To blend into the cultural melting pot, Ray was required to live a double life. At the same time as being an agent codenamed ‘Josephine’, or ‘Joe’ in honour of her husband,11 she had outwardly to maintain the life of a single American English language teacher living in the most vibrant city on the planet. Crucially, Ray still had her American wardrobe, not the shabby, ill-fitting, functional clothes of Muscovites that would give her away. She was required to frequent the spectacular jazz cabarets, nightclubs and restaurants while spending the balance of her nights waiting to decode top secret transmissions from Moscow. The city’s nightlife was immortalised by Busby Berkeley in Jimmy Cagney’s 1933 movie Footlight Parade, in the iconic song and dance routine ‘Shanghai Lil’. The film was popular in Moscow, many of the set pieces being adopted for Soviet parades. It is ironic that Ray’s lifelong crusade to end exploitation required her to play the part of a capitalist exploiter.
Shanghai was a divided city. There were various concessions, each policed by a foreign power, and alongside them the Chinese districts were booming. Shanghai was the espionage capital of Asia at the time, a hotbed of international intrigue and a playground for agents of the great powers playing cat and mouse with the local police. Foreign intelligence services and their agents operated without restraint, attempting to gather information on the latest machinations of Chiang Kai-shek and the feuding warlords who ran China. It was a difficult place to find anyone to trust.
In 1927 the Kuomintang leader Chiang Kai-shek had fallen out spectacularly with his Communist allies, massacring many of them in cities across China, and especially in Shanghai. His formerly close relations with Moscow came to an abrupt end, causing the dismantlement of the Soviet intelligence network and leaving Moscow blind. In the summer of 1929, further tensions arose over the controversial ownership of the Chinese Eastern Railway linking Vladivostok to Chita. This was a single-track spur of the Trans-Siberian Railway that crossed Manchuria, cutting thousands of miles from the route to Vladivostok. The argument over the railway had spilled over into open fighting between the Chinese army and the USSR. The Chinese struck first, seizing the railway. To everyone’s surprise, the Red Army fought back successfully, routing the Chinese. The Soviets now needed to keep tabs on both the Chinese and the bellicose Japanese, whose territorial ambitions extended to the Soviet Far East, and in 1929 Shanghai suddenly became the pivotal foreign espionage station for the service.
The station was run at the time by Alexander Gurvich, who operated under the codenames JIM and ‘Willi Lehman’. Gurvich had learned the espionage trade working for the Soviets in New York, where he had been taught by the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) to operate long-range transmitters.12 He had only arrived in China in late 1928, travelling via America to divert any suspicion about his real purpose for being in the city.
Gurvich had to build his espionage network from scratch. It was a torrid time for the resident, who was desperate for recruits while short of money and under pressure for results. He used a German trading company financed by the Intelligence Directorate as a front for his illegal operations. Newly arrived illegals for his rebuilt station were preferably non-Russians, whose foreign passports meant there was no need to waste time creating a cover story. One key member of the team was a German named Max Clausen, who installed relay wireless radio stations linking Shanghai with the USSR, but Ray was the more trusted assistant, one of the very few taught in strict confidence the difficult skill of how to code and decode messages. The Soviets used a secret one-time pad system of ciphers that was theoretically unbreakable, sounding like gibberish if intercepted. For extra security, the radio operator was not trusted with the secret of how the codes worked, and would broadcast lists of numbers never knowing what information he was transmitting or receiving. Clausen cooperated closely with Ray. When later captured by the feared Japanese secret police, the Kenpeitai, on his last mission in 1941, he told the entire story of his life, recalling Ray as ‘beautiful, despite a big nose’.13
Over her first summer in Shanghai, the hot and very wet climate and the intensity of the work adversely affected Ray’s health. Working at night, as this was when messages were transmitted and received, she spent long, arduous hours alone in a hot, airless room deciphering coded documents from memory. This necessitated recalling the latest cipher, while subtracting the number from the right one-time pad in order to retrieve each letter of a message. The sweat would drip off her. It was so humid in Shanghai that one had to bathe at least twice a day, but the mere act of drying oneself would raise a fresh sweat. By day Ray had to run her language school with legitimate clients as a front. It was an exhausting routine.14
Both Clausen and Bennett moved on to work with Richard Sorge when he arrived in China to head the ring. A legendary spy described by the French newspaper Le Figaro as ‘Stalin’s James Bond’ and by Ian Fleming, Bond’s creator, as ‘the man whom I regard as the most formidable spy in history’,15 Sorge was tall with dark brown hair; with his broad, wrinkled intelligent face he looked older than his thirty-three years. He had been wounded in the Great War and walked with a limp. To maintain cover, he would only speak to Ray in English. Sorge was the established authority on having a good time in Shanghai, participating enthusiastically in the ‘High Life’ that expressed the colonial mores of expat Europeans rather than puritanical Communists. He had a notorious reputation with women, especially radicals, and enjoyed numerous affairs. He accompanied Ray to the best shops to ensure she was kitted out for the Shanghai social scene. Fastidious about her appearance, Ray enjoyed wearing clothes in Shanghai custom made from the finest silk.
