Eliza Manningham-Buller had joined the Security Service in 1974 after being recruited at a party. The work was already in her DNA: her father, a former attorney general, had prosecuted earlier spies, including George Blake, the MI6 double agent; during the Second World War, her mother trained carrier pigeons that were dropped into occupied France and used by the Resistance to send messages back to Britain. Picked out as utterly reliable and discreet, she had been indoctrinated into the Gordievsky case early on and brought into the tiny LAMPAD team, analyzing his output from Denmark and liaising with MI6. By 1983, she was in MI5’s personnel department and ideally placed to search for the spy.
Manningham-Buller would become Director General of MI5 in 2002, rising to the pinnacle of a competitive world dominated by men. Her “jolly hockey sticks” manner was deceptive: she was direct, self-confident, and extremely clever. Despite the sexism and prejudice inside MI5, she was intensely loyal to the organization she called “my lot,” and greatly shocked by the discovery of yet another traitor inside British intelligence. “It was one of the nastiest times in my career, particularly in the early days when you didn’t know who it was, because you would get in the lift and look round and wonder.” To avoid arousing suspicion among their colleagues, the Nadgers frequently met, after hours, in the Inner Temple flat belonging to Manningham-Buller’s mother. One of the team was heavily pregnant. Her unborn child was nicknamed “Little Nadger.”
For an intelligence service, there is no process more painful and debilitating than an internal hunt for an unidentified traitor. The damage Philby did to MI6’s self-confidence was far greater and more enduring than anything he inflicted by spying for the KGB. A mole does not just foment mistrust. Like a heretic, he undermines the coherence of faith itself.
Manningham-Buller and her fellow Nadgers called up the personnel files, and began whittling down the list of potential traitors. The MI5 document outlining the case for expelling the three Soviet spies had been distributed in the Foreign Office, the Home Office, and 10 Downing Street. The chart listing all the Soviet intelligence officers had been drawn up by K4, MI5’s Soviet counterintelligence branch, and fifty copies sent to various departments of the secret world. The mole hunters began by identifying everyone who might have had access to both documents.
The investigation was running at full tilt in late June when Oleg Gordievsky and his family flew back to Moscow. He was hardly in a holiday mood, but turning down his annual leave would have raised immediate suspicions. The risk was huge. Koba was still at large; at any moment, he might discover Gordievsky’s activities and expose him to Guk. If that happened while he was in Moscow, Gordievsky might well not be coming back. The MI6 station in Moscow was placed on alert in case he needed to make contact or fly the escape signal.
Meanwhile, the Nadgers were closing in on a man whose presence inside British intelligence seemed, in retrospect, like an unfunny joke.
Michael John Bettaney was a loner, unhappy and unstable. At Oxford University he goose-stepped around his college quad and played Hitler’s speeches loudly on a gramophone. He wore tweeds and brogues, and smoked a pipe. “He dressed like a bank manager and dreamt of being a storm trooper,” said one fellow undergraduate. He once set fire to himself after a party, and briefly grew a toothbrush mustache, which girls did not find attractive. He changed his northern accent to an upper-class drawl. A later investigation described him as “a man with a considerable sense of inferiority and insecurity.” Raging insecurity is not an ideal quality in an officer of the Security Service, yet he was tapped up as a recruit while still at Oxford, and joined MI5 in 1975.
After a formal induction course, he was plunged into the deep end, combating terrorism in Northern Ireland. Bettaney himself questioned whether, as a Catholic, he was suitable for the job. His doubts were overruled. This was grim work, complex and extremely dangerous: running agents inside the IRA, tapping telephones, talking to unpleasant people in very unfriendly pubs, in the knowledge that a wrong move could mean a bullet in the head in a Belfast backstreet. Bettaney was traumatized by the work, and not very good at it. His father died in 1977, and his mother a year later. Despite the double bereavement, Bettaney’s tour of duty in Belfast was extended. Looking back over his file, Eliza Manningham-Buller was appalled: “We made Bettaney what he became. He never recovered from Northern Ireland.” He was a man with an accent, wardrobe, and image that was not his own, without family, friends, love, or settled convictions, looking for a cause and doing a job to which he was utterly unsuited. “He was not authentic,” said Manningham-Buller. The peculiar stress and secrecy of intelligence work may have pushed him ever further from reality. Bettaney would probably have lived a contented and uneventful life if only he had chosen some other line of work.
Back in London, he spent two years in the training department before being transferred, in December 1982, to K4, the MI5 section analyzing and combating Soviet espionage in the UK, including the running of access agents. He lived alone, with a large plastic figurine of the Madonna, a number of Russian icons, a drawer of Nazi war medals, and an extensive collection of pornography. Withdrawn and isolated, he repeatedly tried to persuade the female staff at MI5 to sleep with him, without success. He was occasionally overheard at parties drunkenly shouting: “I’m working for the wrong side” and “Come and see me in my dacha when I retire.” Six months before the first delivery to Guk, Bettaney had been found sitting on a sidewalk in London’s West End, too inebriated to stand. When taken into custody for being drunk in a public place, he shouted at police: “You can’t arrest me, I’m a spy.” He was fined £10. MI5 did not accept his offer of resignation. This was an error.
Michael Bettaney should not have been allowed within a mile of a state secret, yet, by the age of thirty-two, he had been in the Security Service for eight years, and had risen to become a middle-ranking officer in MI5’s Soviet counterespionage section.
Obvious signs that he was heading off the rails had been noted but ignored. His Catholic faith suddenly evaporated. By 1983 he was drinking a bottle of spirits a day, and was given some “friendly advice” by a supervisor to cut down his alcohol consumption. No further action was taken.
Bettaney, meanwhile, was taking action of his own. He began memorizing the contents of secret documents and taking longhand notes, later typing them up in his semidetached house in the southern suburbs of London and photographing them. Whenever he was on night duty, he took a camera into MI5 and photographed whatever files he could lay his hands on. No one searched him. His colleagues called him Smiley, after John le Carré’s fictional spymaster, but they also noted “an air of superiority [and] bumptiousness.” Like many spies, Bettaney wanted to know, and conceal, a bigger secret than the spy sitting alongside him.
There were four officers in K4. Two of these were indoctrinated into the Gordievsky case. Bettaney was not, but, both literally and metaphorically, he was sitting right next to the biggest secret in the organization: an MI6 spy inside the KGB’s London rezidentura.
Bettaney later claimed to have converted to Marxism in 1982, and insisted his desire to work for the KGB sprang from pure ideological conviction. In a long, self-justifying treatise, he painted his actions in the bright colors of political martyrdom, a strange confection of resentment, conspiracy theory, and righteous outrage. He accused the Thatcher government of “slavish adherence to the aggressive and maverick policy of the Reagan administration” and deliberately increasing unemployment to bring “greater wealth to those who already have too much.” He claimed to be acting in pursuit of world peace, and attacked MI5 for using “sinister and immoral methods…not merely to remove the Soviet Government and Party, but also to destroy the entire fabric of society in the USSR.” He adopted the high-flown rhetoric of the revolutionary: “I call on comrades everywhere to renew their determination and redouble their efforts in pursuit of a victory which is historically inevitable.”
Bettaney’s Marxist politics were as artificial as h
is fruity accent. He was never a committed Communist in the Philby mold. There is little evidence he felt any particular affinity for the Soviet Union, the ineluctable march of Communism, or the oppressed proletariat. In one, unguarded moment, he gave himself away: “I felt I needed radically to influence events.” Bettaney did not want money, revolution, or world peace; he wanted attention.
Which made it all the more hurtful when the KGB took no notice of him.
Bettaney was extremely surprised when his first delivery to Guk’s letterbox elicited no response. He returned to Piccadilly Station several times, and when no thumbtack appeared in the banister, he concluded his choice of dead-letter box and signal site must have been too close to the Soviet embassy. His second set of instructions identified sites outside central London, suggested a signal date several weeks ahead, and provided one of the most secret recent documents in K4. Bettaney waited, wondered, and drank.
