Elizabeth Bentley

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Elizabeth Terrill Bentley (January 1, 1908- November 18, 1963) was an American spy for the Soviet Union from 1938 until 1945. In 1945 she defected from the Communist Party and Soviet intelligence and became an informer for the U.S. She exposed two networks of spies, ultimately naming over 80 Americans who had engaged in espionage for the Soviets.^[1] When her testimony became public in 1948 it became a media sensation and had a major effect on the popular anti-communism of the McCarthy era.^[2]

Contents 1 Early life 2 Espionage activity 2.1 The Silvermaster group 2.2 Conflicts with Soviet spymasters 2.3 Breaking with the Soviets 3 Defection and after 3.1 Public testimony 3.2 Trials and credibility 3.3 Aftermath 4 Named by Bentley 5 Notes 6 References 6.1 Biographies 6.2 Other references 7 External links

[edit] Early life

Elizabeth Bentley was born in New Milford, Connecticut to Charles Prentiss Bentley, a dry-goods merchant, and May Charlotte Bentley, a schoolteacher. Her parents were described as straight-laced old family Episcopalian New Englanders.

She attended Vassar College, graduating in 1930 with a degree in English, Italian, and French. In 1933, while she was attending graduate school at Columbia University, she won a fellowship to the University of Florence. While in Italy, she was briefly attracted to fascism and joined a student fascists group, the Gruppo Universitate Fascisti. While completing her Masters degree at Columbia University, she attended meetings of the American League Against War and Fascism, a Communist front group working to build Americans' opposition to fascism. Although she would later state that she found Communist literature unreadable and "dry as dust,"^[3] she was attracted by the sense of community and social conscience she found with her friends in the league. When she learned that most of them were members of the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA), she joined the party herself in 1932.^[4]

[edit] Espionage activity

Bentley's entry into espionage came at her own initiative. In 1938 she obtained a job at the Italian Library of Information in New York City; an organization that was fascist Italy's propaganda bureau in the United States. She then reported to CPUSA headquarters, telling them of her willingness to spy on the fascists.^[5] The Communists were interested in the information Bentley could provide, and Jacob Golos was assigned to be her contact and controller. Golos was a Russian émigré who had been an American citizen since 1915. At this point, Bentley thought she was spying solely for the American Communist Party. In fact, Golos was one of the Soviet Union's most important intelligence agents in the United States. At the time when he and Bentley met, Golos was involved in planning the assassination of Leon Trotsky, which would take place in Mexico in 1940.^[6] Bentley and Golos soon became lovers, although it would be more than a year before she learned his true name, and, according to her later testimony, two years before she knew that he was working for Soviet intelligence.

In 1940, two years into their relationship, the Justice Department forced Golos to register as an agent of the Russian government under the Foreign Agents Registration Act. This made it dangerous for him to contact and take documents from the network of American spies he controlled, and he gradually transferred this responsibility to Elizabeth. Golos also needed someone to take charge of the day to day business of "U.S. Service and Shipping Corporation" a new company that he and the Communist Party had set up to serve as a front for Golos's espionage activities. Bentley stepped into this role as well. Although she was never directly paid for any of her espionage work, she would eventually earn $800 a month as vice president of U.S. Service and Shipping; a considerable salary for the time.^[7] As Bentley acquired an important role in Soviet intelligence, the Soviets gave her the code name umnitsa, loosely translated as "clever girl" or "Miss Wise." (In some literature it is less correctly translated as "good girl".)

[edit] The Silvermaster group

Most of Bentley's contacts were in what prosecutors and historians would later call the "Silvermaster group," a network of spies centered around Greg Silvermaster that would become one of the most important Soviet espionage operations in the United States.^[8] Silvermaster worked with the Resettlement Administration and later with the Board of Economic Warfare. He didn't have access to much sensitive information himself, but he knew several Communists and sympathizers within the government who were willing to pass information to him, and by way of Elizabeth Bentley, ultimately to Moscow. At this time, the Soviet Union and the United States were allies in the Second World War, and much of the information Silvermaster collected for the Soviets had to do with the war against Germany. It included secret estimates of German military strength, data on U.S. munitions production, and information on the Allies' schedule for opening a second front in Europe. The contacts in Golos and Bentley's extended network ranged from dedicated Stalinists to, in the words of Bentley's biographer Kathryn Olmsted, "romantic idealists" who "wanted to help the brave Russians beat the Nazi war machine."^[9]

