Key Facts

• A senior MI5 officer, known as Officer 2, repeatedly told "lies" that formed the foundation of MI5's false account to the three courts, and he "put forward a wholly fictitious account" in which he denied ever telling the BBC journalist that Agent X was an MI5 agent.
• Officer 2, who worked as MI5's director communications, was "untruthful" throughout and always remembered his "comprehensive departures from NCND" with the BBC journalist, but initially was vague with Officer 3 about whether he had departed from NCND.
• A separate senior MI5 officer, Officer 3, "misled" his own colleagues and did not act in good faith, bearing considerable responsibility for the continuation of MI5's falsehood because he "misrepresented" what Officer 2 had said to him and was not "truthful" about warnings he received from colleagues.
• An MI5 deputy director, Witness A, who gave his organization's witness statements to the courts "overstated" matters during a key internal meeting, and a note of his comments was "misleading," contributing to MI5's continued reliance on the false account.
• The report concludes that there were "serious and systemic failures in MI5's conduct" throughout the case, including various people in MI5 knowing that NCND had been departed from, but the falsehood was nevertheless "allowed to take hold and persist," with opportunities to correct the position being missed.