Soviet intelligence had sent Sorge to China using his favourite cover, that of a German journalist. (Later in 1933, Clausen and Sorge would use the same cover when they became part of a five-man team on an epic mission to Japan.) Ray was a senior and trusted member of the resident’s staff. To be put in charge of cipher communications, correspondence with the junior residents and sending classified agent reports to Moscow were tasks worthy of a resident. She fulfilled some ‘special assignments’ – in other words, spy activity – which included running two agents in the city. When the resident was absent, she acted as his deputy.16
In mid-February 1930 Ray returned from Shanghai to Moscow, again via Siberia. She had missed her new husband and was exhausted by the demands placed on her. It had been agreed that Ovadis would join her in Shanghai, but Ray’s health had become too poor for her to stay. Her replacement was Nadezhda Ulanovskaya, a woman who recalls in her memoirs being trained to operate a radio by Ray in Moscow.17 Ray bequeathed Nadezhda the basics of an appropriate wardrobe for Shanghai, a stylish American leather coat and a knitted dress unobtainable in Moscow. Later Ulanovskaya went on to work with Whittaker Chambers, a Soviet agent and early defector in the US; she features in his memoirs, Witness. Her husband was the New York resident from 1931 to 1933, where the couple spent their time crating up Cherniavsky’s material to smuggle back to Moscow.
• • •
On her return to Moscow Ray quickly became pregnant, and she gave birth to her daughter Joy on 29 December. Soon afterwards, in the spring of 1931, the Intelligence Directorate sent Ray on a second mission. This time she was to join her husband undercover in Kabul, Afghanistan, where he had been working since May 1930 as the correspondent for TASS, the official Soviet news agency. Baby Joy, who was just a few months old, went too. Afghanistan was the pawn in the so-called ‘great game’ between Russia and the British Empire. The Soviets were trying but failing to install a government friendly to them.18
Joy and Raisa Bennett, 1933
On her return from Kabul, the Intelligence Directorate involved Ray as their core – and possibly only – American asset in their biggest project in its history to date. This was the audacious operation to place up to eighty agents simultaneously in ten elite US universities. Its ultimate success was to a great extent down to Bennett’s preparatory work. The scale and importance of the operation to Soviet i
ntelligence cannot be overestimated. It was a vast enterprise in comparison to the limited resources available. The budget had been provided centrally, but the logistics would place a strain on the organisation. The agency only had around eighty-five members in place around the entire world, so to establish a further eighty sources in a key target country was a major operation.
Ray was part of every detail of that operation, from completing each student’s initial application to getting the right student to the best university. The most important task was training the team to fit into modern American society. Since other English language teachers in Moscow were Russians and had atrocious accents, it was Ray who had recruited fellow American Gertrude Klivans to give conversational English lessons and an introduction to America.
