Clever Girl

by Lauren Kessler

  “I have already given my responses in the prepared statement,” Silvermaster said.

  “In other words,” Rankin countered, “you are afraid that if you answer ‘No’ we will prove you were a member and then you would be subject to indictment for perjury.”

  Mundt took a kinder, gentler tack, a folksy approach. Look, he said to Silvermaster, I’m not a lawyer, and you’re not a lawyer. So just between us two laymen, why take the Fifth if answering will clear you? Silvermaster took the Fifth on that question.

  Nixon attempted to box him in with legal thinking. “Either you know Miss Bentley or you don’t,” he lectured Silvermaster. “Either you know these facts are true or you don’t. You have indicated in your statement these facts are false, which would indicate you have knowledge concerning Miss Bentley. Do you want to retract the statement that her statements are false, or do you want to state the facts?” Silvermaster once again took the Fifth. He could not be shaken.

  For the next two days, the hearings were devoted to Chambers and Hiss, but on August 9, the committee returned to Bentley’s allegations, calling Victor Perlo to the witness table. The day before, Truman had publicly denounced the HUAC hearings as a GOP tactic to distract attention from the fact that congressional Republicans were blocking his anti-inflation program. The only spy ring he knew of, he said, was in Karl Mundt’s head. Truman was half-right. The air was particularly thick with partisan politics that day. But the congressmen, for all their vitriol and extremism, were half-right, too. Something had been going on in Washington, D.C., under their noses during the war years, and they would be damned if they didn’t get to the bottom of it. Perlo, however, was not going to be of much help.

  Like Silvermaster, he read a prepared statement in which he vigorously denied any wrongdoing. “The lurid spy charges of the Bentley woman and of Chambers are,” he told the committee, “inventions of irresponsible sensation-seekers.” He then, like Silvermaster, refused to answer any further questions—including whether he knew “the Bentley woman”—and, like Silvermaster, was badgered by the committee when he invoked the Fifth. Rankin was his usual acrimonious self. Nixon was far more clever, pointing out the inconsistency of Perlo denying the charges in his statement and then, when questioned, refusing to answer whether the charges were true. But neither sharp tongues nor sharp wits moved the witness. In all, Perlo took the Fifth more than forty times, his face ashen, his hands clasping his knees to keep them from shaking.

  The following day, Duncan Lee appeared to answer questions, but, unlike Perlo and Silvermaster, he did, actually, answer questions. Yes, he knew Miss Bentley, he told the committee. She had, he said, aggressively pursued a relationship with him and his wife. At first, they liked her, inviting her into their home, finding her conversation both intelligent and interesting. But then, increasingly, she became a nuisance, and her political views began to strike them as too extreme. At that point, they cut off the friendship, he said. Had he ever given her confidential information that came across his desk at OSS? Of course not. Had he ever paid party dues to her? Was he a member of the Communist Party? No. And no.

  Bentley, who was sitting in the back of the room listening to the testimony, was immediately recalled and asked to repeat her story. She insisted, under oath, that Lee had, in fact, given her quite a bit of secret intelligence, including material on OSS operations in the Balkans and an OSS report on suspected communists in the government. Lee knew she was a communist, Bentley said, and was one himself. Once again, Lee took the stand.

  “I am frankly bewildered, congressmen, by Miss Bentley’s testimony,” he said. “I know one thing…she has an extremely active imagination.” Lee insisted that he made it a rule during his service with OSS to never discuss anything that had not previously appeared in the newspapers and that he had certainly held to that rule with Bentley. “It’s hard for me to believe,” he told the committee, “that Miss Bentley’s statements are those of a rational person.”

  But it was hard for the congressmen to believe that Lee, a high-ranking officer in the OSS, could be as innocent and as clueless as he made himself out to be. He had painted a picture of a woman with strong leftist views doggedly cultivating a relationship with him. Hadn’t that set off any warning bells? Why had he continued to see her? As an officer of the OSS whose job, in part, was counterespionage, why hadn’t he reported her actions to one of his superiors? Congressman Mundt fired the questions at him.

