Marian and His Curious Friend

Neighbors, yes. And spies?

To a casual observer, William Holden Bell appeared to be the very model of a hardworking, leisure-loving Los Angeles suburbanite. A U.C.L.A.-trained radar engineer, Bell, 61, had put in 29 years with Hughes Aircraft Co., a major defense contractor once owned by the late Howard Hughes. Together with his pretty second wife Rita, a Belgian-born Pan American airlines cabin attendant, and her nine-year-old son from an earlier marriage, Bell lived in a fairly ordinary-looking condominium complex in Playa del Rey. It had the usual Southern California accouterments--tennis courts, pools, saunas and Jacuzzis. One of his neighbors there was Polish-born Marian Zacharski, 29, an affable, fast-climbing executive of the Chicago-based Polish-American Machinery Corp. Since both men enjoyed tennis and watching their children play in the pool, there seemed to be nothing extraordinary about the friendship between them. Nothing, that is, until both were arrested last week by the FBI.

What a casual observer would not have noticed about Bell and Zacharski --and their neighbors certainly missed --was a tale out of John le Carre: international espionage, replete with secret passwords, a document-copying camera, clandestine meetings with foreign agents, and payoffs made in gold. Zacharski, the FBI alleged last week after six years of not-so-casually observing him, was an undercover operative for the Polish intelligence service. According to a court affidavit filed by the bureau, he had paid Bell about $110,000 over the past three years to photograph highly classified documents detailing Hughes Aircraft radar and weapons systems. The film was passed to Polish agents and ultimately, it is believed, to the Soviet Union.

The FBI got wind of Bell's intrigues about a year ago and obtained his confession and cooperation in the investigation shortly before his arrest. Bell's motive, said Agent John Hoos, was "definitely monetary." Despite a $50,000 salary, Bell said he had been having "financial problems" when he first met his neighbor about three years ago. Zacharski offered to help him out. Equipped by his new friend with a movie camera capable of taking single-frame exposures, the Hughes engineer began photographing unclassified company documents in exchange for cash and gold coins.

Gradually, Bell later confessed, his position became more compromised, and he was required to record more highly classified plans of advanced radar and weapons systems. Bell's involvement grew deeper still in late 1979, when Zacharski told him he would have to start delivering the film directly to Polish agents overseas. During the next year and a half, Bell made three trips to Austria and Switzerland, where Polish agents would identify themselves to him with the code phrase, "Aren't you a friend of Marian?"

The case of Marian and his friend is just the latest example of what the FBI calls "technology transfer"--the continuing effort by foreign countries, particularly the Soviet Union, to grab American technical know-how in whatever way they can. The methods, says FBI Spokesman Roger Young, "range from the legal and overt to the covert and illegal. Sometimes they are crude to the point of a car pulling up to a technological trade show and just loading up with free literature."

Because of loosely enforced Commerce and State Department regulations, says Young, "only rarely can we catch anyone as calculating as Bell." According to Kenneth Kaiser, an agency counterintelligence supervisor in Chicago, Poland is particularly active in the pirating of corporate data. Says Kaiser: "While the Soviet KGB gets all the press, Polish intelligence is perhaps superior. They, however, could care less about military intelligence; they want economic and scientific secrets. Their objective is to short-circuit development costs and undersell us." And, as the Zacharski case suggests, they are good at finding friends in the right places.

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