Wilderness of Mirrors

by David C. Martin

  An official inquiry was launched into the loss of so potentially lucrative a source. Philby maintained that Volkov’s own insistence on using the diplomatic pouch had caused the fatal delay. “Nearly three weeks had elapsed since his first approach to Page before we first tried to contact him,” he pointed out. “During that time, the Russians had ample chances of getting on to him. Doubtless both his office and his living quarters were bugged…. Perhaps his manner had given him away; perhaps he had got drunk and talked too much; perhaps even he had changed his mind and confessed.” Or perhaps someone had tipped off the Russians to Volkov’s intention to defect. Philby found that theory “not worth mentioning in my report.” In any case, the inquiry located the most likely cause of Volkov’s undoing. A British official in Istanbul admitted that he had indiscreetly mentioned Volkov’s name in a telephone conversation with the embassy in Ankara. The telephone line was assumed to be monitored by the Russians.

  Philby was safe, at least for the moment. “The Volkov business proved to be a very narrow squeak indeed,” he said, looking back on the affair. If Angleton suspected anything untoward when he saw Philby in Rome shortly afterward, he did not report it. Philby might have gotten away with it entirely had it not been for William King Harvey.

  At about the same time that Angleton was exchanging thoughts with Philby in Rome, Bill Harvey was sitting in a small room in New York City, listening intently as a plump, dowdy, brown-haired woman named Elizabeth Bentley confessed that she had been a courier for a Soviet spy ring. Harvey had left his desk at FBI headquarters in Washington to come to New York for a firsthand look at this woman who, if she was telling the truth, represented the Bureau’s first big break in combating Soviet espionage. Harvey left the interrogation of Bentley to other FBI agents while he sat quietly and simply tried to get a feel for this woman who would consume the next two years of his life. During fourteen days of questioning, Bentley reeled off the names of more than a hundred people linked to the Soviet underground in the United States and Canada. “Fifty-one of these persons were deemed of sufficient importance to warrant investigative attention by the Bureau,” an FBI memo stated. “Of those 51 individuals, 27 were employed in agencies of the U.S. government.” One of those twenty-seven was named Hiss.

  Bentley was the third defector to have warned the FBI about Hiss, or a man fitting his description. Whittaker Chambers had been the first, but his unsubstantiated allegation carried little weight in the face of Hiss’s powerful friends and brilliant career at the State Department. Graduate of Harvard Law, clerk to Oliver Wendell Holmes, protégé and confidant of Secretary of State Edward Stettinius, personal friend of Under Secretary Dean Acheson, Hiss was beyond the reach of so unsavory a character as Chambers. In the fall of 1945, however, independent though hardly ironclad confirmation of Chambers’s charge suddenly came from an unexpected quarter. A Soviet code clerk named Igor Gouzenko defected in Ottawa, bringing with him hundreds of documents detailing the workings of an extensive Russian spy ring. According to an FBI account of Gouzenko’s interrogation, “the Soviets had an agent in the United States in May, 1945, who was an assistant to the then Secretary of State, Edward R. Stettinius.” A short time later Bentley defected and identified Hiss by name, although she incorrectly gave his first name as Eugene.

  In a few years the name Hiss would be on every tongue, but to Bill Harvey in 1945 Hiss was only one of several senior government officials suspected of treason. Bentley had mentioned Hiss almost as an afterthought at the end of her 107-page statement. Such other names as those of Harry Dexter White, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, and Lauchlin Currie, administrative assistant to the President, played a more prominent role in her tale of espionage. Harvey, just turned thirty and with barely five years’ experience in the FBI, suddenly found himself in the middle of what loomed as the greatest spy scandal in the nation’s history. For the first but not the last time, he was the keeper of secrets that when finally revealed would cause a public sensation. His special knowledge set him apart. The everyday world in which most people lived, in which Hiss, White, and Currie were trusted government servants, was unreal to him. His reality was a world in which the most commonplace events, such as a cab ride shared by White and Hiss, took on special and sinister meaning. He was as far removed from the normal commerce of human lives as if he were locked in a prison. To Harvey, it was not a prison but an inner sanctum.

