Clever Girl

by Lauren Kessler

  Before she had a chance to say anything, he told her that although this should be a happy moment for them, it wasn’t.

  “It would be simple if we were two ordinary communists, moving in party circles,” he said. “Then we could live together as good comrades do.” But they were not ordinary comrades, he reminded her, they were underground operatives. And for those in the underground, the rules were different. We are forbidden to form close friendships, he told her, and especially to fall in love. “You and I have no right, under communist discipline, to feel the way we do about each other.” Bentley didn’t know what to say.

  “I should give you a new contact and walk out of your life forever,” Timmy continued. But he couldn’t do it, as good a communist as he was. He loved her, and he needed her, or someone like her, too much. There is a solution, he told her. They would keep their relationship secret. They would not be seen in public unless they were meeting on business. They would not live together. And she would have to take him completely on faith, not knowing who he was or where he lived or what he did for a living. But they could love each other. They could, somehow, with nuance and innuendo, in stolen moments, forge a relationship. She agreed. She had no other choice.

  In the months that followed, they continued to meet as contacts in public places—a park, a street corner, a restaurant. They had dinner. They talked. Sometimes they took a drive, nowhere special, just an opportunity to be alone together. Occasionally, they would manage to get away for a weekend, drive upstate to a little inn or motel, and pretend for a few days that they were just a couple in love.

  Bentley knew Timmy for almost six months before she accidentally discovered his real name—or at least the name he took for himself when he joined the party. They were sitting on a bench in Madison Square Park, conducting one of their business meetings. After she had given him her regular report on the doings at the library, he handed her two tickets he had gotten to a show. He couldn’t make it. Perhaps she’d like to go with a friend. Bentley glanced at the tickets in her hand. On the top of one she noted the word “Golos.” There must be a mistake, she told him. This ticket is for someone else. It says “Golos.” He blanched, then got up and walked away, leaving her there alone on the bench.

  Later, when they met up at a restaurant for a prearranged dinner, and she casually addressed him as Timmy, he blew up.

  “Why are you pretending you don’t know my real name?” he said. “Don’t put on an act. You know perfectly well I am Jacob Golos.” He said it so fiercely and with so much conviction that it was clear he believed she knew exactly who Jacob Golos was. But the name meant nothing to her. She knew, because Comrade Brown had told her, that the man she was introduced to as Timmy was important in communist circles. But, at her previous level of party involvement, she knew little of the people and personalities that played roles in its tangled history.

  Slowly, his story emerged. The first thing he told her was that, as Jacob Golos, he was the head of a company called World Tourists, a Fifth Avenue travel agency that specialized in steamship tours between the United States and Russia. Founded in 1927 with $50,000 supplied by the Communist Party of the United States, the agency was supposed to arrange and promote travel tours, including securing travel documentation, ship passage, railroad tickets, hotels, and other amenities. World Tourists was the only U.S. company able to make travel arrangements in Russia, thanks to an exclusive licensing contract between the New York company and Intourist, the Soviet Union’s state-owned tourist agency. Amtorg, the Soviet trading company, and other Soviet agencies in the United States steered their business to World Tourists, and the party used its services extensively. Golos had taken over World Tourists in 1930 when it was in financial trouble and had managed to turn it into a healthy, profitable venture.

  By the time Golos met Bentley, the business was at a high point, offering a wide range of travel adventures, from one-week package tours of Leningrad to one-month, ten-city grand tours with three days on the Volga River. There were southern tours, “Great City” tours, tours of the Crimea, and tours of the Ukraine. Passage was arranged on one of several French ocean liners with stopovers in either London or Paris. But World Tourists was not a disinterested commercial agency concerned merely with arranging Russian vacations for adventurous Americans. It was a propaganda enterprise, its main purpose—barely hidden in the didactic brochures the agency produced—the “selling” of the Soviet Union.

