The Defence of the Realm (132 page)

In the wake of Prime's arrest, a Security Service brief for the Security Commission, which was also passed on to the Prime Minister, reviewed the forty-three cases since 1952 of British Soviet Bloc agents who had been convicted, had confessed or had defected. The brief concluded that sixteen had primarily mercenary motives, fourteen (including Prime)
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were ideological and ten had been recruited through ‘emotional blackmail'. Three Soviet agents (who, interestingly, included George Blake) were regarded as having ‘other' motives. A majority of the most important cases, however, were ideological.
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The Service's categorization of motives was arguably less satisfactory than the FBI MICE acronym (money, ideology, compromise, ego); ego, omitted in the Security Service analysis, has frequently been an important subsidiary motive in cases ranging from the Cambridge Five to the Americans Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen. In sixteen of the
forty-three cases the main initial lead to detection had come from Service sources, eleven from defectors, eight from liaison and eight from other sources.
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By far the most serious counter-espionage case for the Security Service in the final decade of the Cold War began on Easter Sunday 1983 when Michael Bettaney, a heavy-drinking, disaffected officer in K4 (the department responsible for the investigation and analysis of Soviet London residencies), pushed through the letter-box in Holland Park of Arkadi Guk, the KGB resident, an envelope containing the case put by the Security Service for expelling three Soviet intelligence officers in the previous month, together with details of how all three had been detected. The envelope also contained the offer of further secrets as well as instructions on how to contact him. Bettaney did not reveal his identity but signed himself ‘Koba', a name once used by Joseph Stalin.
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Fortunately for the Security Service, Arkadi Guk had a penchant for conspiracy theories about its operations: among them his claim that many advertising hoardings on the London Underground concealed secret observation posts from which MI5 monitored the movements of KGB officers and other suspicious travellers. Presented by Bettaney with the KGB's first opportunity for a quarter of a century to recruit an MI5 or SIS officer, Guk demonstrated an ability of heroic proportions to look a gift horse in the mouth. With a greatly exaggerated belief in the extent of Security Service surveillance, he must have found it difficult to believe that an MI5 officer could put a packet through his letter-box without being observed. Guk therefore concluded that Bettaney's offer must be a provocation designed to trap him and did not respond to it.
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On 11 April the small circle of Security Service officers with access to Gordievsky's intelligence learned that Guk was aware of the Service case for the expulsion of the three Soviet intelligence officers in March – though he had not told Gordievsky how the information had reached him.
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It was not immediately clear that the leak had come from within the Service since the case for the expulsion had been passed on to both the Foreign Office and the Home Office as well as (probably) to Number Ten. The first person to fall (wrongly) under suspicion was a Foreign Office official whose contacts with a Line KR (counter-intelligence and security) officer operating under diplomatic cover in the London residency had already caused some security concern.
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The course of the investigation changed dramatically after a report from Gordievsky on 17 June revealed that the KGB residency had received a document listing KGB and GRU staff in London.
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Gordievsky had been
shown the document by the residency reports officer, Slava Mishustin, who sought his help in translating it and commented that KGB officers at the Centre were never given ‘such precise information' about the personnel of Western intelligence stations in Moscow: ‘This shows how much better they work than we do.'
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Gordievsky was able to describe the document he had seen in enough detail for it to be identified as one of about fifty copies of a recent chart of the KGB London residency produced by K4. The hunt (codenamed ELMEN) for the source of the top-secret information reaching the residency henceforth concentrated on the Security Service.
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Important additional information from Gordievsky arrived on 21 June in a report entitled ‘An official from British Counter-Intelligence offers his services to the KGB (Early April–mid June 1983)'. Gordievsky had been told by Guk and the head of the Line KR, Leonid Nikitenko, that the original information on the expulsions of Soviet intelligence officers had arrived in an envelope pushed through Guk's letter-box in April which contained an offer of further classified material and suggested a signalling system and DLB for maintaining contact. Both Guk and Nikitenko believed the approach was a carefully planned British provocation and had decided (with the Centre's approval) not to respond to it. Between 10 and 14 June a further packet had been pushed through Guk's letter-box containing the document listing the personnel of the KGB and GRU residencies, as well as renewing the offer of more top-secret material and making detailed proposals for establishing contact. Guk remained convinced that the whole affair was a devious Security Service plot.

On 24 June, in agreement with the DDG (Cecil Shipp), Director K (John Deverell) decided to concentrate the search for the traitor in K Branch.
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The ELMEN investigators (later known to each other as the ‘Nadgers')
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were chosen from the ranks of those indoctrinated into the Gordievsky case on the grounds that, since he had not been betrayed, the culprit could not be one of them. The investigation was led personally by John Deverell, and meetings of the Nadgers took place in his rooms in order not to attract attention in the rest of the Branch.

K's suite, with office conference room, secretary's room and three doors to the corridor, proved to be a suitable, indeed the only suitable, place where full discussions could regularly take place, and although towards the end of the investigation doors were opening and shutting furtively as in a French bedroom farce . . . nobody outside the team noticed anything out of the ordinary.
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On 27 June the ELMEN investigators received a further important lead from Gordievsky. He had learned that the second letter pushed through
Guk's letter-box about a fortnight earlier asked the residency to give a series of signals on 4 (or possibly 6) July to indicate that it was now willing to make contact – among them parking Guk's car in a London square not far from the Soviet embassy.
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Deverell and the Nadgers unanimously agreed that the officers who had been identified as the most likely suspects (one of them Bettaney) should be put under surveillance on their way to work on 4 July to see if any of them checked whether the KGB residency was displaying any of the signals requested in the second letter to Guk. The surveillance was expected to be difficult since Bettaney in particular was known to be very surveillance conscious. Because A4, still in ignorance of the case, could not be used, the Nadgers proposed to conduct the surveillance themselves with the assistance of ELMEN indoctrinees in SIS. Assistance by SIS, however, was vetoed by the DDG. Remarkably, and with the full support of the Nadgers, Deverell deliberately ignored Shipp's ruling (an act of disobedience for which there are few parallels in Security Service history).
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One member of the Nadger surveillance team recalls, ‘I was five months pregnant at the time and had a very hard time keeping up.' Her baby, who took part in the surveillance while still in the womb, was christened ‘Little Nadger' by her colleagues.

In the event none of the suspects deviated from their normal routes to work on 4 July. Bettaney, however, took a two-hour lunch break during which it was thought he might have gone to check whether the KGB residency was displaying the signals which indicated its willingness to make contact.
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By this time Gordievsky was on leave in Moscow and unable to provide any further leads until after his return on 10 August.
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From 4 July onwards, however, Bettaney's bizarre behaviour combined with his pursuit of files of particular interest to the KGB increasingly persuaded the Nadgers of his guilt. K6/7 noted on 7 July that he was showing an obsessional interest in Guk, joking that the Service really needed to recruit him.
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Next day Bettaney told K4C/1 that, even if the KGB were offered a ‘golden apple' or ‘peach' of a source inside British intelligence, they would reject it.
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Director K noted on the same day that, as well as asking odd questions about individual Soviet intelligence officers, Bettaney had begun to talk at length about what had led Philby, Blake and Prime to work for the KGB.
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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.'
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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.
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But, like the other circumstantial evidence so far gathered, it did not begin to provide the basis for a successful prosecution.
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Neither an HOW ‘to monitor Bettaney's movements'
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nor a secret search of his house uncovered any significant evidence against him.
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The Nadgers hoped that he would make a further attempt to contact the London residency and be caught in the act.
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Bettaney, however, had finally despaired of Guk.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.'
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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.'
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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: