Another voice

Time for an outcry

Auberon Waugh

Ithe general over-excitement about my 'admirer Colonel Gaddafi we seem to have lost sight of Michael Bettaney, the former MI5 officer, whose imprisonment for 23 years on a charge of trying (unsuc- cessfully) to spy for Russia led to predic- tions of a 'public and political outcry'.

Where is the public and political outcry? The Daily Telegraph (which God preserve) commented that Bettaney's treachery `seriously calls into question the wisdom of a decision taken in the mid-70s by a Labour government to launch a substantial reform of the Security Services and recruit from a wider social background. Bettaney, Oxford-educated but from a humble work- ing-class background, was one of the new- style MI5 men recruited to expand the limited social mix and public school image of the Security Services.

`On the face of it, Michael Bettaney fit- ted the bill perfectly, but his recruitment badly backfired. Very clever, he found himself in a maelstrom of equally brilliant colleagues and apparently resented the upper-class accents of many of them, and considered himself intellectually above even his superiors.'

One does not need to have had any ex- perience of the lobby system to apply the Waugh test to this piece of information and ask oneself where it came from. Obviously from one of the public-school-educated old guard of MI5. In other words the informant was one of us. Or nearly. It must have been most galling for this equally brilliant public- school MI5 officer, who also happened to be Bettaney's superior, to find the odious young man questioning his intellectual brilliance on class grounds.

The episode confirms my own analysis of repeated attempts from inside MI5 to blacken the name of its former Director, Sir Roger Hollis. In fact the recruitment of `new-style' MIS officers from a 'wider' (i.e. down-market) social background had started before the mid-70s. Hollis (whom I never met, but whom I feel intuitively to have been an honourable and patriotic man, if one with a slight weakness for a bot- tle of wine at luncheon which sometimes caused him to work late) was never parti- cularly enthusiastic about the 'new-style' recruitment.

In fact the persecution of Hollis started even earlier. Lord Egremont (as John Wynd- ham, private secretary to the Prime Minister) was in the habit of ringing him up late at night in his home in Campden Hill Square or wherever and saying: `Aha, villain! I know your secret!' After a time these calls were traced and it was found that they came from the Prime Minister's private office in Admiralty House, where a red-faced John Wyndham confessed all. I do not know whether he wrote a letter of apology to the Director of the Security Ser- vices but I would not be surprised, and I wish his family would produce it.

Egremont later denied this story but I know it to be true. Perhaps it was this evidence from the highest quarters which first gave some 'new-style' junior officers the idea that their chief might be a Soviet agent. The fact that Egremont was almost certainly drunk when playing these pranks has nothing to do with it. In vino veritas. Many a true word is spoken in jest. Perhaps Egremont, being a member of the upper classes himself, was trying to tip off his fellow ex-public schoolboy. The possibi- lities are endless.

Bettaney, by contrast, when drunk, managed to get himself arrested by the police. When charged, he said: 'You cannot arrest me, I am a member of MI5' — or words to that effect. One begins to wonder whether the bounder was even a Mason. A few days later, he was arrested for having a railway ticket. Round about then — if we are to believe the version of his trial which was allowed to appear in the press — he was converted to communism. After his convic- tion, he released a Statement to the Press through his solicitors which was so babyish in its pomposity and its lack of guile that one could only suppose it was a spoof, or at best that it had been written for him by Private Eye's Dave Spart.

Finally, we learn that the wretched man is being kept apart from other high-security prisoners at Coldingley Prison, Surrey, in case he imparts to them any of the highly sensitive information which he has retained in his brilliant, photographic memory. Apart from that, the traditional secrecy of MIS has descended on the whole business like a great blanket. We know nothing of what these secrets are except for the Lord Chief Justice's statement that they 'could have sent British agents to their deaths'.

On the face of it, this seems unlikely, since Bettaney was not concerned with British agents abroad, nor is there any reason to suppose he would have known anything about them. His service is con- cerned with domestic security and counter- espionage, not with sending spies to Russia. Just possibly he might have been able to identify some undercover agents in Nor- thern Ireland, but that is not quite the same thing.

In any case, the main lesson of the Bet- taney business is surely that the Russians are no longer in the slightest bit interested in any secrets which MI5 may have to offer.

Perhaps the organisation is already so well penetrated that they are embarrassed. Perhaps Bettaney did not have the proper introductions — the KGB expects aPPII" cants to be recommended by a former headmaster of Eton, head of the Govern- ment think-tank or at very least the head of an Oxford or Cambridge college.

,

m. It is small thanks to you that the Rus- ans rebuffed your advances,' said Lord Lane. But through all the barrage of Press publicity about the importance of Mr Bet" taney's secrets, the solid fact remains that the Russians were not interested in them.This must be the most bitter blow of all for an organisation like MI5 which devotes about three quarters of its time and energY to keeping itself secret. If the Russians were making a terrible mistake in treating his approaches with suspicion, they do JIM seem to have realised it yet. Mr ArkadY Gouk, the Soviet embassy official whom he approached, has not been recalled to Moscow in disgrace.

Dare we suggest that the Russians were

absolutely right, and that Bettaney was In, deed a somewhat hamfisted attempt at `plant'? Throughout the whole incident I suspected this might be the case and Most particularly when reading Bettaney's alleg its statement after conviction, with all Dave Spart-New Statesman touches which pmilighetrhhaivm.eseblefen written by the great John ig

So implausible, in fact, is Bettaney's

statement, with its heavy reliance on Marxist-populist jargon, that one can only suppose that some of those brilliant mind in the MI5 maelstrom have at last go round to reading Le Carre's The SPY Who Came in from the Cold. Or at anY rate, that someone, somewhere in Curzon Street, has got around to reading it and has _eriors sold the plot of the book to his sup asaiansb.rilliant idea for fooling Russ as

In other words, Bettaney, far from

demonstrating the collapse of the l9Dv_ ethos of classlessness and proletarian vigouicil which gave us Harold Wilson, Har° f Evans and most of the other disasters ?' our time, demonstrates its continuation lar the Security Services, if nowhere else. F,,ae from being a down-market Guy Burgess, "_ is being groomed as a new-style Greenman, tie, who will be 'sprung' by the Russians a George Blake was and then act as a super heroic double agent ever after. priIsfoIn ahmasringohtth, nothing toitsooldaotiownitit: the his that he might give secret information,to the fellow-prisoners, much more to do with!suggestion that he is living the life of Riley,ri; there, being fed on steak and chins for every meal. The main problem is tha.._„ tdhoeesRnuosstiasenesm to have succeeded in f°°11/1/6 original Greenmantle, a grandson of Buchan's Greenmantle, I might even allow MYself,t ,s eil1

luxury of returning to my original

ae analysis and suggesting that N 3ct Bettaney is not quite up to the job.