Ulric Bell was born in 1891. During the First World War he became friends with Cordell Hull. After the war he became a journalist working for Louisville Courier-Journal. In 1940 Barry Bingham employed both Ulric Bell and Herbert Agar at the newspaper and continued to pay both of their salaries while they helped run Fight for Freedom, an organization funded by the British Security Coordination.

According to Thomas E. Mahl, the author of Desperate Deception: British Covert Operations in the United States, 1939-44 (1998): "Barry Bingham was deeply involved with intelligence and attacks on the isolationists. From the spring of 1941 he was ostensibly in the navy, but attached to Fiorello La Guardia's Office of Civilian Defense.... From the over one hundred surviving pieces of correspondence in Barry Bingham's file in the Fight for Freedom Papers it is evident that after Bell went back to Fight for Freedom, Bingham organized these anti-isolationist speakers for Fight for Freedom." One document asks Bell to help organize the office "in regard to the whole subject of offensive publicity to offset the propaganda of the Wheeler's Nye's, Lindbergh's, etc."

During t he Second World War Bell became executive director of Fight for Freedom. One of his main roles was to persuade movie producers to make films for interventionist propaganda. After the war he worked for Spyros P. Skouras of Twentieth Century Fox.

Ulric Bell died in 1960.