Too Secret Too Long, page 75
After securing a second-class degree and passing the Civil Service examination he was formally recruited to MI5, subject to a satisfactory positive vetting, in late 1973 but was required to wait until he reached the minimum age of twenty-five for an officer. He filled in the time by staying on at Pembroke to initiate some research and began to drink heavily on occasions. He lived in West Germany for a year, teaching part time and learning the language. He lived there with a priest from Eastern Europe who might have influenced him. After being positively vetted, he started work with MI5 in the autumn of 1975, when Sir Michael Hanley was Director-General. After basic training at the headquarters in Curzon Street he spent some time in F Branch, studying files on British communism, and was then posted to Ulster for counter-I.R.A. activities. Recalled to London in 1980 he was given a rather boring post on the training side and was to claim that he had become progressively disenchanted with MI5 as a whole. He was due for re-vetting, after his first five years’ service, but has claimed that this was never completed as a result of some disagreement over the referees, whose names he had supplied.[4]
On 12 October 1982 Bettaney was fined after being arrested for being drunk and incapable in Oxford Street. According to newspaper reports he told the police, ‘You can’t arrest me I’m a spy’, or, more likely, ‘You can’t arrest me, I work for MI5.’ Bettaney was to claim that he had been to a joint MI5 and Foreign Office party where many of his colleagues had been drinking heavily. He was fined £10 and was to claim that he reported the incident to the MI5 management. I have never met a teetotal MI5 officer but have met several who were heavy drinkers, two of them having a drink problem, and if Bettaney had been attending an MI5 party the circumstances were probably regarded as extenuating. A few days later he was in court again and was fined for a railway fare offence but did not disclose this to MI5.[5]
The drunken episode did not prevent his planned transfer to the counter-espionage branch, Section K, where he could hardly have been more sensitively placed. The headquarters for his work, which was concerned with countering the activities of the K.G.B. and the G.R.U., were in an out-station in Gower Street.[6]
Bettaney was to say that the move fortified his determination to help the adversary because he could not work against the Russians but instead of resigning he continued to draw his salary and became a traitor and agent in place. He marked various documents which crossed his desk and photocopied them later or took notes which he typed out at home. He photographed everything at home so that he would be able to supply his information in cassettes, which could be more easily secreted in dead-letter boxes. On at least one occasion, when he was night-duty officer at the Gower Street office, he took a camera into the building, against the rules, knowing that staff were never subject to search, and photographed documents there. MI5 has been castigated for this, and possibly rightly so, but if Bettaney was already under suspicion then the camera might have been condoned so that he could be observed using it through a hidden T.V. camera of the type used in the Mitchell case.[7]
All this was going on only a few months after Mrs Thatcher had told the House of Commons that the Security Commission’s review following publication of Their Trade is Treachery had been ‘generally reassuring’ and that the threat from committed communists, such as Blunt and Philby, had receded. The danger of such complacent pronouncements was derisively demonstrated by Bettaney in a lecture he was required to give to recruits about the past penetrations of MI5 by Soviet agents. According to one recruit, he ended by assuring his audience, ‘You can be sure from the lessons we have learnt that MI5 is not penetrated now.’
After some research inside MI5, Bettaney chose a K.G.B. officer posing as a diplomat, calling himself Arkady Gouk, as the person to approach and on 13 April 1983 he delivered a letter to his residence in Holland Park at midnight, probably knowing that no MI5 watchers were on duty there. The contents of the letter constituted a serious offence because they gave details of MI5’s reasons for expelling three Soviet Intelligence officers in the previous month, including an account of how they had been detected. Gouk, no doubt, reported the letter to the Centre which reacted in the routine way concerning such a ‘walk-in’. Fearing that Bettaney was an MI5 provocation to secure further deportations or an attempt to plant a double agent, the Centre advised no action but to await further developments. Bettaney therefore tried again, depositing another letter at Holland Park at midnight on 12 June containing a copy of a top secret document giving an MI5 assessment of the K.G.B. and G.R.U. effort being mounted in Britain, and its purposes. It also contained an arrangement for communication by dead-letter boxes. Again, presumably on instructions from the Centre, there was no response. After a further attempt by letter on 10 July 1983, when Bettaney later said that he feared he might be under surveillance, he continued to collect information for a further attempt at contact in Vienna.[8]
After collecting more than fifty documents giving the greatest detail of MI5’s ‘order of battle’ and counter-espionage plans against both the K.G.B. and the G.R.U., Bettaney made plans to visit Vienna for a holiday, as Prime had done before him, and was to claim that he had discovered the names of K.G.B. agents to approach there. Presumably he told his superiors he intended to visit Vienna before he bought an air ticket to leave on 19 September, a date chosen because he was due for leave three days before. Had he managed to arrive there with his haul almost every officer in MI5 would have become ‘Sovbloc Red’, because there can be little doubt that the K.G.B. would have met him, in the safety of a foreign capital, and having realized that such material could never have been provided as ‘chickenfeed’ it would have accepted him and arranged for his regular control in London and wherever he might be posted. The possibility of another ‘mole’ in place for a further twenty-six years could hardly have been resisted.[9]
As will be seen, the evidence against Bettaney depended mainly on documents and copies of letters found in his home and his interpretation of them. Confessions by previous Soviet spies, like Fuchs, Philby and Blunt, have proved to be partly false and I regard Bettaney’s account of his projected trip to Vienna as suspect. It could be that some message concerning a meeting there had been delivered to him from the K.G.B. which had chosen Vienna. As a fervent and unrepentant pro-Soviet communist, which Bettaney proved to be, he would have been required to avoid incriminating the K.G.B. in any way. The fact that Gouk remained in Britain during the trial is proof enough that he never met Bettaney but some message could have been delivered by a ‘cut-out’ or even by some coded radio programme from Moscow.
