Northern Irish progressives began organising to pressure the government for equal civil rights for Catholics in the late 1960s.
Mainstream unionists thought was split on this issue, with some of the more liberal side being willing to gradually accommodate certain demands, and other more hardline Ulster loyalists seeing this as a slippery slope to minority rule in Northern Ireland and eventually reunification with the Republic.
The Prime Minister at the time, Terence O'Neill, was regarded by these elements as too liberal, and a number of loyalist paramilitary organisations were set up for self-defence against what was thought to be the encroaching threat of the Irish Republican Army, or IRA.
In truth, many of these paramilitaries, such as the notorious Ulster Volunteer Force, practised an indiscriminate campaign of terror against Catholic citizens, All of whom were considered suspect in their lack of loyalty to Queen and country.
The spark that lit the bonfire, in John Hume, a local nationalist politician's words, was a civil rights march on the 5th of October 1968.
A peaceful march by civil rights protesters, many of them students, was beaten with batons by the Royal Ulster Constabulary.
More than a hundred people were injured and the televised scenes of violence sparked two days of rioting in Derry.
The world is looking at the problems of this city after the events of the past four days.
At least 80 people have been treated in hospital since police broke up last Saturday's banned civil rights march.
The majority opinion here in Derry seems to be that the scenes would never have taken place had the parade been allowed to continue.
But after the bloodshed, the stonings and the impassioned speaking, the basic problems remain much the same.
The situation where, in the words of nationalist leader Mr Eddie McAteer, 30% of the people hold overlordship over the remaining 70%.
And while that position goes on, he says, a recurrence of the scenes of the past four days is always likely.
And what's going to happen now, nobody is prepared to forecast.
In 1969, the violence intensified.
After clashes between civil rights marches, the police, and loyalists in the largely Catholic Bogside neighbourhood of Derry, a loyalist organisation was allowed to march freely along the edge of the neighbourhood.
A fierce battle broke out between the Catholic locals on one side, and the police and their loyalist supporters on the other.
The police deployed tear gas, armoured vehicles and water cannons to attempt to storm the neighbourhood, but were kept at bay over three days of continuous fighting.
The event became known as the Battle of the Bogside.
In response, Republicans in Belfast held protests at RUC bases, and in some cases physically attacked police.
Loyalists, believing this to be the beginning of an insurgency to overthrow the Northern Irish government, responded by invading Catholic areas, attacking civilians and burning houses and businesses.
The Northern Irish journalist Martin Dillon described the impact.
British soldiers were on the streets of Belfast and Derry within days of the serious rioting in Derry and Belfast.
Their arrival was welcomed by Catholics, and they were treated much like the soldiers who liberated Paris.
However, their role was simply defined as peacekeeping, which necessitated there being a buffer between the two tribal factions.
While the army settled into this role, both communities made their own preparations to ensure that individual areas were safe from attack.
Barricades were erected in both Catholic and Protestant neighborhoods.
The barricades created defined areas which were run by those who controlled them.
The presence and maintenance of barricades in Catholic and Protestant areas is one of the most critical elements in the development of the war.
They created virtual self-government where the paramilitary organizations could act freely.
The provisional IRA used the cover of the barricades to shape a highly professional terrorist organization and the Ulster Defense Association and the UVF did likewise.
Those areas of confinement enabled criminal enterprises to be devised and the only law and order was that decreed or delivered by the paramilitaries.
My dad said much the same, although he viewed the turning point in the start of the Troubles as the change of British government in 1970.
Well, I think initially the British army was welcomed into the Catholic areas of Belfast and there was a general feeling that they were there to protect Catholics from the police and the beast specials who were involved in either in actively backing or allowing to happen various pogroms where people were burnt out of their homes and so on and attacked in the streets.
So people felt that the British Army was a good thing at the beginning and that was generally across the board.
But that changed in 1970 when there was a change of government in London from Labour to Tory and the Tory government then were persuaded by the Unionist government in Northern Ireland at the time No, actually the biggest threat was not people attacking Catholic areas, but the provisional IRA.
And they were to be eliminated.
And the best way of eliminating them was to take all their arms away.
basically instituted curfews in all the Catholic areas of Belfast and Derry to search for those arms and in a matter of weeks lost every single ounce of support that they had from the Catholic community because people's homes were being smashed up and raided and sold at bursting through.
