A Treasury of Foolishly Forgotten Americans (21 page)

The witness, wearing a conservative dark dress, walked into the crowded House Ways and Means Committee room on the morning of July 31, 1948, apparently undaunted by the wall of newsreel cameras and blinding klieg lights set up for the occasion. Taking her seat behind a desk with a phalanx of microphones placed upon it, she sat poised and erect, her hands clasped. On a raised platform in front of her sat members of the notorious House Un-American Activities Committee, still basking in the destruction of the “Hollywood Ten” the previous fall. Having ferreted out dangerous subversives in the film industry, they now wanted the names of traitors working within the government so they could, in the words of one committee member, “drive these rats from the federal…payroll.” This witness was there to oblige them.

 

Some called her a kook, and worse, but Elizabeth Bentley was telling the truth when she declared that Soviet spies were operating at the highest levels of government. She knew, because she controlled them. Fifty years after her revelations helped launch America's second Red Scare and all the excesses of the McCarthy era, the release of decrypted Soviet communications confirmed much of what she had to say (while debunking some of her more blatant lies). It was only then that it became clear how the Right had overplayed the Communist menace she exposed, and the left seriously underestimated it. In the meantime, while the Cold War raged, Elizabeth Bentley gradually faded into the footnotes—a curious place for a woman who managed first to betray her country, then outmaneuver the murderous NKGB, manipulate the FBI, and, in the words of one biographer, “initiate one of the most destructive episodes in U.S. political history.”

The life of the “Red Spy Queen,” as Bentley came to be called, had a rather unremarkable beginning. She described herself as a “lonely, withdrawn child” growing up in Connecticut, with overly strict parents who allowed her very little freedom to socialize. As a student at Vassar she was alienated from most of her classmates, one of whom later remembered her as “kind of a sad sack, plain, dull, very teacherlike. She didn't have a single boyfriend…a pathetic person really. Everyone that knew her just called her Bentley. She was a sad and lonely girl.”

However, a dramatic change overcame Elizabeth when she went to Italy in the early 1930s as part of a Columbia University graduate program. The once withdrawn girl became wildly promiscuous and indulged a taste for booze that would plague her for the rest of her life. She also showed herself to be a liar who blithely disregarded the rules, as when she delivered a master's thesis written by someone else. “Throughout her life, she seemed to believe that other people's regulations and laws did not apply to her,” writes biographer Kathryn S. Olmsted. “If egotism is a central ingredient for treason, as Rebecca West has said [in
The New Meaning of Treason
], then Elizabeth Bentley had it in abundance.”

While in Italy, Bentley developed a tendency toward political extremism and joined a student group that agitated for Benito Mussolini's Fascist regime. But she returned home in 1934 to dismal prospects, thanks to the Great Depression, and was introduced to a group of anti-Fascists who warmly welcomed her—particularly since she conveniently altered the details of her time abroad and presented herself as having been a militant opponent of Mussolini. Elizabeth immersed herself in the group's activities and basked in the fellowship she found among them. “Surprisingly enough,” she later wrote, “from then on my life took on a new zest. I seemed to have cast off the old feelings of listlessness and despair.” Before long, she learned that her new friends were not only anti-Fascists, but Communists as well. Comradeship now took on an entirely new meaning.

The Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) was near its peak membership when Bentley joined in 1934, and perfectly legal. With the nation in the midst of the Depression and Adolf Hitler on the rise in Europe, the party's seemingly progressive agenda appealed to many who saw it not only as a bulwark against Fascism, but an enlightened alternative to a demonstratively corrupt and unworkable capitalist system. They looked to the Soviet Union and came to believe that Joseph Stalin had built a model state, free from class strife and geared toward the common good—yet they were unable or unwilling to see that it was a massive fraud costing millions of lives and denying every vestige of freedom. “I have been over to the future,” journalist Lincoln Steffans famously said after a visit to Russia in 1919, “and it works.”