  “…Surely a man who had the capacity in OSS to rise up to the rank of lieutenant colonel had the capacity to figure out that something was unusual,” Mundt said. Lee remained calm and stuck to his story. Lud Ullmann and Robert T. Miller followed him that afternoon, both vehemently denying all charges.

  It was, perhaps, the worst day of the twenty-one-day hearing for Elizabeth Bentley. She sat in the crowded room, face flushed, listening as Lee dubbed her a nuisance and suggested that she had mental problems, as Ullmann called her a liar and a neurotic, and as Miller referred to her as a woman with a serious drinking problem. What had she expected when she publicly testified against them and the others, that they would nod their heads in agreement and admit to everything? That they would capitulate? Thank her for easing their own consciences? She really hadn’t thought that far. For three years she had been insulated by the secrecy of the FBI and the grand jury, surrounded by agents and government prosecutors and journalists who were kind and solicitous. But that was over now. The gloves were off.

  The hearings continued with Charles Kramer and David Silverman, whom Bentley had named as a member of the Silvermaster Group, invoking the Fifth and then Frank Coe and Bela Gold denying any involvement in either espionage or party activities. On Friday, August 13, Lauchlin Currie, a former top-level assistant to FDR, faced the committee. He had not been subpoenaed but appeared at his own request to answer, he said, “false statements and misleading suggestions.” Currie took an aggressive rather than defensive stance, not merely denying involvement but rejecting any possibility of indiscretion on his part. He stressed that he had never met or even seen Miss Bentley—which was true. He was one of the Silvermaster Group who had never directly interacted with Bentley, giving his information instead to an intermediary.

  The final witness that day was the most impressive, most highly placed of the people Bentley had named, former assistant secretary of the Treasury Harry Dexter White, one of the major architects of America’s postwar foreign economic policy. Bentley had never met White but testified that she knew he was part of the Silvermaster Group because the Silvermasters and Ullmann had talked about him many times. White, she said, found key positions in the Treasury Department for a number of the people in the network, implying that he played a significant role in the group’s ability to carry on its espionage activities. Sonya Gold, Bentley said, was hired as a secretary in White’s office to facilitate the flow of documents back to the Silvermasters, information that included departmental memos concerning foreign loan applications. White pulled strings to help members of the network when they were in trouble. He had masterminded the Morganthau Plan, which called for the destruction of German industry after the war and was seen by some as pro-Soviet, as playing into the hands of the communists whose position would be strengthened if Europe was weak.

  White read the allegations in the Washington papers, proclaimed Bentley’s testimony “the most fantastic thing I have ever heard of,” and wired the committee asking to be allowed to respond. In his opening statement before HUAC that Friday afternoon, he called Bentley’s story “unqualifiedly false,” insisting that his principles would make it impossible for him to be disloyal to his country. Those principles were, he said, nothing more and nothing less than “the American creed: freedom of religion, of speech, of thought, equal opportunity for all, a government of law, where law is above any man and no man is above the law.” He spoke with quiet passion and more eloquence than had been heard in that room for some time. Whittaker Chambers thought the performance was grippi
ng.

  “I consider these principles sacred,” he told the congressmen. “I regard them as the basic fabric of our American way of life, and believe in them as living realities and not as mere words on paper. That is my creed. Those are the principles I have worked for…and am prepared to defend at any time with my life.” The room erupted in applause. White then proceeded to dominate the hearings, unintimidated but not insolent, defending himself without being defensive, articulate, in control, seemingly relaxed, even witty at times. He answered all the questions patiently, affirming—not “admitting,” he told Stripling, but affirming— that he knew most of the members of the so-called Silvermaster network but denying that he knew anything about or had ever participated in espionage activities. He was not, nor had he ever been, a communist, he said.

