Clever Girl

by Lauren Kessler

  Buckley’s office was a small, drab, uncarpeted room, sparsely furnished with the obligatory, government-issue steel desk and two hard-backed office chairs. It was not a comfortable place for a conversation, but then being questioned by the FBI was not supposed to be comfortable. However, Buckley and Jardine were quite aware that Bentley had come forward voluntarily, and they planned to treat her gently. The interview would not be adversarial. They would do nothing to scare her off. They told her that they were glad to see her and that they appreciated her arranging her schedule to come in. They chatted for a while about nothing, as strangers do when they are otherwise busy taking stock of each other. Buckley and Jardine could see she was nervous and tense. They began by asking her broad, open-ended questions that allowed her to talk as little or as much as she wanted, revealing as little or as much as she wanted. Tell us about yourself, Buckley asked. Tell us how you got mixed up in all this, Jardine added.

  Bentley began to chart for the agents her journey into communism, talking first of her visits to Italy in the early 1930s and the experience of living under Mussolini’s rule. She told them how she had returned to America wanting to stop fascism and build a better world. As she filled them in on her personal history, Jardine became increasingly fascinated. How could a woman from stable stock, with the benefit of a top-notch education, swallow the communist line, he wondered? She was so well-spoken, so obviously intelligent. He was supposed to be a hard-bitten G-man, but Jardine found himself almost immediately sympathetic to Bentley. Maybe it was because she was a woman. He wasn’t taken in by her feminine wiles—Bentley didn’t have many—but rather by the idea that as a woman she was a victim, not a perpetrator. A product of his time, Jardine saw Bentley as someone taken advantage of rather than someone in charge. She wasn’t a criminal, he decided. She was an idealist, a misguided idealist who had gotten in over her head.

  No stenographer was in the room, and as Bentley began to offer more and more details about her life as a communist and as a spy, the agents furiously scribbled notes on lined yellow pads. She talked of her mentor Golos, hinting they were something more to each other. She gave details about World Tourists and USS&S. And she began to name names. Some of the people she named were civil servants in positions of responsibility, even power: Silvermaster and Perlo, Wheeler, Halperin, Fitzgerald, Kramer, Ullmann and Harry Dexter White. The names came quickly. Once she decided to open the tap, she opened it all the way. When she first contemplated going to the FBI, she wrestled with her conscience about turning in her contacts, some of whom she had considered friends. But she convinced herself that she was doing them a favor. She was “saving them.” If she turned them over to the authorities, they would no longer be useful to the Soviets. They would be out of the spy business, whether they liked it or not. And maybe they would see the light, as she had seen the light.

  The reasoning might sound like pure self-justification, a skewed logic that allowed her to expose others and not feel guilty about it. But her motives for coming forth and for naming names had an underlying simplicity. She was a woman who needed to believe in something greater than herself. She needed to be connected to a noble cause that gave her a part to play. For ten years, that cause had been communism. Now, because of what she’d learned about the Soviets, because of how she’d been treated, because Golos was dead, because she was scared, her cause would be anticommunism. As sincerely as she had been a party member, a steeled Bolshevik, a courier, and a spy, she would be a warrior on the other side, for the other side. Her own immunity from prosecution was not discussed. It was assumed.

  She talked through the afternoon and into the evening. Buckley sent out for sandwiches, and they kept going. Four hours, six hours, eight hours, and they were still at it. The agents listened eagerly as Bentley pulled back the curtain and allowed them a glimpse of the Soviet spy apparatus. She recounted a complex web of relationships and interactions, code names and cover stories, secret meetings with people she knew by first name only, late-night calls made from telephone booths, microfilm carried in knitting bags. The agents marveled at her memory. She remembered the names of three different hotels where a minor contact had stayed in 1936. She remembered in which drugstore on what corner she had met a source three years before. She remembered what people ate for dinner, the color of a man’s tie, the shoe size of a woman she knew only by a code name. She was able to recount employment histories, educational backgrounds, family histories. Jardine would mention the name of a person the FBI already had in its files, and she would know it and be able to respond with a wealth of details that would later be confirmed in the record. She talked about her KGB contacts, “Bill” and “Jack” and “Al,” and how “Al” had asked for her help in placing someone in the FBI, “the only government agency that they could not crack”—a comment the agents noted with particular pride.

