Clever Girl

by Lauren Kessler

  Abe Brothman, the chemical engineer who, Bentley claimed, passed secret blueprints to her, testified that he gave her only harmless information, notes about common industrial processes and simple chemical formulas for the purpose of obtaining a business contact with the Russian government. Brothman said he knew both Bentley and Golos and had met them through a fellow chemist by the name of Harry Gold. Gold, when called to testify, corroborated Brothman’s story. It would be three years before the FBI discovered that the two had concocted the story together, prior to their grand jury appearances. In 1950 investigators “broke” Gold and learned that he had taken over from Bentley as Brothman’s courier and had later acted as a courier for atomic spy Klaus Fuchs. Gold’s new testimony led to indictments against Brothman and his secretary, Miriam Moscowitz, who were subsequently convicted of perjuring themselves during their grand jury appearances. But this was in the future. What Donegan had in 1947 was Bentley’s accusations countered at every turn by denials under oath, assertions of complete innocence, or invocations of the Fifth Amendment. On April 6, 1948, when the grand jury heard its final witness, Donegan knew he was in trouble. He was, as would be expected, close-mouthed to the media. Federal officials were “refusing to guess” whether the jury would indict or clear a “large group of American citizens” who stood accused of passing information to the Russians, reported a Newsweek story in the fall of 1947. But Donegan didn’t have to guess. He knew. What he had, after thirteen months of grand jury investigation, was little more than what the FBI had back in 1945: one woman’s story.

  The media, sniffing around the edges, caught the scent. From New York and Washington came “inside” stories—leaks—that the jury would be dismissed without handing down any indictments, that the espionage case was “all washed up.” There was even speculation in some quarters that the case reached so high in the federal government that it was politically “too hot” to pursue. To Donegan, the grand jury’s failure to indict would be a significant professional setback in what had been thus far a highly successful career. More than that, it would be an embarrassment to the Department of Justice, which had vigorously mounted the case, and a repudiation of the FBI, which had devoted so many resources to investigating it. It wouldn’t kill, but it would certainly wound, the growing anticommunist cause. So Donegan, with the approval of Attorney General Tom Clark, decided to take another tack. He asked the jury to wait while he prepared a new case. This one would accuse the American communist party of conspiring to advocate the overthrow of the government by force and would call for the indictment of the top party leaders. The idea behind this new strategy, Donegan told the FBI, was that the failure in the Bentley case would become “much less significant.” If the jury were to stay in session and hand down indictments in the new case, the resultant publicity “would not be unfavorable.”

  The Smith Act of 1940 provided just the foundation Donegan and his staff needed to build the case. The law made it a crime “to print, publish, edit, issue, circulate, sell, distribute, or publicly display any written or printed matter” advocating the violent overthrow of the U.S. government. Using the incendiary, often overblown language of standard Marxist literature, like The Communist Manifesto and the program of the Third International, as well as the writings and speeches of various American party leaders, it should not be difficult to persuade the grand jury that the party—at least on paper—called for the overthrow of the government. And, if Bentley told the grand jury what she had told the FBI about the connection between the party and Moscow—how former leader Earl Browder helped identify possible espionage agents from among party ranks, for example—that would strengthen the case even more.

  Donegan’s idea worked. On July 20, 1948, with what the media called “boom and sizzle,” the grand jury handed down sealed indictments against the twelve-man national board of the American communist party. While this was hardly as dramatic, or important, as espionage indictments would have been, the news made headlines big enough to obscure the fact that the grand jury had been, essentially, a flop. The indictments—which resulted in guilty verdicts for all twelve of the accused—were, more than anything else, a face-saving device for the government. But to most Americans, who knew nothing of Bentley’s allegations or the lengthy FBI investigation or the secret grand jury proceedings, the indictments looked like the successful conclusion to a government investigation of those who would harm their own country. The Department of Justice, the FBI, and especially Elizabeth Bentley knew better.

  Bentley was bitterly disappointed with the outcome. None of the people she named were indicted. Her endless sessions with the FBI, her 107-page signed statement, her testimony before the grand jury, the disruption, the isolation, the secrecy, the guilt over naming names, the risks she had taken, the stress…it all meant nothing. She had come forth. She had told everything. But that wasn’t good enough. Those she accused of passing confidential information would not be prosecuted. Her story would remain untold, hidden in a top-secret FBI file and in the never-to-be-published proceedings of the failed grand jury. It could be that her sense of justice was outraged. As a born-again patriot and staunch anticommunist, she would have had a hard time seeing the people she accused—the men and women she knew to be leaking secrets to the Soviets—go not just unpunished but unexposed. But it was also a matter of pride and of ego. Remington had, in essence, called her a liar. So had Duncan Lee and Frank Coe and William Taylor. Ullmann had told the grand jury that she was a neurotic and a nuisance. How could she let that stand? How could she, in the face of testimony that contradicted everything she said, take pride in her conversion, in the work she had done with the FBI, in herself? How could she feel she was playing a major role when the show went unproduced? The failure of the grand jury would also have scared her, as her best protection from Soviet reprisal was in her story becoming public. Once the story was out, it would be harder, riskier—and of little use—for the KGB to harm her.

