The Defence of the Realm

by Christopher Andrew

  Henceforth, the Nadgers referred to Bettaney by the unofficial and pejorative codename TRAFFIC after the tiresome traffic noise which disturbed their non-air-conditioned Gower Street offices when they were forced to open the windows during the long, hot summer of 1983. He was later assigned the official codename PUCK, but, as one of the Nadgers recalls, ‘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.’57 On 14 July Bettaney provided clinching evidence of his guilt when he asked K4C/1 how he thought Guk would respond if a British intelligence officer put a letter through the door of his house.58 But, like the other circumstantial evidence so far gathered, it did not begin to provide the basis for a successful prosecution.59 Neither an HOW ‘to monitor Bettaney’s movements’60 nor a secret search of his house uncovered any significant evidence against him.61 The Nadgers hoped that he would make a further attempt to contact the London residency and be caught in the act.62 Bettaney, however, had finally despaired of Guk.63 Evidence began to accumulate that he was planning an approach to the KGB residency in Vienna instead. In late July he mentioned to K4/0 that he was considering taking a holiday in Austria and discussed with her the effectiveness of Austrian security. The DG ruled that under no account must Bettaney be allowed to go abroad.64 There was worrying evidence that Bettaney continued to make plans to do so. A search of his cupboard in K4 revealed that he had prepared a study of KGB agent-running abroad, including one case (in which Bettaney had shown particular interest) involving a KGB officer expelled from London during Operation FOOT who was currently stationed in Vienna.65

  Without adequate evidence for a prosecution, it was therefore decided to gamble on a confrontation with Bettaney designed to extract a confession from him. Planning for the confrontation in the DG’s conference room, codenamed Operation COE, began early in August.66 It was clear from the outset that COE was a high-risk strategy. The Service Legal Adviser Bernard Sheldon warned that Bettaney could not be forced to answer any questions. So long as Bettaney remained a member of the Service, he could be ordered not to leave the country. But, if he resigned during the questioning, nothing could be done to prevent him leaving the building.67 The DDG warned SIS that ‘We could not guarantee success; it was possible that TRAFFIC may walk away at the end of the day free to do what he wants – even to defect. We cannot in the last resort be sure that we can prevent this.’68

  Throughout the preparations for the confrontation, it remained a major priority to avoid any suspicion among non-Nadgers within the Service that the lead which led to Bettaney’s discovery had come from an agent in the London residency. In order to conceal Gordievsky’s role, Director K and SIS agreed in early August to invent a fictitious reason for the hunt for the traitor in K Branch by concocting a K6 source report of 28 June from ‘a very delicate and reliable liaison source’, which stated that ‘In early 1983 the KGB received an offer of service from a person purporting to be an official in the Russian Department of British Counter-intelligence. It is not known whether the offer was taken up.’69 Protecting Gordievsky was regarded as so important that, when the Security Commission later investigated the Bettaney case, it too was informed that the original lead was ‘a report from a liaison service’ (though it is possible that the chairman of the Commission may have been better informed). Even Bernard Sheldon was not briefed on the Gordievsky case until two months after the agent’s defection in July 1985.70

  The operational plan for Bettaney’s interrogation was intended to take him by surprise. At the time he was on a course run by SIS, and was summoned to Gower Street in order to discuss an urgent (but fictitious) K3 case which had just arisen.71 Bettaney was completely deceived. Even after the interrogation began he was not sure whether it had all been a ploy or whether the operational emergency was genuine. Though visibly surprised when ushered into the DG’s conference room on 15 September Bettaney initially remained calm as Director K set out the case against him, using a series of visual aids which were intended to shock him into confessing. As Deverell referred to ‘an offer which was made to the RIS in the Spring of this year’, he showed a photo of Guk’s front door taken from an observation post, which was doubtless intended to give Bettaney the false impression that he had been observed pushing packets through the letter-box.

