A Treasury of Foolishly Forgotten Americans (22 page)

 

On August 23, 1945, the week after World War II ended, Elizabeth Bentley walked into the FBI offices in New Haven, Connecticut. It was only a tentative step, however. She said little of substance at that first meeting, and was so vague that the agent in charge had no idea that the most significant American agent of Soviet espionage was sitting right in front of him. And it was evident the following month that she wasn't quite ready to sever her ties to the past when she returned to her job at U.S. Service and Shipping, mostly for the money.

This was against express Soviet orders and led to a drunken confrontation with Antoly Gorsky, during which Elizabeth made some rather unwise threats that left her even more vulnerable to reprisal. “Judging by her behavior,” Gorsky wrote to Moscow, “she hasn't betrayed us yet, but we can't rely on her. Unfortunately, she knows too much about us.” There was only one remedy left, he concluded, “the most drastic one—to get rid of her.”

Bentley knew she was “living on borrowed time,” as she later related. But that's not what drove her back to the FBI. One of her sources, Louis Budenz, editor of the Communist newspaper the
Daily Worker,
suddenly left the party amidst a flurry of publicity, and Elizabeth feared he would expose her. As a preemptive maneuver she went back to the feds, but was still less than forthcoming. She said that “she was closely tied in with people of whom she had suspicions and whom she believed to be Russian espionage agents,” according to bureau files, but gave few details. The FBI still had no idea about who they were dealing with. It was only when Lem Harris, a leading fund-raiser for the CPUSA, questioned the finances of U.S. Service and Shipping and demanded the return of the $15,000 the party had invested in the front organization that she became indignant and made her third trip to the FBI. This time she told all.

“There wasn't any question in my mind that we hit gold on this one,” agent Don Jardine told Kathryn Olmsted in 2001. Thanks to earlier revelations by another Soviet agent, Whittaker Chambers, the bureau already had suspicions about a number of sources named by Bentley, including Harry Dexter White and Lauchlin Currie. But the information was fragmented, in part due to the fact that the bureau had failed to give much weight to what Chambers had to say. “We had files here, there, and everywhere,” Jardine said, “and [Bentley] kind of sewed it all together.” In addition to the sources she knew personally, Elizabeth also offered clues to ones she had heard about from Golos and others. One turned out to be Alger Hiss, a high-ranking State Department official also named by Whittaker Chambers; another was the atomic spy Julius Rosenberg.

By December 1945, seventy-two special agents were working on the biggest espionage case in the FBI's history. Bentley herself was part of the effort, although she didn't have much choice in the matter. The plan was for her to act as if she were still loyal to the Soviets and thus help the bureau gather critical evidence against the sources she had named. Only problem was, the Russians already knew that she had turned courtesy of Kim Philby, chief of Soviet counterintelligence for the British Secret Service and, as it turned out, a major Soviet spy.
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As a result of Philby's disclosure, all Soviet espionage in the United States ceased. The Russians acted as if they were unaware, however, which left the FBI to conduct a massive investigation that was stymied at every turn.

The bureau faced an almost insurmountable problem. After a year of investigation, they had no evidence of illegal activity against anyone Bentley had named. Any potential prosecutions would “hang by the thread” of her testimony alone, noted an aide to FBI director J. Edgar Hoover; she had no documents or other proof to back up her allegations. “[T]he case is nothing more than the word of Gregory [the bureau's code name for Bentley] against that of the several conspirators,” wrote one of Hoover's top lawyers. The FBI's frustration was perhaps best summarized in a memo by Louis Nichols, the bureau's public relations chief: “Obviously this whole group is wrong and as far as I am concerned they could be shot, but that is not legal proof.”