With hindsight, Bettaney should have been identified as a risk years earlier. But the three most powerful spy agencies in the world—the CIA, MI6, and the KGB—were all, at different times, vulnerable to betrayal from within by people who seemed, on closer inspection, to stand out as highly suspicious. Intelligence agencies have a reputation for brilliant insight and cool efficiency, but despite close vetting of candidates they are just as likely to hire and retain the wrong sorts of people as any other large organization. This was a business that involved heavy drinking, on both sides of the Cold War, and officers and agents frequently took refuge from the stress in the blurring of reality that alcohol can bring. The peculiarly demanding relationship between agent and agent runner is often oiled by the convivial, disinhibiting effects of drink. Unlike other branches of government, secret services tend to recruit imaginative people who have what Winston Churchill called “corkscrew minds.” If the marks of potential treachery are being clever, eccentric, and inclined to have a few too many drinks, then half the wartime and postwar spies in Britain and America would have been suspect. But in this respect the KGB was different, since it officially frowned on both inebriation and individuality. Gordievsky’s betrayal was invisible because he was sober and outwardly conformist; Bettaney went undetected because he was not.
The Nadger team, meanwhile, had narrowed down the mole hunt to three suspects, with Bettaney at the top of the list. But putting him under surveillance posed problems. Bettaney knew the A4 surveillance teams well, and had been trained to spot when he was being followed—if he recognized one of the Watchers, the game would be up. Moreover, the Watchers knew Bettaney, and might be unable to resist leaking to others in MI5 that their colleague was being monitored. Instead of using the professionals of MI5, therefore, it was decided to deploy the MI6 NOCTON team, none of whom were known to Bettaney. The director general of MI5 explicitly vetoed the use of MI6 officers in an MI5 operation. Deverell ignored the order. The MI6 officers in the Gordievsky case would shadow Bettaney and try to catch him in the act of treachery.
Bettaney was given the code name PUCK, an unpopular choice among the Nadgers. “The Shakespearean connection was deemed highly inappropriate by all members of the team and the word itself was too close to a well-known Anglo-Saxon expletive for comfort.”
On the morning of July 4, a disheveled couple in tattered clothes could be seen lounging aimlessly at the end of Victoria Road, Coulsdon, in the South London suburbs. One was Simon Brown of P5, MI6’s head of Soviet bloc operations; the other was Veronica Price, the architect of Gordievsky’s escape plan. A Home Counties creature from her pearls to her twinset, Price was not suited to this sort of subterfuge. “I’ve borrowed the char’s hat,” she announced, as they climbed into their disguises.
At 8:05, Michael Bettaney emerged from Number 5, paused at the front gate of his home, and looked up and down the street. “That moment, I knew it was him,” said Brown. “No one does that unless they are guilty, and looking for signs of surveillance.” Bettaney did not give the down-and-outs a second glance. Nor did he spot the pregnant woman a little way down the carriage, on the 8:36 train from Coulsdon Town; nor the balding man who tailed him on the ten-minute walk from Victoria Station to the MI5 building in Curzon Street. That day Bettaney took a two-hour lunch break, but at some point he was lost in the lunchtime crowds. MI5 could not be sure whether he had gone to Hanover Square to check if the rezident had finally signaled a willingness to play ball by parking his car on the north side—which Guk had not.
Frustrated and increasingly anxious, Bettaney resolved to make one more effort to coax the KGB into cooperation. After midnight on July 10, he dropped a third letter through Guk’s letterbox: this asked for an indication of whether the earlier packages had been received, and what the Soviet response might be. He proposed to call the Soviet embassy switchboard on July 11, at 8:05 a.m., and ask for Guk by name. The rezident should answer and indicate, by a specific form of words, whether or not he was interested in Koba’s trove of secrets.
Why MI5 did not have Guk’s property under tight surveillance, and thus spot the spy making his third delivery, remains a mystery. Gordievsky was now in Moscow, and not in a position to tip off his British friends to this latest approach. But, in any case, Bettaney was incriminating himself in various ways suggestive of intense mental strain, and possibly some sort of breakdown: on July 7, he discussed Guk with colleagues in a manner that struck them as “obsessional,” and suggested the KGB rezident should be recruited by MI5; the next day he remarked that even if the KGB was offered a “peach” of a source, they would reject it; he began asking odd questions about specific KGB officers, and showing an interest in files outside his immediate remit. He spoke at length about the motivations of spies from the past, including Kim Philby.
On the morning of July 11, he called the Soviet embassy from a public telephone, identified himself as “Mr. Koba,” and asked to speak to Guk; the KGB station chief declined to pick up the phone. Three times, Bettaney had presented the KGB chief with a valuable gift horse; each time, Guk had looked it squarely in the mouth. Intelligence history offers few comparable examples of such an opportunity squandered.