  After about three-quarters of an hour, as the apparent weight of evidence against him began to sink in, Bettaney became for the first time visibly nervous. The turning point in the interrogation came when he could offer no explanation for a page torn from his office diary on which he had written coded telephone numbers for two KGB officers. Five minutes later Bettaney started referring to a hypothetical spy who might have done what Director K was saying he had done and would, he thought, have had ideological motivation. In responding to further questions from both Director K and the DDG, he sometimes slipped into the use of the first person singular when referring to the hypothetical spy. By saying that he did not think it was in his interest to confess, Bettaney implicitly admitted his own guilt. After a lunch-break during which he refused the offer of food, he admitted sympathizing with Philby and Blake, referring to them familiarly as Kim and George. He also commented that he assumed there could be no question of an offer of immunity from prosecution as in the case of Blunt – a further implicit admission of guilt.72 An implicit admission, however, was not enough. Since all the evidence against him was circumstantial, only an actual confession, made or repeated to the police, would make a prosecution possible. K6/7, who was listening to the interrogation in the monitoring room, later recalled:

  We had a very real fear that Bettaney would succeed in bluffing it out. When he started to talk ‘hypothetically’ about what the guilty person might or might not have done, those of us in the monitoring room were at the edge of our seats, urging him to go further. Listening to his attempts to avoid admitting anything, but indulging in musings about motivation and actions which tied in with what we knew but couldn’t use as evidence, was an excruciating experience.73

  At the end of the first day’s questioning, Bettaney agreed to spend the night in a Service flat at the top of its Gower Street headquarters and resume on the following day. On entering the flat, his first action was to check the windows. All had been secured to guard against the possibility that he might commit suicide by jumping into Gower Street. Bettaney was already on friendly terms with two of his three overnight minders, and developed a particularly close rapport with K4A/1, who listened sympathetically to what he said, occasionally asking disingenuous questions designed to elicit further admissions. Having already refused lunch, Bettaney also turned down the offer of supper and non-alcoholic drinks. Instead, he demanded a bottle of whisky, drank most of it by 3 a.m., and rejected the advice of his minders to try to get some sleep.74

  As Bettaney reflected aloud in the course of the night on the past day’s questioning, it became clear to his minders that he had been greatly impressed by what he called the ‘battery of evidence’ deployed against him.75 He failed entirely to realize that, unless he confessed, the evidence was quite inadequate to secure a conviction. In the course of the night, though making no formal confession and showing no contrition, he abandoned all pretence of innocence, telling his minders that his aim had been to warn Soviet intelligence which of its officers were at risk. He began referring to the British as ‘you’ and the Russians as ‘us’. Bettaney admitted informally to K4A/1 that he had approached Guk but had received no response.76

  Bettaney refused any breakfast before the interrogation resumed in the DG’s conference room on the morning of 16 September. After a sleepless night, a bottle of whisky and no food for the past twenty-four hours, he was, unsurprisingly, in a bad temper, telling K4A/1 he had no intention of making a confession. When K4A/1 replied that this was not the impression he had given overnight, Bettaney became agitated and asked if he could tell him something off the record. Director K intervened to say noth
ing was off the record. Eventually, probably through exhaustion, Bettaney said he wanted to get the whole business over quickly. While Director K was out of the room contacting the MPSB, Bettaney told the sympathetic K4A/1 he was past caring about the admissions he was making and identified the places in his home where he had hidden incriminating material later used in evidence at his trial. At 11.42 a.m. he announced, ‘I think I ought to make a clean breast of it. Tell Director K I wish to make a confession.’ Detective Superintendent Westcott of the Special Branch subsequently took Bettaney to Rochester Row police station, where he recorded his confession and he was charged under the Official Secrets Act.77

  What remained most obscure both to the Nadgers and to his other colleagues when they were informed of his arrest was Bettaney’s motivation. His favourable references to ‘Kim’ and ‘George’ during interrogation showed the extent to which he identified with Philby and Blake and their work for the KGB. But he was not, like them, a committed pro-Soviet Communist. ‘There was no simple motive,’ he told his interrogators, ‘it was a cumulative process.’ He did not even appear particularly hostile to the Security Service, saying at one point: ‘I have put the Service in a bloody position – but it wasn’t my intention.’78 Even during the tense night between the first and second days of his interrogation, he seemed genuinely to enjoy the company of colleagues, despite the fact that he had spent the last few months attempting to undermine Service operations against the KGB.

  The ELMEN investigation, though conducted under very difficult conditions, was remarkably successful. Bettaney made a confession, despite the lack of the evidence against him required to mount a successful prosecution.79 Neither he nor any other non-indoctrinated member of the Service had the slightest suspicion that the investigation was taking place. The surprise when Bettaney’s arrest was announced by a DG’s circular on 16 September was total.80 Nor was there any suspicion that his detection was the result of leads from an agent inside the London residency.