  When Bentley finally left, taking the subway home, in the dark, unescorted, Buckley and Jardine remained in the little office hunched over the metal desk hammering out a seven-and-a-half page summary of the interview. At 1:30 in the morning, they sent it by teletype to their boss, J. Edgar Hoover, at FBI headquarters. Eighteen hours later, Hoover had a complete seventy-page statement covering the eight-hour interview, hand-delivered by an agent who flew down from New York. The director could not contain his enthusiasm, and neither could his agents in New York. Early in the interview, Jardine had thought to himself: This lady knows what she’s talking about. We hit pay dirt here. He was right. And it was only the beginning.

  Two days later, Bentley was back. And the day after that, and the day after that. She was interviewed fourteen times in November by the two New York special agents who took over her case, Joseph M. Kelly and Thomas G. Spencer. She came in at least every other day, and, during a particularly grueling stretch in the middle of the month, she was interviewed six days in a row. The logistics were challenging. She continued to work at USS&S during the day, both because it was the way she made her living and because quitting might have tipped off the Russians that something was going on. That meant she came in for her interviews in the late afternoon or in the evenings or on weekends. Often she walked or took a cab down to Foley Square after work, but sometimes the agents met her elsewhere for her convenience, like a hotel closer to her office.

  At each interview, she mentioned more names and remembered more particulars, clarifying relationships, chronicling rendezvous, and explaining, in calm and precise detail, how the system worked. Her initial nervousness was gone. She was composed and self-possessed now that she had made the decision to tell all. Mostly, the agents let her talk, allowing her story to unfold as she told it. Of course, they would follow up on any names she mentioned, pressing for details, but they rarely brought up names themselves. They did show her photographs of officials and employees of the Soviet Embassy to see if any of the Russians she knew by code name could be further identified. That’s how she learned that her contact “Al” was really Anatoly Gorsky.

  As Agents Kelly and Spencer sat and listened to Bentley through November, they became increasingly convinced that she was telling the truth. Her delivery was clear, concise, and clinical. Whatever emotions she may have been experiencing, she kept to herself. She was poised and in control, just what the agents would have expected from someone who operated at her level with her responsibilities. The stories she told were internally consistent and, based on what the Bureau knew or suspected, they sounded logical. They were too rich with potentially verifiable details to be mere concoction. And the stories were beginning to check out. After every interview session, the agents would comb the FBI files to find references to the people Bentley had just mentioned, and time after time, they were there. Some of the people she named, like Silvermaster, already had thick files with the Bureau. Each time the agents found confirmation, even of the smallest detail, Bentley’s stock went up.

  Of course, the FBI immediately began a background check on Bentley herself, going through her Vassar and Columbia rec
ords, calling Foxcroft, checking with Macy’s personnel department and various banks and credit unions. And, in mid-November, while she was being interviewed at the New York office, FBI agents were dispatched to her Brooklyn hotel to do what was called in the trade a “black-bag job.” Without a search warrant—which presumably would have alerted anyone watching her room, like the KGB—the agents “surreptitiously entered,” that is, broke into her room and searched it thoroughly, looking for anything that might reflect on her credibility, that might either prove or disprove the stories she was telling. They found nothing out of the ordinary.

  The agents’ major concern now was that Bentley could not support her story with any documents. If she had handled the volume of material she said she had, where was the proof? Why didn’t she have a copy of some confidential government memo or a few pages of a secret report or even ticket stubs from her many train trips to Washington? Of course, it was explainable: The whole idea of living a clandestine life was to leave no documents behind, no traces of that life, to arrange it so there was no whiff of who you were and no hint of what you did. Her tradecraft may have been a bit sloppy for the Russians’ taste, but she was a good enough spy to adhere to basic rules. One of those rules was that you did not keep incriminating material in your possession. It was a testament to how well she did her job that she could not prove, in black and white, that she had indeed done it. She had been a good communist, and she would never have thought to squirrel something away, some bit of evidence, “just in case,” or for insurance, to be used against her comrades sometime later. And by the time Bentley seriously considered going to the FBI—at which time she might have thought about what proof she could bring—it was too late. It had been months since she last met with any of her sources, as much as half a year since she gathered material from one of her networks.

