Jimmy Burns, who was Walter Bell?
When Water Bell died in January 2004, aged ninety-four, the details of his life-not least of his professional career in the British secret services during a defining period in the history of modern espionage and security-remained a well-kept secret. An obit that appeared in The Times on the 4th March 2004 provided some tantalising clues that there might be more to his life than the vague references of ‘foreign service’-after all, he had been decorated with the US Medal of Freedom in 1946 for wartime services in support of the Allied cause and, close to retirement in 1967, was appointed Companion to the Order of St Michael and St George (CMG), an honour reserved for those who make a significant contribution to the national interest.
It was only thanks to the personal papers that his widow Tattie Spaatz-daughter of the US wartime general Carl Spaatz-made available to me, that I began to build a clearer story of his far from ordinary life.
Descended from the founder of the News of the World, Bell was the wayward youngest son of an Anglican vicar and his wife, born into Edwardian England and spending his private school days in the run-up to World War One rebelling against his background, before maturing as a consummate networker. In his youth,he formed part of a generation that embraced left -wing politics as a reaction to the rise of fascism in the 1930’s , but at the same time developed a network of influential mentors, thanks to whom he was recruited by M16 in the autumn of 1934 when was studying law and also attending lectures by the political theorist and economist Professor Harold Laski at the London School of Economics. In 1935 Bell began his professional career at deputy chief of the MI6 station in New York which ran under the cover name of the British Passport Office.
Bell joined the intelligence services firstly in MI6, then later MI5. He’s not hugely well-known, but why did you want to write about him?
An intriguing character that I thought deserved to be better recognised. It is quite rare to have someone whose professional career had him working as an MI6 and then as an MI5 officer, and involved in WW2 and the Cold War years-the latter during the twilight of empire when British intelligence played an important role in the process of decolonisation and countering Soviet aims in Africa, India, and the Caribbean.
It is also quite rare for a British intelligence operative to have left paper trail providing a very personal insight into how he went about working for his masters, while also retaining a mind of his own, providing, through his notes, and letters to trusted family members and friends, a very human dimension to his spycraft-worthy of a good novel, but actually a revelatory historical narrative of a very intimate kind.
As I began to delve into his papers, I realised that Walter Bell was not one-dimensional, but complex, always trying to make sense of, and often challenge, the politics of his time, while searching for greater meaning to his life, which he found when he converted to Roman Catholicism in the early 1950’s. Which is not say that Bell ever allowed himself to be dogmatic or doctrinal-indeed I think his Catholic faith only made him intolerant when it came to Stalin and the totalitarian and essentially dehumanised Communists state which others of his generation, like the Cambridge Five, were so easily seduced by, because of their wayward idealism.
The real-life character of Walter Bell, as it unravels in my book A Faithful Spy, is an amalgam of his wartime faith-stirred MI6 colleague Graham Greene and the quintessential literary archetypal Cold War spy that John le Carré came to write about in his fiction, a flawed individual trying to find meaning in a morally compromised world.
Like Nat, the main protagonist of le Carré’s novel Agent running in the field, Bell suffered from the black dog of depression at times, or in MI6 parlance ‘camel’s-back syndrome– as le Carré describes it, ‘when the things you’re not allowed to talk about suddenly outweigh the things that you are, and you down temporarily under the strain.’
We’ve seen a recent publication that makes a strong case that the real special relationship is the intelligence one between the UK & US. Was that Bell’s experience?
Bell served as an MI6 officer in the US (New York and Washington) and in Europe (based in London) during a critical period in the creation of the Anglo-American intelligence relationship leading up to World War Two and during the war itself, the old empire giving way to a new global giant, with internal powers struggled that he endeavoured to defuse. Of course, Churchill and Roosevelt provided the political and strategic leadership, and the military alliance in major wartime operations like Operation Torch and Operation Overlord was also critical, but I think Bell’s experience showed the huge importance the UK played in not only cooperating with the FBI but also with the US’s first foreign intelligence organisation, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of the CIA.
During the Cold War, Bell continued to develop close ties with his America friends in intelligence, in countering Soviet influence in places where he served with MI5, such as Kenya, India, and the Caribbean.
Even after he formally retired from British government service in the late 1960’s Bell was part of a network of former spies and agents who drifted into the media, academia, and think-tanks, on both sides of the Atlantic.