Hoover's solution was to secretly feed Bentley's allegations to the notorious House Un-American Activities Committee, which would serve two desirable purposes: First, it would expose the traitors within the government; even better, it would embarrass President Harry Truman, whom the FBI director not only despised, but sincerely believed was criminally soft on Communism. Attorney General Tom Clark pursued a different course and presented the Bentley case to a grand jury. Though there was little chance of any indictments, Clark wanted to cover himself should questions arise as to what the Justice Department had done with the information Bentley provided. As one internal memo noted, “it would be possible to answer by saying that the Grand Jury had considered the evidence and had not deemed it sufficient to justify criminal action.”

While the Justice Department fretted over the case, Elizabeth was eager to profit from it. Her first thought was to write a book, but the FBI quickly put a stop to that idea. Undeterred, she approached two reporters from the
New York World-Telegram,
a staunchly anti-Communist newspaper. “This was one of the most fateful choices of her life,” writes Olmsted. “She had decided to spy; she had decided to defect; and now she decided to tell the world about it. None of these decisions worked out well for her, but in many ways the last one was the most disastrous.”

Hoover was furious when he learned what Bentley had done. “This certainly is outrageous acting upon part of informant,” he jotted in the margin of one memo. Though Elizabeth assured the FBI that she had “absolutely made no proposition toward developing her story on a commercial basis,” within a few weeks she signed a contract with reporter Nelson Frank to ghostwrite her autobiography and serialize the story in the
World-Telegram
. Frank himself promised the bureau that nothing would be published while the grand jury was still in session. But when the
New York Sun
made an oblique reference to a mysterious female informant, he wasn't about to jeopardize his scoop.
RED RING BARED BY BLOND QUEEN
, read the
World-Telegram
's front page headline on July 21, 1948, and an equally sensational story followed. Bentley was unnamed in the article, but described as a “svelte and striking blond”—a generous representation of a middle-aged woman who, on a good day, could only be described as frumpy. The information she had given the FBI was exaggerated as well. Over the days that followed, the paper continued to run stories about the alluring spy queen, always protecting her identity until Frank felt it would be most advantageous to reveal it. He hoped to manage Elizabeth's debut by arranging her first public appearance before Senator Homer Ferguson's respected Committee on Expenditures in the Executive Departments, thus avoiding the Red-baiting House Un-American Activities Committee and some of its more unsavory members. Yet HUAC got her name anyway—probably from an FBI leak—and promptly subpoenaed her.

J. Parnell Thomas, the Republican chairman of the committee, was eager to show how the Democratic administrations of Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman were, as he put it, “hand in glove with the Communist Party.” Bentley seemed only too eager to help him prove it by burnishing her story with lies and distortions. She falsely testified, for example, that sources within the government provided her with advance notice of the D-Day invasion. “Elizabeth's testimony did not need any embellishments,” writes Kathryn Olmsted. “Her true story was scary enough. In her eagerness to please the congressmen and generate headlines, though, she was not satisfied with the truth.”

Bentley's appearances before Congress at the end of July 1948 did indeed generate headlines. But if she expected to emerge as a heroine, she was no doubt disappointed. Certainly the Right celebrated her revelations, which, in an election year, provided excellent ammunition against President Truman and the New Deal Democrats. Yet the anti-Communist press also caricatured her as a temptress who seduced secrets out of treasonous Reds in the government. The Left, on the other hand, dismissed her altogether. Her charges, writes historian Earl Latham, were treated as the “imaginings of a neurotic spinster.”

The Red Spy Queen's image was hardly enhanced after Harry Dexter White, the prominent Treasury official whom she accused of disloyalty, passionately defended himself before HUAC and then dropped dead of a heart attack three days later. Many believed Bentley's charges were baseless and drove a good man to his grave. Other men and women she named vigorously denied her charges as well. One in particular, an official with the War Production Board by the name of William Remington, would harass her for years with libel charges and batter her reputation with revelations his lawyers uncovered about her sordid past. Still, the fact remained that Remington, like the others, was indeed guilty of espionage.

