As news of Bentley’s defection made its way through government channels, the FBI geared up for what would become one of the longest, most expensive investigations in its history. In mid-November, while Bentley was still being interviewed, Hoover took the case away from the FBI’s Soviet Espionage Squad in New York, arguably the group that knew the territory best, and assigned it to the Bureau’s elite Major Case Squad, which had been working on German and Japanese espionage during the war and now had little to do. Hoover put his faith in thirty-eight-year-old Thomas J. Donegan, head of the Major Case Squad, a small, intense man who, like Hoover, was so focused on his work that he was almost oblivious to the rest of life. At the office, Donegan had earned the nickname “The Hat,” because he was often so busy coming and going that his colleagues rarely saw him without a fedora on his head. Hoover told Donegan that he wanted the Bureau to devote all its energy to following up Bentley’s leads and that there would be “no limit” on the number of agents he could use. Donegan began immediately, focusing the investigation on fifty-one of the more than a hundred people Bentley had named, with special attention to the twenty-seven still employed by the federal government. Tracking Bentley’s statements from day to day, Donegan began the investigation in earnest on November 17, when the Bureau requested wire taps from the attorney general on Perlo’s, Bela Gold’s, and Maurice Halperin’s telephones. That same day, agents were assigned to tail Silvermaster. William Remington’s phone was tapped. Perlo, Ullmann, and Donald Wheeler were put under surveillance, and New York agents were told to locate and follow Mary Price. Then Harry Dexter White was put under round-the-clock surveillance, his phones tapped and his mail intercepted and read. Written summaries of White’s phone conversations were forwarded to the squad, and when he moved to a new apartment, FBI agents rented the adjoining unit and installed microphones next door. Following Bentley’s meeting with Gorsky in mid-November and her subsequent identification of him from FBI photos, agents in Washington were assigned to tail him night and day. Then, based on Bentley’s November 21 statement, Donegan put thirteen additional people under surveillance. By the third week in November, Hoover had reassigned six Philadelphia and six Newark agents to the Washington office to join the twenty-five agents already there on the job. Eventually, more than two hundred agents would work the case.
Herman Bly was one of them, a thirty-two-year-old, five-year veteran of the Bureau when he was assigned to dissect Bentley’s statement, line by line, checking and cross-checking every detail with existing material in FBI files and elsewhere. At one point, agents worked assiduously to verify a meeting that Bentley said took place. She remembered that it was a rainy Sunday in March, and she remembered that one of the men at the meeting, Harry Magdoff, had been off work recovering from an operation. Agents combed Magdoff’s personnel file at the Department of Commerce and found confirmation that he’d been on sick leave following gallbladder surgery and was not set to return to work until March 7. A check with the Weather Bureau established that it had rained in New York on Sunday, March 5. Bingo. At another point in the investigation, agents from four different field offices fanned out to interview scores of people, search city directories, and dig into newspaper archives, police reports, and hospital records in what turned out to be a futile attempt to identify a man known to Bentley only as “Charlie.”
Much of it was monotonous work, but it was also the most exciting assignment Bly and his fellow agents had ever had. They were electrified by the Bentley material, astounded at the richness of detail, amazed at the number of leads, and absolutely convinced that this was the breakthrough that would halt Soviet espionage in the United States. As the initial investigation gained momentum, it looked as if they might be right. The details were checking out. The diverse people Bentley named matched the descriptions she gave, which was the first good news. Then the surveillance on White showed that he had frequent contact with Silvermaster and several others in the alleged network. And a search of the Silvermasters’ home revealed a photo lab in the basement, just as Bentley had said. Things were looking good.
As the investigation continued, so too did the interviews with Bentley. But Donegan wanted her to do more than talk. He wanted her to act as a double agent. Bentley was not just amenable; she was eager. Here was a chance to prove her rekindled patriotism, a chance to go back to the exciting life she had lived before the Russians stripped her of her duties and took away her networks. She would be squarely back in the game, although, of course, on the other side. Bentley was asked to stay on at USS&S and keep her eyes open. She was asked to maintain contact with Communist Party leader Earl Browder. It was suggested that she attempt to renew her Washington, D.C., contacts and resurrect her moribund career as network handler. Toward this end, the FBI asked Bentley to schedule another meeting with Gorsky, her KGB contact.
