BLOODY SUNDAY INQUIRY: The former British secret agent, David Shayler, has asserted that his serving MI5 colleagues will be inclined to lie to investigators "as they know that telling the truth might embarrass or expose their bosses, from whom they have no legal protection or trade union representation".
In a signed statement to the Bloody Sunday Tribunal which has been seen by The Irish Times, he criticises MI5 management and claims that officers who speak out would find that "any career prospects would be severely curtailed" while officers could not simply leave MI5 and work for a similar organisation "as could any whistle-blower from, say, BP, who could find a job with Shell or Esso".
Mr Shayler, whose statement has not yet been sworn into the evidence, comments that if Mr Martin McGuinness really did tell the alleged MI5 agent/informer known as Infliction that he fired the first shot on Bloody Sunday, then the release of this information "has already blown his \ identity, unless Martin McGuinness told lots of people the same thing".
In the latter case, he adds, Mr McGuinness (who was the acknowledged second-in-command of the Derry Provisional IRA in 1972) would have a clear list of individuals he suspected of being agents of the security services.
Mr Shayler was arrested under the Official Secrets Act last year when he returned to Britain from France, and he faces charges in relation to MI5 documents allegedly passed to a British newspaper which carried revelations that the agency kept files on British Labour politicians and certain show business personalities.
A statement supplied to the inquiry by an MI5 agent identified as Officer L, asserts that he was the author of a "top secret" document on Provisional IRA links with Libya between 1971 and 1996, which is allegedly one of the documents taken by Mr Shayler without authority and passed to the Mail on Sunday newspaper.
Officer L says he wrote this 135-page document in March 1996, when he was the desk officer responsible "for the investigation of PIRA's links with the state sponsors of terrorism".
In his own statement, Mr Shayler outlines how he joined MI5 in 1991 and in 1992 joined the Irish section, T2, which dealt with threats from Ireland "on the mainland". He left that section in 1994 to work on the Libyan desk until he resigned in October 1996.
He states that when he encountered references to Infliction, he spoke to another officer in the section which ran the agent, and this person used the phrase, "This guy's a bullshitter".
He was told that Infliction had at one time been totally believed and was regarded as reliable, but in a later case information given by another source had contradicted Infliction and had been found to be accurate.
Mr Shayler says he never saw Infliction's report about Martin McGuinness.
"When I saw the report of it in the Guardian, I spoke about it to my girlfriend Annie Machon, who was also an officer of the Security Service in T5 section," he states. She had also replied that Infliction was a "bullshitter".