  Perhaps Bentley sensed that the agents needed more. Perhaps her newly awakened Yankee conscience was bothering her. Whatever the case, on November 17, when she met Kelly and Spencer at a Manhattan hotel for her sixth interview, she brought with her the money Gorsky had given her the month before. Immediately on entering the room, even before she took off her coat and hat, she opened her purse, took out a fat envelope, and threw it on the bed. She was clearly enjoying the drama of the moment. “Here’s some Moscow gold,” she told the agents. More to the point, here was what could be considered tangible proof of the story Bentley had told the agents during her initial November interview when she first mentioned “Al” and what she considered his efforts to buy her loyalty. The agents took the money and stored it in a safe deposit box at a Manhattan bank. For weeks, the joke around the office was that the cash in the envelope was “the only money we’ve ever gotten back, or ever will get back, from the Lend-Lease program.”

  Bentley also proved her credibility to the FBI in another way. She had arranged a November 21 meeting with Gorsky the month before, at the end of their October rendezvous. When Bentley told the Agents Kelly and Spencer about it, they urged her to keep the appointment, and then set the Bureau’s wheels in motion. In the capital, agents tailed Gorsky from his home to Washington National Airport, watching him board an Eastern Airlines plane for New York. New York agents picked up the trail when he arrived in town, and stayed with him despite his vigorous efforts to lose them. Three agents took note of the Gorsky-Bentley rendezvous outside Bickford’s restaurant late that afternoon and watched as the two of them walked a half block east to Cavanaugh’s and went in. The agents did not attempt to eavesdrop on the two-hour conversation that took place, but they didn’t have to. The point was made: Bentley said she met with top Russian functionaries, and she did.

  By the end of November, when the FBI assembled a final 107-page statement for Bentley to sign, she had named eighty-seven American citizens, from prominent party functionaries to prominent government officials, from sympathizers and fellow travelers to dues-paying comrades, from people she knew personally to those she had only heard about from others. The list was longer still if one counted Russians and other foreign nationals—more than a hundred names. Bentley seemed to be a one-woman encyclopedia of espionage. Her statement was so dense with names and details that the agents appended a seven-page index to it.

  Of all those she named, the Bureau was most immediately and fervently interested in the federal employees Bentley said had provided her with confidential information, several of whom were already under suspicion. That list included some mostly invisible, midlevel bureaucrats, New Dealers toiling away in alphabet agencies, but it also included Harry Dexter White, the undersecretary of the Treasury, and Lauchlin Currie, former assistant to FDR, and Duncan Lee, a protégé of and top aid to OSS founder William Donovan. Twenty-seven of the government employees she named were, the FBI soon determined, still employed in Washington, D.C., including seven people at the State Department, ten at Treasury, two at Commerce, and two in the OSS. There was someone at the Department of Justice, someone at the Office of War Mobilization, several people at the Foreign Economic Administration. These people still had access to sensitive information.

  Bentley’s allegations were the biggest thing to hit the FBI since agents had gunned down John Dillinger in front of the Biograph Theater in 1934. The information the Bureau now had, courtesy of a woman who had just walked in the door one day, was almost overwhelming, both in quantity and in its potential significance. If she was right, the Russians had managed to burrow deep into the U.S. government using U.S. citizens as moles. If she was right, widespread espionage was more than paranoia, it was reality. And the Soviet Union, our temporary, tenuous wartime ally, would certainly now have to be considered our most powerful enemy. Her November statement touched off a torrent of memo-, letter-, teletype-and report-writing by the director, including communiqués to the White House, the attorney general, the State Department, the Civil Service Commission, the War Department, and others. Hoover moved into high gear. There would be no undeveloped leads in this case.

