Bentley emerged unscathed. She might have seemed a bit high-handed to those who tuned into the program, but she also seemed intelligent, alert, and articulate. Those who might have heard or read that she was hysterical, neurotic, a liar, and a Red-baiter saw only a mild-mannered, unflappable schoolteacher who spoke carefully and appeared to know what she was talking about. If Bentley had decided to say yes to Lawrence Spivak in order to enhance her reputation—which continued to suffer because of the lack of indictments against those she had named—she had perhaps modestly succeeded. If she had said yes to make nice to her friends at the FBI after giving them so much trouble the year before, she also succeeded. Bentley was “very conservative in her answers,” a Bureau official noted, with pleasure, and she “did not allow herself to be trapped.” She had done a “very good job in the face of loaded questions.” And, most important, she had mentioned the Bureau “only briefly” and “each time remarks were commendable.” If she agreed to appear on Meet the Press to reclaim her place in the public eye, she also succeeded. A week after her appearance, the New York Mirror reprinted the six-part series that had originally appeared in the St. Louis paper, and she was the talk of the town again.
The articles themselves were the same, but the Mirror treated them as tabloid fodder. EX-SPY QUEEN TELLS OWN STORY…LINE RAN STRAIGHT TO STALIN, SAYS BENTLEY ran the one-inch-high banner headline announcing the first in the series. The second article, which detailed her interactions with the Silvermaster and Perlo Groups, mentioned in passing that Bentley believed there might be other spy rings still operating. The headline read, in bold face: BENTLEY FINDS THIRD SPY RING. Publishing these stories in St. Louis was one thing; airing them in New York was another. FBI officials at headquarters, tipped off three days before the first article appeared, instructed agents in the New York office to obtain copies of the paper and forward them to Washington, D.C., for analysis. There the series was read with interest, as agents compared it, name for name, detail for detail, with Bentley’s book as well as her 1945 statement to the FBI. Upon close examination, there seemed to be a few places where Bentley had expanded on the original material. Headquarters instructed the New Orleans field office to send an agent to Grand Coteau to question her about this.
Back at her teaching post at Sacred Heart after her appearance on Meet the Press, Bentley made herself available for three FBI interviews in as many weeks. She was as cooperative and voluble as she had been in the best of times, filling in details for the visiting agent, answering questions about Golos and her Soviet contact “Bill,” adding information about a communist member of the War Production Board. But she claimed to be displeased with the Mirror articles, which, she told the agent, she had not actually written, although all of them appeared under her byline. She said she had been interviewed by a reporter in Louisiana months ago, and that the articles were a product of those talks, written entirely by the reporter. Bentley claimed she did not even review them before publication. The agents analyzing the newspaper articles had not found any misstatements or inaccuracies, but Bentley may have been worried that they would. She had trouble remembering what she had said to whom, which details had been made public and which had not. There had been too many grand juries, too many hearings and trials, too many speeches and interviews. She was on the record too many times for there not to be a mistake somewhere, a story she told a shade differently one time, a date she remembered, then misremembered. But the FBI concluded that “practically all” the information in the newspaper series was previously published in Out of Bondage.
Whatever her involvement in the series, it couldn’t have happened without her participation and consent. The stories had been published in two major newspapers within a week of each other, and in between, she had appeared on national television. She had been in Grand Coteau for only a matter of months, been out of the media spotlight only since the Remington trial barely a year ago. Still, it seemed she had had enough of obscurity. Maybe she wanted it both ways: a quiet, out-of-the-way job she could settle into and the excitement of reporters at her door, special agents calling for interviews, NBC producers inviting her to appear on national television. Although she had been hurt by it, although it had created stress in her life that she had not been able to handle, she apparently could not give up her identity as the righteous and rehabilitated Spy Queen. As it turned out, she would not have the choice.