There was no way that they could be considered to be neutral anymore.
However, I think it's worth remembering that not all Belfast was the same.
So, you know, it's something that I've always told people who didn't live there at the time, that you could live in Belfast and not be aware of what the army was up to because you weren't the targets.
So the idea that, if you like, that it was an occupying force, you know, akin to the Nazis in France or somewhere, is over the top.
That's not how they behaved generally.
In most places, people got along quite well with the army being there on the doorstep and checkpoints and so on.
Where, at the end of the day, most people's interactions with the army were quite polite and business-like, even if you didn't particularly feel that comfortable that they were there.
And that's true of, you know, riots and so on.
They were confined to certain parts of the city.
By 1973, some areas of Belfast and Derry were war zones.
467 people had been killed in the previous year alone.
The Provisional IRA, an offshoot of the official Marxist IRA, was now three years into its offensive campaign, aided with weapons and funding supplied by wealthy figures in the Irish-American diaspora, the then-chairman of the Libyan Arab Republic, Muammar Gaddafi, and, in at least one case, sympathisers in the Irish government.
Wow, what a motley crew that's propping us up.
Many of the Unionist paramilitaries by this point had squabbled, fractured, and were dangerous not only to Republicans and Catholics, but to each other.
The Northern Irish sociologist and Professor Emeritus at the University of Sheffield, Professor Richard P. Jenkins, who I interview later in this episode, described the atmosphere this way in his book, Black Magic and Bogeyman.
It was a bad time to live in Northern Ireland.
The pervasive presence of violence or its threat created an atmosphere of uncertainty at best and mortal dread at worst.
People stubbornly did their best to maintain ordinary lives, often with surprising success, but even within ethnically homogenous communities, the quiet, taken-for-granted mutual trust that underpins everyday life was under serious strain.
The fabric of civil society, where it was not in shreds, was badly frayed.
It was in August 1973 that the rumours began.
First printed example Jenkins finds appeared in the Sunday News, a broadsheet published in Belfast.
This is a beach on the Copeland Islands, only a few miles from the busy Ulster tourist town of Donadie.
But things have been happening on the main island, which are a million miles away from the carefree atmosphere of the happy holiday crowds.
Horrifying blood rituals have taken place on the island in recent weeks, and all the signs point to some sinister and macabre rites having been practiced there.
The article chronicled that four sheep had been found with their throats cut by the remains of a fire, with a large number of footprints suggesting that a group of people had been dancing by the flames.
The discovery apparently alerted enough panic in the local population that a night-long counter vigil had been planned by volunteers on the island to prevent the would-be Satanists from returning.
But the idea was aborted last minute, and it was decided to leave the matter in the hands of the police.
In fact, the police returned with a disappointing answer.
They announced in September, to very little publicity, that their investigations had produced no evidence of either black magic or drug parties on the island.
Recent suggestions of such activities seem to have been based on misconceptions.
A sheep was found on the island with its throat torn and its insides picked out.
In fact, the animal was a victim of the birds which thronged the island.
A sheep carrying fleece frequently finds it impossible to regain its legs if it falls onto its back.
Unless the shepherd is there to roll it over, it will die.
The sheep is seen as a food source by crows and gulls which attack the unprotected underparts and clean out the carcass.
Owners lose sheep in this way from time to time, and the police say there is nothing to suggest this particular sheep died in any other fashion.
During the last two months, regular police patrols have visited the Copelands by boat and helicopter without finding any evidence of black magic-style rituals.
This is just great to imagine a kind of Travis View of the era that has to go through sheep carcasses to debunk.
I was thinking exactly that as Travis was reading it out.
I was just like, oh, there's just a Northern Irish Travis View in the 70s who's visiting the Copeland Islands.
It's a subtle relationship that the birds have with the sheep.
Let me explain.
Yes, go ahead.
You see, nature is cruel and sometimes bloody, and sometimes animals eat other animals in the wild.
Now, as you might expect, this explanation was hardly as interesting to local press as sensationalist reports about hard-partying Satanists.
But there was another very tragic reason the media had moved on.
The very real murder of a 10-year-old boy.
Brian McDermott was reported missing on the 2nd of September 1973.
He was last seen walking at Ormo Park in the Belfast city centre, Not far from his home in the primarily Protestant Lower Woodstock Road area.
