The Bloody Sunday Inquiry: A former MI5 agent, who was jailed last year for disclosing secret information to a British national newspaper, said yesterday that members of the Secret Service agency believed that an IRA informer who made serious allegations against Sinn Féin's Mr Martin McGuinness was "a bullshitter".
The informer, known as Infliction, claimed that Mr McGuinness was a member of the IRA's army council over 20 years ago and that he had fired the first shot on Bloody Sunday.
However, Mr David Shayler, who served six weeks of a six-months' jail sentence last November when he was convicted of three charges of unlawfully disclosing 28 classified MI5 documents to a British newspaper, yesterday told the Bloody Sunday inquiry that officers within the Security Service regarded Infliction as "a bullshitter". Mr Shayler told the inquiry that he first came across Infliction in 1993 when he was dealing with another "target".
He then spoke to a member of MI5's T8 section, which ran the agent.
"I cannot recall the name of the person I spoke to in T8 but in telling me about this source, he used the phrase 'this guy's a bullshitter'," he said.
The witness said that other colleagues also tended to describe Infliction in the same terms when he discussed the matter with them in a limited way.
He also felt there was no need to protect Infliction's identity if his allegation about Mr McGuinness was true.
"If Martin McGuinness genuinely did tell Infliction that he fired the first shot, he would presumably remember to whom he had told a piece of information as controversial as that. He would therefore know who Infliction was if he had only told one person," he told the inquiry's three judges.
Mr Shayler, who never saw any MI5 file relating to Infliction, joined the agency in 1991. Six years later, he left the Service and gave damning details of MI5 operations to the Mail on Sunday newspaper. He then moved to France and was arrested when he returned to Britain in 2000 and was jailed two years later.
Meanwhile a member of the Security Service, known as Officer B, told the inquiry that when he debriefed Infliction in 1984, Infliction, who had been a senior member of the IRA, told him that Mr McGuinness was a member of the IRA's army council.
"Infliction told me the current membership of the PAC (Provisionals' Army Council), which included Mr McGuinness", he said.
In a statement submitted to the inquiry last year, Mr McGuinness admitted that on Bloody Sunday, he was the IRA's second-in-command in Derry.
The inquiry continues.