Chapter 22
Under Attack
IT WAS WILLIAM HENRY TAYLOR, an obscure government bureaucrat, who turned up the heat. Bentley had testified a number of times that Taylor was one of the group of federal employees who fed confidential information to Greg Silvermaster. She knew this, she said, not because she had ever met or talked with Taylor, not because she had actually seen him pass information to Silvermaster, but because Silvermaster told her of Taylor’s involvement. Taylor had been anything but intimidated by the accusations. He hadn’t tried to escape the spotlight by leaving the country or even, as Silvermaster, Ullmann, and so many others had done, by leaving government service. He had stayed put and spent five years defending himself. When called to testify—he had appeared before three congressional committees, five grand juries, and was in 1954 being investigated by a loyalty board—he did not plead the Fifth, and he did not skirt the issues. Again and again, under oath, he proclaimed his complete innocence and denied all of Bentley’s accusations.
The war of words between Bentley and Taylor mostly stayed behind closed doors, locked away in secret grand jury testimony or the unpublished record of subcommittee executive sessions, until, in the fall of 1953, both the attorney general and the director of the FBI mentioned Taylor’s name in their statements at a public session before the SISS. The press covered the hearings, and Taylor, who at the time was an assistant director at the International Monetary Fund, found himself fighting for his job. This time it was not enough to proclaim his innocence. This time he took direct action, mounting a $5 million libel suit against the Washington Daily News for carrying a story in which he was accused of disloyalty. In putting together the case in February of 1954, Taylor’s lawyers subpoenaed Bentley. She was to give her deposition at a law office in Opelousas, Louisiana.
But Bentley wanted no part of it. She immediately called the FBI field office in New Orleans, telling agents there that she had no intention of honoring the subpoena. Taylor was on a fishing expedition, she said, and she was the fish. The libel suit was just a cover for Taylor’s real purpose: He wanted to find out exactly what Bentley had told the FBI about him and what she had testified to in closed-door sessions. Meanwhile, the suit would delay his dismissal from the IMF. Bentley didn’t stop there. She told the resident agent in Lafayette, Louisiana, that the suit was, in fact, a communist plot, that Taylor was being backed by the party in an effort to bring her out into the open so that a libel suit could be filed against her. This, she told the somewhat incredulous agent, was a tactic used by the party to get revenge on a turncoat. Later, Bentley reported to the agent that unknown persons had broken into the College of Sacred Heart library and then ransacked the dormitories. Bentley saw this as directly related to her troubles with Taylor.
But the New Orleans agent wasn’t so sure. “It is apparent that a lot of the instances which she has related to agents of the Bureau are merely figments of her imagination,” he reported to his boss in Washington. “She is merely trying to apply pressure on the Bureau to get them to intervene on behalf of her so she will not have to appear and give a deposition.” The “communist plot” may have been a figment of her imagination, but she was right about Taylor’s underlying motive. He named a newspaper in his suit, but he was after her. He had been trying for two years to confront his accuser in public under oath. He was hopeful, he told the press, that the libel trial would finally provide that opportunity.
But the New Orleans agent was also right about one thing: Bentley was looking for FBI protection against Taylor and his lawyers. The FBI was, she told him, “the only organizat
ion left in the government that can’t be bought,” and it was the FBI’s duty to protect those who, like herself, had assisted the government. The Bureau had gotten her out of scrapes before, both legal and financial, and she expected the Bureau to do it again. She was being difficult and demanding—not to mention paranoiac—the agents thought, but the truculence actually masked fear. The college was expressing concern about adverse publicity. She would lose her job, a job that had not been easy to come by. She would be penniless again. And in the meantime, she would be dragged through the mud. She would have to listen, again, to people calling her a liar. She would have to read about herself in the newspapers. It was one thing when she wrote the stories herself, quite another when they were written about her. She still didn’t understand, or at least had not come to terms with, the reality: In coming forth to target others, she had become a target herself. She had set something in motion that she could not stop.
