ARCHIVE: Former MI5 agent Annie Machon on UK's 'diabolical responsibility' for ISIS

FIRST AIRED: 06/10/2014. Annie Machon, a former MI5 agent, talks to Going Underground host Afshin Rattansi about Britain’s role in the rise of ISIS and other extremist groups. She says that even senior spies, including the head of MI5, advised Tony Blair that the 2003 war would cause problems in the future and create new generations of terrorists. By going in again, we could be creating even more problems for ourselves. She explains that there is a history of UK intelligence agencies funding people they think will assist in fighting other threats and then those groups come back and bite them. She says that the reason strikes took place could be the interests of other groups, with large corporations lobbying politicians to act in their interests. She warns that there are revolving doors between MI6 and people from those same big companies, so for example even if MI5 advise against going into Syria, MI6 could be advising the opposite. She also advocates a return to human intelligence, rather than taking the American approach – humans will give precise information, whereas the UK has increasingly gone towards dragnet surveillance, which is looking for a needle in a haystack. And she warns that countries like Saudi Arabia are playing both sides of the game, with individuals on one side funding groups like ISIS, whilst the government continues to say it is supporting its Western allies.

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