  No other witness had comported himself so well and had managed such utterly convincing denials. By the time the questioning ended that afternoon, White appeared to have cleared his name. But the assistant secretary had, in fact, passed information, possibly sensitive documents, to Silvermaster, and he had knowingly met with Soviet underground contacts. Two years after the HUAC hearings, the FBI would positively identify White—whose code name was “Jurist”—in a number of Venona messages. But the committee knew only what they had heard that day. They had publicly scoffed at the denials of others, but they believed White. The press was friendly. His friends showered him with congratulations. Seemingly victorious, White left Washington, D.C., the next day for his farm in New Hampshire. Two days later, at age fifty-six, he was dead. There were rumors at the time that he killed himself. In a scathing editorial, the New York Times implied that the HUAC hearings had done him in. But the truth was that Harry Dexter White had long suffered from heart disease and had already lived through one major heart attack. He didn’t survive the second one.

  After White’s appearance, the hearings continued off and on for another three weeks, with the focus increasingly on the stand-off between Chambers and Hiss. Truman watched from the White House, irate, convinced that the communist conspiracy was, as he told the press, a “red herring,” a political invention whose purpose was brazenly partisan. The liberal left agreed, casting HUAC as an agency of bitter revenge against the champions of the New Deal, a group of rancorous, self-promoting bigots with little respect for the Constitution. But there were others who saw the committee as a group of fearless, honest, and moral men crusading against the enemies of the American way of life. Certainly, the committee cast itself in these terms, and this is how Elizabeth Bentley must have seen it as well as she alternately testified and sat through the hearings that August. She was, after all, a reformed sinner eager to confess and renounce, determined to see that those who sinned with her were exposed, and the committee gave her that opportunity. The congressmen had supported her and encouraged her, and she had done what she had to do. She had told the truth. There were, indeed, spies in the government. Communist espionage was not a figment of the Republicans’ imagination. Her allegations were not the ravings of a neurotic exhibitionist.

  But Bentley was not just an anticommunist witness telling her tale. She was a pawn in a political game she could not have understood. And the hearings she instigated by leaking her story to the New York World Telegram were more than a public forum about a serious problem. They were the beginning of one of the most controversial periods in twentieth-century history. Elizabeth Bentley had unknowingly set the stage for the abuses of McCarthyism, for innuendo and guilt by association, for the smearing of reputations and the ruining of careers, for fear and suspicion and paranoia.

  Chapter 17

  She Said, He Said

  THAT SUMMER, the summer of 1948, Elizabeth Bentley transformed herself once again. She was the New England blueblood who had become a communist spy, the communist spy who had become a government informer. Now she was the shadowy figure, identified in FBI files only as “Confidential Agent Gregory,” who became a headline-making celebrity. Some might dismiss her testimony before the Senate and House subcommittees as groundless, or worse, as politically motivated character assassination. But others, many others, sat up and took notice. For those who believed Bentley’s story, or even a small part of it, the revelations were both startling and disturbing. It was not so much that the Soviet Union, our sympathetic, wartime ally, could now be seen, or reinterpreted, as an evil-doer. That was really not so hard to believe in the late 1940s, with the Soviet blockade of West Berlin and with the press full of news of communist aggression in Turkey, Greece, Czechoslovakia, and across Eastern Europe. What was hard to believe, what was particularly disquieting, was the idea that seemingly solid, upright Americans, well-educated—in many cases brilliantly educated at the nation’s finest schools—men with distinguished careers and upwardly mobile lives, men who epitomized what was good and right about America, that men like these could be spies. That one really didn’t know whom to trust. That the enemy might be among us, invisible. This would be a theme in 1950s America, a thread woven into the fabric of everyday life. And it began in earnest that summer with Elizabeth Bentley’s public testimony.

  Her metamorphosis from obscurity to fame—or infamy, depending on one’s politics—was partly her own doing. She had come forth, unbidden, to tell her story to the FBI. She had leaked it to the press when the grand jury hit a wall. She was a voluntary, and eager, witness before both subcommittees. She was, or thought she was, in control of her life. But that summer she became public property in a way she could not possibly have imagined. She became an item. She became a target. She was “the queen bee of the informer set,” “the Nutmeg Mata Hari”—Connecticut being “the Nutmeg State”—as A. J. Liebling dubbed her in a particularly snide article in The New Yorker. The Nation and The New Republic reviled her. In a poem published in the New York Herald Tribune that summer, Archibald MacLeish wrote:

  God help that country where informers thrive

  Where slander flourishes and lies contrive.