  Sir Robert Armstrong, the cabinet secretary, rang the DG, Sir John Jones, on 16 September 1983 to convey the Prime Minister’s congratulations on ‘how well the case had been handled. She was very pleased that Bettaney had been detected and that he had been stopped.’81 Alone in the cabinet save for the Foreign and Home Secretaries, Mrs Thatcher knew that Bettaney had been detected thanks to intelligence supplied by Oleg Gordievsky. The DG sent Gordievsky a formal letter of thanks which was shown to him by his SIS case officer. The Nadgers also sent a personal message of gratitude, telling Gordievsky ‘how warmly we feel about him’. Gordievsky replied with equally warm congratulations on the success of the Bettaney investigation, saying that he dreamed of the day when he would be able to meet and talk to the officers of the Security Service:

  I don’t know whether such a day will come or not – maybe not. Nevertheless, I would like this idea to be recorded somewhere: that I have underlined my belief that they are the real defenders of democracy in the most direct sense of the word. Therefore it is natural for me to give them whatever help and support I can.82

  The contrast between Gordievsky’s spontaneous warmth and the DG’s stiffness struck all the Nadgers. As one of them later recalled: ‘John Jones, not the chummiest of DGs, called the team in for a drink on conclusion of the case. Given how closely the team had worked below DG and DDG level, it was a curiously stiff, sad, anticlimactic moment for us all. It all seemed very hollow.’83

  Bettaney’s arrest occurred just as the Cold War was approaching its most dangerous moment since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. With Operation RYAN at its peak, Gordievsky provided extraordinary intelligence on the state of near-paranoia which prevailed in the Centre. The silver lining, so far as the Security Service was concerned, was the evidence of the extent to which the London residency was being distracted from more productive espionage by the time-consuming and sometimes bizarre requirements placed on it to find non-existent evidence of US and NATO preparations for a nuclear first strike. Among twenty ‘tasks’ imposed on the residency on 17 February 1983 in order to monitor supposed British preparations for a thermonuclear Armageddon were regular checks on the number of lights on at night and the cars parked at official buildings, the identification of possible evacuation routes for government officials and checks on the state of readiness of bomb shelters. The Centre’s requirements were informed by ignorance as well as paranoia. ‘Immediate task’ number three instructed the residency:

  The scathing press comment in the Bettaney affair contrasted with Mrs Thatcher’s congratulations on how well the investigation had been handled (Daily Mail, 23 April 1984).

  One important sign that preparations are beginning for RYAN could be increased purchases of blood from donors and the prices paid for it . . . In this context, discover the location of the several thousand blood-donor reception centres and the price of blood donated, and record any changes. Time limit: 2nd quarter [by 30 June 1983]. If there is an unexpectedly sharp increase in the number of stationary and mobile blood donor centres and in the prices paid, report at once to the Centre.

  It had not occurred to the Centre that British blood donors are unpaid, and the residency was reluctant to cause embarrassment by drawing attention to its ignorance. Almost as bizarre was the Centre’s suggestion that leading clerics and international bankers might be given advance warning of the NATO nuclear first strike.84

  On 28 September the terminally ill Soviet leader, Yuri Andropov, issued from his sickbed a denunciation of US and NATO policy couched in apocalyptic language unprecedented since the depths of the Cold War: ‘The Reagan administration, in its imperial ambitions, goes so far that one even begins to doubt whether Washington has any brakes at all preventing it from crossing the point at which any sober-minded person must stop.’ The KGB took its cue from Andropov. The Centre’s alarmism reached its peak during the NATO command-post exercise ABLE ARCHER 83, held from 2 to 11 November to practise nuclear-release procedures, which it feared might be used as cover for beginning the countdown to an actual first strike. Gordievsky passed to his SIS case officer, who informed MI5, a telegram from the Centre to the London residency on 5 November warning that, once the preliminary decision was taken to go ahead with a first strike, nuclear missiles were likely to be launched within a week to ten days. During this period that secret decision was bound to ‘be reflected in the pattern of work in [British] state institutions which are involved in safeguarding the defence capability and security’. Guk was therefore instructed to pay particular attention to ‘unusual activity at the Prime Minister’s residence at 10 Downing Street, where there will be energetic consultations without informing the press’.85 Gordievsky, wrote Sir Geoffrey Howe later, ‘left us in no doubt of the extraordinary but genuine Russian fear of real-life nuclear strike’.86