A week later, his body, burned and mutilated, was retrieved from the River Lagan.
His murderer was, and to this day remains, unidentified.
Immediately, two lines of public speculation began.
One was that the child was a victim of particularly brutal sectarian violence.
He was a Protestant and his family had a military background, with his brother being a currently serving soldier.
It was not unheard of for the Provisional IRA to claim family as legitimate targets, and McDermott's last known location, Ormo Park, was considered by some rebel territory.
This was certainly the view taken by some of the more fervently loyalist papers.
The other view, however, was that McDermott's killing was too savage for even the IRA to contemplate, that there must have been something ritualistic going on.
This was explicitly connected by some papers to the slain sheep on Copeland Islands, or just darkly alluded to with unsourced rumours of occult practices going on in the city.
It was certainly not helped when Assistant Chief Constable William Maharg announced that he was, quote, not in a position to deny or confirm speculation that the killing could have been the result of witchcraft.
Which of course gives everyone else license to speculate about it.
I'm not in the position, but the rest of you, go ahead.
As the book Black Magic and Bogeymen documents, printed gossip concerning Satanism and black magic only continued to grow from here.
On the 22nd of September, a long article was published in the Belfast Telegraph headed, Teenagers Dabbling in Black Magic.
There is widespread concern among clergymen throughout Belfast that teenagers looking for an escape from the Troubles might be dabbling in the occult.
Though there are few solid facts available to investigators, at least one inquiry has been carried out by priests in a city parish.
Priests at the Holy Cross Church, Ardoyne, have confirmed that they carried out their own inquiry after reports in their parish that teenagers dabbling in the occult claim to have contacted the soul of a man killed in the violence.
One of the priests said today that they found no evidence to support the rumors, but that they were still concerned that teenagers might be involved in such practices.
He added, "Children subject to the violence have no form of recreation and their escape
leads them to things such as the occult.
We are still hearing rumors, but it is difficult to pin them down."
These rumors do not seem to pertain to just Catholic areas, but to other parts of the
city as well.
A reliable source told a Belfast Telegraph reporter only this week that the authorities had been informed about a black mass which took place recently in a house off the Antrim Road.
So yeah, just baking.
I love how often they're just like, there is literally no evidence for this, but we're writing an article about it anyway.
Now, this will probably sound weird to you guys right now, but remember that anonymous, reliable source quoted at the end of that article, because it's important for where we go next.
It's time for us to finally turn to the story of a man called Colin Wallace.
Colin Wallace was born in June 1943 in Randallstown, a small, firmly Protestant town in Northern Ireland.
His father was an RAF officer who was injured in the last throes of World War II and died shortly afterwards when Colin was three.
Wallace was brought up Presbyterian and fiercely Loyalist.
He would later describe the three influences on his childhood as being his church, His country, meaning Britain, and the armed forces.
As his unlikely biographer, the left-wing investigative journalist Paul Foote would later write, Colin doesn't remember having contact with any Catholics during the whole of his childhood.
The enemy lurked like weasels in the wood, unseen and undiscovered, except perhaps to be shot at by a B Special Patrol.
He could see the hamlets where they lived from the high ground above Tomb Bridge and Moneyglass, but he never went near them.
Quote, I grew up to believe, above all else, in the importance of loyalty to the crown and service to my country, Colin recalls.
The attitude of complete, unswerving loyalty to the British sovereign state shaped the whole way I thought and behaved.
All of this is important to say because of what Colin Wallace alleges happened next.
After a stint with the notoriously anti-Republican Ulster Special Constabulary, the B Specials, he took a job as deputy to the public relations officer at Lisbon Barracks, headquarters of the British Army in Northern Ireland, in 1968.
At the time, although the civil rights movement was just beginning its agitations, the barracks were a relatively quiet place.
As public relations officer, Colin's duties consisted largely of giving local press jolly stories to report, athletic achievements of soldiers, voluntary activities for charities, assisting amateur theatre companies with military costumes.
Colin's boss, Tony Stoughton, would later comment.
It became clear at once that Colton was in love with the Army.
He kept proving himself excellent in many, many ways, and he was always going off for some entirely voluntary military activity of one kind or the other.
He was absolutely first class with the press from the beginning.
He didn't believe in deceiving people at all, and he won the journalists' respect and trust right from the outset.