But maybe her friends at the Bureau could. On the phone, the agents stonewalled her. There would be no protection. The Bureau would give her no legal advice, they said. She should hire a lawyer and attend to the business herself. But behind the scenes, they moved into action, with the New Orleans office in close contact with the assistant attorney general, a federal judge in western Louisiana, and Taylor’s lawyers. It was a good thing, because Bentley was decidedly not taking care of business. She didn’t hire a lawyer for herself, and she ignored the subpoena. In April, a second subpoena was issued, and once again, Bentley ignored it, this time leaving the impression with a federal judge that she was under FBI protective custody. When Hoover heard about this, he was furious. In an urgent teletype sent to the New Orleans field office, he instructed the agent in charge to make it clear to the judge that the FBI was in no way protecting Bentley. Bentley should be told that responding to the subpoena was her own business but that the Bureau would not want her to do “anything foolish which might damage her reputation and possible future value as a government witness.”
Meanwhile, it seemed that Bentley was damaging her reputation with the people she needed most. In early May she presented herself at the New Orleans field office, demanding that the attorney general and Mr. Hoover provide her with immediate protection against the “corrupt [Huey] Long political machine in Louisiana” and the “communist plot” against her. She rambled and spoke in generalities about intimidations and threats, telling the agent in charge that she expected to be a “corpse” before long. Clearly rattled by the encounter, the agent sent a special delivery teletype to Hoover. Bentley appeared “irrational and illogical,” he told his boss. “Her talk impressed me as being that of a demented person.”
“Demented” was an overstatement, but certainly Bentley was bordering on hysteria over the Taylor affair. Regardless of what they thought of her at the moment, however, the FBI had many reasons to try to shield her from her own worst instincts. She was still a star witness and one of their most valuable informers. And the federal judge had his own reasons as well. Although Bentley was ignoring the subpoenas, he was reluctant to cite her for contempt. “She has undoubtedly performed a great service to this country,” he told the assistant attorney general. And he was particularly averse to moving against Bentley if the plaintiff in the libel suit was, as she alleged, a communist.
With Bentley successfully avoiding subpoenas, and the lawyers unable to depose her, the libel case stalled. But Taylor and his attorney Byron Scott refused to be stymied. In mid-April, Scott engineered a press conference in Manhattan at which he called for a public hearing before SISS where Taylor could confront Bentley and deny her charges under oath. But Taylor and his lawyer had more in mind than that. They had spent months going through Bentley’s public testimony, cross-checking her statements for internal consistency and checking the veracity of any independently verifiable facts, like names and dates. Their strategy was to find enough to discredit Bentley in general, so that her testimony against Taylor would be seen in that context. And they thought they had found more than enough.
Scott immediately went on the attack, charging that they had found thirty-seven “discrepancies” in Bentley’s writings and testimony. “We are challenging the inconsistencies, the inaccuracies, and the impossibilities of her story,” he told the press. Taylor was even more forthright: “Miss Bentley has lied so often and so outrageously in her testimony…that she can scarcely be looked at as a credible source,” he later wrote.
Taylor and Scott had, indeed, uncovered a number of discrepancies. For example, Bentley had testified that she collected party dues from the Perlo Group and passed it to Golos, but Golos had already died by the time Bentley took over the group. She also testified, at various times, that Duncan Lee, her valuable OSS contact, was a member of the Silvermaster Group, the Perlo Group, and no group at all. At one point, Bentley told investigators that her Soviet contact “Al” informed her she received the Red Star in “late October,” but in another statement she put the date at “mid-November.” She had testified incorrectly that only two of her government sources were not native-born Americans. Taylor and his lawyer had checked: There were at least ten. She had misestimated the number of people in the Communist Party. A source no less unimpeachable than Hoover himself had used another number.