[edit] Conflicts with Soviet spymasters

Late in 1943, Jacob Golos suffered a fatal heart attack. After meeting with CPUSA General Secretary Earl Browder, Bentley decided to continue her espionage work, taking Golos's place. Her new contact in Soviet intelligence was Iskhak Akhmerov, the leading NKGB "Illegal Rezident," or undercover spy chief working without a diplomatic cover. Under orders from Moscow, Akhmerov wanted to have Bentley's contacts report directly to him. Bentley, Browder and Golos had been resisting this move, believing that an American intermediary was the best way to handle their sources, and fearing that Russian agents would endanger the American spies and possibly drive them away. With Browder's support, Bentley initially ignored a series of orders that she "hand over" her agents to Akhmerov. Indeed, she expanded her spy network when Browder gave her control over another group of agents. This was the "Perlo group," with contacts in the War Production Board, the United States Senate and the Treasury Department.^[10]

Bentley had been noted as suffering from bouts of depression and having a drinking problem since her days in Florence. Now, despondent and lonely after the death of Golos and under increasing pressure from Soviet intelligence, she began to drink more heavily. She missed work at U.S. Service and Shipping, and neighbors described her as drinking "all the time."^[11]

In early June 1944, Browder gave in to Akhmerov's demands and agreed to instruct the Silvermaster group to report directly to the NKGB. After her defection, Bentley would describe this as the event that turned her against Communism. "I discovered then that Earl Browder was just a puppet, that somebody pulled the strings in Moscow," she would say.^[12] Her biographers suggest that Bentley's objections, rather than being ideological, were more a life-long dislike for being given orders and a sense that the reassignments left her with no meaningful role.^[13] Late in 1944 Bentley was ordered to give up all of her remaining sources, including the Perlo group she had recently acquired. Her Soviet superiors also told her she would have to leave her position as vice president of U.S. Service and Shipping.

[edit] Breaking with the Soviets

Things did not improve for Bentley in 1945. She began an affair with a man whom she came to suspect was either an FBI or a Soviet agent sent to spy on her, and her Soviet contact suggested that she should emigrate to the Soviet Union--a move Bentley feared would end with her execution.^[14] In August of 1945, Bentley went to the FBI office in New Haven, Connecticut and met with the agent in charge. She did not immediately defect, however. Instead she seemed to be "feeling out" the FBI, and it would not be until November that she began to tell her full story to the FBI. In the meantime, her situation continued to worsen. In September she met with Anatoly Gorsky, her latest NKGB controller, and arrived at the meeting drunk.^[15] She became angry with Gorsky, called him and his fellow Russian agents "gangsters," and obliquely threatened to become an informer. She soon realized that her tirade could have put her life in danger, and in fact when Gorsky reported to Moscow his recommendation was to "get rid of her."^[16] Moscow advised Gorsky to be patient with Bentley and calm her down. Only a few weeks later it was revealed that Louis Budenz, editor of the CPUSA newspaper and one of Bentley's sources, had defected. Budenz had not yet revealed any of his knowledge of espionage activity, but he knew Elizabeth Bentley's name and knew she was a spy. Imperiled both sides, Bentley made her final decision to defect on November 6, 1945.

[edit] Defection and after

In a series of debriefing interviews, Bentley gave the FBI over 80 names, including those of 37 federal employees. The FBI already suspected many of the people she named, and some of them had been named by the earlier defector Whittaker Chambers, so the FBI was fairly confident that her story was genuine. They gave her the code name "Gregory," and J. Edgar Hoover ordered the strictest secrecy measures be taken to hide her identity and defection. Unfortunately, Hoover himself notified Sir William Stephenson, head of British Intelligence about Bentley. Through Stephenson, word was spread quickly to Kim Philby, a Soviet agent in Britain's MI6, and thus to Soviet intelligence. The Soviets immediately shut down virtually all of their U.S. espionage operations.^[17] Bentley's NKGB contact Gorsky once again recommended to Moscow that she be "liquidated", and again Moscow rejected the idea.^[18]

This breach not only foiled a year-long attempt by the FBI to have Bentley act as a double agent, but also meant that FBI surveillance of the agents Bentley had named turned up no evidence that could be used to prosecute them.^[19] Some 250 FBI agents were assigned to the Bentley case, following up the leads she had provided and, through phone tap, surveillance and mail openings, investigating people she had named. The FBI, grand juries and congressional committees would eventually interview many of these alleged spies, but all of them would either invoke their Fifth Amendment right not to testify or maintain their innocence.