  She had been worrying about the jury’s silence, and what it would mean to her, all spring. Maybe she should go public with her own story, she thought, and write a book about her experiences. Or maybe she could get someone else to do the work. In early April, she contacted Nelson Frank, a New York World Telegram staff writer and labor reporter who had interviewed her in the past for a story on the customs duties Russia charged on relief packages sent by Americans. As the vice president of USS&S, she was a logical source for the story. At the time, she learned that Frank had dabbled in communism himself. And so, that spring, she phoned the newspaper office and made an appointment to see him and his newsroom colleague, Frederick Woltman, the paper’s Pulitzer Prize–winning expert on communism.

  “I want some advice,” she told the two reporters when they met the following day. “The men of the FBI are very friendly, but they don’t feel free to talk to me.” She told them briefly, with few details, about the stalled grand jury. What will happen to the testimony I gave, she asked, if the jury returns no indictments? Will my story be forgotten? Frank’s nose for news began to twitch.

  They talked for three hours that day, with Bentley outlining her espionage activities. Frank and Woltman knew immediately that they had banner headline material. Within days, Donegan found out about Bentley’s meeting with the reporters, which he considered an “ill-conceived act.” The FBI called Bentley in for questioning, reporting for the file that she was “nervous and distraught.” Donegan didn’t care about her mental health. His chief concern was that she keep quiet. This would have been just the time he was switching gears to mount the case against the Communist Party. The last thing he needed was a loose cannon, a troubled witness who could blow his chances of rescuing the grand jury from failure. He couldn’t prevent her from meeting with the reporters—which she did on and off for the next three and a half months—but he could make it very clear to the powers that be at the World Telegram that the Department of Justice would not appreciate a story at this time. The newspaper may also have worried about po
ssible contempt charges had it published what could be considered secret grand jury testimony.

  Nelson Frank continued to research the story through the late spring, checking in several times with Donegan and his assistant, Vincent Quinn, to see if he could squeeze them for information about what was happening with the grand jury. Early in the summer, Frank met Quinn in Washington, D.C., where the reporter picked up hints that something might be breaking soon. He went back to New York and started preparing a series of articles highlighting the “exclusive details” he had gleaned from interviews with Bentley. Then, he waited. It wasn’t until July 20, 1948, sixteen months after it was first impaneled, that the grand jury concluded its work by handing down the indictments against the twelve leaders of the Communist Party. The newspapers, just as Donegan had hoped, carried the “good news” of the jury’s successful outcome with little mention of the failed espionage investigation or the woman who started it all.

  But the next day, July 21, the World Telegram ran its big story on page one under a half-inch-high banner headline that announced: RED RING BARED BY BLOND QUEEN. In a lengthy story that ran across the top of the page, the paper focused the journalistic spotlight clearly on Elizabeth Bentley, although her name was withheld. “The sparks that touched off yesterday’s indictment,” went the lead of the story, “…originated a year ago in the gnawing pangs of conscience suffered by a svelte striking blonde.” It was the “beautiful young blonde” whose story of espionage was “so fantastic that even veteran FBI officials scarcely could believe [it]” who was behind the indictments and who had an even bigger story to tell. That story was one of espionage and intrigue, of secrets turned over to the Russians, of government officials—from “a personal adviser to President Roosevelt” to “a man high in the councils of the Office of Strategic Services”—who worked with the blonde to sabotage the country of their birth.

  It was a dramatic story, fancifully told, in which Bentley, a plain-featured, matronly brunette in her late thirties was transformed by Nelson Frank into a captivating Mata Hari. Clearly, svelte blondes made better copy. But the fictional description also shielded Bentley’s identity, which may have been one reason it was concocted. An FBI secretary, a young blonde, had been assigned to escort Bentley to and from her court appearances, the only time she would have been within sight of the press. The svelte blonde description might have been an attempt to throw a curve to the rest of the press, purposely confusing the secretary with the witness.

  The next day, the World Telegram went with the second in Nelson Frank’s series, another front-page story, this one titled, SUPERSECRECY VEILED RUSSIA’S SPY CELLS HERE. Once again, the “good-looking blonde spy ring leader” was center stage as she revealed a vast espionage network that “systematically milked” the government of “much of its top secret information.” The story went on to mention a “top subordinate to a cabinet member,” “a secretary to a Senator,” and other well-placed federal government employees who were part of the network. The third story, published July 23, took a new approach, attempting to explain to readers how Americans could end up as Russian spies.