Three days later, Bettaney asked an MI5 colleague: “How do you think Guk would respond if a British intelligence officer put a letter through the door of his house?” This was the clincher: Koba was Michael Bettaney.
But the evidence against Bettaney was circumstantial. His telephone had been tapped, without producing any result. His house was subjected to a cursory search, without uncovering anything incriminating. Bettaney was covering his tracks with professional efficiency. For a successful prosecution MI5 needed to catch him in the act of treachery or secure a confession.
The Gordievsky family returned from their holiday on August 10. At the first meeting in the Bayswater safe house since his return, Gordievsky was told that while there was now a definite suspect, the spy in MI5 had not yet been arrested. Back at the KGB rezidentura, he made casual inquiries as to whether the dangle by the mysterious Koba had progressed in his absence, but learned nothing new. He attempted to resume his normal routine, cultivating contacts for the KGB and gathering intelligence for MI6, but it was hard to focus knowing that there was still a spy at liberty, somewhere inside British intelligence. Clearly this person had been unaware that Gordievsky was spying for Britain when he first posted his letter to Guk. But that was now more than four months ago. Had Koba discovered the truth in the interim? Had Guk agreed to take him on, and were his KGB colleagues even now watching him, waiting for him to make a slip? Every day that the spy remained uncaught, the threat increased. He picked up the girls from school, took Leila out to dinner, listened to Bach, and read his books, trying to appear unperturbed, as the anxiety steadily mounted: would his friends in MI6 catch the nameless spy before the spy caught him?
Bettaney, meanwhile, apparently tired of waiting for Guk to respond, had decided to take his illicit wares elsewhere. At the office, he let slip that he was thinking of taking a holiday in Vienna, a center of Cold War espionage wi
th a large KGB rezidentura. A search of his cupboard at work turned up documents referring to a KGB officer expelled from the UK in Operation FOOT, who was now living in Austria. Bettaney, it seemed, was about to fly the coop.
MI5 decided to haul him in and attempt to extract a confession. It was a huge gamble. If Bettaney denied everything, and resigned from the service, he could not be legally prevented from leaving the country. The plan to confront Bettaney, code-named COE, might backfire. “We could not guarantee success,” MI6 warned, pointing out that if Bettaney played his cards right, he might “walk away at the end of the day free to do what he wants.” Above all, the interception of Bettaney must not be traceable to Gordievsky.
On September 15, Bettaney was summoned to a meeting at MI5’s Gower Street headquarters to discuss an urgent counterintelligence case that had arisen. Instead, on arrival, he was taken to a flat on the top floor, and the evidence against him was laid out by John Deverell and Eliza Manningham-Buller—including a photograph of Guk’s front door, intended to imply that he had been seen making his deliveries, which he had not. Bettaney was shocked and “visibly nervous,” but in control. He spoke hypothetically about what this theoretical spy was supposed to have done, without ever indicating that he had done anything at all. He noted that it would not be in his interest to confess, an implicit admission, but hardly a confession. Even if he had acknowledged his guilt, the evidence would not have been admissible, since he had not been arrested and no lawyer was present. MI5 wanted him to tell all, then arrest him, and get him to confess again after being advised of his rights. But he did not.
Bugs relayed the conversation to the monitoring room below, where a bank of senior MI5 and MI6 officers craned to catch every word: “Listening to his attempts to avoid admitting anything was an excruciating experience,” said one. Bettaney might be unstable, but he was not stupid. “We had a very real fear that Bettaney would succeed in bluffing it out.” By evening, everyone was exhausted, and no nearer a breakthrough. Bettaney agreed to spend the night in the flat, though MI5 had no legal right to detain him. He had refused to eat lunch, and now declined dinner. He demanded a bottle of whisky, which he drank steadily. Manningham-Buller and two other minders listened sympathetically, “occasionally asking disingenuous questions,” as he expressed his admiration for the “battery of evidence” MI5 had gathered, without admitting its truth. At one point he began referring to the British as “you” and the Russians as “us.” He admitted that he had wanted to warn the KGB officers that they were under surveillance. But he did not confess. At 3 a.m. he finally collapsed into bed.
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