Although both Russian Jews, Klivans and Bennett were chalk and cheese. Klivans’s family had made a success of their immigration. Klivans was frivolous whereas Ray was driven. Klivans had an extremely wealthy, supportive family who sent her regular parcels of otherwise unobtainable items. She was having fun in Moscow and if she ever felt like it could leave at any time to rejoin the family on vacation in Florida. There was no Great Depression for the wealthy Klivans family. In contrast, Ray was a committed Communist, an intelligence officer and had become a citizen of the Soviet Union. She was a member of the inner sanctum, trusted with the secrets of the intelligence service. With their very different backgrounds, Gertrude and Ray did not become friends. Gertrude commented to her parents that Ray was too serious a Communist for her taste.
Initially, the teachers worked with six engineers for just two hours a day, but as departure drew closer, they worked with the group non-stop. After the first challenge of preparing any Russian used to queues and shortages for the shock of America, a second, more difficult task was to knock the rough edges off Communist engineers straight from the factory floor and teach them how to behave at an elite US university such as Harvard. Ray was responsible for an enormous ‘Pygmalion’ project transforming nearly eighty ex-peasant soldiers and radical Marxists into suave, besuited Ivy Leaguers. There was a lot to explain to the students, from the basics, such as personal hygiene, to instructing them not to chew and spit sunflower seeds. They had to be taught not to scratch, a Moscow habit caused by infestations of bed bugs. Ray had to explain about the use of toilet paper, which was unobtainable in Russia, the liberal use of soap and the importance of ironing shirts. A thorny topic was how to hold a conversation with an American without falling into Marxist rhetoric, for example calling a professor ‘Comrade’. Some of the raw material Ray had to work with were, like Shumovsky, genteel by Soviet standards, with a grounding in manners and etiquette, but the majority had no understanding at all.
From her time at AMTORG and her long membership of the CPUSA, Ray had an encyclopedic knowledge of US Communists. She was able to identify some of those who could be relied upon to welcome the students into their communities and help them adjust. In Boston, she selected Professors Cheskis and Halphin, as well as a local businessman named Stephenson, who was a regular visitor to Moscow and friendly to the Soviet Union.19
In her role as prospective dean she met each student when the party, including Shumovsky, assembled in Moscow. She spent weeks briefing them on the do’s and don’ts of life in America. Her goal was to keep the party away from any inadvertent brushes with the authorities. In particular, she had to explain to the hard-drinking Russians the rules of prohibition. The lessons in integrating into American society that she had first taught new immigrants in the 1920s were dusted off and put to use teaching agents and students to blend seamlessly into university life.
With her structured English language teaching experience, Bennett was ideally suited to raise the engineers’ English, both spoken and written, to a very high standard. The engineers were expected to be completing term papers at Harvard in a second language within weeks. They all had to pass an exacting English proficiency exam. Ray worked closely with Klivans, each teaching part of the group in Moscow.
Ray had one exceptional pupil. In preparation for her trip to the US, she carefully taught her daughter Joy to speak only English, despite living in Moscow. She could not take the risk that while in America her young daughter would suddenly start speaking Russian and break her cover. Sadly, today Joy remembers not a word of the English her mother taught her.
• • •
Once the student operation was launched, Ray was to travel to the US with the party as their official dean and leader. The mission would involve her in a great deal of travel around the universities to arrange the exfiltration of information. At the same time, she was to carry out other unspecified ‘illegal’ operations such as the recruitment of agents. It is likely that MIT was not the only university to admit as students a quota of intelligence officers.