He was acquainted with the Cambridge Spy Ring. Do we know what he thought of them?
He met Philby, when they both worked for MI6 in wartime London, who he admired professionally without suspecting he was working for Moscow. He went on a pub crawl with Guy Burgess who he disliked the more he drank. In 1946, he coincided with Donald Maclean in the British embassy in Washington and again never suspected his treachery. Bell later caught up with Maclean in Cairo when Maclean went on one of his alcoholic binges which had become destructive and diplomatically embarrassing.
The transition to an independent Kenya under Jomo Kenyatta was a very difficult one. What did Bell find there?
Bell was posted to Nairobi in the late 1940’s after joining MI5. He thought Kenyatta’s politics was the product of years of injustice committed by local settlers and the colonial authorities and saw in the demonised ‘terrorist’ behind the Mau Mau uprising a future African nationalist leader. When Bell returned to Kenya in the early 1060’s, it was with MI5’s blessing, as security adviser to Kenyatta’s first post-independence government.
He had first hand experience of decolonisation during the 1960s – what role did he play?
Bell was involved in developing a close liaison between Kenyatta and the British on intelligence and security matters. As the Cold War took hold in Africa, the partnership was based on a mutual interest in dealing with the more radical Marxist threats to the new independent government posed by some of Kenyatta’s political rivals. It’s worth noting that in a previous posting in Delhi during the 1950’s, Bell’s MI5 role had him developing close intelligence links with Nehru’s chief spy B.N.Mullick (director of the Intelligence Bureau of India 1950-1964), cooperating in countering Soviet influence.
Cairncross was supposedly the last of the Cambridge spies to be uncovered (Oleg Gordievsky fingered him in 1990). Did Bell believe it, and what do you think?
I didn’t come across any evidence that Bell knew Cairncross although he would have been almost certainly questioned by his British masters about what he knew about with the other Cambridge spies. What I did discover was the extent to which Bell was involved in a ‘damage limitation’ exercise over the Cambridge Five affair led by his friend Dick White, who during different periods served as head of MI5 and MI6 chief during the Cold War, to counter media allegations against the senior MI5 officer Guy Liddell and Roger Hollis, the MI5 chief from 1956 to 1965, that they were Russian moles.
I think Bell showed himself well ahead of his generation of spies, recruited on the 1930’s, by arguing in a paper he wrote in 1980 that the security and intelligence services should engage in a reasonable public discussion about their role-even if his defence of Liddell and Hollis showed the intelligence community determined to protect the reputation of one of their own when they perceived it to be unfairly attacked.
As Bell put it, and I believe he was being sincere, thanks to the exposure of the Cambridge spies, ‘old assumptions were shattered, and loyalty was no longer assumed, no matter who presented themselves for recruitment in government service. The background checks on recruits to sensitive area in Whitehall were intensified.’
My own view on Bell is that while his career was overshadowed by the betrayal of the Cambridge Five, he personally remained faithful to the values of Western democracy on both sides of the Atlantic. He knew which side he was on, even if he recognised the crooked timber of humanity on both the Soviet and the ‘free world’ side of the Berlin wall.
Did Bell leave a legacy in the intelligence services?
Bell was careful not to reveal sensitive operations and agents in the papers he kept in his personal archive which I based my book on. But what I think his papers did provide me with was colourful and incisive details of the human context-both political and social-that he operated in and which I hope makes his biography a worthwhile read.
As the former MI6 chief Sir Richard Dearlove commented on reading my book A Faithful Spy: ‘Espionage as and when it happens is microcosmic, with the bigger picture immersed in the human drama of spying. My guess is that Bell left his archive because he wanted the larger significance of his career to be his legacy, and the result is an important and possibly unique contribution to the 20th century history of British intelligence.’
Did you meet him (Bell) before his death in 2004?
Yes , several times during an enduring friendship that began in 1986 over lunch at the Travellers club.
What’s next for you?
I am researching a book on Churchill and Spain
Any thoughts on Barca’s difficulties?
It’s a club that has been badly managed and over politicised.
Maradona or Messi?
Read my books The Hand of God and Cristiano & Leo.
Jimmy Burns is a journalist and writer and the author of The Faithful Spy: The Life and Times of an MI6 and MI5 Officer.