Stories started to circulate, some of them from the highest levels of the Truman administration, that Elizabeth was a lunatic. Yet her charges were soon bolstered by Whittaker Chambers. His testimony before Congress, which was prompted by Bentley's own, verified much of the undocumented information she had provided. (This in addition to his startling revelations about Alger Hiss, the State Department official Whittaker famously accused of espionage.)

Decoded Soviet communications from the Venona project also proved much of what Elizabeth said. But Venona remained a secret to all but a few, and would remain so until 1995. Even President Truman was unaware of it. Had the president known, he might not have been so quick to dismiss Elizabeth Bentley and what he termed “the Communist bugaboo.”
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Furthermore, as John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr point out in their study of Venona, if the project had been made public, the very real threat of Communist infiltration of the government probably would not have been reduced to the dangerous partisan rantings of the Far Right. Conversely, the limits of the conspiracy would have been clearly defined by Venona, and such demagogues as Senator Joseph McCarthy would have been denied the platform to smear loyal Americans including Secretary of State George Marshall and others who he claimed were part of “a conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man.” With the secrets of Venona well concealed, one of the ugliest chapters in American history began.

Bentley became the avenging angel of the Right as she made more appearances before Congress and various grand juries investigating Communist infiltration of the government. Her testimony thrilled newfound pals such as Joe McCarthy, but she continued to embellish it with distortions and fabrications that further inflamed the Red hysteria she had helped ignite. For instance, just as she had earlier lied about the D-Day invasion, she also falsely claimed that a source inside the Pentagon had given advance notice of General Jimmy Doolittle's famous raid on Tokyo in 1942. “Yes,” she declared, “we knew about that raid, I guess, a week or ten days ahead of time.” Over time, her tales would become even more fantastic.

Although she was always cool and collected when she testified, Elizabeth was a drunken, paranoid mess out of the spotlight. The FBI worried that she was “bordering on some mental pitfall,” as one agent put it. Unstable as she was, however, she remained a valuable asset to the bureau and had to be protected, particularly since she would be a key prosecution witness in several important trials—most notably that of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.
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Bentley knew the FBI needed her and, as a result, her demands for cash and other perks became increasingly outrageous. “You should inform her,” an exasperated J. Edgar Hoover wrote in a memo, “that any further trouble may necessitate our terminating any further weekly payments to her.” Yet no matter how irksome she became, the bureau continued to compensate its star witness.

Profit was always a major motivating factor for Elizabeth. She went on what she hoped would be lucrative lecture tours (they weren't), and converted to Catholicism to boost her anti-Communist credentials and thus her income potential. (Her new faith did little to improve her morals, however: She was dismissed from a teaching job at Mundelein, a Catholic college in Chicago, for her rather uninhibited lifestyle.) Bentley also hoped to make money from her autobiography,
Out of Bondage,
a book many found to be a bit disingenuous. “She decided to portray herself as a sort of Communist June Cleaver,” writes Kathryn Olmsted—a devoted companion led down the path to treason by the man she loved. “It is very hard to decide whether to treat
Out of Bondage
…as tragic, or as ludicrous, or as terrifying, or as pathetic,” journalist Joseph Alsop wrote in one review. Whatever it was, the book was definitely not a bestseller.

Success from the Red Scare continued to elude Elizabeth, leaving her broke, demoralized, and as dependent as ever on the FBI. The bureau needed to protect her “credibility as a witness,” as it was noted in her file, and repeatedly extricated her from the endless problems she created for herself. These included an abusive boyfriend, several car crashes, and debts to the Internal Revenue Service.
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On one occasion, when she demanded that the FBI pick her up at her home in Connecticut and drive her to her doctor in New York, an agent took note of her unsettled state: “Throughout the trip from Madison to New York City she was rambling and incoherent in her speech…engaged in backseat driving, weeping, sleeping, fingering a small crucifix, chain-smoking and was quarrelsome and demanding throughout the trip.” Still, she was a great witness, and whatever problems she caused the FBI were mitigated by her compelling testimony.