PA Media
MI5 told the court everyone from director general Ken McCallum downwards acknowledged the seriousness of the false evidence
MI5 lied “deliberately and repeatedly” as it tried to defend its handling of a neo-Nazi agent who abused women, the BBC has told a panel of High Court judges.
The corporation argued the threshold for contempt of court proceedings against MI5 and three individual officers had been met.
Sir James Eadie KC, acting for MI5, issued an “unreserved apology” on behalf of the Security Service but said the “errors that had been made had not been deliberate”.
The three judges – England and Wales’ most senior judge, Lady Chief Justice Baroness Sue Carr, President of the King’s Bench Division Dame Victoria Sharp and Mr Justice Chamberlain – reserved judgement on the case until a later date.
The case, which began in 2022 with an attempt to block the BBC from publishing a story about the neo-Nazi agent, has become a major test of how the courts view MI5 and the credibility of its evidence.
MI5 gave evidence to three courts, saying that it had never breached its core secrecy policy of neither confirming nor denying (NCND) that a man known only as X was a state agent.
But in February, the BBC was able to prove with notes and recordings of phone calls with MI5 that this was false.
An MI5 officer had confirmed the agent’s status as he tried to persuade me to drop an investigation into X, a violent neo-Nazi misogynist who used his Security Service role to coerce and terrify his former gi
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