  Not surprisingly, the Communist Party was particularly displeased with Bentley and began a campaign of smears and slanders against her, including planting a story that she had spent time in a mental institution. Among themselves, American communists dismissed her as a neurotic, lonely woman who was never serious about communism in the first place and was now starved for attention. She received threatening letters in the mail. “Dear Betty,” read one of them. “Congratulations on your spy story…. It will be the last story you will ever write. We will wright [sic] the last chapter.” In San Francisco, police found a pile of women’s clothes, a handbag, and a letter addressed to Bentley on the Golden Gate Bridge. The letter accused Bentley of betrayal and said that the anonymous writer had jumped off the bridge along with her baby daughter. It was a hoax, the police discovered a few days later. But meanwhile, the story went out across the country through the wire services. If Bentley had been looking for the spotlight when she testified that summer, this, surely, was not the spotlight she had in mind.

  Part of what kept her in the public eye after the hearings ended was William Remington. When she testified to the Ferguson Committee that he was one of her regular Washington, D.C., sources, she set in motion an epic drama that would be played out at three congressional hearings, and before two loyalty boards, a grand jury, and in two courtrooms. It would be part of her life—and great fodder for the press—for years to come.

  Remington himself was not a particularly important figure in government, like Harry Dexter White, nor was he a network leader like Silvermaster or Perlo. But he became the test of Bentley’s credibility, just as Alger Hiss became the test for Whittaker Chambers. Remington was not like the others Bentley had named. Silvermaster, Ullmann, Perlo, and most of the rest effectively took themselves out of the game by invoking their Fifth Amendment privilege and refusing to answer questions that might link them with Bentley—or each other. They were not going to be indicted for espionage, and they and their lawyers knew it. They knew they were safe when the 1947 gran
d jury didn’t return indictments. When it was evident that Bentley could offer no more corroboration in the congressional hearings than she had to the grand jury, it became a simple matter of keeping quiet and toughing it out. Silvermaster and the others had no way of knowing that Venona could prove their involvement in espionage. But even if they had known, it didn’t matter, because Army Intelligence and J. Edgar Hoover had no intention of making Venona public. All Silvermaster and the rest had to do was not say anything that could later be used against them in a perjury trial. All they had to do was leave their government jobs and remove themselves from the crossfire.

  Of those who did not take refuge in the Fifth Amendment, Lauchlin Currie disappeared to Colombia, Maurice Halperin fled to Mexico, and Harry Dexter White, who had so eloquently stated his own patriotism before HUAC, died. Then there was William Remington, who declared his innocence, did not invoke the Fifth—and stayed to fight. He was an ambitious and self-confident young man with impeccable credentials and his whole career ahead of him. If he was going to have the career he imagined for himself, he needed to clear his name. And if Elizabeth Bentley—and by extension, the FBI, HUAC, and the whole communist conspiracy juggernaut—were to maintain credibility, Remington must be brought down.

  Following the Ferguson hearings, the Commerce Department suspended Remington while a regional loyalty board—part of the government security system Truman had created under pressure—examined his case. Remington testified before the four-man panel for more than thirteen hours. “It never occurred to me,” he told the board, “that she was a communist…. I thought of her as a vague, rather pleasant lady, a kind of sad and aimless person I befriended for a brief time.” A parade of witnesses then attested to Remington’s loyalty, stressing the avowedly anti communist stances he had taken in recent years. According to Truman’s executive order, the loyalty examiners were supposed to determine whether a person was loyal to the government at the present time. But Remington’s panel decided to dismiss his present activities as “self-serving” and concentrate on his past and Bentley’s allegations of his conduct in 1942 and 1943. There they found much to criticize.