Winthrop Pickard Bell, left, with two other prisoners at Germany’s Ruhleben prison camp during the First World War, where he was interned as a postdoctoral student after another student accused him of criticizing the Kaiser. In 1939, Bell was the first to warn about Hitler’s plan to exterminate non-Aryan races throughout the world.Mount Allison University Archives
Jason Bell is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of New Brunswick and author of Cracking the Nazi Code: The Untold Story of Canada’s Greatest Spy.
Citizens of liberal democracies sometimes complain that their governments engage in spying. Secrets can bother people, after all. How dare my government keep secrets from me? But keeping tabs on other countries’ potential threats – that is, spying on them – necessarily involves keeping secrets.
Espionage can be an unsavoury business. Spies break laws that everyone else must follow. Of course, if James Bond dutifully obeyed the speed limit, then he wouldn’t be 007. But when spies illegally snoop on mail and destabilize legitimate governments, it fuels conspiracy theories and threatens civic order.
Is there a defence for secret intel? By looking to the history of espionage, we get a good idea how the Great Game works, and what spycraft contributes to a free society.
The archives of Mount Allison University in Sackville, N.B., hold the recently declassified papers of the Nazi-fighting British superspy Dr. Winthrop Pickard Bell of Halifax. An ambassador, journalist, agent handler and intelligence analyst are usually different people. Bell (no relation) was all of them at once.
By serendipity, I found Bell’s papers 15 years ago. I was interested in his work as a philosopher, but his papers were being held under restriction at Mount Allison. The classification was lifted upon my request, and I soon made exciting finds from his time as a philosophy professor at the University of Toronto in the 1920s. But I was astounded to discover why the archives had been kept classified: He was an MI6 secret agent.
At nearly six feet tall, Bell was handsome, blond and blue-eyed. A muscled outdoorsman and sportsman, he had survived arduous employment as a railway surveyor in the inhospitable northern forests. A Sackville newspaper described his “amazing capacity for hard work” and “studious, friendly, gracious, attractive” personality. The renowned philosopher Edmund Husserl, founder of phenomenology, called him brilliant.
Prime minister Sir Robert Borden, a family friend, knew Bell’s talents and recruited him into MI6 in late 1918. After a whirlwind training, Bell, code-named A12, was sent undercover as a Reuters reporter into Berlin. The German capital had been orderly during the war, but afterward it turned deadly. Militias and spies fought to seize control of the continent as ancient empires crumbled. Bell wrote to MI6 about the situation: “There are cliques here who are in communication with Lenin; others with Denikin [the leader of the antisemitic forces fighting in Russia and Ukraine], each trying to cut the other’s throat.”
He became the first to warn about the antisemites’ war plans to ally with the Soviets, Japan and Italy for revenge against the Allies. The extremists hadn’t yet been named by their enemies as the “Nazis” (they never called themselves such), but Bell knew their essence, two decades before the Axis’s plan for world domination became public. These extremists would be ready, Bell warned MI6 in 1919, to strike in a “generation” – 20 years, give or take.
In late 1919, Bell wrote that the antisemites had grown so powerful that they could seize control of Germany whenever they wanted. They just didn’t want to, yet, because of the country’s disarray. Bell requested his warning be declassified so the extremists could be defeated, but powerful British politicians scandalously blocked the effort.
Winthrop Pickard Bell’s 1919 press card for the German parliament, or Reichstag.Mount Allison University Archives
Two decades later, in 1939, Bell was the first to warn about Hitler’s plan to exterminate non-Aryan races throughout the world.
Through his decades of secret service, he hobbled the Nazis in ways that are only now being revealed. It arguably made the difference between victory and defeat in the Second World War.
Recently, inspired by Bell’s dual careers as philosopher and spy, a question came to mind: Is there a philosophical essence of espionage through the ages, from Bell against the Nazis to the spies fighting Russia today?
The history of language gives us a clue. The root word for spying is spek – Proto-Indo-European for “observe.” Good spies observe closely so that politicians can act wisely. To see requires knowing what reality is, and anticipating what comes next. It is easier said than done. Seeing through a tangle of deceptions makes the metaphysics of espionage a difficult job.
