David Shayler - After MI5

After MI5

Shayler stated that MI6 had been involved in a failed assassination attack on Libyan leader Muammar al-Gaddafi in February 1996 without the permission of the then foreign secretary Sir Malcolm Rifkind. The plot involved paying the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group with supporters in London and links to Al-Qaeda £100,000 to carry out the attack. The group was paid to plant a bomb underneath Gaddafi's motorcade. The attack happened in March 1996 in the coastal city of Sirte. The bomb was planted under the wrong car and failed to kill Gaddafi but did result in the deaths of several innocent civilians. In November 1999 he sent a dossier of detailed evidence of this including the names of those involved to then home secretary Jack Straw who stated that he was "looking into the matter" as well as Parliament's Intelligence and Security Committee and the police. In 2005, the LIFG was banned as a terrorist group in Britain.

He also stated that the intelligence services were deliberately planting stories in newspapers and the mainstream media by feeding willing journalists with misinformation, such as a November 1996 article in the Sunday Telegraph by Con Coughlin linking Colonel Gaddafi's son with a currency counterfeiting operation citing the source as a British banking official when in reality the source was MI6. This was later confirmed when Gaddafi's son served the paper with a libel writ which later admitted the true source of the information.

According to Shayler the 1994 bombing of the Israeli embassy in London was known to the intelligence services before it happened, and could have been prevented.

The British government later placed an injunction on the republication of Shayler's claims although this was later lifted on 2 November 1997 allowing the paper to print his claims of how the bombing of the Israeli Embassy in London in 1994 could have been prevented if the service had acted on prior knowledge it had obtained. On 19 June 1998 he told The Spectator magazine that the security service had information that could have prevented the 1993 Bishopsgate bombing. After revealing information to the Mail on Sunday in August 1997 Shayler fled the day prior to publication, first to Utrecht in the Netherlands and then later to France with his girlfriend and former colleague Annie Machon and was arrested by French police on 1 August 1998 with an extradition warrant on the request of the British government and then held in La Santé Prison for four months under the prisoner number 269151F. On 18 November 1998 the French courts decided that the British government's extradition request was politically motivated and therefore not grounds for extradition.

In 2000, Shayler appeared on Have I Got News For You via satellite. He was the subject of many jokes on the show, including when team captain Paul Merton received huge applause for switching off David Shayler's TV screen.