Annie Machon (born 1968) is a former MI5 intelligence officer, a writer, and public speaker. In 1996, she resigned from MI5, with the intention to blow the whistle on a series of alleged crimes committed by the agency. Afterward, Machon went on the run around Europe for a month before returning, and was never charged with a crime. In July 1998, she and MI5 colleague David Shayler worked with several media outlets to expose the 1996 Gaddafi assassination plot. After the September 11 attacks, Machon became a vocal member of the 9/11 truth movement. Early life and MI5 Born in 1968, the daughter of a former pilot who became a Guernsey newspaper editor, Machon won a scholarship to a private school and then read classics at Girton College, Cambridge. After her graduation, she worked for a minor publisher. In 1990, Machon sat a Foreign Office examination to become a diplomat but was recruited by MI5, where she was posted to their counter-subversion department, officially known as 'F2'. One year after joining the service, she met David Shayler and they became a couple. Machon said she and Shayler were "trying to track down old communists, Trotskyists, and fascists, which to us seemed like a waste of time". During the 1992 general election, she and Shayler provided summaries of the files of "anybody who stood for parliament". They were both "horrified by the scale of the investigations" and "argued most vociferously that we shouldn't be doing this". Two years later, she and Shayler moved to 'T' Branch, investigating Irish terrorism. Resignation and whistleblowing In October 1996, Machon and Shayler resigned from the service with the intention to blow the whistle on a series of alleged crimes committed by the service, such as secret MI5 files held on the government ministers responsible for overseeing the intelligence services, illegal MI5 phone taps, lying to the government by MI5, IRA bombs that could have been prevented, the 1994 bombing of the Israeli embassy in London, when two innocent people were wrongfully convicted, and the attempted Secret Intelligence Service assassination of Colonel Gaddafi of Libya. Shayler took classified documents to The Mail on Sunday. The first story, published on 24 August 1997, concerned the allegation of widespread spying on so-called subversives including Peter Mandelson, whose telephone had been bugged for three years, and other government ministers. A court injunction prevented claims about what the security services