Considering several intel domains helps us see how espionage works: HUMINT, or human intelligence; SIGINT, signals intelligence; and OSINT, open-source intelligence.
Human intelligence refers to sources who risk assassination, torture and execution to reveal the truth behind the veil. Why take the chance? Some of them do it for philosophical reasons, others for love, revenge or money. Whatever their reason, human agents are foundational to effective spying. For instance, Bell’s sources in German military intelligence gave him crucial information about the secret creation of national socialism in the spring of 1919 at Berlin’s Eden Hotel, the headquarters of the antisemitic militia. In the summer of 1919, there were reports of co-ordinated attacks on Jews throughout Germany. By the fall, propaganda posters declared “Kill the Jews!” Meanwhile, a German army spy, corporal Adolf Hitler, infiltrated the same terroristic movement, but for very different reasons.
Bell’s warning let the Allies thwart the antisemites’ earliest attack plans in 1919 against Ukraine and Latvia, forestalling mass genocide. Many times we don’t realize the impact of HUMINT. While the bloodshed that would have made history books was prevented, it is difficult to notice when undetected spies thwart evil by uncovering enemy secrets.
Signals intelligence, SIGINT, intercepts and interprets foreign communications. From Bletchley Park to modern-day hacking, technologies change, but the end product is the same: Clandestinely collected raw data is turned into information by analysts. That information, in turn, informs political decisions.
How does this work in history, and now? In the fall of 1919, Bell intercepted a crucial letter from a reactionary German officer to prove that it was his faction, rather than the German government, that was invading Latvia. If it had been Germany, as it first seemed, the Allies would have had reason to attack Berlin, despite the Versailles peace treaty. The mistake would have destroyed Germany’s fledgling democracy.
And in early 2022, as Russian high command issued secret invasion orders to its front-line officers, Ukraine heard it too. The free world knew a Russian invasion was coming even before ordinary Russian soldiers did.
OSINT, open-source intelligence, has a double nature. It collects intelligence from non-secret sources, and it sends intelligence to the public. The technology has changed over the past century, but the drama remains the same. For instance, in 1939, Bell worked the OSINT beat when he became the first in the world to report Hitler’s plan for worldwide racial exterminations in the Canadian newsweekly Saturday Night, though the editorial process meant months elapsed between Bell’s writing and its eventual publication. His information came not from intercepted communications, but rather from his clear and logical interpretation of Hitler’s and the Nazis’ published and publicly stated words.
Today, owing to the internet, OSINT operatives supply nearly live-time reports of Russian atrocities. It has made a great difference to political opinion from the first weeks of the invasion to today. In early 2022, it seemed prudent to many to appease Vladimir Putin by exchanging Ukrainian territory for peace. But after the massacres of civilians became front-page news, it became clear that Russian troops must be expelled from Ukraine.
Despite their vantage point, spies bear an agonizing burden. When nations such as Putin’s Russia or Hitler’s Germany commit war crimes, it can seem as if everyone who lives there deserves punishment. It isn’t true. Our spies have sources on the inside who are willing to risk their lives to thwart tyrants. But their names are secret, and it can seem to the public as if these sources do not exist.
Where the work of spies ends, ours begins. Through Bell’s papers, we now know the names of German spies who sabotaged the Nazis from within. Of course, we can’t yet know the names of the Russian spies who betray Mr. Putin’s aggression. But we should act as if they exist. It means planning for a postwar peace built on friendship rather than recrimination, envisioning a future that looks more like the Marshall Plan after the Second World War and less like the Treaty of Versailles after the First.
As Bell wrote in one of his secret reports: “On returning from the continent, I find myself asked to prophesy. But surely practical politics consists rather in sizing up a given situation, realizing what tendencies are latent therein, and taking the action calculated to make inevitable, or most probable, that particular development which one regards as most desirable.”
The Great Game will be won the same way today.
One day, we hope, all nations will stand in friendly relations. Then the liberal critics will be right to defund secret intelligence. We will have retired spies to thank for making it happen.