Elizabeth
Bentley – Clever Girl
Mark here, and welcome to Intelligence and Society, a product of
Kensington Security Consulting. In this lesson, we will examine the
torturous life of Elizabeth Bentley, who shocked America when she confessed to
a hidden life of Soviet espionage. She held several monikers, including Clever
Girl and, my favorite, The Blonde Bombshell from Vassar College. Her bombshell
status is open to dispute but not the impact of a her revelations of Soviet
espionage on American society. Her verified disclosures of vast Soviet spy
networks shook American counterintelligence out of its complacency and directed
it toward exposing and undermining Soviet intelligence and active measures in
the United States.) As we will see, her testimony to the F.B.I. in the
fall of 1945 laid the groundwork for Congressional investigations into Soviet
penetration of the U.S. government and the motion picture industry. So, who was
Elizabeth Bentley?
Elizabeth Bentley was born of genteel New England stock in 1907 and was
raised by Republican, Episcopalian parents. Her parents, particularly her
mother, advocated for the poor. Both died prematurely before 1925.[i]
The Soviets would give her the code name Clever Girl, and she was clever
enough to earn a half scholarship to Vassar and continue to Columbia and the
University of Florence for graduate work. Later in life, she reminisced about the
“humanistic” education a Vassar "complete pushover
for communism." At Vassar, she was a mediocre student, earning low grades.
Throughout her life, people described her as intelligent but flakey and prone
to periods of melodrama and depression. A Vassar classmate
described her as "kind of a sad sack."
After Vasser, she
studied in Italy in 1933 where she found passion. Mussolini was firmly in
power, and Bentley was excited about the passion springing from the Gruppo
Universitate Fascisti (While
in Italy, she shed her New England Republican upbringing and tasted a social
and political radicalism, which she embraced. She also enjoyed breaking the
rules. Her advisor at the University of Florence was a leading anti-fascist and
provided romantic mentorship. Under
the influence of a profession, she switched her ideology from fascism to
communism.[ii] (picture 7, Italian communism)
This was not that
rare. After World War Two, many East Germans became ardent communists, as we
will see in future lessons. Before the war, some prominent left-oriented
intellectuals shifted between the dominant authoritarian philosophies and
parties. Joseph Goebbels and the Nazi head of the Peoples Court, Roland Freisler,
moved from communism to National Socialism. Mussolini had his political origins
in left-wing, populist politics.
Elizabeth
Bentley returned to Columbia in 1934 to finish her master’s degree but did not
pass the examinations. She also had the misfortune of searching for a job when
few were available in Depression-era New York. She joined the American League
Against War and Fascism (picture 9, League) and the Communist Party of
the United States (CPUSA) and remained in the Party for two years. The Party
offered her a tight circle of friends and comrades who partnered in a world
hidden from outsiders. Each member held secrets of others, which created an
unconventional and sometimes intimate bond. Bentley futilely searched for
emotional intimacy her entire life. She also searched for physical intimacy,
which she received from men in her circle of communists. Many of the communists
believed in free love that was unconstrained by Victorian and bourgeois
moralism, which certainly appealed to the hormone-driven Elizabeth.
Enter Golos
Yakov Naumovich Reizen was born in 1889 in the
Ukraine to Jewish, poor parents.[iii] He became
a committed communist and an officer in the NKGB, a predecessor of the K.G.B.[iv] In the
United States, he used the alias Golos, which means voice in Russian. (picture
10, Golos) (Text –
Golos) Golos lived in the
United States for years and understood the nuances and idiosyncrasies of
American culture.[v]
He worked with Bentley at World Tourists, (picture 11, USSR tourist) a
Soviet front company. Soon, they became lovers even though Golos had a wife and
family in the Soviet Union. One commentator is convinced that both fell in love
with each other. Others speculate that he needed her to promote Soviet
interests. Golos likely spotted her vulnerability and love-bombed her to bring
her under his control. This certainly fits into Soviet tradecraft. He probably
saw the risks of sending such a flighty personality on dangerous courier
missions. But he calculated that he could control her. And he did, unlike his
successors who unsuccessfully tried to reign in the fiercely independent Miss
Bentley.
Bentley
continued to work part-time at Columbia University's Italian Library, but soon,
she was fired because her connection to fascism was revealed. Golos was forced
to register as an agent of the USSR under the Foreign Agents Registration Act
or FARA, which is the topic of future lessons. And now, the FBI was on to
him.
Golos
trained Bentley to avoid detection. She
varied her travel and took several cabs. She would leave the cab several blocks
from her destination and walk the remaining distance, zigzagging between blocks
and department stores.) She would meet in parks, or hotel lobbies, or
(picture) restaurants. Her handlers would claim that she became sloppy about
her tradecraft as a courier. In all fairness, she met with many people, had to
memorize many names and meeting places, and was constantly on guard.