Ideology always meant less to Bentley than a sense of belonging. She found Communist literature tedious and difficult to grasp. “If you ever tried to read Marx, you will understand what I mean,” she later said. “I used to read one page ten times and give up.” Still, she was a dutiful Communist and met all the party's stringent requirements. Her diligence was recognized by the Soviets, who saw great potential in her and several times approached her for underground spy work. Nothing came of it, however, until Elizabeth essentially activated herself and infiltrated Mussolini's propaganda bureau in New York, the Italian Library of Information. This secret work put her in contact with Jacob Golos, who was, according to historian Anthony Cave Brown, “among the cleverest, most mysterious, and most powerful” Communist spies in the United States. He was also the love of Elizabeth Bentley's life.

Golos, born Jacob Raisin,
¹
had been a Bolshevik revolutionary in his native Russia before he escaped the czarist secret police and immigrated to America, where he became a founding member of the U.S. Communist Party. Though an American citizen, Golos remained fanatically loyal to the Soviet Union and performed many valuable services for the regime there, from forging passports to plotting the assassination of Stalin's rival, Leon Trotsky. “Our reliable man in the U.S.,” as intercepted Soviet cables referred to him, also served as the feared enforcer of Stalinist doctrine among American party members. “As with Tomás de Torquemada and Isabella I of Spain [during the Spanish Inquisition],” wrote Anthony Cave Brown, “so with Golos and Stalin.”

Bentley knew little of her contact's power or position, at least initially. All she saw were his “startlingly blue” eyes, as she described them, and his “powerfully built” frame. Soon enough she fell into bed with him and was more than willing to do his bidding. Golos taught his new source all the skills of espionage and reminded her of the sacrifices that were necessary for their great cause. “You are no longer an ordinary Communist, but a member of the underground,” he told her. “You must cut yourself off completely from all your old Communist friends.” This was to ensure that the Fascists at the Italian Library of Information would be convinced of her loyalty. As it turned out, Bentley's job at the library didn't last long. But her undercover work with Golos continued as she assisted him in various capacities. “Elizabeth fairly glowed with satisfaction and self-importance,” writes Kathryn Olmsted. “A few years earlier, she had been an unemployed, unattached virtually friendless young woman. Now she had a powerful, caring lover who was training her to play a critical role in the coming worldwide revolution.”

That critical role came sooner than expected when a Justice Department investigation exposed Golos as a Soviet agent and effectively neutralized him. It was under these circumstances that his lover and protégée took over many of his responsibilities and reached a new level of importance. Now she would control his highly placed sources, some within the U.S. government, and operate a newly created front organization, U.S. Service and Shipping, that provided cover for various espionage activities. With barely a blink, Elizabeth Bentley set off on the road to treason. “I had made my choice,” she later wrote, “and I would stick to it.”

Soviet espionage in the United States was at its most aggressive when Bentley took over for Golos during World War II. Although the USSR was a close ally in the effort to defeat Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, and received billions of dollars in American aid, Stalin nevertheless recognized that the United States would emerge from the conflict as the strongest power in the world. He was determined to avert such an outcome. Messages to and from Moscow, decrypted shortly after the war in a secret operation known as Venona, indicate that he had plenty of assistance in this effort from members of the CPUSA and other so-called “fellow travelers”—a term coined by Stalin to describe people who were not members of the party but who sympathized with the revolution and were willing to work toward it. “While not every Soviet spy was a Communist, most were,” write historians John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr. “And while not every American Communist was a spy, hundreds were.”

Some of the most influential spies of all were controlled, directly and indirectly, by Bentley. Among them were members of what was known as the Silvermaster Group, one of the most productive espionage operations in the United States. Nathan Gregory Silvermaster, an economist with the Agriculture Department and a committed Stalinist, led the spy ring and had powerful sources within the government who willingly assisted him. Two of the most prominent by far were Lauchlin Currie, President Roosevelt's White House economic adviser, and Harry Dexter White, who in 1945 became the second-highest ranking official in the Treasury Department. There were also a number of “singleton” spies who operated outside any organized ring, but reported to Bentley. Some of these lone sources worked for the Office of Strategic Services, forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency; one in particular, Duncan Lee, was actually the personal assistant to the agency's director, William Donovan.

