A former journalist with the Guardian newspaper said yesterday he believed the British army's expert on counter-insurgency warfare, Brig Frank Kitson, used him as a mouthpiece in Northern Ireland. Mr Simon Winchester described to the inquiry how he saw a soldier fire in his direction on Bloody Sunday, and he said his view that the army fired needlessly on the day remained unchanged.
"From what I saw they were firing essentially at unarmed civilians," he said.
Mr Winchester, described as a freelance writer and journalist now based in New York, reiterated much of the evidence he had given to the Widgery Inquiry in 1972 when he was working in Northern Ireland for the Guardian.
He said he had good contacts with the army prior to Bloody Sunday, but afterwards, because of his articles "and particularly because I had said that the army may have fired needlessly into the crowd and had referred to Sharpeville, I became unpopular with the army and was essentially frozen out".
However, earlier during his 2-1/2 years in the North he had got to know Gen Robert Ford, Commander of Land Forces in Northern Ireland, reasonably well and was close to Brig Frank Kitson, author of Low Intensity Operations - Subversion, Insurgency and Peacekeeping.
In reply to questions from Mr Arthur Harvey QC, for a number of families of Bloody Sunday victims, he said he found Brig Kitson fascinating, "not least because of his own interest in post-colonial military policy which is something I became interested in because of my time in Northern Ireland".
He added: "He and I became close friends - relatively close friends - such that I was invited to his home many times and I remember playing cards with his daughter, so it was a fairly close relationship."
Mr Winchester was asked by Mr Richard Harvey, for the family of Mr Jim Wray, whether he was ever given the sense from the army "that you were viewed as an asset or as a person through whom they could feed stories to the public in some way".
He replied that, in hindsight, because it was known he had contacts in the Provisional IRA and also in militant loyalist organisations, he was surprised that the army "did seem so ready with information about the IRA".
Immediately after an incident involving casualties, he would ring up Brig Kitson "and he would tell me without demur and give me chapter and verse about who the person was (who was shot) and . . . the rank and importance of the person to the IRA and therefore to the army . . ."
He would then often be interviewed on the BBC and "seemingly blessed with profound knowledge about the inner workings of the IRA, would parrot, it has to be said, what Frank Kitson told me".
Mr Winchester said that therefore "I know in retrospect that I was a useful mouthpiece which . . . surprised me somewhat because of my relatively intimate knowledge of the IRA from my contacts with them".
That had remained true for most of his time in Northern Ireland - the British army had been very eager and keen to tell him, and later Robert Fisk of the Times, a great deal about what they knew about the people they had shot.
After Bloody Sunday, at some levels of the army, there was a greater degree of suspicion directed towards him and towards the Guardian as a newspaper - "I mean, the Guardian was not regarded as a friend of the Ministry of Defence".
He said he had been surprised and concerned when he was excluded by the MoD from the press conference at the ministry on the day the Widgery Report was due to be released. He was told that only the defence correspondents were invited. Asked if he could think of any explanation for this, he said: "My feeling was that defence correspondents, like a lot of specialist correspondents, are part of . . . enjoy a degree of camaraderie with the department they are covering.
"Therefore (they) would not be quite as hostile in their questioning as someone who came from, in this particular case, the area that was being reported about. I felt I was being deliberately excluded."
Mr Winchester was asked to elaborate on an account in his book, In Holy Terror, written a year to 18 months after Bloody Sunday, of a lunch meeting he had with Martin Meehan "and several other high-ranking Provisionals" in Dundalk before Christmas 1971.
At this meeting they had told him they were going to intensify the fighting against the British. They were being supplied with weapons by "the general insurrectionary movement around the world" and now had the materials to wage war.
In reply to Mr Edwin Glasgow QC, for a number of soldiers, he agreed there had been a frightening moment during that meeting when, he believed, Mr Sean Mac Stiofain (who died last week) had made a phone call to the hotel alleging that he (Mr Winchester) was effectively a military spy. The witness said that "Sean Mac Stiofain and I did not see eye to eye".
Earlier, Mr Winchester repeated evidence he gave in 1972 of hearing a single shot fired at about 4.05 p.m. on Bloody Sunday which seemed to come from behind him as he stood in William Street - "from where, had they been on duty on that day, the IRA could have expected to have positioned its snipers".
He later heard what sounded like a machine-gun returning the army's fire. His colleague from the Times had been fairly certain that this noise was made by a helicopter. The witness said it was difficult to be absolutely precise - he thought it sounded rather more like a machine-gun of a type that he knew the Provos had at the time, "so it sounded vaguely consistent, but I could not swear to it".
The inquiry continues today.