We were extremely lucky to have found him.
The significance of public relations for the army would change almost overnight once troops were deployed in Northern Ireland in 1969.
And a staff of nearly all English officers, Colin, as a local, was an asset.
What's more, he already had a strong relationship with many of the local journalists as their questions switched tracks from charity dues and sporting events to bombings, riots and police shootings.
But it wasn't just the events around the Army that were changing, it was what Colin's job entailed too.
In 1970, on the orders of the Ministry of Defence, the Information Department of Northern Ireland was reorganised.
Now, side-by-side with Public Relations, was a new department called Information Liaison, later Information Policy.
It was a separate unit reporting directly to the intelligence services.
Peter Broderick, the former head of Army Information Services in Northern Ireland, described its role this way.
Under the title of Information Policy, its brief was to use psychological means to assist operations strategically and tactically.
It is a skill that requires sensitivity, political finesse, and a thorough knowledge of the situation.
Though Colin Wallace was on the staff of Public Relations, he was used by Information Policy as their outlet to the press.
He also had a knowledge of the Irish situation, which was totally unique in the headquarters.
As time progressed, he was not only the main briefer for the press, but also the advisor on Irish matters to the whole headquarters and, because of his personal talents, contributed much creative thought to the Information Policy Unit.
That creative thought, Broderick alludes to, might be better understood by the term misinformation, or in a less loaded term, selective truths, fed to the press for the purpose of disorienting and undermining insurgents and their supporters.
If all of this sounds a bit vague and confusing, let's use some examples given by Colin himself.
He claims a major operation was spreading rumours of unstable and dangerous chemicals being used in IRA bombs that posed a threat to anyone coming into contact with them.
It was known in the army that there had been incidents of IRA bombs exploding early, killing their handlers before they were planted.
The real reason for this was their ultra-sensitive timing devices.
Instead, Colin Wallace selectively leaked to the press that their premature explosions were because the IRA were using impure chlorate from their bombs that had been imported from France.
Paul Foot writes, Selective journalists told of this unstable source of IRA bombs hurried into print.
The Guardian's report on the 23rd August 1972 was followed the next day by one in the Daily Telegraph, which promoted the story to a page-two lead under the headline, quote, Faulty Bomb Chemicals Used by the IRA Gangs.
Six weeks later, the story ran in The Observer, headlined, IRA Using French Chemicals.
Colin was amused to find himself described in the second paragraph as, quote, an army chemical expert.
The completely bogus story, he is certain, had its effect.
The IRA were more careful about the use of chlorate of soda, especially if it was imported from France.
And Colin heard in the ensuing weeks of their continuing difficulties in finding a substitute elsewhere.
Another huge problem for the army at the time was Irish-American sympathisers who funnelled money to the IRA, and more than once put them in contact with American arms dealers.
Stories were planted that the IRA were being trained by American peaceniks and communists who had learned how to fight in Vietnam and become disillusioned with Western democratic values.
The idea was to associate the IRA, who most Americans had never encountered and particularly in the diaspora had a tendency to romanticise, with a closer-to-home, more personal enemy.
As the war drew on, information policy's emphasis began to switch from Americans to their old foe, the USSR.
In December 1972, the news of the world had an exclusive on what it called the Emerald Isle Red Plot.
This was a remarkable story about three young intellectuals, Trotskyists apparently, who in spite of the unpopularity which most Trotskyists encountered in Brezhnev's Russia, were lucky enough to have been smuggled into Ireland in a Russian submarine.
The story was bunkum from start to finish, but its purpose?
To demonstrate that the IRA were a sinister bunch of communists with close links to the Russians, and the KGB was triumphantly achieved.
Nice.
Russiagate!
Now, you can probably figure out where this goes next, but remember all those Northern Irish newspaper stories about Satanism and devil worship that were so light on tangible detail?
Many of those, Colin said, were seeded by him in his duties to undermine insurgent groups, both Republican and Loyalist.
Professor Richard Jenkins, the author of Black Magic and Bogeymen, explained to me why in an interview.
Colin Wallace, who's an officer in the Territorial Army but seconded to Army Intelligence, and a local man, by the way, from North Antrim, a Protestant, he has suggested and presented some evidence to demonstrate that Some element in the formation of the rumours about Satanism and black magic emerged out of black propaganda activities of the army, setting up fake ritual sites, putting stories in the newspapers and so on.
