INTELLIGENCE OFFICER SENTENCED IN BRITAIN

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP96B01172R000300020033-2
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 2
• Document Creation Date: December 16, 2016
• Document Release Date: July 28, 2005
• Sequence Number: 33
• Publication Date: April 17, 1984
• Content Type: NSPR

Approved For Release 2005/08/03: CIA-RDP96B01 20033-2
Intfiigenc~ Officer
Sentenced in Britain
By Maureen Johnson
Associated Press
LONDON, April 16-Michael
John Bettaney, a 'middle-ranking of-
f cer in Britain's counterintelligence
agency, was sentenced today to 23
years in prison for passing secrets to
the Soviet Union.
But Bettaney,. 34, who wanted to
become a KGB "mole" within M15,
was a spy Moscow left out in the
cold, by one account, because he ap-
parently looked too good to be true
to his potential Soviet spy masters.
According to the Press. Associa-
tion, Britain's domestic news agency,
the Soviet secret service itself tipped
off British intelligence' about Bet-
taney.
"They ... thought it was a clum-
sy British plan to plant a double
agent on them," the agency said,
quoting British security sources.
[Other security sources suggested
to British reporters that M15 knew
of his betrayal for some time before
his arrest, United Press Internation-
al reported.]
Bettaney, 34, the Oxford-educated
only child of a factory janitor, was
convicted today on 10 charges under
Britain's Official Secrets Act.
The prosecution said he left sam-
ples . of top-secret information in
three letters in midnight visits to the
London home of a Soviet diplomat,
First Secretary Arkadi V. Gouk,
whom Bettaney believed to be a
KGB agent.
In a statement from jail, Bettaney
lambasted Britain's Conservative gov-
emment and declared that the British
and U.S. intelligence services sought
by subversion to destroy "the entire
fabric of society" in the Soviet Union
and other Communist nations.
At the close of the jury trial at the
Old Bailey Central Criminal Court,
Chief Justice Lord Lane described
Bettaney as "self-opinionated and
dangerous ... and. in many ways
puerile."
Except for the opening and clos-
ing, the five-day trial was held be
hind closed doors because of-the sen-
sitivity of the material Bettaney
hoarded at the modest suburban
house where he lived alone.
Security officers said his home in
Coulsden, west of London, was filled
with mementos of his dead parents,
along with some of Britain's secrets
hidden in cushions and kitghen,cup-
boards.
Bettaney, who said he would ap-
peal, was convicted of spying for the
Soviet Union for 10 months starting
in December 1982 when he joined
the British security agency that is
supposed to catch spies.
Bettaney said nothing in court
when the sentence was passed. But
in a statement read by defense law-
yer Michael Mansfield, Bettaney
said he attempted to become a spy
because the British government was
intensifying "the inequalities and
injustices in British society."
"I thought and I think that the
close relationship between the Con-
servative government and the Amer-
ican administration ... presents a
danger to peace," Bettaney added.
He was arrested Sept. 16, Attor-
ney General Michael Havers said,
the night before he planned to leave
for Vienna, Austria, to try to prove
himself.to KGB agents.
In spying for ideological reasons,
Bettaney was similar to Britain's
most damaging spy of late-Geof-
frey Prime. He was a translator of
Russian at the top-secret Govern-
ment. Communications Headquarters
at Cheltenham.
Prime was sentenced in 1982 to 35
years in jail after being convicted of
spying for the Soviets for 14 years.
Prime and Bettaney differ in back-
ground from the immediate postwar
generation of Cambridge-educated,
upper-class spies for whom a flirtation
with Marxism at the university in the
1930s turned to a lifetime of betrayal.
Guy Burgess, Donald MacLean
and Kim Philby, who fled to the So-
viet Union in the 1950s and, 1960s as
the net closed on them, and one-
time royal art adviser Anthony
Blunt, all were products of Britain's
expensive private schools.
Bettaney, educated at a state high
school, joined government service in
1975, one of a trickle of working-
class entrants hired during years of
debate about the "old school tie"
domination of the senior ranks of
the civil service.
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Ap IA-RD 000300020033-2