  Harvey had begun his career with an unsuccessful campaign for public office and thereafter withdrew behind walls of silence, as if he found sanctuary in secrecy. His father was the most prominent attorney in Danville, Indiana, a small town twenty miles west of Indianapolis, and his grandfather was the founder of the local newspaper. In 1936, on the strength of his father’s name and the endorsement of his grandfather’s newspaper, Harvey had run for prosecuting attorney in Hendricks County while still a student at Indiana University Law School. Despite the Danville Gazette’s promise that “Billy is a keen student and his election would be a great benefit to the people of Hendricks County,” Harvey was a Democrat in a staunchly Republican county, and he lost by 880 votes out of 12,000 cast.

  Staying in Indiana only long enough to collect his law degree, Harvey and his young wife, the former Elizabeth McIntire, moved to the small Ohio River town of Maysville, Kentucky, where he opened a one-man practice. Libby, as everyone called her, had grown up in nearby Flemingsburg, across the street from a cousin of Harvey’s. Her father was the leading attorney in Flemingsburg and only too pleased to help his son-in-law set up practice down the road in Maysville. Harvey went through the motions, joining the Rotary Club and working with the Boy Scouts, but he never really made a go of it in Maysville. “He didn’t have the personality to succeed in a small town,” said a local insurance broker who counted himself Harvey’s best friend in Maysville. “In a small town you have to be nice to people and smile. He didn’t meet people well…. He didn’t indulge in small talk. He could walk down the street and not speak to anybody.” Harvey did little more than “sit around in the office and fiddle with his collection of guns and knives,” a local attorney said.

  No one was very surprised in December of 1940 when Harvey left Maysville and joined the FBI, starting in the Pittsburgh Field Office at an annual salary of $3,200. By 1945 he had made his way to FBI headquarters in Washington as part of a small vanguard of three agents—himself, Robert Collier, and Lish Whitsun—targeted against America’s ostensible ally, the Soviet Union. “We were the first ones to be fighting the Soviet side of it,” Collier recalled. And now the defection of Elizabeth Bentley finally gave them something to fight with. “Bentley made a lot of things we suspected into reality,” Collier said.

  Like so many of her generation, Bentley had turned to Communism in the 1930s out of disillusionment with the inability of democracy to combat the evils of Fascism and the Depression. As Bentley told it, she had begun her career as a spy by collecting blueprints of commercial vat designs from an engineer named Abraham Broth-man. Her Soviet handler, Jacob Golos, had more grandiose schemes in mind, however. He taught Bentley the rudiments of espionage— to throw off automobile surveillance by walking the wrong way on a one-way street, to remove all identification marks from her clothing—and in the summer of 1941 dispatched her to Washington to make contact with Nathan Silvermaster, a Russian-born employee of the Department of Agriculture. As Bentley told it, Silvermaster collected documents from an underground network of Communists throughout the government, and she hauled them back to Golos in New York in her knitting bag.

  She would later claim that she had been driven to confess by her “good old New England conscience.” However, an FBI memo suggested that she feared the Bureau was already onto her and was simply trying to save her skin. Whatever her motive, Bentley had chosen her moment well, arriving at the FBI’s doorstep on the heels of Gouzenko’s defection in Canada and amid the increasing postwar distrust between the United States and Russia. The vigor of the FBI’s reaction to her stood in
sharp contrast to the indifference with which Krivitsky and Chambers had been greeted seven years before.