The question, of course, is why they did that.
And it was part of a several-pronged approach which they had developed, encouraged by the work of Frank Kitson, who was a senior British Army officer who had developed counterinsurgency techniques, first of all in Kenya, and then wrote about them more generally.
And they developed, in the Northern Irish version of this, they developed a several-pronged attack in which they were trying to, if you like, tar paramilitary organisations with one of several brushes.
There was involvement in massage parlours, there was involvement in drug running and selling, and there was satanism, black magic.
And in particular, the black magic theme was supposed to, A, Demonstrate the threat to respectable society of the kind of things which had been let loose on the streets by the Troubles.
But it was also, apparently, an attempt to discourage local people, particularly children, from going outdoors at night and getting in the way.
And more generally, I can't put it in a better way than this, it was designed to put the fear of God into people.
This was no small undertaking.
Colin read several books about the history of witchcraft and demonology, and even went as far as to copy related symbols and sigils in his notes.
This was necessary to construct black magic ritual sites that looked as authentic as possible, which could then be stumbled across and credulously reported on.
It's amazing.
It's like becoming an occultist to catch the occultists.
It's actually in the book that Jenkins wrote, it does actually say to him, you know, you were actually like just desecrating graveyards and things with like occult symbols.
Did you not ever worry that like maybe you were messing with stuff you shouldn't?
Right.
Accidentally.
This sounds like the start of a horror movie.
Folks, I'm just going to become a Satanist to put the fear of God into people.
In one quite funny story, they even went as far as to bring reporters alongside them in helicopters to accidentally happen across a supposed illegal training ground, complete with black mass ritual sites.
Jenkins reports.
This escapade, complete with helicoptered in UDR troops and journalists, was reported in the Belfast Telegraph on the 31st of October 1973 under the front page banner headline, Illegal Training Ground Found.
The date, Halloween, may be extra support for Wallace's argument that the real object of the exercise was meant to be black magic rather than weaponry.
I can remember being told about this outing at the time by one of the journalists involved.
He thought it was rather an odd affair, as indeed it was, even if only because journalists were not often transported by helicopter.
But he mentioned nothing about upside-down crosses or anything even vaguely similar.
The most likely explanation for this apparent oversight is that the reporters saw what their initial briefing had led them to expect, evidence of a paramilitary training ground.
Information policy had, perhaps, been too subtle.
Wow, so you didn't make the pentagram visible enough from the helicopters.
You fucking idiot!
You go to all of this trouble of creating this fake training ground with all of this spooky stuff that you want the journalists to be like, what?
And report on and just none of them see it.
I'm surrounded by incompetence!
And they're just flying the helicopter in circles, just coming back, like, what else do you see?
As a conspiracy-critical podcast, it's only right that we stay sceptical.
The only explicit primary source we have that the Army was doing this is Colin Wallace himself, who would not long after this leave the Army rather than be subject to disciplinary proceedings for sharing classified materials with journalists.
What's worse, in 1981, he would be convicted of manslaughter of the fiancée of the woman he was having an affair with at the time.
A conviction that was later overturned as unsafe, and which we'll go into more in this week's second premium episode.
But it seems fair to say that there are many who remain sceptical of Colin Wallace's claims, describing him as a fantasist and attention seeker.
Nonetheless, it's impossible to research Colin Wallace without finding a lot of switched-on journalists, academics and politicians who believe him, and a good deal of corroborating evidence if not a direct smoking gun.
Plenty of journalists in Northern Ireland at the time have confirmed that he did indeed brief them.
A former senior ministry of defence official, Clive Ponting, confirmed in an interview with Channel 4 News that after Wallace left the army he was the subject of several high-level MI5 meetings, and that there was, quote, Richard Jenkins, who has interviewed Wallace himself, said much the same to me.
There is a considerable amount of uncertainty about the whys, the whens and the wheres of what the army did.
Partly because not all of it worked as well as it hoped it would, and partly because the Ardoyne in 1972 seems to be an outlier, a year before the actual panic or the rumours started in the autumn of 73.
But I think there's sufficient evidence to suggest to me that, A, when Conor Mollis said they did this, he's telling the truth, and, B, that it will have had some effect, some impact, some feed-in to the rumour mill and the panic.