Bettaney’s major treachery was foiled – so far as is known – by his arrest on 16 September but it remains a matter for wonder that if his objective was simply to pass on all the information that he could, he did not just deliver it through Gouk’s letter box. It may be that the K.G.B. insisted on a meeting or that Bettaney was determined to make his mark with his new masters by personal contact.
Whether the MI5 management considered the possibility of offering the traitor immunity is not known. It probably did not, realizing that the Attorney-General, Sir Michael Havers, could not have countenanced it on political grounds after the furore over the immunities granted to Blunt and his accomplices. Because of the inevitable damage to MI5’s reputation and to the morale of the Service, immunity would almost certainly have been considered in Hollis’s day.
Like most spies, Bettaney did not panic when arrested and was rather arrogant. In the interviews, which lasted four days, he disclosed what was hidden in his semi-detached home in Coulsdon, realizing that otherwise the police would tear it apart in their searches. With his assistance, copies of classified documents, and, it is believed, of the letters he had delivered to Gouk, were found in a cushion, an electric shaving box and a laundry cupboard.[10]
How he had been detected remains uncertain, though MI5 claims some credit for catching him early. His system of marking documents may have been spotted or he might have raised suspicion through his use of the photocopying machines over which there is stricter supervision, following Security Commission recommendations resulting from the Their Trade is Treachery inquiries. Once Bettaney became suspect he would have been under telephone and letter check and his house may have been entered and bugged. MI5 might have preferred to let the case run until Bettaney could be caught with a Soviet controller but it could not risk the trip to Vienna. It has been suggested that the K.G.B. ‘blew’ him to cause a problem for MI5 but it is unlikely that they would have done that before testing what he had to offer. The suggestion that a British spy inside the K.G.B. revealed him also seems unlikely, because to have prosecuted Bettaney without further evidence would have put that source at risk and such sources are too rare to be expendable. It is, of course, possible that the K.G.B. had an agent inside MI5 who was really a double, and that, when approached for a view about Bettaney, the agent informed the MI5 management.
When Bettaney appeared at the Old Bailey on 10 April he was the first MI5 officer to face prosecution and the first – so far as is known – to claim that he had become converted to communism while within the Service. After an opening statement by the Attorney-General the remainder of the trial, during which Bettaney appeared in the witness box, was held in closed session for two reasons. Firstly, highly secret evidence had to be discussed; to prevent leakages, the jury had been carefully vetted. Secondly, it had become clear that Bettaney’s purpose in pleading not guilty, after making a confession covering 170 pages, was not to repudiate it but to use the trial as a platform for pro-Soviet and anti-British propaganda, directed against MI5 particularly. He would have stressed his own motives in working for ‘peace’, while alleging that MI5 was part of the Tory machinery working for war and grossly infringing civil liberties. The reality of this danger was proved by a damaging statement, which Bettaney was said to have written, read out by his lawyers after his conviction.[11] He claimed that he had been given an unfair trial when a comparable traitor in the country he professed to love so dearly would probably have been given no trial but would have been shot. A letter written by Bettaney and sent to the Observer from prison provided further evidence of his determination to blacken the Government and MI5.[12]
Being found guilty of all ten charges of which he had been accused under the Official Secrets Act, he was sentenced to a total of twenty-three consecutive years’ imprisonment, the sentence being merited but also necessary to keep him out of contact with Soviet agents for a period long enough for the value of his knowledge to be eroded. Predictably, the Russians issued a lying statement denying that they had ever received anything from Bettaney.
A routine damage assessment satisfied the MI5 management that the traitor had been apprehended before he had done much more than limited damage – providing he had been telling the truth. The real injury he had inflicted was to the reputation of MI5 both at home and abroad and to morale within the Service.
Once again positive vetting had been shown to be of scant value and the re-vetting which might have exposed Bettaney’s political conversion and drinking habits had been negligently applied.
Journalistic inquiries, of a type which had not been made when Bettaney had been recruited by MI5, showed him to be an unstable loner who was an occasional heavy drinker and had the usual bleat about ‘society’s unfairness’, which seems to be an integral part of traitor’s make-up. He was, as the judge told him, ‘puerile, self-opinionated and dangerous’. So how could such a man have gained and sustained the confidence of his superiors?
