File releases highlight MI5/MI6 rivalry in the 1980s
Security Service chiefs sought to keep MI6 out of Bettaney case
Nuggets from the New Year’s file releases at the UK National Archives are starting to trickle out in press reports today, and some of the files have been digitised on the archives’ website.
As expected, some of the material released under the 20-year-rule bears on the period around the invasion of Iraq. The Guardian reports on documents relating to the feud between the No.10 Press office and the BBC which led to the death of weapons expert Dr David Kelly a few months after the invasion.1
For the most part, however, material from the early 2000s has been over-shadowed by a cache of new files on intelligence controversies of the 1980s. While this is probably a more comfortable focus for current officialdom, it is still a significant period, an era of revelations that led to the public avowal of the intelligence services, with MI5 being put on a statutory basis under the Security Services Act in 1989, and the Intelligence Services Act of 1994 covering MI6 and GCHQ.
Avowal came only after a spirited attempt at suppression had failed. Many of the new files concern the attempt to deal with the influence of three books; Their Trade is Treachery, by the intelligence journalist Chapman Pincher, Spycatcher, by the former MI5 counterintelligence officer Peter Wright; and One Girl’s War, by Joan Miller, the former personal assistant to controversial MI5 agent-runner Maxwell Knight.
The Pincher and Wright books were very much from the British end of the Angletonian school of intelligence thinking, publicising security suspicions about Prime Minister Harold Wilson and MI5 Director General Roger Hollis that owed much to former CIA counterintelligence chief James Angleton and the conspiracy theories of Soviet defector Oleg Golitsyn.
Miller’s book dealt with an earlier era, but her memories of B Branch counter-subversion operations under Knight, a distinctly right-wing figure, can only have compounded the impression of an intelligence community out of control.
There are also files on Michael Bettaney, the MI5 officer whose attempt to defect to the Soviets in 1982 was foiled by a mole in the KGB’s London residency, Oleg Gordievsky. The Mail has this nugget on the case:
MI5 was so desperate to stop fellow MI6 spooks seeing the full bombshell report into how one of its agents went rogue that Margaret Thatcher limited her foreign secretary's use of the document, newly released papers reveal….
[Thatcher’s Principal Private Secretary Robin Butler] noted that MI5 - which protects national security and is accountable to the home secretary - could be left red-faced should MI6, its foreign intelligence counterpart overseen by the foreign secretary, see the report before a restricted version is published.2
I was initially surprised by this, as I recalled that MI6 was involved in the surveillance of Bettaney. A similar procedure had been followed in the 1960s, when MI5 officers had come under the suspicion of the British Angletonians, and it was feared that they would recognise the usual surveillance specialists from MI5’s own A Branch.
When I checked my recollection against Andrew’s authorised history, I found this:
Because A4, still in ignorance of the case, could not be used, the Nadgers proposed to conduct the surveillance themselves with assistance of ELMEN indoctrinees in SIS [MI6]. Assistance by SIS, was vetoed by the DDG. Remarkably, and with the full support of the Nadgers, [John] Deverell deliberately ignored [Cecil] Shipp’s ruling (an act of disobedience for which there are few parallels in Security Service history).3
The Mail’s story seems to confirm the Bettaney case as another episode in the perennial MI5/MI6 rivalry, albeit one where relationships were more collegiate at operational level. Deverell’s propensity for going out on a limb with MI6 is particularly interesting in the light of his later role in the Northern Ireland peace process.
Kevin Rawlinson and Caroline Davies, Alastair Campbell proposed legal threat to BBC amid Iraq war coverage row, files reveal, The Guardian, 29 December 2023.
Mary O'Connor, MI5's efforts to stop a report on a rogue spy being seen by MI6 led to Margaret Thatcher limiting Foreign Secretary Geoffrey Howe's use of the document, papers reveal, MailOnline, 29 December 2023.
Christopher Andrew, Defence of the Realm, The Authorized History of MI5, Allen Lane, 2009, p.716.