INFLICTION did not seek and was not given any additional payment for the information. Officer A said that he could not think of any credible reason for INFLICTION to lie to him when providing the information about Bloody Sunday. Since INFLICTION could not appear at the Inquiry for security reasons, his credibility had to be assessed indirectly, by interviewing his handlers. INFLICTION’s position within the IRA was kept deliberately vague for obvious reasons, though the Inquiry did disclose that INFLICTION “knew Martin McGuinness quite well and was friendly with him”.

Fascinatingly, the “conversation between the two of them was taped ”, meaning that somewhere in the British archives there is a recording of INFLICTION speaking. INFLICTION said McGuinness had “talked to me a few times about it” and felt guilty about it. In November 1984, INFLICTION told Security Service “Officer B” that “one thing that bothers McGuinness is, er, the Bloody Sunday thing, that he fired the first shot, which no one knows”. Martin MCGUINNESS had admitted to INFLICTION that he had personally fired the shot (from a Thompson machine gun on “single shot”) from the Rossvill flats in Bogside that had precipitated the “Bloody Sunday” episode. By that time, McGuinness had been the lead negotiator for “Sinn Fein”-the IRA’s political front-in concluding the Belfast Agreement (or “Good Friday Agreement”) in April 1998, which was put to a referendum in Northern Ireland the next month, and under its terms he had become a leading member of the Northern Irish government.Īn intelligence summary after an April 1984 meeting between INFLICTION and “Officer A” of MI5 reads: McGuiness, eventually, testified to the Inquiry in 2002. McGuinness was one of the most senior IRA officials in Londonderry in January 1972 and by 1976, aged just 26, he was a member of the Provision IRA (PIRA) executive committee, the Army Council. The INFLICTION evidence was recorded in 1984 and relates to the activities of Martin McGuinness on “Bloody Sunday”. And second, because of the contents of the evidence that INFLICTION contributed. Many witnesses were able to testify to the Inquiry with their anonymity preserved in various ways this was considered too risky with INFLICTION. First, because of the elaborate security procedures the Inquiry adopted to keep the agent’s identity hidden. INFLICTION attracted so much media and other attention for two reasons. As mentioned in recent post, one British agent within the IRA, codenamed INFLICTION, became a slightly sensational part of the Saville Inquiry, the investigation into the “Bloody Sunday” episode in Londonderry on 30 January 1972 that concluded in 2010.

Bloody Sunday by Douglas Murray