DAVID SHAYLER TO DEBATE HIS MI5 CAREER

I had a lot of sympathy for Shayler when he fled abroad, and used to post a lot of stuff to the web-site he set up at that time. A lot of this stuff was rubbish but some of what I did was ok, and helped. It was pre-seattle,late 90's and I used that site and others to try and get information across about how the left should re-organise and take on the state.

I was getting harassment at the time, so it was very difficult and stressful for me. I had to go abroad too, but for different reasons.

Anyway, the view put forward at the time was that Shayler was on a disinformation mission, sanctioned by MI5. I am not certain but I think Larry O'Hara had this view , or one a bit more nuanced, because at the time I read his magazine. And by the way, larry, a few months ago, some asked me if I knew you, read your magazine a few months agao, when i was chatting with them in the Institute of Autinomy - the woman who said she was a film maker, had her own production company. I knew then that you were seated at the next table. There were three blokes at that table. But I didn't know which one was you. Because I dont know what you look like.

Larry, do you remember the email I sent you in 1999. The reply you sent me resulted in me lossing my job. I was workink as a software consultant at CACI coventry earing a pretty good salary. They were obviously monitoring my emails. Because the following day, after I you sent me that mail, I was sent home. I was then forced to leave. The firm i got a job with originally was a local small family owned softeware house. CACI, bought them out as I took up a job with them for the second time, I had worked for them as a contractor several years bedore, that's Anadata, as they were known beofre they were bought out.

CACI, are US based. I discovered later that they supply poeple to the US military. In fact they supplied intoerogators for the army and CIA in Iraq and all sorts of other of these "Contractors". In effect they are a private wing of the american military. They also bougght up all sorts of personal information data bases i the UK, and had sole rights to things like electoral roles and personal information in British residents. They were (and maybe still are) second only yo expedia in proceesing and selling personal information/data in the UK.


Anyway I have gone off on a tanngent. returning to David Shayler. Others put foreward the view too, that shayler was on a disinformation ruse, such as Madeline Abas. A human rights lawyer and SWP sympathiser, from Leeds. When I met her in 1999, in her offices in Leeds, she said: "Shayler, and his book, is just disinformation." She said this, whether she belived was another matter, becuas eshe started telling me about one of her clients with me having asked about him. That client was Stephen Tomlinson. Madeline Abbas pissed me around when I really needed help.

Come on get real, Shayler and Tomlinson have dome MI5 and MI6 a lot of damage to their credibility, although it didn't stop new labour giving them hundreds of millions more. Funning world really.

What is important is that a lot of the money they have been given has not gone into terrorism - the war on terror - but to investigate and infiltrate and destablise the anti-capitalism globalisation movement. They aslo spent a lot of time and effort distabalising Auther Scargils Slocialist Labour Party, of which I was a pretty active member. Difficult getting hard eveidence on this but its pretty certain they did. This happened when Shayler was in MI%,I think, so maybe he can conform or deny this. Maybe he wasn't not party to that section of MI5 at the time or joined it just afterwards.

Madeline Abas - the Irwin Mitchel based solicitor in Leeds - was was for a short time Stephen Tomlinson's solicitor, the MI6 agent who was sacked, and then went off one, and nearly took MI6 to the cleaners, by exposing all sorts of shit. At the time I saw her Tomlinson was in hiding abroad, being persued by MI6, and most of Europes intelligence agents, because he was revealing secrets about MI6 operations. He was getting revenge for how MI6 treated him - they sacked him for not being a clone and basically for being too clever and having a mind of his own.

She also told me that she was the only person who knew where Tomlinson was. I think thois was a liew, becausae Tomlinson is too smart, he wouldn't even reveal to his solicitor where he was hiding. I know that for sure. For obvvious reasons. So why was Abas bullshiting to me? Tell me someone.

The point is there was a lot of shit fying around then and I put out lots of propaganda/disinformation to help these guys, amongst serious political analysis, tactical and otther strategic perspectives. I agued for setting up independent media before seatle, for having counter summits at G8 protests and other stuff. It was a very interesting time.

I spent a lot of time putting out all sorts of crap, but amongst it there was some good stuff that was taken up.

But what I want to know is: If I come down for this discusion, will I be harassed by memers of the Wombles, or some other Anarchist out to wind me up? What's the point of all the play acting or it there a disease of the mind runing through their movement, a hangover from an other era.

I dont get it, because the state and its forces are the enemy. Why turn in on yourself, and give members of your own community a really hard time. Whats the point.

I think there needs to be workshops by Dissent on how to behave. This is, I think, because some anarchists - the ones who have been around a while - have a kind of social autism in respect of me. I dont really understand it. I have had so much shit you wouldn't credit it. If I were an animal and not human the animal rights movement would be persuing you lot for cruelty really.

So can someone film the Debate? Because I cannot risk being there to get more harassment.
Can it be streammed onto the internet live.

