Thanks to intelligence provided by Oleg Gordievsky, an exceptionally committed and able British agent in the KGB’s London residency, Bettaney was caught and later sentenced to 23 years’ imprisonment. Fortunately for MI5, the suspicious Guk interpreted this and other approaches from Bettaney as a deception operation. On Easter Sunday 1983 Bettaney pushed through the letter-box in Holland Park of the KGB resident (station chief), Arkadi Guk, an envelope containing the case put by the Security Service for expelling three Soviet intelligence officers in the previous month, together with details of how all three had been detected. The greatest potential threat to MI5 counter-espionage operations in the later Cold War came from Michael Bettaney, a disaffected, heavy-drinking officer in its own ranks. By 1986, according to Chinese defectors, Beijing rated Britain as its fourth most important source of S&T. During the final years of the Cold War there was a dramatic increase in Chinese S&T operations. MI5 officers manning an observation post tracking the movements ofĪs Soviet intelligence made a limited post-FOOT recovery, its main achievements seem to have been in the field of scientific and technological espionage (S&T), though its successes in Britain were far fewer than in the United States. However, the KGB’s contacts with probably its most important British agent in the 1970s, Geoffrey Prime, who worked at GCHQ until 1977, were unaffected by the FOOT expulsions because, since his recruitment in Berlin, he had been run exclusively outside the UK. For several years most Soviet agents in Britain were put on ice and the KGB was forced to ask Soviet Bloc and Cuban agencies to help plug the intelligence gap. in the number of Russian intelligence officers threatened to swamp our then meagre resources.’įOOT made Britain a hard espionage target for Soviet intelligence for the first time. Over the previous two decades, as the Service acknowledged, ‘The steady and alarming increase.
It followed a long campaign by the Security Service to persuade successive governments of the need for the expulsions. Operation FOOT, the expulsion of 105 Soviet intelligence officers from London in 1971, marked the major turning point in Cold War counter-espionage operations in Britain. By Professor Christopher Andrew, author of "The Defence of the Realm".
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