BETTANEY, MICHAEL• 49by SIS. In his submissions to the bankruptcy courts, he consistently
described himself as an intelligence officer, with the intention of em-
barrassing SIS, and he made no attempt in his memoirs,The Venlo
Incident, to shield his former employers from criticism. He died in
Calne, Wiltshire, in 1978 aged 93, having donated his carefully con-
structed, but largely fictitious, diaries to the Imperial War Museum.
They dated back to his adventures with carrier pigeons and observa-
tion balloons on the Western Front, but the material concerning his
networks of agents in postwar Germany was almost entirely fabri-
cated.
The tragedy of Best’s case was that he was indeed innocent of the
charge that he had cooperated with his Nazi interrogators. It was only
much later that SIS learned that another SIS officer,Dick Ellis, had
spilled secrets to theAbwehrbefore the war, and this was the infor-
mation that was presented to Best and Stevens separately for corrobo-
ration during their incarceration. Each assumed the other had been
responsible for supplying the information, little realizing that it had
been neither. Ellis confessed to his treachery, citing financial hard-
ship as a motive, only in 1966.BETTANEY, MICHAEL.Michael Bettaney was recruited to join the
Security Service in 1975 when he left Oxford, where he had gained
a second-class degree in English at Pembroke College. Once ap-
proved for employment byMI5, he worked in F Branch until June
1976, when he was posted to Belfast. There, he was slightly injured
in a car bomb attack. Two years later, Bettaney returned to London
to participate in the newly created antiterrorist branch. In December
1982 he was transferred to the Sovietcounterespionagesection, and
it was while he was serving in this highly compartmented unit that he
made three anonymous approaches to the KGBrezidentin London,
Arkadi Gouk, and offered to supply him with MI5 secrets.
Although Bettaney subsequently claimed to have been inspired by
political motives, the reality is that he had received a final warning
following a criminal conviction for fare-dodging and an arrest for
being drunk in the street. A further offense of using an out-of-date
railway season ticket followed, and although Bettaney had failed to
declare it, as he was required to do, he knew it would be disclosed
during his next routine security screening, which would inevitably
lead to his dismissal.