Some of the charges were so insignificant as to be silly: She had, for example, called the United States Service and Shipping Corporation the U.S. Service and Shipping Corporation. She had referred to the same man by two different first names (both of which she had known him by). Other discrepancies were probably errors in transcription and not in testimony. Taylor noted that Bentley told HUAC that Columbia University didn’t offer classes in American government, testimony that would have been both ludicrous and patently false. What Bentley probably said was that she didn’t take any such courses. The mistake was not hers but the stenographer’s.
Most of the thirty-seven errors, mistakes which Taylor and his lawyer were trying to present as unconscionable and deliberate lies were, in fact, trivial: relatively minor mix-ups that might be expected, given how many times she had testified, always without notes, and given the sometimes convoluted questions she was asked. Taylor was certainly right that Bentley had not recalled all facts and dates accurately and that her testimony was occasionally inconsistent. But her mistakes were not only relatively minor, they did not show a pattern of fabrication. There seemed to be, in almost all cases, no intent to mislead. Even if every one of Taylor’s charges were proven correct, the case against Bentley was still weak.
Regardless, the FBI took the accusations seriously, understanding Taylor’s charges for what they were: the first significant effort to discredit their top informer. Except for Remington, who had hemmed and hawed his way into prison trying to explain his relationship with Bentley, everyone else she accused ducked the fight. Harry Dexter White undoubtedly would have pressed the point, but he had died soon after his initial testimony. The others opted out, refusing to testify, consistently invoking the Fifth rather than directly denying Bentley’s accusations (and thus risking a perjury charge). But Taylor was clearly in for the long haul. He was angry, and he was defiant. As long as he kept his job in Washington, D.C., he was, he told the press, a constant reminder of the government’s failure to make anyone believe Bentley’s story.
After interviewing and reinterviewing Bentley at length, both in Louisiana and back in Connecticut where she was spending her summers, the FBI was not overly concerned with the errors themselves, most of which were deemed misinterpretations, understandable mix-ups, or minor quibbles. Even her outright errors were not so egregious as to worry the investigating agents. But the Bureau was concerned with preserving her credibility. The best tactic, it was decided, was not to counter every one of Taylor’s charges but to stress the corroborating evidence for significant elements in Bentley’s testimony—and to keep Bentley out of the hands of Taylor’s attorneys.
In late September 1954, Taylor was called before a grand jury, where he once again
denied Bentley’s charges and testified at length and in detail about the thirty-seven discrepancies he had uncovered. Then, in the spring of the next year, he was called before a loyalty board that would rule on whether he could keep his job with the International Monetary Fund. There, Taylor and his lawyer presented a 107-page brief charging Bentley with lying and accusing the Bureau of conducting a sloppy investigation of her story. A synopsis of the brief was printed in an April 1955 issue of I. F. Stone’s Weekly, and both the tabloids and the leftist press spread the story. The Worker, in an article that referred to Bentley’s past testimony as “lurid tales” and blamed her for the death of Harry Dexter White, said she was “tripped up” and “undone” by Taylor’s accusations. The New York Post called her in Grand Coteau for a comment. “I have testified truthfully,” she told the reporter, “and I see no point in making any reply.” BENTLEY CLAMS UP ran the headline.
Then, in the midst of the Taylor case and fending off the press, Bentley heard the shocking news that William Remington had been bludgeoned to death in his bed in the honor dormitory of the federal penitentiary at Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. He had been murdered by an inmate with an IQ of 61, who told the FBI that he killed Remington because he was a “damn communist who wanted to sell us all out.” Remington had less than nine months left to serve on his perjury conviction.
Bentley was no more to blame for Remington’s murder than she was for Harry Dexter White’s heart attack. The two men had been engaged in highly questionable activities, and she had testified honestly about them. But that was probably slim consolation to Bentley. She knew Remington as a bright and charming man, and his death must have shaken her, as she considered the part she played in his demise. Of course, she was not left alone to work through her emotions. Reporters from all over called her at home, badgering her for comment. She said nothing. What could she say?
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