  “From the moment of his arrival the visitor from abroad comes across entirely new human relationships, and realizes he is in a society that has never before been known, a society whose members are bound together by the common idea of refashioning their own backward fatherland,” read the copy in a 1935 brochure. The brochure touted public education, collective agriculture, the “reeducation of the old,” science, and art, and the “palaces of culture” as must-sees for all those who wanted to see firsthand the triumphs of the new Soviet Union.

  World Tourists operated for at least two other purposes. Its profits helped support various East Coast communist enterprises, including the Daily Worker, and it provided Jacob Golos with a “cover,” a legitimate job that masked his other, less-than-legitimate activities. For Golos was not just—as Comrade Brown had originally told Bentley—a good communist and a high-ranking functionary in the party. He was, as she now knew, an underground operative, a man who dealt in the currency of secret information. As head of World Tourists, he secured American passports for members of the party and the Comintern, assuring easy international movement for operatives and others. By bribing foreign consular officials and U.S. passport agency workers, he obtained fraudulent passports, naturalization papers, and birth certificates, generally belonging to people who had died or permanently left the country. Although Golos had intended to keep himself a mystery to Bentley, as much to protect his new lover as to shield himself, this turned out to be an unworkable plan. He never told her everything, but he told her more than he knew he should have. He loved her. And ultimately, he trusted her.

  Eventually, he told her an abbreviated, edited version of his life story. Born into a Jewish family in the Ukraine in 1890, he was, at the age of eight, arrested for distributing anticzarist literature, and at seventeen, sent to Siberia for operating a clandestine Bolshevik printing house. Two years later, he escaped on foot into China and from there made his way to Japan and finally to the United States. By 1915 he was a naturalized American citizen, but when the Russian Revolution broke out, he went home to support the Bolsheviks, serving as a foreman in a Siberian coal mine and, he told Bentley, joining the Cheka, the powerful political police of the Soviet state and predecessor to the KGB. Back in America, he became active in the Socialist Party, a broad-based, contentious group that seemed to quarrel more with each other than with its political adversaries. Golos belonged to the especially quarrelsome left-wing faction, which was expelled from the party in 1919. This group then split again to form two rival communist parties, with Golos a founding member of one of these groups, the Communist Party of America. In 1921, Golos’s party merged with the other splinter group to become the sole communist party in the United States.

  Golos became a full-time functionary of the party in the early twenties, first working as an editor for one of the party’s Russian-language journals, then serving as an organizer in Detroit and Chicago, and later acting as chief administrator of the Society for Technical Aid to Soviet Russia, an organization that recruited U.S. technicians for work in Russia. Then, as Bentley now knew, he was asked to take over World Tourists. When they met, he was walking a tightrope, inhabiting a dangerous and ultimately untenable position as both an open party member—he served on the three-man Central Control Commission, a powerful and often feared disciplinary committee that kept American comrades in line—and as a clandestine operative. This was precisely what he had told Bentley she could no longer do. When one worked for the underground, one went underground, disappearing from the public life of the party. Golos, p
robably because of his importance in both spheres and his impeccable revolutionary pedigree, was the exception.

  Bentley may not have understood the subtleties, but she felt she understood the man. It was clear to her that he had worked many years for little recompense, going where the party needed him, doing what needed to be done, living cheaply, caring little about material comforts. His very shabbiness was a badge of honor. Everything that Golos said about himself made Bentley respect him more. Here was a man who had lived history, a man who came to his political beliefs from harrowing personal experience, a man with high ideals.

  That much she knew about Golos. But there were important things she did not know. She did not know that when they first met and began their affair he already had a mistress, a woman named Caroline Klein, whose apartment on West 13th Street he shared. She did not know that he had a common-law wife and a son, whom he had sent back to live in Russia three years before. He had met Celia, a comrade in his party unit, in the early 1920s. The arrangement may not have been a love match, but the couple had lived together for more than a decade and had produced a child. By the time Bentley found out about his other intimate associations, it didn’t matter. She was in love, convinced that Golos was the only man she would ever need or want.