  Chapter 13

  Hoover’s Turn

  J. EDGAR HOOVER COULDN’T have been more pleased when he got word of Elizabeth Bentley’s allegations from the New York field office. What a treasure to fall in the FBI’s lap just as one war was ending and another, more subtle one, was about to begin. With fascism defeated, it was time to deal with the enemy the United States had embraced for wartime convenience, the Soviet Union. And the fight against communism didn’t have a more willing warrior than Hoover. Bentley’s revelations buttressed his belief that there was a communist conspiracy in America—men and women actively working for the Soviets and against the best interests of the United States—and gave him ammunition he was eager to use. The Bentley interviews were yielding hundreds of leads. The information she gave would reinvigorate scores of languishing investigations. It would fatten the files of men like Silvermaster and White, who were already under suspicion.

  But Hoover saw something more in the Bentley revelations. He saw opportunity. He immediately grasped the political importance of her allegations, seeing them as way to extend the power and influence of the FBI. What could be more threatening than spies in our own government working for the demise of the American way of life? Hoover wanted—and with Bentley’s help could now demand—a bigger budget to fight this evil, more agents, more field offices, more power, more independence of action. Not only that, he now had, courtesy of Elizabeth Bentley, ammunition against his chief rival in the counterintelligence business, the OSS. Several of the sources Bentley named worked for the OSS. That meant the organization had been infiltrated and could no longer be trusted. That meant the field would be clear for the expansion of Hoover’s personal and political power.

  On November 8, the day after Bentley’s first substantive interview in New York, Hoover fired off a letter, a “preliminary flash,” he called it, to Brigadier General Harry H. Vaughn, military aide to President Truman. Bentley’s statement was incomplete, unsigned, and based on the scribbled notes of two agents, rather than the work o
f a trained stenographer. But the information was too hot. Hoover couldn’t wait. According to a “highly confidential source,” he wrote General Vaughn, a number of federal government employees had been passing sensitive information to outsiders who then transmitted it to Russian espionage agents. Hoover repeated sixteen of the names Bentley had mentioned the day before, including several who worked for the OSS. The investigation, Hoover assured the general, was being vigorously pursued. But, he wrote, hardly containing his eagerness, “I thought the President and you would be interested in having the preliminary data immediately.”

  Six days later, in the early evening, President Truman called Hoover personally and asked him to brief Secretary of State James F. Byrnes on the Bentley affair. At 9:30 the next morning, Hoover presented himself at Byrnes’s office where he summarized the information the Bureau had gotten from Bentley, telling the secretary that the allegations had not been fully corroborated yet—after all, the investigation was only a week old—but that he believed they had “some substance.” Many of the people Bentley mentioned were already in the FBI’s files, he said. Then he named names: Silvermaster, Ullmann and White, Lauchlin Currie and Duncan Lee, Victor Perlo and several in his group, Mary Price and Helen Tenney. He named eighteen people that morning, all federal employees. The secretary and the director apparently saw eye-to-eye on the importance of convincing the public of the existence of Soviet espionage. From Hoover’s perspective, it was a very successful meeting. That afternoon, he wrote a letter to his assistant directors summarizing his session with the secretary and asking for a detailed report on the Bentley situation that he could forward, as soon as possible, to Byrnes.

  In New York, agents Kelly and Spencer were still busy interviewing Bentley, having her statements typed up after each session so she could review and sign them at the next session. By the end of November, the New York field office had spliced together one, all-encompassing, 107-page statement, which Bentley signed on November 30. Four days later, Hoover sent out a 71-page report titled “Soviet Espionage in the United States,” based almost entirely on Bentley’s allegations. Copies went not only to the secretary of state and General Vaughn, but also to the attorney general, the secretary of the Navy, the secretary of the Treasury, the president’s chief of staff, and several others. Hoover left no doubt that the Bentley case was the Bureau’s single most important priority.