They met on November 21 at their usual spot in front of Bickford’s restaurant on 23rd Street and had a long and seemingly friendly conversation over dinner. Gorsky talked mostly about USS&S and the problems still to be ironed out there. Meanwhile, Bentley made a few apparently not too subtle attempts to get him to discuss the relationship between USS&S and the Communist Party, and the party and the KGB. Gorsky’s antenna immediately went up. What was she fishing for? He kept the conversation going, not allowing his suspicion to show while he chose his words carefully, answering without really answering. Bentley told him she was restless and dissatisfied with her routine duties at USS&S, implying that she was ready to be reactivated or at least take on additional responsibilities. Gorsky was wholly unresponsive to her hints, not because he didn’t get them but because he did. When she tried to elicit from him what, if anything, he had in mind for her, he was noncommittal. The meeting netted nothing for Bentley in her new role as a counterespionage agent. But it had served to alert Gorsky. His suspicions were further aroused when he left the restaurant and realized he was being tailed. It would be their last meeting.
Bentley could not contact her old sources without Gorsky’s involvement. She had been forced to break off ties with them many months before, and since then Silvermaster and Perlo had been reporting directly to the Russians. Any attempt to reinsert herself in the apparatus would have been far too suspicious. But the FBI did ask if she would get in touch with Helen Tenney, one of her old OSS contacts. Tenney had been hospitalized for a nervous breakdown, and the FBI probably considered her the most likely candidate for “weak sister,” the fragile link in the chain, the unstable one who might break under questioning and give the Bureau what it needed: corroboration for Bentley’s story. Bentley traveled to Washington to meet with Tenney, who had no idea her former handler had defected. Tenney seemed amenable to reestablishing contact—too amenable for the Bureau’s purposes. She indicated no dissatisfaction with the Russians, no desire to get out of the game. There was no hint that she was ripe for turning.
Bentley’s efforts at counterintelligence were doomed anyway—as were the FBI’s surveillance and phone-tapping operations—because by the third week in November, the KGB was not only aware of her defection but was also receiving regular summaries of her interviews with Bureau agents. The leak was in London, in British Intelligence, which received frequent FBI reports both as a professional courtesy and to aid counterintelligence efforts in that country. The mole was Harold “Kim” Philby, a senior British agent who was also a Soviet spy, recruited into covert work while a student at Cambridge in the late 1930s. When Philby read the FBI report on Bentley, he notified the KGB’s London station chief who immediately reported the news to Moscow. Two days later, on November 22—the day after Gorsky had met with Bentley and had his suspicions aroused—he and his counterpart in New York received urgent cables from Moscow telling them of Bentley’s defection and instructing them and other KGB operatives in the United States to cease all contact with her. On November 24, Vsevolod Merkulov, People’s Commissar for State Security, notified Stalin, Molotov, and Beria of Bentley’s betrayal. The FBI had no idea there
was a leak and kept sending summaries of the Bentley interviews to British Intelligence, where Philby conscientiously forwarded them to Moscow, which in turn kept its American operatives duly informed. It was a smooth, continuous communications loop, a dandy system for everyone but the FBI.
A few of Bentley’s former sources heard directly about her defection. Silvermaster was told the news by Akhmerov in early December. Some of the twenty-seven federal employees she had named undoubtedly picked up hints at work. Hoover had alerted so many people so early that rumors, if not truth, were probably circulating through Treasury, State, and the OSS, at the very least. Other sources may have caught on to the fact they were being tailed. With scores of agents in New York and Washington on the streets conducting close physical surveillance, it was likely that someone at some time noticed them. The clicks and taps and buzzes on phone lines would have alerted others.
