Shayler gets six months' jail for his 'blinkered arrogance'

The former MI5 operative David Shayler was sentenced yesterday to six months in prison for selling secret service documents to a newspaper.

Mr Justice Moses said the renegade agent had shown "blinkered arrogance" in breaching the Official Secrets Act. But the judge, who could have imposed a six-year jail term, said the defendant could be free after serving half his sentence. He said he had taken into account the three and a half months Shayler had spent in a French jail in 1998 during unsuccessful attempts to extradite him to Britain.

Shayler, 36, looked relieved as the sentence was passed. The judge said he was prepared to accept that Shayler was motivated by a desire to expose what he thought was wrong, not by money. But he added: "Your own actions demonstrate a lack of any real insight into what you were doing or any intelligent foresight into its consequences. It is, contrary to your own belief, that blinkered arrogance which has led you here today."

The former spy copied 28 files on seven topics, including several on Libyan links with the IRA and Soviet funding of the Communist Party of Great Britain, before leaving MI5 in October 1996. The documents, some marked "Top Secret", were said to be "chock-a-block" with agents' names and the prosecution claimed 50 had their lives placed at risk. Shayler gave the documents to to The Mail on Sunday, which paid him £40,000.

The judge told Shayler he should be grateful to his girlfriend, Annie Machon, for removing an impression that he made the disclosures to get into journalism. Ms Machon, a former MI5 employee who left the Security Service at the same time as Shayler in October 1996 and fled to France with him a year later, had told the court: "He feels passionately about a number of fundamental issues." She denied Shayler was a self-publicist, saying he believed his comments on the security services would lead to government action.

But the judge said Shayler had taken it on himself to decide what he thought was in the public interest, and did not seek any legal advice.

Shayler's mother, Anne, said she was very upset at the prison sentence but relieved it was not longer. She added: "Given the fact that he has already done three months in jail in France, I am sure he will cope very well in prison."