British Agent Detained In France

At Britain's request, France has detained a British intelligence officer, after the officer claimed to have evidence that his former bosses in Britain's MI5 security service were incompetent and breaking laws.

David Shayler, a former member of Britain's security service, was arrested in Paris over the weekend and is now awaiting extradition to Britain. He made claims to the British media that MI5 did everything from plan assassinations to spy on its own government officials, CBS News Correspondent Kimberly Dozier reports. Shayler called the intelligence agency incompetent.

Among the most damaging remarks, the former officer claimed Monday that three IRA bombings could have been prevented if his former secret service bosses had been more efficient.

In an interview published in the Daily Telegraph, Shayler alleged that three different Irish Republican Army (IRA) bombings on the British mainland could have been avoided.

He claimed to have evidence that over-adherence to bureaucratic procedure by his former bosses in the MI5 security service had cost at least one life—a man killed when an IRA bomb went off in London's financial city district in 1993.

"It is not the fault of MI5. It's the fault of the intelligence community as a whole. This is a problem of having different organizations. They can blame each other," he said in the interview, which was conducted last month.

The Daily Telegraph said it could not give further details of Shayler's claims because of a British government injunction.

Shayler faces charges under Britain's Official Secrets Act. Britain has 40 days to prepare an extradition request. Before being arrested Shayler threatened to publish his own whistleblower Web site on the Internet.

Shayler's lawyer, John Wadham, said he would fight the extradition order and doubted if a British court would ever convict his client.

"His only fault was to disclose malpractice and abuse within MI5. There was never any intention to damage national security," Wadham said.

Shayler has also claimed that MI5 was tipped off in advance of a bomb attack in 1994 on the Israeli embassy in London in which 13 people were wounded, but that it did nothing.