So even if Bentley had been skillful and subtle and well-trained in the art of counterespionage—which she wasn’t—circumstances were such that she would have failed as a double agent anyway. The same leak that sunk her efforts then began to sink the FBI’s investigation. Agents following paper trails were still finding success, matching people with descriptions, pinning down details. But surveillance efforts and wiretapping were netting nothing. Gorsky and Akhmerov, Silvermaster and Perlo, everyone stopped doing what they had been doing. There was nothing for the agents to observe. There was nothing to overhear.
The interviewing wasn’t going very well for the FBI either. Agents had hoped to uncover a “weak sister,” but they encountered instead men and women strident in their declarations of innocence, who offered universal, unequivocal denials. Akhmerov had discussed with Silvermaster what his response would be if Bentley fingered him. “Naturally, he will deny completely any allegations of his connection and cooperation with us,” Akhmerov assured his Moscow superiors. Ullmann, when interviewed, admitted meeting Bentley at the Silvermasters a number of times but denied that anything untoward took place. He told agents he and the Silvermasters considered Bentley a “hysterical, highly emotional nuisance.” Remington said he knew Bentley only as “Helen” and thought she was a newspaper reporter. He gave her only press releases and published articles, he told the FBI. Some of those interviewed gave evasive answers. Others flatly refused to talk.
But even if there had been more cooperation —any cooperation—in developing an espionage case, the government still faced formidable obstacles. For a charge of espionage to stick, it had to be shown not only that the accused persons passed confidential information relating to national defense but also that they engaged in these acts with an intent to do injury to the United States to the advantage of a foreign nation. In other words, the sources who passed the information had to know it was going to Russia. Some of them undoubtedly did. Perlo had joked with Bentley about “Uncle Joe” Stalin getting the information from his network. If Silvermaster didn’t know before Akhmerov took over from Bentley in late 1944, he certainly knew afterwards. But a number of the other sources had connections only with Bentley, who was also their liaison to the party, and believed, or allowed themselves to believe, that the information they were passing went from her to Earl Browder and stopped there. Maybe they knew better, maybe they suspected otherwise, but it would be difficult to prove in a court of law. A case of perjury was no simple matter either. To prove that someone lied, you needed the direct testimony of two witnesses or one witness plus corroborating evidence. But Bentley was the only witness talking. And she had no documentary evidence.
The case itself may not have been progressing as the FBI had hoped, but there was little doubt that Bentley’s defection was having a major effect. In fact, the double whammy of Gouzenko’s defection in Canada and Bentley’s in the United States led Moscow to order a freeze of virtually all intelligence activities by the KGB in North America for more than two years, until late 1947. On November 23, Moscow instructed Gorsky to sever connections with a number of sources who knew Bentley, including Harold Glasser, Charles Kramer, Donald Wheeler, Victor Perlo, Allen Rosenberg, Lauchlin Currie, Helen Tenney, and Maurice Halperin. Further, Gorsky was to tell Perlo and a few others, under strict secrecy, that Bentley was the cause of the new orders. Two weeks later, Akhmerov broke with Silvermaster, telling him that Bentley’s defection meant they would have to “stop our work totally.” Then, one by one, the KGB functionaries who had dealt with Bentley over the years were called home. Akhmerov and his wife, Catherine, both of whom had met with Bentley a number of times in New York, were ordered back to Moscow in early December. Vassily Zarubin, Akhmerov’s colleague in New York, also had to leave. Gorsky, Bentley’s Washington, D.C., contact, was replaced as station chief and ordered home at the same time. All of a sudden, because of one loose-lipped woman, it was the end of the golden age of Soviet espionage. Bentley had delivered what the head of KGB intelligence called “the most tangible blow to our work.”
