BENNETT, LESLIE JAMES• 41acrimonious correspondence and a breaking of relations. Later SOE
was to be accused of attempting to discredit Lepage.
After the war, SIS retained its links to the Surete ́d’Etat and the
Service Ge ́ne ́ral du Renseignement de la Se ́curite ́(SGR) and occa-
sionally mounted joint operations, usually of a technical nature,
against Soviet Bloc targets.BELL, WALTER.Educated at Tonbridge, Walter Bell was called to
the bar at the Inner Temple before going to theSecret Intelligence
Service’s New York station under consular cover in 1935 as an assis-
tant to thepassport control officer, Captain Sir James Paget. In
1940 he was posted to Mexico City as head of station, and the follow-
ing year returned to New York to join the newly createdBritish Se-
curity Coordination. From 1942 until the end of World War II, Bell
was in London, but in 1946 he was sent back to the United States,
this time to the Washington, D.C., station. In 1948 Bell married the
daughter of General Carl Spaatz and transferred toMI5to go to Nai-
robi in 1949 assecurity liaison officer(SLO). In 1952 he was ap-
pointed SLO in New Delhi, and then four years later worked for the
newdirector-general of the Security Service,Roger Hollis, as his
personal assistant. After only a year atLeconfield House, Bell went
to Nassau as SLO, and in 1961 returned to Nairobi until 1967, when
he retired to London.
BENNETT, LESLIE JAMES.Having served in theRoyal Corps of
Signalsduring World War II—stationed with 101 Special Wireless
Section of theSpecial Wireless Groupdetachment in Malta, then at
Heliopolis in Egypt, and finally Italy as an noncommissioned offi-
cer—Jim Bennett joinedGCHQin July 1946. In October 1947, hav-
ing supervised the absorption of the remnants of the Radio Security
Service into GCHQ, Bennett was posted to Istanbul to establish an
intercept site inside the consulate general, whereKim Philbywas
theSecret Intelligence Servicehead of station. After seven months
Bennett returned to England as a section head and secretary of the
Counter-Clandestine Committee.
In 1950 Bennett volunteered for a posting as traffic liaison officer
at Melbourne, but after a few months was reassigned to GCHQ’s in-
tercept station inHong Kong, where he married an Australian teleg-