You can bet MI5 and special branch agent provocateurs will be there to disrupt the meeting and give Shayler a hard time, for sure, so sort out the security.

Ed

Shayler started his 'work' at university in the 1980s when he 'joined' the miners support group.

You maybe right - but I'd put my money on you being wrong "Long Memory", for what it's worth. Compicated conspiracy theories are often complete bollocks. Usually its the simply plot that's the true story, and I dont think there is much dowbt in this case. But I am open to be proves wrong. And that will be done only by proof and evidence.

So show us your evidence "Lon Memory."

David Shayler was born in 1965 that puts him in his teens when the Miners strike was almost at at end. Are you serious "Long Memory" or is this a tall story.

I am sure Shayler just joined Mi5 in the end because he thought it would be interesting and give him a reasonable living. How wrong this turned out for him, and Steven Thomlinson the MI6 bloke who MI^ totally pissed off by sacking him for being too intelligent, or was it "Motivated by challenge" as well - ironic really.


If its true where's your evidence; could you back up your assertion please.

It's well known Shayler was around the SWP at University. Perhaps he was just having a laugh, or more likely he was interested in what was going on, as any young student with a mind might. He was a trainee journalist after graduating then applied to MI5, in what was a new type of recruitment campaign - to get recruits from red-brickand the newer universities, because they were still full of Oxbridge half-wits and the ex-military. He answered an advert in the daily newspapers. It's all on the record and not contestable. He was in MI5 in the mid to late 90's, only for a few years. He work on trade Union and Left wing groups I think, with a little counter-terrorism.

Anyway, here's some background, to refress your memory.

The Observer Profile

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Spy v Spy - David Shayler

He's the secret agent who blew the whistle on his spymasters' incompetence - and now he faces being sued by MI5

Martin Bright
Sunday February 27, 2000
The Observer

On the afternoon of Friday 29 August 1997 a team from Special Branch acting on instructions from MI5 smashed into a flat in St George's Drive, Pimlico, owned by David Shayler and his girlfriend, Annie Machon, both former intelligence officers. In the three-day search that followed, the flat was ransacked for documents to incriminate Shayler, who had gone public in a Sunday newspaper a week earlier with his claims about MI5 incompetence. In the search, the police took away a handful of innocent papers. They also stripped the couple's sheets, which they confiscated along with a pair of Machon's knickers. But they overlooked a report Machon had written for a management consultancy, into personnel problems at MI5.
Shayler has always claimed that he was merely attempting to highlight serious flaws in the way the intelligence services operate in Britain. The operation to find evidence in his own case seemed to prove his point. In the years since, however, the focus has shifted away from the substance of Shayler's claims and on to the reliability of the man himself. Until this month, even the interest of the media was drying up. In the year that followed his release, Shayler slipped out of the public eye, exiled in Paris, eking out a living as a journalist using his increasingly out-of-date knowledge of intelligence. He still lives with Annie, who acts as spokeswoman for 'Public Friend No 1', spending much of her time travelling between France and Britain, something which Shayler is unable to do. They live in a flat in Paris's comfortable 11th arrondisement , close to the Bastille. It is unlikely they are still surviving on the money received for the original Mail on Sunday article, around £39,000, but Shayler has continued to work as a journalist, notably for Mohamed al-Fayed's Punch magazine, in which he writes a monthly column. Much of the life of the couple centres around the cafés and restaurants near the Gare du Nord, where they meet lawyers and journalists for sometimes several lunch appointments a week.

Both are French speakers - Shayler's degree was in French - but are nevertheless isolated and desperate to return to Britain. Machon, a Cambridge classics graduate, has remained a somewhat enigmatic figure: blonde, slim and extremely careful with her words, she could not be more different to her partner. Throughout the past three years, she has studiously avoided talking about her own experiences in intelligence. Apart from Tony Benn, no MP has publicly defended Shayler. This weekend one prominent Labour backbencher said that Shayler was his own worst enemy: 'He has become a media personality, always willing to appear on TV and get quoted in the papers and that does enormous damage to his credibility.'

From the outset, Shayler has had an image problem. When he walked free from La Santé prison in France in November 1998 he claimed a victory for free speech and justice. He had successfully demonstrated to the satisfaction of the French courts that he was a whistleblower, not a traitor. All attempts by the British government to extradite him had been deemed politically motivated. Shayler felt he had been vindicated. As he left the prison his delight was captured by French photographer Jacques Brinon. This single photograph, which appeared on the front pages all over the world, probably did more for Her Majesty's Government's case than any previous smears about his unreliability and incompetence. It showed Shayler with his hands behind his head, eyes half closed and mouth wide, revealing the full extent of his double chin. With a Middlesbrough FC away strip visible under his jacket, he looked for all the world like a fat, stupid football yob. When the papers arrived on the desk of MI5 chief Stephen Lander the image staring out at him must have confirmed his beliefs that this was a man who was not 'one of us', who should never have been recruited in the first place.