Espionage activity ceased, and lives were changed forever. The FBI, disappointed that the surveillance and wire-tapping operations had not been productive, decided to go after some of the people Bentley named, the twenty-seven still employed by the federal government, in more subtle ways. The Bureau quietly alerted the appropriate officials in the appropriate departments, and internal pressure was applied. When William Remington was about to be tapped for a White House staff position, two FBI agents paid a visit to the assistant to the president, informing him that Remington was a principal figure in an ongoing espionage investigation. Remington’s name was quickly removed from the list. When the Bureau let it be known to Naval Intelligence that Remington was under suspicion, he was discharged from the Naval Reserves. Within the various government departments, some positions were abolished, some people were forced out, and some were allowed to resign. Silvermaster left the Treasury Department in mid-1946. Ullmann and Perlo followed nine months later. Halperin and Wheeler resigned from their State Department positions. Magdoff and Fitzgerald left their Commerce Department jobs. Glasser was forced out of his high-ranking Treasury post. During the course of the next year and a half, twenty-four of the twenty-seven, most of whom were career civil servants, left the employ of the federal government.
Bentley’s defection was felt at the highest levels. Responding to the alarms set off by Hoover, as well as to the director’s growing power and influence, the Truman administration began to take the threat of espionage more seriously. In March of 1947, the president issued a sweeping executive order that established a security-checking program for all federal employees. The new program empowered the FBI to investigate any hint of disloyalty among those working for the government. During the next few years, more than twenty-five thousand people were referred to loyalty boards for investigation.
Removing people from their positions, plugging the leaks, and stemming the flow of information to the Soviets was all fine. But Hoover wanted convictions. He wanted those who had spied to pay for their disloyalty with more than just their jobs. So the investigation continued, with every independently verifiable fact checked, every lead pursued, scores of agents on the streets, hundreds of people interviewed. There was some external corroboration for Bentley’s story—Katherine Perlo’s letter, for example, and a 1939 report by ex-communist Whittaker Chambers—but it was not enough. The Perlo letter could be dismissed as the ravings of a distraught woman who wanted to harm her former husband to gain the upper hand in a custody battle over their children. And Chambers, who had left the Party in 1938 and had named Harry Dexter White, Lauchlin Currie, and others in a debriefing with FDR’s assistant secretary of state, was, like Bentley, an informer. Juries didn’t like informers. They didn’t trust them.
But two years into the investigation, Hoover got the break he was looking for. Back in 1943, Carter Clarke, the head of the Army’s intelligence service, had ordered the Army’s elite cadre of code-breakers to start examining ciphered Soviet diplomatic cables sent between the United States and Moscow. Clarke’s
fear was that Stalin, then an ally, might actually be undermining and endangering the United States by trying to make a separate peace with Hitler. But the code was more difficult to break than he thought, and by the time the first messages were deciphered, it was 1946, and the war was over. In any event, it turned out that the decrypted cables had nothing to do with the relationship between the Soviet Union and Germany. Venona—as the top-secret decryption project was code-named—had instead yielded what was unarguably the counterintelligence coup of the century: a detailed chronology of Soviet spying activities in the United States. Soon the government had evidence from the decrypted cables that more than three hundred citizens, immigrants, and permanent residents of the United States, including some high-ranking government officials, had covert relationships with Soviet intelligence agencies.
But the identities of those mentioned in the cables were obscured by code names. It fell to a select group of FBI agents, working in total secrecy, to comb Bureau files, check the personnel and travel files of other agencies, pull confidential documents, and study Elizabeth Bentley’s statement in an effort to match the code names with the people. It was careful, exacting, tedious work, but it began to pay off. A picture began to emerge: The code name “Clever Girl,” which showed up a number of times in the cables, was the name given to Elizabeth Bentley. “Eck,” it turned out after much cross-checking and investigation, was Perlo; “Pal” was Silvermaster. Harry Dexter White was referred to as “Lawyer” or “Richard.” Lauchlin Currie was “Page”; Helen Tenney was “Muse.” By matching details in the cables with details in the files—personal information, travel dates, positions held, changes in assignments, access to certain material—the FBI was able to identify almost 150 people, including a number of those named by Bentley. In addition to Perlo, Silvermaster, White, Currie, and Tenney, the FBI managed to identify Duncan Lee, Harold Glasser, Bela and Sonya Gold, Mary Price, Maurice Halperin, Donald Wheeler, Edward Fitzgerald, and others. Bentley herself was the subject of more than a dozen Venona cables.
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