Elizabeth
first began using codenames in student circles at Columbia. Now, long out of
college, she had different aliases or code names. He called herself Helen or
Myrna or Mary. Bentley never made copies of the documents she received from her
sources. This would make verifying some claims she made after she defected
difficult. When Bentley revealed the vast network of Soviet spies to the
F.B.I., the agents were initially reluctant to believe her. She had no proof.
We will see that another American agent who served as a courier to the Soviets,
Whitaker Chambers, photographed purloined documents in case he needed them. And
he did need them. He kept them inside of pumpkins. But Bentley had no copies
and relied on her memory. Sometimes her memory was sharp; sometimes it wasn’t.
Tradecraft – Sloppy Lizzy (SLIDE X)
In the
early 1940s, Bentley shuttled between Washington DC and New York to receive
documents from high-level American communist spies. She usually traveled every
two weeks. And there are many of them. Some stand out. William Remington, who
worked for the War Production Board at the time. Nathan Gregory Silvermaster was a
Russian-born bureaucrat who did not pass much intelligence to Elizabeth and
whose true value was his connection to the rest of the group. The group also
allegedly included Harry Dexter White the undersecretary of the Treasury who
was one of the architects of the post-war economic system, the International
Monetary Fund, and the World Bank.
During
her confession, she identified almost 50 Communist agents operating in the
U.S., which would lead to a network of 150 spies that included 37 federal
employees. She met a man named Julius who fit the description of Julius
Rosenberg. This would be used in the trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Elizabeth's testimony that the CPUSA was
intimately tied to the Soviet Union. This was a key and damning disclosure
because it helped shatter the myth that the CPUSA acted autonomously without
the direction of financial help of the Soviet Union.[vi]
In 1943,
Golos suffered a heart attack and died. The following day, Bentley met her new
handler “Bill,” Itzhak Akhmerov, the leading non-official cover NKVD operative in the U.S.
The relationship became toxic immediately after Akhmerov made demands on
Bentley, which she brushed off. She thought he patronized her because she was a
woman. In October 1944, Elizabeth was again given a new handler, Joseph Klatz,
one of the most active NKGB agents in the U.S. She didn't like him or Earl
Browder, the leader of the CPUSA. Her prickly personality did not help
her maintain amiable and productive relationships with the Soviets.
In early
1945, an emotionally and financially drained Bentley began to drink heavily.
This degraded her already-declining performance as a courier. The Soviets
became increasingly worried that this barfly would spill her secrets. And they
were right. They considered killing her to quiet her. But in August 1945, she
moved to New Haven, Connecticut. She went to the F.B.I. and, on November 7,
1945 began to confess all. It was too late to kill her now. At first, the
F.B.I. thought she was a scatterbrain drunk. However, after investigating her
claims, they realized that most of her stories were likely correct. They
alerted Hoover, who became very concerned.
Throughout
1948, Elizabeth became the F.B.I.'s star witness in a series of committees and
grand juries. Some of her recollections were imprecise, but she offered facts
to allow the F.B.I. to puzzle together a fairly complete picture of networks. (Here
she is testifying before HUAC There was one of the great faceoffs
between the accused of Soviet espionage and the accuser.[vii]
William Remington presented as an all-American boy with movie star looks. This
upper-middle-class Ivy League graduate had access to War Department secrets,
which he passed to Bentley.[viii]
He perjured himself in testimony and was sent to prison, where he was murdered. Here is Remington responding to Bentley’s
claims
Bentley also revealed elements of
the Rosenberg ring. The Rosenbergs were executed. Harry Dexter White succumbed
to a heart attack during the hearings and died. So, four persons in her
communist circle died. In another lesson, we will discuss high-profile Soviet
agents who passed information to her.They were important spies and testified
before HUAC. But they lacked the melodrama of the Elizabeth Bentley show.
Were
her claims about Soviet espionage correct? By and large, yes, they were. The
Venona decryption program, which uncovered communications between Soviet
intelligence agents in the U.S. and USSR, would later vindicate her claims and
confirm that nearly everything she had testified to was true.
Life After Espionage (slide
Life After Espionage)
Elizabeth
Bentley had a moment of fame that she enjoyed. She was the center of national
attention, and people sought her out for interviews. She often relished this
moment because they gave her the attention she needed. But her fame faded
quickly, and her speaking engagements dried up. In 1951, Bentley published an
autobiography, Out of Bondage, (picture, though to whom or what she was
ever bondaged remains unclear. Later, she became a Catholic
schoolteacher with the help of friends in the anti-Communist community to
support herself. Throughout the rest of her life, she would fade into obscurity
and continue her descent into alcoholism, from which she died in 1963.