However, the really important thing about this, perhaps, is that Conor Mollis, when I spoke to him, he kind of spoke to me as a God-fearing Northern Irish Protestant.
He said, I knew what would get people going.
So I just scattered a few things around and let them develop it, let ordinary people on the ground develop it.
And I think he was more or less successful in that.
But he was also keen to remind me that the rumours of black magic and Satan worship were not solely the result of Wallace's efforts.
The one thing that's very important to remember about the Northern Irish Witchcraft Panic, particularly between 73 and 74, is that it was emergent and dependent upon one terrible episode.
The murder of Brian McDermott, age 9, in Belfast.
Now, enough people have speculated in public venues about who actually killed Brian McDermott that I don't think I would be breaking any rules by saying a strong suspicion is that it was a member of his immediate family.
However, he did get murdered.
He was dismembered.
He was partly burned.
And in the context of that, that murder put more fuel on the fire of the witchcraft panic, Satanism panic, than anything could have done.
And it's an interesting historical conjecture to ask yourself, well, without that poor wee boy's death, what would have happened?
It's a good question to which I don't have an answer, but I do pretty much think things would have been different in one way or another.
Yes.
It's a matter of great persistent regret to me that I would never have written that book, of which I'm very proud, without that wee man's death.
For all of Colin Wallace's handy local knowledge and obvious creative talent, the murder of Brian McDermott and how it would interact with and fuel local witchcraft rumours seemed to be an unintended consequence.
In a copy of a memo he sent around Northern Irish Army Intelligence in 1974, it's clear that Wallace is disturbed by the continued speculation that the boy's murder had a ritualistic element, and the fact it could be disrupting the police investigation.
Our own investigations of instances of alleged witchcraft or other satanic rites in the province would tend to dismiss the RUC's theory that Brian McDermott's murder could be part of these activities.
I think from a press point of view, we would be very foolish to give any credence to such claims without the most convincing evidence.
However much the British Army may have added fuel to the fire of the Northern Irish Satanic Panic, it's also clear that it was never fully in their control.
Perhaps this is because they didn't quite understand the forces they were dealing with.
Forces that weren't supernatural, but all too human.
For many in Northern Ireland at the time, no matter what political side of the line you stood on, there were some killings that felt too gruesome to comprehend.
These included things like the assassinations of women, which flew in the face of even many hardened militia men's sense of decency, but also killings that bore the marks of torture and mutilation before death.
Murders that were not just a case of taking someone out, but deliberately inflicting agony and humiliation.
As the author of Ulster's Uncertain Defenders, Sarah Nelson, put it,
It seems plausible to me that, despite the fear those rumours of black magic and satanists lurking
around the corner induced, there may have been something oddly comforting about them as well.
In a conflict as tribal as The Troubles, it maybe had some kind of soothing effect to speculate or imagine that the worst horrors were nothing to do with your friends and neighbours, but a shadowy, godless force so distant to you, it might as well be another country.
I'd even reason that this is backed up by the fact that despite all the headlines about witchcraft, this panic was never a witch hunt.
Nobody was ever accused of dabbling in the dark arts beyond some murmurs about anonymous wayward youths.
Since my dad was in fact a youth in the area at the time, I thought I'd ask him what he remembered.
He didn't recall much of the rumours about witchcraft, but he did remember a general, not unjustified, lack of trust with official narratives from both the police and the army.
I think what I did know, and because my involvement in politics at the time was sort of peripheral in the sense of I was a supporter of the Northern Ireland Labour Party, but also I'd been involved in the People's Democracy Movement, which was a sort of left-wing, student-based movement, which was quite adept at identifying British Army propaganda and exposing it.
It was quite useful to kind of be aware of that and to know that quite a lot of what was being said by the army about incidents wasn't necessarily true and you had a very sceptical approach to it.
I'd always been aware that he was part of the British Army.
His job was gathering intelligence, and just like their counterparts all over the world, these people were involved in all kinds of shenanigans.
misinformation and deliberate attempts to subvert the truth in order to fulfil what
they thought was their operational requirements. So yes, I can well imagine that they were
involved in some way in some of the more speculative nonsense that came out about some killings
that happened in Northern Ireland. You've got to remember of course that because the
sort of law as we would understand it had broken down that people were getting away
with things which in normal circumstances they simply wouldn't.
