THE SPY WHO MUFFED IT

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP96B01172R000300020034-1
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 2
• Document Creation Date: December 16, 2016
• Document Release Date: July 28, 2005
• Sequence Number: 34
• Publication Date: April 21, 1984
• Content Type: NSPR

Approved For Release 2005/08/03 :CIA-RDP96B01172R000300020034-1
Espionage, continued
The spy who
muffed it
Yet another buffoon from Britain's secu-
rity services went to prison last week. Mr
Michael Bettaney's secret trial earned
him a total of 23 years on 10 charges, and
provoked both a torrent of abuse from
the judge and a preposterous nineteenth-
century Marxist statement from the con-
victed man (through his defence lawyer)
on behalf of the "rights, interests and
aspirations of the broad masses of our
people, without whose labour by hand
and brain etcetera...
This silly fellow, a fairly senior counter-
espionage officer with MI5, was not even
competent to get in touch with the Rus-
sians. He kept pestering one of their
officials, a Mr Gouk, with offers of highly
sensitive material, including samples of
what he had to offer. Mr Gouk would not
take the hint, Mr Bettaney was arrested
last September when about to leave for
Vienna, in the hope of finding a more
willing purchaser among the Russians
there. It is conjectured that the Russians,
faced with such an absurd approach,
simply rang the foreign office to complain
about what they thought must be a provo-
cation to entrap them.
So a new type of disaffected Briton
makes his appearance. Instead of the
languid intellectuals who used to be re-
garded as natural traitors, we now have a
self-made, working-class intellectual
whose peculiarity at Oxford (not even
Cambridge, these days) was to have worn
neat suits and short-cropped hair in the
late 1960s: that really made him stand
out. He joined the air cadets, took up
dogmatic religion, then became interest-
ed in Nazism and got more than conven-
tionally drunk. A spell teaching in Ger-
many was his apprenticeship for spying-
a necessary one, if (like the British securi-
ty services) you absorb most of your
_------
4861 ' lZ lltldtl 1SIWON0~3 3H1
techniques from Mr John le Carre.
The real oddity is not Mr Bettany's
sudden conversion from Nazism to a rigid
Marxism-fervent believers often reach
suddenly for new certitudes when an old
one gets damaged-but why the security
service recruiters took such a man on, and
why they kept him once his personality
had collapsed to the point where he was
convicted for being drunk and disorderly
in a London street. He apparently actual-
ly shouted to the policeman who arrested
him: "You can't arrest me, I'm a spy".
Approved For Release 2005/08/03 :CIA-RDP96B01172R000300020034-1
 Approved For Release 2005/08/03 :CIA-RDP96B01172R000300020034-1
Espionage, con3fnued
The spy who
muffed it
Yet another buffoon from Britain's secu-
rity services went to prison last week. Mr
Michael Bettaney's secret trial earned
him a total of 23 years on 10 charges, and
provoked both a torrent of abuse from
the judge and a preposterous nineteenth-
century Marxist statement from the con-
victed man (through his defence lawyer)
on behalf of the "rights, interests and
aspirations of the broad masses of our
people, without whose labour by hand
and brain etcetera...
This silly fellow, a fairly senior counter-
espionage officer with MI5, was not even
competent to get in touch with the Rus-
sians. He kept pestering -one of their
officials, a Mr Gouk, with offers of highly
sensitive material, including samples of
what he had to offer. Mr Gouk would not
take the hint, Mr Bettaney was arrested
last September when about to leave for
Vienna, in the hope of finding a more
willing purchaser among the Russians
there. It is conjectured that the Russians,-
faced with such an absurd approach,
simply rang the foreign office to complain
about what they thought must be a provo-
cation to entrap them.
So a new type of disaffected Briton
makes his appearance. Instead of the
languid intellectuals who used to be re-
garded as natural traitors, we now have a
self-made, working-class intellectual
whose peculiarity at Oxford (not even
Cambridge, these days) was to have worn
neat suits and short-cropped hair in the
late 19fi0s: that really made him stand
out. He joined the air cadets, took up
dogmatic religion, then became interest-
ed in Nazism and got more than conven-
tionally drunk. A spell teaching in Ger-
many was his apprenticeship for spying-
a necessary one, if (like the British securi-
ty services) you absorb most of your
~-'-z ~adv lsirwNOOa a-u
techniques from Mr John le Carr.
The real oddity is not Mr Bettany's .
sudden conversion from Nazism to a~rigid
Marxism-fervent believers often reach
suddenly for new certitudes when an old
one gets damaged-but why the security
service recruiters took such a man on, and
why they kept him once his personality
had collapsed to the point where he was
convicted for being drunk and disorderly
in a London street. He apparently actual-
ly shouted to the policeman who arrested
'him: "You can't arrest me, I'm a spy".
r - - _~_..
Approved For Release 2005/08/03 :CIA-RDP96B01172R000300020034-1