The most disturbing aspect of the Bettaney case was the exposure of the fact that an officer of several years’ service can become disillusioned, convert to pro-Soviet communism and transfer his services to the adversary in spite of the massive prison sentences given to some traitors in the past. The previous traitors, with the possible exception of Blake, had been recruited before entering the secret services and when very young.[13] Further, if Bettaney is to be believed, his was a case of auto-conversion, without being worked on by other communists with an eye to his recruitment to espionage. Such a person could not be detected during a first positive vetting. But Bettaney may have been lying and may have had communist friends.
A month after Bettaney’s conviction, on 14 May, the K.G.B. officer who called himself Arkady Gouk and whom Bettaney had contacted by letter, was declared persona non grata and duly expelled. The Russians retaliated, however, by expelling the MI5 security officer at the British Embassy in Moscow. Whether or not the Foreign Office had been given further evidence against Gouk is not yet known.
The Security Commission, which at the time of writing is still investigating the case, will presumably consider the possibility that Bettaney was influenced or, perhaps, talent-spotted by somebody else in MI5. In that respect they may remind themselves of the statement by James Callaghan that in the late 1970s, after Bettaney had joined MI5, it was thought that some officers who had been recruited as Soviet agents might be in the process of passing out of the Service.[14] Such agents would have been required by the K.G.B. to nominate replacements. Whatever the cause and nature of Bettaney’s conversion it must now be accepted that no officer can, in future, be considered as entirely immune to ideological ensnarement. The Government, and Mrs Thatcher in particular, had pinned their hope on the belief that the ‘climate of treason’ which had induced young men to spy for the Soviet Union in the 1930s had evaporated and that such cases could be forgotten as part of a poisoned past. Bettaney has shown that half a century later the simplistic attractions still exist and the present is poisoned too.
Supporters of Hollis will protest that it is invidious to make comparisons between him and Bettaney, a convicted spy, but the comparisons present themselves. Both were unremarkable products of Oxford and had a strong religious factor in their backgrounds. Neither had shown any left-wing leanings at Oxford and Bettaney’s known behaviour disposes of the argument that if Hollis had been inclined to communism, while in China or later in MI5, there would have been discoverable evidence of it at Oxford, as there was with the Cambridge Ring. Both were remembered for drinking at Oxford and Bettaney might have qualified for Evelyn Waugh’s description of a ‘good bottle man’. Both became secretive and withdrawn and it seems that Bettaney found no difficulty in squaring his continuing religious belief with communist ideology. He has continued to attend Mass in prison while confirming to friends his faith in the Soviet system.
If Bettaney had managed to contact the K.G.B. in safety, and had then come under professional control, he might have continued in MI5, reaching the top management and retiring at sixty, after twenty-eight years of treachery, in the year 2010.
The Potential Value of Oversight
From what is known about the Bettaney case so far it would seem that precautions about document security, which MI5 is responsible for devising and for recommending to other secret departments, were not being put into effective use in the Service itself. This is reminiscent of how MI5 had failed to subject its own staff to positive vetting and suggests that the complacency concerning the possibility that MI5 might be penetrated had regenerated itself or had always existed. Would that have been the case if the MI5 management, which has remained a law unto itself, totally free from outside interference, had been subject to independent oversight and been constantly aware of that? The same question can be asked concerning Bettaney’s second positive vetting if the Security Commission confirms that it was never satisfactorily completed.
Clearly, lessons learned from previous cases in other departments had not been applied in MI5, or, at least, had not been applied effectively. In spite of the Blunt affair and the continuing suspicion about Hollis, the MI5 management may have continued to consider it unthinkable that any of its colleagues could be or might become Soviet spies. An oversight body might ensure that the possibility is regularly thought about in future.
The camera incident provoked Bettaney to reveal that MI5 officers are never subjected to random searches. The Security Commission may recommend that they should be, just as G.C.H.Q. staff are liable to them following the Prime case. Oversight could ensure that this extra safeguard, likely to be regarded as insulting by some officers, is applied. Further reasons for the need for oversight over MI5 may emerge from the Security Commission’s inquiry, but because of the secrecy surrounding the trial evidence and the circumstances of Bettaney’s detection they may not become available for public comment.
chapter sixty-three
The Outlook for Oversight
Mrs Thatcher’s use of the Security Commission to carry out the inquiry which she instigated as a result of the publication of Their Trade is Treachery necessitated consultation with the leader of the opposition, Michael Foot, both before announcing the inquiry and after receiving its report. The implications of this consultation were considered by her Cabinet advisers and it was seen to carry advantages. The confidentiality of the consultations meant that Foot would be extremely restricted concerning anything he would want to say in Parliament or in public about the matter. As I have pointed out, there was great potential embarrassment for Foot, if the Prime Minister was subjected to searching questions by backbenchers, because of the disclosures about his friend, Driberg. Parliament’s interest had been suppressed when the inquiry was instigated by the severe restriction of questions and again when the report was completed by Mrs Thatcher’s announcement about it in the middle of the Falklands conflict. It therefore appeared to the public and to the media that Foot, having been made privy to the secret aspects of the inquiry, fully agreed with Mrs Thatcher’s statements to Parliament, including her apparent assurance that Hollis had been cleared.