  Within twenty-four hours of Bentley’s appearance and before he had verified any of her information, J. Edgar Hoover sent a top-secret message to the White House. “As a result of the Bureau’s investigative operations,” he puffed, “information has been recently developed from a highly confidential source indicating that a number of persons employed by the Government of the United States have been furnishing data and information to persons outside the Federal Government, who are in turn transmitting this information to espionage agents of the Soviet Union.” Hoover named twelve officials as being either witting or unwitting “participants in this operation,” no doubt taking private satisfaction in the fact that five of them had served with his arch-rival, the Office of Strategic Services. Within a matter of days, Hoover had assigned a total of 227 agents to conduct “technical surveillances, mail covers and physical surveillances” of the government officials suspected of espionage. The surveillance confirmed that Bentley, or GREGORY as she was code-named within the Bureau, was telling the truth. “In no instance has GREGORY reported information which could not either directly or circumstantially be verified,” an FBI memo stated. Bentley said that a laboratory for reproducing government documents had been set up in the basement of the Silvermaster home. A break-in by FBI agents “determined that such a photographic laboratory does now exist sufficiently well equipped for the copying of documents.” Bentley identified a photograph of Anatoli Gromov, first secretary of the Soviet Embassy in Washington, as that of the man she knew as “Al,” one of her Soviet contacts. At four o’clock on the afternoon of November 21, 1945, a team of FBI agents watched Gromov arrive for a scheduled meeting with Bentley on the corner of Eighth Avenue and Twenty-third Street in Manhattan.

  By themselves, neither a basement darkroom nor a street-corner rendezvous constituted proof of espionage, but other information provided by Bentley left no doubt in Hoover’s mind that espionage had been committed. “GREGORY has reported with a high degree of accuracy situations … which were only known within the government itself as examples of material which was passed through GREGORY … for use by the Soviet Government,” a Bureau report said. Bentley claimed that Major Duncan Lee of the OSS had passed information about “peace maneuverings going on between the satellite Axis nations through the medium of OSS representatives in Sweden and Switzerland,” a vague but accurate description of Operation SUNRISE, the secret surrender of one million Axis troops in northern Italy brokered by Allen Dulles. Bentley also alleged that Lee had told her of an OSS plan to open an official liaison channel with Soviet intelligence, a plan that Hoover had derided in government councils as typical of the harebrained schemes emanating from General William “Wild Bill” Donovan and his “Oh-So-Social” set of Ivy League bluebloods. Hoover was so impressed with Bentley’s inside knowledge that he was willing to stake his reputation on her credibility. He assured the Secretary of State that GREGORY’s “statements and reliability have been established beyond any doubt.”

  There was one problem, however. Despite intensive surveillance of the suspects identified by Bentley, the FBI could uncover no evidence of an ongoing espionage operation. One year after the surveillance had begun, Hoover was forced to report that his agents had turned up nothing but “repeated inconsequential contacts” among suspected members of the spy ring. The Bureau intercepted a letter from one suspect, Michael Greenberg, to Hiss, asking for help in getting a job with the United Nations Organization. The Bureau monitored a phone call from another suspect, Henry Collins, inviting Hiss to dinner. The Bureau monitored a three-hour meeting in Hiss’s office with still another suspect, Robert Miller. The Bureau followed Harry Dexter White to Hiss’s home in Georgetown. Was this a sinister pattern or the random socializing of fellow bureaucrats? “It was like a bowl of Jell-O,” the FBI’s Robert Collier said. “You couldn’t grab hold of anything.”

  Harvey drafted a memo to the Attorney General reporting that “a highly confidential and reliable source”—an FBI euphemism for a wiretap—had discovered that one suspect, Charles Kramer, had helped Senator Claude Pepper write a speech advocating the dismantling of all American facilities capable of producing atomic weapons. In another memo, Harvey reported that one of Bentley’s suspects had suggested that Czech nationals be used to assist the Army’s censorship operations in Europe. “In view of the extent of Soviet penetration and domination in Czechoslovakia, the utilization of large numbers of Czechs in connection with military censorship in the European theater would necessarily place a number of undoubted Soviet agents in positions where they would have access to considerable information of value,” Harvey warned. “Most significant,” Hoover jotted at the bottom. Perhaps, but it would never stand up in a court of law. As Harvey noted in a memo drafted for Hoover’s signature, “It does not appear that sufficient probative evidence exists at the present time in connection with this case upon which to base a successful substantive prosecution.”

  Without more substantial evidence the case was dead, but the Bureau’s best source was no longer in a position to provide that evidence. “A substantial portion of GREGORY’s activities as a courier … ceased in December, 1944, and she has not been actively used since that time,” Harvey wrote. According to Bentley, Anatoli Gromov had ordered her “to turn over all of my Washington contacts. I was told by Al to tell these people that I was anticipating going to the hospital for an appendectomy and that … they would be contacted by another individual.” Bentley made her last courier run a few days later. Thereafter she maintained desultory contact with her Soviet controllers, but only to straighten out her tangled finances and occasionally to advise on the care and feeding of her former Washington stable.