For J. Edgar Hoover and a few highly placed FBI and army intelligence personnel, the definitive corroboration of Bentley's story came some time in the late 1940s to early 1950s, when the highly secret Venona project succeeded in decrypting some wartime cables sent between Soviet intelligence agents and Moscow. In these cables, Bentley was referred to by the codename she told to the FBI, and several of her contacts and documents she had collected were discussed.^[20][21] However, Venona was considered so secret that Hoover was unwilling to expose it by allowing it to be used as evidence in any trial. In fact, even presidents Roosevelt and Harry Truman were unaware of Venona; when Hoover delivered intelligence reports based on Venona data, the source of the information was not named.

[edit] Public testimony

With the chances of successful prosecution looking unlikely, Hoover chose to give Bentley's information to certain U.S. Congressmen with the understanding that the accused spies would be questioned before congressional committees, and the publicized suspicion and accusations would be sufficient to ruin their careers.^[22] Additionally, Attorney General Tom C. Clark decided to present the Bentley case to a grand jury, although he thought there was little chance they would be able to return any indictments. Bentley's appearances before this grand jury lasted until April 1948, and during this time, some details of her case began to leak to the press. It was Bentley herself who decided to reveal the full story, however. She met with reporters for the New York World-Telegram, and in July 1948 the paper carried a series of front page stories about the "beautiful young blonde" who had exposed ring of spies (the initial articles included no picture of Bentley). Almost immediately, Bentley was subpoenaed to testify at a public hearing of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC).

Descriptions and analyses of Bentley's testimony varied wildly with the politics of the reporter. The strongly anti-communist New York Journal-American described her as a "shapely" "blonde and blue-eyed New Yorker" who "lured" secrets from her sources, while A. J. Liebling of The New Yorker ridiculed her story and called her the "Nutmeg Mata Hari."^[23] For her part, Bentley portrayed herself as naïve and innocent; corrupted by her liberal professors at Vassar and seduced into espionage by Golos.

At the HUAC hearings, Bentley received some corroboration from Whittaker Chambers. Although at this time he was denying any knowledge of espionage activity, he claimed to know that two Bentley contacts, Victor Perlo and Charles Kramer, were Communists. He also supported her charge that Harry Dexter White, a prominent economist who had worked in the Treasury Department, was a Communist sympathizer. Still there was considerable skepticism in some quarters about Bentley's claims. Since some of those she accused were prominent figures in two Democratic administrations, Democrats in particular were eager to have her discredited. President Truman at one point characterized her testimony as a Republican-inspired "red herring." Republicans, in turn, accused Truman of "covering up" Communist espionage. Conflicts of this nature, along with the increasingly publicized hearings of HUAC, were setting the stage for McCarthyism, which would become a central factor in domestic American politics in the 1950s.

[edit] Trials and credibility

Most of the people accused by Bentley invoked the Fifth Amendment and refused to answer her charges. A few, however, specifically denied them. Most notable of these was Harry Dexter White. White was suffering from heart disease, and he died of a heart attack a few days after his testimony before HUAC. Others who denied Bentley's charges were Lauchlin Currie, formerly President Roosevelt's economic affairs advisor, William Remington and William Henry Taylor, both midlevel government economists, Duncan Lee, formerly with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and Abe Brothman, a chemist. In September of 1948, William Remington sued Bentley for libel. In hopes of discrediting her, Remington's attorneys hired private detectives to look into her past. They were able to produce evidence of her alcoholism, her periods of severe depression and a suicide attempt while a student in Florence, that her master's thesis had been written by someone else, and that, by the standards of her day, she had been sexually promiscuous since her college days.

Bentley would give testimony in the trials of three accused spies: The perjury trial of William Remington, a case against Abe Brothman for obstruction of justice, and the famous case of the "atomic spies" Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Bentley's involvement with the Rosenberg case was peripheral. She was used to develop two points for the prosecution: first, the proclivity of Communists to be spies for the Soviet Union; and second, to establish, if only vaguely in the jury's mind, a connection between Julius Rosenberg and Golos. She testified that she would receive calls from a man who identified himself as Julius, after which Golos would go out to meet him. In earlier debriefings with the FBI, Bentley described Julius as an engineer who moved to Norfolk, Virginia. She also described having seen this "Julius" once and said he wore wire-rimmed glasses. Since Julius Rosenberg never moved to Norfolk and never wore wire-rimmed glasses, Bentley's testimony was evidently changed in order to make it fit the prosecution's needs at the Rosenberg trial.^[24]