  Their union had all the excitement of an illicit affair—the secret rendezvous, the stolen moments, the forbidden sex—and few of the responsibilities of a real relationship. By being together, they were not just breaking society’s code but also party regulations and espionage tradecraft. It was a heady combination. She was drunk on it. He called her golubushka, a Russian endearment that means “little dove.” She called him Yasha, the Russian diminutive of Jacob. They were living, as someone later put it, in bourgeois sin and Leninist bliss.

  Chapter 7

  Tradecraft

  IN MARCH 1939, after five months at the Italian Library of Information, Bentley was fired. Someone, probably a coworker—she never found out who—apparently went to some lengths to unearth a 1935 article published in the Columbia University student newspaper, which made it clear that Bentley was an antifascist. In the story, written back when she was trying to complete her master’s degree in Italian, Bentley claimed she had not received a scholarship from her department because of her affiliation with the American League Against War and Fascism. Perhaps someone at work had noticed her amateur attempts at spying. Or maybe someone just didn’t like her. At any rate, when the director was presented with a copy of the newspaper story, he fired her on the spot.

  Now that her self-initiated stint as an undercover agent was over, she assumed she would be sent back to the open party to rejoin her unit and take up the comradely life she had left behind the previous fall. But Golos told her no. He said she would be of more use working directly for him. As a woman in love probably more than as a communist eager to serve, she was delighted. It would mean she would have the opportunity to see him more often. He told her to give up her place in the Columbia University neighborhood, where he felt she was too well-known to the party and would risk running into old comrades on the street, and take an apartment in Greenwich Village. She first found a place on Grove Street, and then a few months later moved to an apartment in a brownstone at 58 Barrow. During the day, she worked at a series of temporary and part-time secretarial and translation jobs. In off-hours, she did research for Golos, compiling biographical data on various American politicians, researching the history of the U.S. labor movement, and providing background on the elections in Mexico. He told her the information was for use in articles in the Daily Worker and The Masses.

  Golos appreciated Bentley’s work, but he had other things in mind for her. With party membership becoming increasingly Americanized in the late 1930s, the Soviets were interested in having their U.S. espionage efforts follow suit. Golos told Bentley that the Russians wanted to make their agents look, act, and sound more American, and they wanted to enlist more native-born Americans, rather than Russians or immigrants, into their covert operations. Golos, the Russian immigrant, saw the possibilities for Bentley, the Connecticut Yankee. He noted her industriousness, her desire to please, and her deepening attachment to him, and he began to trust her with minor tasks. She became a “mail drop” for Golos, receiving at her address letters meant for him mailed from Canada and cablegrams sent from Europe. Every week she handed them over, unopened. That way Golos could shield his own whereabouts and still be in communication with communists outside the country. She also began to function as a mail courier, traveling to Brooklyn once a week to pick up letters intended for Golos that had been sent by a high-ranking Mexican communist to another mail drop. This gave Golos another degree of separation, which became important when the Mexican letter-writer was later implicated in the plot to assassinate Trotsky.

  Meanwhile, he began training her for bigger things. He instructed her in the tricks of the spy trade. First there was the use of phones. She should always use a pay phone when calling him or conducting any covert business, he told her. She should always listen carefully for buzzing or clicking sounds that might indicate that the phone on the other end was bugged. Even if she thought the line was clear, she should never say anything important over the phone. Calls should always appear purely social. They should be used only to set up meetings at which the actual conversations could take place. Then there was the issue of sensitive material. If she had to store documents in her apartment, he told her to put them in a locked trunk and then wind a thin black thread around the lock so that if someone opened the trunk in her absence, she would know. Before she left her apartment, she was to place a book behind her front door. If the book was out of place when she returned, she would know someone had broken in. He cautioned her to never, under any circumstances, put letters or documents in the trash. If she needed to get rid of them, she should burn them or flush them. One of the advantages of her Barrow Street apartment was its wood-burning fireplace.