Bentley’s revelations energized the F.B.I. to
target the Soviets. During the war, the F.B.I. focused on German and Japanese had
relegated Soviet spying to the back burner and had devoted most of its
attention to the more pressing business of German and Japanese espionage. Bentley's
pilled secrets eviscerated the Soviet espionage apparatus, and Moscow never
recovered. The Silvermaster and Perlo groups were destroyed, and other skilled,
experienced, and well-placed agents took cover. Soviet officers who ran the
agents took diplomatic cover, and many returned to the Soviet Union. Finally, Bentley's
information forced the hand of the Truman administration (22, Truman) to
take the Soviet penetration of government agencies seriously. By any measure, Bentley
was one of the three or four most important defectors from the Soviet Union.
Her testimony before HUAC rattled the nation and would be a dramatic prelude to
further investigations of Soviet influence. Yet, as historian Kathryn notes,
eleven prominent college textbooks on American history discuss Whittaker
Chambers but do not mention Bentley. Scholars of the Cold War debate why
history has largely abandoned the case of Elizabeth Bentley.
Popular Culture (slide and narration)
So, how did Elizabeth Bentley fit into popular culture? She became a
target of the dominant media when her defection from communism was made public.
Snickering and sarcasm began immediately, and her physical appearance became a
target. She was bestowed with the derogatory or sarcastic monikers we discussed
earlier. Perhaps the historian Earl Latham expressed the familiar image as "imaginings
of a neurotic spinster." (picture 24, Bentley_three_shots) But,
generally, Ms. Bentley was ignored. For fifty years, there were no published
scholarly or even journalistic biographies of her life. To my knowledge, there
were no doctoral dissertations about her.
By the time she died, she was largely forgotten, a relic of a more
innocent age when revelations of American communists were shocking. By the late
1950s, the shock had long worn out. Also, many Americans were still sympathetic
to those who were accused of being communists. () This was certainly the case with Hollywood
entertainers, discussed in detail in other lessons. Some professors conceded
that Elizabeth Bentley was honest and accurate, but not many rushed to
exonerate her image. She was simply forgotten.
But her search for the credibility
that eluded her in life was granted to her decades after she succumbed to the
effects of her drinking and loneliness. Only in her grave did she receive
complete vindication and validation for her claims of the vast network of
Soviet agents throughout the U.S. government. The release of the Venona codes
proved her claims were accurate. Perhaps not every claim was without mistake,
but most disclosures were largely accurate, and many were entirely correct.
Books (slide)
She was not forgotten entirely and will not be forgotten because there
are two solid biographies of her. Kathryn Olmsted's Red Spy Queen and
Lauren Kessler's Clever Girl. Kathryn Olmsted is a professor of history who studies the
cultural and political history of the United States since World War I.[ix]
She is prolific and has published on some of the world's most prestigious
university presses. (picture, 28 picture of Olmsted)
The Cold War historian John Earl Haynes ( credits Olmsted Red Spy Queen is as
a scholarly book with a full academic apparatus and is based on extensive
original archival research. This is high praise from Haynes, who is a world
expert on Ameican communism. You will notice that Haynes’ commentary pops up in
lessons on the early Cold War period.
There are many things Haynes likes about Red Spy Queen. He sees it
as a well-researched and objective account by a historian who concluded that
Bentley was not a fraud or a fabulist on key issues. Yes, she embellished her
biography a bit, but she did not lie about those whom she accused of espionage. She paints a dark picture of Bentley’s
personality but concludes that Bentley told the truth
about Soviet espionage in high places.[x]
Olmsted scholarly work verifies Bentley’s claims of Soviet espionage in
high places. She also objectively brings to light the unintegrated nature of
Bentley personality. Her impulsive decision making, often-reckless risk taking,
and cloying demands of emotional and attention. Olmsted opines that Bentley differed
from defectors in that she never really had her heart in communism. from the
others, and particularly from Chambers, her fellow defector from communism, is
that she seems never to have held any strong beliefs.
Haynes hailed Red Spy Queen as a welcome indication that some in our academy, given irrefutable
evidence, are not afraid to face the facts about Soviet espionage in America.[xi]
Also, historians CIA liked the book. More specifically, Michael Warner, a
historian writing for the CIA publication Studies in Intelligence,
praise it. He did say that Olmsted could have cast the Bentley case in the
larger context of American efforts against the Soviets.[xii]
Nonetheless, Warner acclaims her efforts by saying, “Thanks to her, we now have
the threads tied together sufficiently to explain why Bentley’s charges were
both substantially correct and almost entirely unsubstantiated by any positive
evidence until the declassification of the VENONA cables in 1995.”[xiii]
Lauren...