  It was as if the Soviets had anticipated Bentley’s defection and deliberately set out to minimize the damage she could do. Bentley said that one of her Soviet contacts, “Jack,” had explained to her “that the present policy of the Russians was to split up the larger groups that were obtaining information into smaller groups and implied that I personally was taking care of too many groups.” As “Jack” told it, the idea “was that in the event anything happened to any one member of this whole group, the identities and activities of the other members would not be known to this individual and therefore they could operate with extreme security.”

  The FBI’s task was clear—in Harvey’s words, “reactivating the Informant GREGORY as an operating Soviet agent and utilizing her … as a double agent.” With Bentley once again shuttling secrets between her government contacts in Washington and her Soviet handlers in New York, the Bureau would be able to catch the suspected spies in the act of espionage. Harvey pondered the best “procedure of having Informant GREGORY attempt to discreetly renew her contacts.” It was “a very difficult problem.”

  Although she had taken her first Soviet contact, Jacob Golos, as a lover, Bentley had not gotten along so famously with his successors. At one of her final meetings with “Al,” she had arrived in an ornery mood fortified by several dry martinis. “I told him in plain words what I thought of him and the rest of the Russians and, further, told him that I was an American and could not be kicked around,” Bentley related. Harvey suggested that Bentley could finesse that bit of ugliness by explaining that because of her “nerve wracking, long and faithful service to the Soviet cause, she was then overwrought and inclined to say things she of course did not fundamentally believe.”

  The real problem was not Bentley’s lack of rapport with “Al” but the fact that the defection of the code clerk Gouzenko in Ottawa had forced the Russians to pull in their horns not only in Canada but also in the United States. “Al” suddenly left the country aboard a Soviet ship bound for Argentina, and Harvey noted “considerable alarm on the part of known and suspected Soviet agents.” There were, according to Harvey, “numerous indications of connections” between the CORBY, as Gouzenko was code-named, and GREGORY cases. Both had refer
red to a Soviet agent who fit the description of Hiss, and both had identified a number of Canadians who ran messages back and forth between Soviet intelligence officers in New York and Ottawa. Just how interlinked the two spy rings were would not become apparent until a few years later, when the FBI discovered the trail that led from Gouzenko to the British physicist Klaus Fuchs and from there in the direction pointed by Bentley to Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.

  Prospects for reactivating Bentley all but vanished when “Al” failed to appear for his next scheduled meeting. The one remaining hope was to recruit another, still active member of the alleged spy ring as a double agent. At Harvey’s direction, Bentley telephoned Helen Tenney, an OSS employee who, Bentley said, had once turned over to her “a considerable quantity of written data reflecting the activities of OSS personnel in virtually all sections and all countries of the world.” While two FBI agents eavesdropped from a nearby table, Bentley and Tenney renewed acquaintance over cocktails at a Washington restaurant and made plans to meet again a few weeks later in New York.

  On the basis of the first meeting, Harvey assessed the prospects for turning Tenney into a double agent. “Tenney was extremely cooperative and apparently very happy to see the informant,” Harvey wrote, but there was no indication that her “fundamental ideological orientation with regard to the Soviet Union and the Communist Party, USA, had changed one iota.” He cabled New York that it was “not desired Informant GREGORY make any effort to double Tenney at this time.”

  Having abandoned its last hope of penetrating the Bentley network, the FBI seemed no closer to piercing the veil of Soviet espionage than when Krivitsky and Chambers had defected in 1938. The distance traveled could be measured only indirectly. Krivitsky and Chambers had been ignored; Bentley had been fawned over, even though none of her allegations could be proved. She “has been extremely cooperative and the information furnished by her has been of the greatest possible value,” Harvey gushed as he recommended that the FBI take the unprecedented step of helping Bentley get hotel reservations for a three-week vacation in Puerto Rico— provided “that Bentley will not appear connected with Bureau in any way.”