It so happens that this story has since moved on slightly since it was last posted. Two years ago, Michael Bettaney died. I knew him briefly - after he got out of jail, he moved into small-group communist politics, where we crossed paths.
The stuff about his incompetence as a spy is rather overstated. By the time I knew him, he certainly had a drink problem, which may for all I know have predated his long prison sentence (much of it in solitary). The truth is of course that MI5 was not the only intelligence agency with double agents and he was shopped by one such British KGB mole, Oleg Gerdievsky. One rather suspects that the fate of the cold war did not hang in the balance.
The underlying point - that counterintelligence has very often proved to be a spectacular waste of human effort - stands, although that is hardly a reason to be insouciant about mass surveillance.
The stuff about his incompetence as a spy is rather overstated. By the time I knew him, he certainly had a drink problem, which may for all I know have predated his long prison sentence (much of it in solitary). The truth is of course that MI5 was not the only intelligence agency with double agents and he was shopped by one such British KGB mole, Oleg Gerdievsky. One rather suspects that the fate of the cold war did not hang in the balance.
The underlying point - that counterintelligence has very often proved to be a spectacular waste of human effort - stands, although that is hardly a reason to be insouciant about mass surveillance.