  There was other tradecraft to learn when going out into the world, and Golos taught her that, too. He told her that when leaving the apartment on covert business, she should never carry anything that marked her true identity, from a driver’s license in her wallet to old ticket stubs in her purse to labels on her clothing. He taught her how to recognize if she was being followed, and cautioned her to react coolly. The idea was to not let on that you knew you were under surveillance. She should cross and recross the street, surreptitiously taking note of the actions of anyone behind her. She should memorize the license plate number of any automobile she thought might be on a stakeout. And then, as nonchalantly as possible, she should try to lose the tail. That might mean ducking into a crowded store, especially one with more than one exit, or dodging into a darkened movie theater or a strategically located ladies’ restroom. Golos insisted that she make a tour of the city to identify places where she could most conveniently elude surveillance. If she thought a car was following her, she was to walk to the nearest subway station and take a ride, or walk the wrong way down a one-way street.

  Bentley was an eager student, and Golos was an experienced teacher not above using their relationship in the service of the cause. I want you to work hard, he told her. It is because I love you that I want to be especially proud of you, he said. To disappoint him would be to risk losing that love. He was her teacher in other ways, too, now that she was cut off completely from the party. He gave her party literature, explained party politics, and discussed public affairs, taking over the functions generally performed by various comrades in an open unit. She depended on him to interpret the world for her through the communist lens.

  On an August evening in 1939, Bentley and Golos were listening to the radio in her apartment. Their public rendezvous were still in out-of-the-way places, and they took care to appear as business associates, not lovers. But lately, Golos was visiting Bentley at her apartment more often and sometimes staying the night. That night, sitting on the couch, they heard the news that Stalin had signed a nonaggression pact
with Hitler. Communists and Nazis making deals with each other? Bentley didn’t understand—and neither did thousands of other antifascist liberals in the party. She was distraught. How could this be, she asked Golos? How could the Soviet Union, the leading force in the struggle for a better world, align itself with all the evils we are fighting against? For a good many writers and intellectuals, this moment signaled the end of their infatuation with communism and the end of their membership in the party. But Bentley was isolated from the foment in the party ranks. She no longer had any comrades. She had no one to go to with her fears or doubts other than Jacob Golos, proud Russian, dyed-in-the-wool Bolshevik, a man whose entire life was the Revolution. He had to believe that the Soviet Union had not betrayed its high ideals. So he calmed her that night with rationalizations. The Soviet Union was justified in doing whatever it had to do to stay alive, he told Bentley. The communist dream must be preserved at all costs, he said. She needed to believe him, and she did. A month later, when Russia invaded Poland, and Golos told her that the Soviet army was, in fact, liberating the Polish people from a regime more oppressive than the czars, she believed that, too.

  Golos told her she could help the cause against Nazism by getting a job at McClure Newspaper Syndicate with Richard Waldo, the owner and president. The party suspected Waldo was a German agent and wanted to keep tabs on him. At first, she balked at the idea. She was all for fighting Nazism, but her experience at the Italian Library had shown her that working undercover could be nerve-racking. She would have to play a role again. She would have to watch what she said and did. She would have to be hypervigilant without seeming to be so. When Golos saw her hesitancy, he was quick to lecture her about being a good Bolshevik, about acquiescing to the will of the party. I wanted so much to be proud of you, he told her, once more playing the relationship card, and instead you are letting me down. She couldn’t bear to do that, and he knew it. But there was something besides love and ideology that made her put on a good dress and go down to the syndicate office the next morning. True, undercover work was disquieting, but it was also, she had to admit, something of a thrill. She might feel anxious about it, nervous, a little jumpy, but that wasn’t all bad, was it, for it also made her feel more alive. And it was certainly more exciting than reporting to yet another temporary typing job or scanning old magazines in the library for Golos.