  Bentley had explained the process, and her own motivations, somewhat disingenuously to Nelson Frank, portraying herself as a victim of manipulation, tricked by the party into spying for Russia. “Like many other communists who worked in these networks, I didn’t fully realize how I had been tricked,” she was quoted as saying in the story. Of course, this wasn’t true. Bentley knew a long time before she took control of the Silvermaster and Perlo networks for whom she was working. She had discovered Golos’s true identity early in their relationship and, after his death, had been reporting directly to Russian agents. But in the front-page story headlined CITIZENS TRICKED INTO SPY RING BY U.S. REDS, Bentley and her sources were portrayed as, if not innocents, then unwitting participants. It was a comfortable fiction, a reasonable explanation for a seemingly unreasonable act. Bentley could be understood—and sympathized with—as a victim of forces greater than herself, a woman whose desire to build a better world was used to manipulate her into doing things she would not normally do. There may have been some truth to this version of her past, but clearly Elizabeth Bentley was beginning to rewrite her own history. She needed to explain herself publicly in the most solicitous terms. She needed to explain herself in a way she herself could understand and live with.

  The World Telegram stories were a journalistic coup that made New York and Washington papers sit up and take notice. Some derided the revelations. The World Telegram had not done itself any favors with its screaming headlines and tabloid tone. But other news media picked up the story and began to make it their own. Newsweek, echoing the World Telegram series, presented Bentley as a “tall, thin blonde…of old American stock and full of the idealism which had flowered at Walden Pond and Brook Farm.” And editors were not the only ones paying attention. The morning after the first story appeared, Nelson Frank got a call from the legal counsel of a Senate investigating committee eager to delve into this issue of communist spies in the federal government. This mysterious blond spy in the story, would she be a good witness to appear before the committee? Yes, said Frank, she would. In fact, he could personally arrange for her appearance.

  Bentley hadn’t wanted her story to die. She hadn’t wanted it to languish in confidential files and top-secret documents. She was getting her wish.

  Chapter 15

  The Lady Appears

  IT WAS SUMMER, and Congress was in recess. But President Truman, in a fiery acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention in July, summoned the legislators back to the hot, steamy capital for a special two-week session to pass bills stalled in the regular session. In retaliation, Republicans in the House and Senate convened hearings on subversion in the federal government. It was an election year—Americans would be voting for president in just four months—and both parties were busy positioning themselves. The Republicans considered Truman soft on communism. The hearings, they thought, might turn up something embarrassing to the administration, something that could help fuel a Republican victory in November. Up until now, the investigations had been conducted behind closed doors, within the confidential confines of the FBI or hidden from view in the grand jury room. There had been little publicity and no public naming of names. That was to end abruptly in the summer of 1948, when two congressional committees jumped feet first into what would soon become the single most contentious issue in American public life: the “communist conspiracy.” Elizabeth Bentley was about to take her place, center stage.

  The so-called Ferguson Committee—officially the Investigations Subcommittee of the Committee on Expenditures in the Executive Departments, but Homer Ferguson, its Republican chairman, was its namesake—had been investigating the somewhat prosaic subject of export policy. But now the public allegations of the Red Spy Queen gave the committee a chance to delve into a much juicier topic. In the World Telegram series, the anonymous Spy Queen had named William Remington as one of her espionage sources. Remington had been with the War Production Board at the time, but now it turned out that he held an important post in the Office of International Trade in the Commerce Department. So here was a man, thought Homer Ferguson, who might very well be a communist spy, in a sensitive position linked to export policy decisions. This man had access to confidential information that could affect America’s economic and perhaps even political status. How could this be? How could Remington—while under investigation by both the FBI and a grand jury—be hired and promoted and placed in such an important and sensitive position? It was, of course, the fault of the Truman administration. It was the executive branch’s laxity, its blindness to the communist threat—and maybe even its own pinkish proclivities—that allowed a man like Remington to serve in important positions. That’s the case the Republicans wanted to make.

  When the committee convened on July 30, just one week after the World Telegram series was published, it initiated hearings on the conduct of the executiv
e branch in hiring employees for sensitive positions. Bentley would be the key witness, her appearance arranged by Nelson Frank, the World Telegram reporter. The question the committee set for itself that day was “how our government could employ or transfer from one department to another, a very important employee in a highly secret position when at the same time an investigation was being made of that particular employee on questions of espionage and loyalty.” The target was William Remington.

  At 2:20 in the afternoon, Senator Ferguson called the session to order in a cramped hearings room in the Senate office building. News photographers jockeyed for space, flashbulbs popping. News-reelers lined up along one side of the room, adjusting their klieg lights and balancing their cameras on tripods. The small room became uncomfortably hot almost immediately. Ferguson, a Republican from Michigan, was, at age fifty-eight, a first-term senator. But he had the self-assurance of a man who had been a practicing attorney, a circuit court judge, and a professor of law before coming to Washington. He had already tangled with the Truman administration over concealment of facts about Pearl Harbor and was more than willing to do battle again.