Bentley's personal life became increasingly tumultuous after her defection. She continued to drink heavily, was involved in car accidents and had a relationship with a man who beat her severely. She also avoided subpoenas on a number of occasions. These incidents, along with generally erratic behavior, led her FBI handlers to worry that she was "bordering on some mental pitfall".^[25] Nevertheless, she was invariably calm and professional on the witness stand, earning praise from the prosecutors whose cases she was supporting. As she repeatedly testified before grand juries, congressional committees and jury trials, however, some details of her story became embellished over time. Information passed to her about a process for manufacturing synthetic rubber that was originally "vague" and "probably of no value" became "super-secret" and "an extremely complicated thing."^[26] She would also assert that her espionage gave her advance notice of the Doolittle raid on Japan and the D-Day invasions, both claims that appeared to be exaggerated.^[27]

In one case, Bentley made an accusation that was apparently a complete fabrication.^[28] During the post-World War II occupation, the United States had control over the currency used in Germany. Plates for this currency were given to the Soviet Union, which then used them to print millions of Marks that Russian soldiers then exchanged for goods and hard currency, costing the U.S. a quarter of a billion dollars.^[29] Bentley claimed in her autobiography and later in 1953 testimony before Joseph McCarthy's senate subcommittee that she had been "able through Harry Dexter White to arrange that the United States Treasury Department turn the actual printing plates over to the Russians."^[30] However, she had not previously mentioned this to the FBI or to any of the committees, grand juries or prosecutors she had testified before. Furthermore, there is no evidence that Bentley had any role in this decision, and in fact, Harry Dexter White's role in the decision is considered questionable.^[31]

[edit] Aftermath

After her defection, calls to give evidence before various bodies would be a fixture in Bentley's life for many years. Occasional consultations with the FBI would continue for the rest of her life. Though she had been a successful executive with a profitable shipping company while she was with the Communists, after her defection she earned a living first through secretarial work and then at a variety of teaching jobs.

She died on December 3, 1963, at the age of fifty-five, of abdominal cancer. Her death passed with minimal notice; the National Review, which had put out a special memorial issue on the death two years earlier of Whittaker Chambers, allotted only a paragraph to Elizabeth Bentley. In the 1990s the Venona transcripts and some Soviet intelligence archives were made available. With these revelations there was finally a definitive and public verification of the basics of Bentley's story, and also a new appreciation of the impact her defection had on Soviet espionage in the United States.

[edit] Named by Bentley

Among the individuals named by Bentley are:

• Rae Elson, an active Communist, and courier of the CPUSA underground, was chosen by Joseph Katz to replace Bentley at the Soviet front organization, U.S. Shipping and Service Corporation.
• Frederick V. Field, Executive Secretary American Peace Mobilization
• Michael Greenberg, Board of Economic Warfare; Administrative Division, Enemy Branch, Foreign Economic Administration; United States Department of State
• Joseph Gregg, Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs; United States Department of State
• Maurice Halperin, Office of Strategic Services (OSS), and later advisor to Secretary of State Dean Acheson and advisor to the United Nations.
• Irving Kaplan, United States Department of the Treasury Foreign Economic Administration; United Nations Division of Economic Stability and Development; Chief Advisor to the Military Government of Germany
• Charles Kramer, Senate Subcommittee on War Mobilization; Office of Price Administration; National Labor Relations Board; Senate Subcommittee on Wartime Health and Education; Agricultural Adjustment Administration; Civil Liberties Subcommittee, Senate Committee on Education and Labor; Senate Labor and Public Welfare Committee; Democratic National Committee
• Bernice Levin, Office of Emergency Management; Office of Production Management
• Harry Magdoff, Chief of the Control Records Section of War Production Board and Office of Emergency Management; Bureau of Research and Statistics, WTB; Tools Division, War Production Board; Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce, United States Department of Commerce; Statistics Division Works Progress Administration
• Jenny Levy Miller, Chinese Government Purchasing Commission
• Robert Miller, Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs; Near Eastern Division United States Department of State
• Willard Park, Assistant Chief of the Economic Analysis Section, Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs; United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration
• Victor Perlo, chief of the Aviation Section of the War Production Board; head of branch in Research Section, Office of Price Administration Department of Commerce; Division of Monetary Research Department of Treasury; Brookings Institution
• Bernard Redmont, head of the Foreign News Bureau Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs
• William Remington, War Production Board; Office of Emergency Management
• George Silverman, Civilian Chief of Analysis and Plans with the Army Air Forces at the the Pentagon.
• William Taylor, Assistant Director of Monetary Research, United States Department of Treasury
• David Weintraub, United States Department of State; head of the Office of Foreign Relief and Rehabilitation Operations; United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA); United Nations Division of Economic Stability and Development

[edit] Notes

[edit] References

Currently, two biographies of Elizabeth Bentley have been published:

[edit] External links

• Truman Presidential Library Oral History Interview with Stephen J. Spingarn
• "The Network", Time, August 9, 1948.