The majority of such sources within the government were motivated by principle, not profit. A few, like Silvermaster, were fanatical Stalinists; most were terribly misguided idealists who foolishly believed they were helping to build a better world—not betraying their country. The Soviet Union was an ally, after all, and as far as some of these men and women were concerned, secrets should be shared among friends. As for Bentley, her motives tended to be a bit less lofty. “She had only the vaguest grasp of Communist doctrine, which of course made it easier for her to abandon it later,” writes Kathryn Olmsted. “For her, spying offered the chance to take risks and break the rules, all the while earning a good income [mostly from U.S. Service and Shipping]. Most important, her supervisor [Golos] loved her and kept her bed warm at night.”

Interestingly, Bentley's career as a spymaster nearly collapsed before it even really began. Her association with Golos attracted the attention of the FBI in 1941, but after only a few months the bureau determined that she was of little importance and the surveillance stopped. Now, having assumed more and more of her lover's responsibilities as his health failed, in addition to his exposure by the Justice Department, she became a powerful agent in her own right—code-named
umnitsa
by the Russians, which loosely translated into “clever girl” or “Miss Wise.” That was a bit of a misnomer, though, for while the Soviets found Elizabeth intelligent, they also thought the way she and Golos operated and controlled their sources was dangerously lax. In fact, they eventually ordered Golos to turn over all his agents, including Elizabeth, to their direct control. He resisted, and after his death in 1943, she continued to defy Moscow.

Bentley was bitter, and drinking hard. She believed that the pressure the Russians put on Golos had killed him, and she was in no mood to bow to their demands that she turn over the Silvermaster Group and some of her other sources. Iskhak Abdulovich Akhmerov, the NKGB agent who replaced Golos, reported his new charge's intransigence to his bosses back home. “She, as a rule, carries out my instructions gladly and reports everything about our people to me,” he wrote. “However, her behavior changes when I ask her to organize a meeting with [Silvermaster]…. Sometimes, by her remarks, I can feel that at heart, she doesn't like us.” The Soviets eventually bypassed Bentley entirely and went to Earl Browder, head of the CPUSA, who agreed to give them the Silvermaster Group. Elizabeth was livid, and her disenchantment would soon lead her to the FBI.

In the meantime, though, she would play a subversive game with the Soviets who she believed had betrayed her. She pretended to repent of her defiant ways and became a model agent. Akhmerov was stunned by the apparent transformation. “Now she tells me that her life is connected with us,” he reported to Moscow, “that she doesn't have any other interests besides her work, and that she loves our country more than anything else.” Bentley also lied to the Russians by reporting detrimental information about the sources she still controlled in an effort to discredit them. This, she later claimed, was to save them. “I would slant the information I had on them to such a degree that they would look like poor risks to the Russian Secret Police, who perhaps would drop them,” she wrote. Revenge, however, was the more likely motive.

“As the end of World War II and its grand alliance approached,” writes Kathryn Olmsted, “one of the top Soviet agents in the United States was an unstable, alienated, mendacious American who drank too much and was doing all she could to sabotage her own agent network. She was not, in short, the perfect spy.”

Antoly Gorsky, chief of NKGB operations in America, became Bentley's final handler and the one she came to truly fear. There was something about this hardened Stalinist that made “shivers run up and down your spine,” she later recalled. Gorsky feared Elizabeth, too. Her undisciplined approach to espionage was simply too risky to tolerate. “I'm afraid our friend Golos was not too cautious a man,” Gorsky told her, “and there is the risk that you, because of your connection with him, may endanger the apparatus.” Elizabeth was ordered to give up the rest of her contacts, quit her job at U.S. Service and Shipping, and move out of the apartment she had shared with Golos. The final breach in the poisoned relationship came when she started sleeping with a man who claimed after a few dates to be a federal agent. He wasn't, as it turned out, but Gorsky had no way of knowing that. Bentley, he reported, “is a serious and dangerous burden for us here.” All too aware of what could happen to anyone the NKGB found burdensome, Elizabeth finally came in from the cold.