Shayler has been described variously as a ' born rebel', a 'blabbermouth' and a 'troublemaker'. The Foreign Secretary himself said that his talk of the involvement of British agents in a plot to kill Colonel Gadaffi of Libya was 'pure fantasy'. For his enemies , the combination of Shayler's appearance, his quickfire patter and an obsession with football, make him a distinctly dodgy geezer. But people who have met Shayler describe him as charming and amenable, and capable of inspiring a surprising amount of loyalty among friends and associates. The events of the past two weeks increasingly suggest that Shayler has been telling the truth from the beginning. An MI6 document posted on the Internet appeared to confirm there had been of a plot to kill the Libyan leader in early 1996 as Shayler had said. The suspicion that Shayler has highlighted serious wrongdoing by the intelligence services is given added credibility by the lengths to which the British state is prepared to go to silence him, including this weekend's news that the Government is taking out a civil action against him.

David Shayler joined MI5 as part of a recruitment drive in the early Nineties to attract a new breed of non-public school, non-Oxbridge graduates who would shake up the moribund service. With the end of the Cold War, it was felt that MI5 had to shift the emphasis of its operations towards the very real threat from the IRA, Islamic fundamentalists and hostile regimes in the Middle East. A cryptic advert appeared in national newspapers in 1991 showing three empty chairs, with the catchline 'Godot Isn't Coming'. It read: 'If you have already achieved plenty, but now find yourself marking time, stuck in a rut and unable to progress, then it's time to act.' Shayler, who attended a Buckinghamshire grammar school and Dundee University, seemed the perfect candidate - bright, able, with experience of the real world, but without any traditional preconceptions of how an intelligence officer should behave. He even had a background in left-wing politics, campaigning for the miners during the 1984 strike, and as a student editor publishing extracts from Spycatcher , the memoirs of former MI5 agent Peter Wright, but even this did not exclude him from what he believed was a reformed service.

According to Shayler, he and other officers of his generation soon became disillusioned with intelligence work. Most of it seemed to involve shuffling papers and getting official clearance for the endless MI5 phone taps on ordinary individuals. He became appalled by the level of surveillance of tiny extreme left groups, while the intelligence service was unable to stop terrorist acts by the IRA such as the bombings at Bishopsgate and Canary Wharf. Most seriously he was convinced that MI5 and MI6 agents often acted outside the rule of law, knowing they were unlikely to be punished. After raising his concerns with senior officers he, like many of his colleagues, left around the time the Labour government came to power in 1997 pledging to make the intelligence services more accountable.

Tony Benn believes Shayler has raised important issues about the way MI5 and MI6 operate without any real control from Ministers or Parliament: 'If what he was saying was irrelevant and inaccurate they could easily dismiss it. What he is doing must be extremely unsettling to the secret services.' Benn, a Cabinet Minister in the Wilson government, added: 'What Shayler has demonstrated is that you can challenge the muddles and bungles of the intelligence services as long as you don't challenge their right to do it.'

Others are less convinced. One former Tory Cabinet Minister told The Observer that he had it on good authority that Shayler 'got into the service by mistake', that there were distinct indications that Shayler had entered MI5 'with the specific object of finding embarrassing things and publishing them'. Shayler describes himself as 'almost autistic' in his memory for detail about the history of Middlesbrough football club, and admits to having a chip on his shoulder about the public school and Oxbridge types who dominated MI5 and MI6 while he was there. But opponents should not underestimate his chippiness and his memory for detail. It has served him very well so far.


David Shayler


Born: Middlesbrough, 24 December 1965

Girlfriend: Annie Machon

Studied: Grammar school, Buckinghamshire; Dundee University

Jobs: Sunday Times trainee (sacked); newspaper proprietor (launched student newspaper, the Paper) ; spy (resigned)

Lived: Paris, 11th arrondisement on the run from British Police

....

Won French court case against his extradidtion.

Decided to turn himself in to the british police, pperhaps because it was dificult making
a living and living in Paris away from his friends, family and football team.

returned to london, arrested and convicted of breaking Official Secrets act

Did his porridge in Bellmarsh prison.

Since leaving prison has campaigned on human rights issues.

Campaigned against the iraqi - seen on anti-war march earlier this year.

Put himself forward as a candidate in Tony Blairs consituencey

Ed. C

edward campbell is writing crap - larry has never been to the institute of autonomy and knows nothing about the allegations made by campbell re losing his job. evidence please?

the shayler v o'hara debate was rivetting with shayler challenged on lots of important issues, chiefly domestic surveillance of anti-state groups and the running of mi5 agents inside the swp. there is likely to be an mp3 internet version of the debate for those unable/unwilling to attend - anyone know if this is possible on indymedia and how one goes about it?