But the plan to send Ray to the US was overtaken by an unforeseen event and abandoned at the last minute. Just as Ray and Joy were packed and ready to sail. Catching the world by surprise, on 18 September 1931 the Japanese had invaded and annexed the Chinese territory of Manchuria following the Mukden incident, a staged terrorist attack by them on a strategic railway. After this act of military aggression, the Soviet Union expected the large Japanese army based on its border in Manchuria to launch an attack on its territory at any moment. Unprepared militarily to confront Japan at this point, they needed as much warning as possible of any imminent invasion. So Ray was given a new, vital task. She was indeed to go to America on a mission, but not to chaperone engineers. She was to settle down on the West Coast, establish a new residency and organise work in America against Japan. The Soviets knew that Japan lacked many vital war materials. It imported metals and oil for its armaments industry from the USA. By monitoring cargoes that crossed the Pacific to Japan, the Soviets would have advance warning of any planned attack. Ray’s new network was to ascertain from Japanese sailors what their cargoes were and how frequently shipments were made.20 She later described to the NKVD one of the goals of her mission: ‘I was supposed to prepare a radio operator and the resident for work in Japan. It was planned that for the role of resident we could use one of the journalists that have connections in Japan. For a cover, it was expected to open a Chinese restaurant in Japan.’
The proposed resident was Richard Sorge, the German journalist with connections to Japan and the German embassy in Tokyo. In preparation Ray’s former boss was recalled to Moscow from Shanghai in 1932. But there was one big problem: he spoke no Japanese. At the very least he needed a Japanese assistant who was fluent in English and committed to Soviet ideals. The search for such an individual led the Intelligence Directorate to the US, then to California and finally to a painter-cum-activist named Yotoku Miyagi, who supported himself as an artist by running a restaurant called the Fukuro or Owl – the Japanese venerate the owl as a symbol to ward off misfortune and hardship – in the crowded Little Tokyo district of West Los Angeles. Moscow’s request to Miyagi, channelled through the CPUSA in the autumn of 1932, was that he should return to Japan as a spy. His niece later commented that ‘he refused, he had no experience in spying, and he asked them to find someone more suitable.’21 But in the end Miyagi reluctantly agreed to go, if only until a more appropriate replacement was found. Ray was likely sent to California in late 1932 to vet and train the reluctant Japanese recruit.
Miyagi returned to Japan in 1933 to recruit a network of agents. The least well-known member of the five-man Sorge cell, he would work successfully until the network’s arrest in 1941. By that time the cell had provided intelligence of immense value, much of it from unlikely sources developed by Miyagi. They are credited with confirming that Japan would not attack the USSR in 1941, allowing thousands of troops to be transferred to save Moscow from the approaching Nazis. It was however Miyagi’s past links to the CPUSA that would eventually contribute to the downfall of Sorge’s network in Japan.
Yet Ray’s wider mission soon unravelled. In California, she grew disenchanted with the prospects
for success as she was ‘not given a concrete task or [told] precisely how I was meant to fulfill the task’. Unlike Shumovsky, who acted independently and could adapt to changing circumstances, Ray needed and craved constant hand-holding and detailed instructions. She was better suited to a subordinate’s role, to being given a task to perform and instructions on how to do it. This was never going to be possible working alone thousands of miles from Moscow. In hindsight, Ray was too inexperienced to be given such responsibility. She would have been perfect as the dean of the student party, but as events in California spiralled out of control she would make extraordinary errors of judgement.
To Ray ‘this whole enterprise was questionable in its conception due to the extreme difficulty of conditions around establishing intelligence work on the West Coast of America’.22 She was nevertheless given a salary of $250 a month and sent off to America for an indefinite period with a list of friendly contacts.
• • •
After an absence of five years, when she stepped ashore in California in 1932 Ray Bennett became the first independent female Soviet Military Intelligence operative in the USA. Along with George Koval, she is one of the very few Americans to serve in the Red Army on US soil. At two years of age Ray’s daughter Joy, after her mother’s work in Afghanistan, was already an unwitting veteran of two undercover espionage operations, although she never realised that her time playing on the beach or with her American relatives in the Bronx was part of an intelligence mission. Such precious moments were captured in photographs and sent to her father Ovadis in Moscow. In one photo Joy is pictured in a goat cart, looking frightened by the goat, and Ray recommends on the back that they should get her a pet. (After her arrest in 1935, the NKVD interrogators were bemused at the details of her operation and its execution, which seemed distinctly amateurish even to them.)
The Spy Who Changed History Page 17