  Gordievsky reported that in the annual review of the work of the London residency at the end of 1983, Guk felt forced to admit ‘shortcomings’ in failing to obtain the (non-existent) intelligence demanded by the Centre on ‘specific American and NATO plans for the preparation of surprise nuclear missile attack against the USSR’. During the early months of 1984, however, helped by the death of Andropov on 9 February and reassuring signals from London and Washington (prompted, particularly in the British case, by knowledge of the fears generated by ABLE ARCHER 83), the mood in Moscow gradually lightened. Andropov’s successor and former rival, Konstantin Chernenko, was already in failing health and had only a year to live, but he was less morbidly suspicious of Western surprise attack than Andropov had become at the end of his life. A marginal lessening of East–West tension was evident even at Andropov’s funeral, attended by Mrs Thatcher and other Western dignitaries. The Soviet ambassador in London, Viktor Popov, told a meeting of embassy and residency staff that Mrs Thatcher had gone out of her way to charm her hosts. In March Nikolai Vladimirovich Shishlin, a senior foreign affairs specialist in the Central Committee (and later an adviser to Mikhail Gorbachev), addressed the staff of the London embassy and
KGB residency on current international problems. Gordievsky reported to his case officer that Shishlin made no mention of the supposed threat of surprise nuclear attack which had been the residency’s chief preoccupation for the past three years. The bureaucratic momentum of Operation RYAN, however, took some time to wind down. When, in the early summer of 1984, the London residency grew lax about sending its pointless fortnightly RYAN reports, it received a reprimand from the Centre (passed on by Gordievsky to his SIS case officer) telling it to adhere ‘strictly’ to the original RYAN directive.87

  Bettaney’s conviction and sentencing to twenty-three years’ imprisonment in April 1984, later followed by a report of the Security Commission, provided public embarrassment for both the Security Service and the KGB. The revelation that the Service had harboured a traitor in its midst and tolerated his binge drinking exposed it to media ridicule. Arkadi Guk received at least equally unwelcome publicity as a bungling KGB resident. The Attorney General, Sir Michael Havers, told the jury that Bettaney had written to inform Guk that, if his offer to work for the KGB were accepted, ‘he would find in the first-floor gents lavatory at the Academy One Cinema in Oxford Street, taped under the lid of the cistern, a canister containing exposed film of classified information’.88 Guk was publicly revealed to have turned down the KGB’s first opportunity since the Second World War to recruit a penetration agent inside the Security Service.

  Despite the fact that Bettaney’s offer had been ignored, both the Security Service and SIS argued strongly that the publicity given to Guk’s role as KGB resident should be used as justification for declaring him persona non grata with the secret aim of furthering Gordievsky’s career. With Service backing, ‘C’ (Sir Christopher Curwen) sought Sir Robert Armstrong’s assistance in gaining the support of Mrs Thatcher for what he said was a unique opportunity to get rid of the resident ‘since Guk has always been most careful not to become directly involved in KGB agent running operations and is likely to be even more careful in the future’ – thus making it difficult to prove his active involvement in espionage.89 Gordievsky believed that after Guk’s expulsion, his deputy, Leonid Nikitenko, head of Line KR, who was likely to become acting resident, might well confide in him more – and that his own chances of becoming resident would be improved.90 Unlike some FCO officials, Sir Julian Bullard, deputy PUS and political director, was enthusiastically in favour of seizing the opportunity: ‘The stakes are very high; nothing less than the chance of access to all, or practically all, the KGB operations against this country. For such a prize it is, in my opinion, worth paying the price of sacrificing our own PSO [post security officer] in Moscow . . .’91 Sir Robert Armstrong informed the PUS at the FCO, Sir Antony Acland, that the Prime Minister ‘would be grateful if the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, in consultation with the Security Service, would as a matter of urgency consider the expulsion of Mr Guk without delay’.92 The Soviet embassy was informed of Guk’s expulsion on 14 May. As Bullard had anticipated, Moscow retaliated by expelling the British PSO.93 At Guk’s farewell party before returning to Moscow, Gordievsky was asked to deliver a tribute to him. ‘I must’, he recalls, ‘have sounded just a touch too smooth, and very slightly insincere, because all Guk said, immediately, was “You’ve learnt a lot from the Ambassador.” In the art of making insincere speeches, Popov was undisputed champion.’94 As Gordievsky had expected, Nikitenko as acting resident almost immediately gave him increased access to residency files and regularly sought his advice. During Nikitenko’s absences from London, Gordievsky stood in as acting resident.95