He trained as a Russian interpreter during his National Service from 1956 to 1958, and studied Oriental Languages at Pembroke College, Cambridge, specialising in Arabic and Persian.
After he graduated, Bethell worked for the Times Literary Supplement from 1962 to 1964, and was a script editor for the BBC Radio Drama department from 1964 to 1967.
Professor emeritus at Georgetown University Peter Reddaway describes in some detail the role of Bethell and his close acquaintance Alexander Dolberg in "sabotaging samizdat".
The BBC and Radio Liberty were offered the same text by Dolberg (under his pen name "David Burg") but, unlike The Sunday Times, did not agree to publicize it.
At a time when prominent writers, scientists and public figures throughout the USSR had openly signed letters of protest against the January 1968 trial of Alexander Ginzburg and Yury Galanskov,[2] and eight rights activists had demonstrated on 25 August that year on Red Square against the invasion of Czechoslovakia a few days earlier,[3] the "anonymous protest" was regarded, at the least, as a hoax.
One consequence of this debacle was that Michael Scammell rather than Nicholas Bethell was chosen in 1971 to be director of Writers and Scholars International,[4] the new NGO which founded the quarterly Index on Censorship periodical.
Bethell brought a libel suit against Private Eye and resigned as a whip in January 1971 to pursue the litigation.
The controversy denied him a place on Edward Heath's list of Conservative candidates to be appointed to the European Parliament.
Heath refused to discuss the matter with him, but government papers released in 2002 under the 30-year rule revealed that Bethell's contacts with people in Communist Russia and Poland were thought to be a security risk.
He set up the "Freedom of the Skies" in 1980, campaigning to force airlines to reduce their prices which he believed were artificially inflated by a cartel.
At the same election, his second wife Bryony was an unsuccessful candidate on the Conservative Party list for the South East England seat.
He used his European post to campaign for the human rights of dissidents in the Soviet bloc, including Andrei Sakharov and Anatoly Sharansky.
After the fall of Communism, he continued to support critics of the Russian government, such as Vladimir Gusinsky and Alexander Litvinenko.