And I think that made it easier for people to spread rumours and all sorts of kind of tales, told tales, some of them, I've turned out to be true.
You could say also that in a place where everyone knows that the truth is at a premium, that propaganda is being spewed out by official sources, if you like, say the police or the army, as well as by the politicians and by the paramilitaries.
then it's, if people aren't convinced about what is true and what isn't,
then it's much easier to ferment stories which are simply untrue.
Pretty base dad there.
When I began researching this episode, I thought that would be where I left it.
Although most people who know a bit about most conspiracy theories roll their eyes when they hear the term PSYOP, it's worth remembering that psychological operations do exist, particularly when it comes to active, immediate insurgent groups, and can have unintended and strange consequences.
But the more I dug into the story, and Colin Wallace in particular, the more I realised there was more to tell.
As I've mentioned, Colin Wallace left the Ministry of Defence in 1975.
He claims that this was for two reasons.
One, he had refused to continue participating in a secret intelligence services project to smear key players in the current Labour government in hopes of destabilising them to the point of collapse.
The second allegation was even more shocking.
The MI5 had prior knowledge of child abuse going on in a Belfast boy's home and had not intervened due to the perpetrator's utility as informants.
He further claims that his knowledge of these two incidents was what led to his arrest and conviction for manslaughter in 1980 as an attempt to discredit him.
It all sounded like the stuff of a particularly lurid spy novel, and I wanted to find out more.
We'll talk about that in our premium episode this week, The Trial of Colin Wallace.
Wow, I cannot wait.
Holy shit.
A two-parter ending with a trial?
I mean, Netflix couldn't have done it better.
Good shit.
Amazing.
You know, what strikes me yet again is the way that conspiracists always, always, always exploit mystery corpses.
I mean, you could take this all the way back to William of Norwich and blood libel.
It's like whenever there's a mysterious death, Whether it's William Morgan or Seth Rich, just as whenever there's a mysterious death and they could advance some sort of weird paranoia, there are conspiracists who are willing to do it.
Yeah, you know that was where I live, right?
William of Norwich.
That's my city's claim to fame.
We literally invented blood libel.
A millennia of blood libel started here.
Thank you for listening to another episode of the QAnon Anonymous podcast.
You can go to patreon.com slash QAnon Anonymous and subscribe there for five bucks a month, which will get you a whole second episode every week, including this week's trial of Colin Wallace premium, plus access to our entire archive of premium episodes.
And if you're already a subscriber, thank you.
You help us stay advertising free and editorially independent.
Annie, tell us about your other podcast called The Vaccine Podcast.
Yeah, if you want to listen to me talk about the history of the development of the smallpox vaccine and the first anti-vax movement, you can find me at Vaccine The Human Story.
We're on all podcast platforms and we also are on YouTube with some lovely visuals as well.
Go check it out, folks!
And for everything else, we have a website, QAnonAnonymous.com.
Listener, until next week, may the deep dish bless you and keep you.
It's not a conspiracy, it's fact.
And now, today's Auto-Tune.
The newspapers, particularly the local newspapers, the East Antrim Times, the Balamina Chronicle or whatever,
those newspapers did play an active role in disseminating the rumours.
They weren't the be all and the end all, but they were very, very important.
Among the ways in which they were important was the recycling of stories.
A story that was in one paper one week would appear with very little alteration in another paper the next week.
And in fact, you can track the progress round Northern Ireland of some of these stories from one paper to another.
So there was a kind of uncritical news cycle in which a lack of attention to the veracity of stories and a greater attention to whether or not they were printable and quote-unquote newsworthy.
That's nothing new.
Newspapers have been uncritically printing and recycling stories.
And I think stories is a much better word than news.
For a very long time, I don't think it was It wasn't made up in the 70s in Northern Ireland.
It was something that newspapers have done for a very long time.
If you look at the Daily Mail, and I choose that example purely at random, the lack of responsibility to the truth in the pages of the Daily Mail is something that goes back at least to the 1930s.
So we're not doing anything strange or startling here and as I said some people believed this, some people believed the news, some people didn't.
I think we do know that the reception of stories in the media is in part a A product of people's preconceptions and predilections and their existing view of the world.
So, I think that's important to say as well.
That, you know, you can, in newspaper terms, and you'll forgive me, but you can throw so much shit at the wall and it will only stick in certain places.
