Michael Bettaney
In the movies, secret agents are often hard drinking, tough-living renegades, taking huge risks and getting away with it. In reality, men – or women – with a fondness for alcohol make terrible spies, as the case of Michael Bettaney was to prove. But, however useless Bettaney was himself, his superiors were just as bad at their jobs. After all, they cleared him to carry on working even when it was clear that he was hardly suited to keeping his head down. And so, when Betteney was finally convicted of treason, the British Security Service, or MI5, suffered one of the worst public humiliations in history. So, who was this bumbling agent?
Michael Bettaney was born in the English city of Stoke-on-Trent in 1950. Evidently smart, he attended the prestigious Oxford University, an institution that has long provided Britain’s spymasters with new talent. While at Oxford, Bettaney was something of a character. He was known for his hard-drinking ways. More shockingly, he was also open and extremely vocal in his admiration of Adolf Hitler and could often be heard drunkenly singing old Nazi songs in the quads of Pembroke College. Surely this was warning enough that Bettaney would make for a terrible spy? Evidently not as in 1974, he was recruited by MI5 (though, according to some accounts, this was only so that the spy agency could meet a quota on recruiting new agents from blue collar backgrounds).
By all accounts, Bettaney carried on drinking hard even after starting his career in espionage. Famously, he was once caught by police drunkenly singing offensive songs in public, only to shout out loud “You can’t arrest me, I’m a spy!”. Astonishingly, his bosses continued to overlook such indiscretions and, in 1982, they even promoted him to the Soviet desk, giving him access to highly secretive information. For Bettaney, this was an opportunity too good to resist. Soon, he was taking a camera to work, photographing sensitive documents and building up a collection to sell to Russia.
By 1984, Bettaney had amassed enough documents to earn himself a small fortune. He told his bosses he was going on holiday to Austria, bit instead set up a meeting with General Guk, the head of the KGB in London. Unbeknownst to both men, another high-ranking member of the KGB station, a certain Colonel Oleg Gordievsky, was an MI6 agent. Bettaney’s bumbling approach meant word got out, and Gordievsky informed his London handlers. It goes without saying that Bettaney had hardly covered his tracks well, so he had no chance of pleading innocence. He was ultimately sentenced to 23 years in prison, though was released on parole in 1998, his name becoming a byword for bad espionage and terrible management.