CORCORAN (after the decision was reached to go ahead to the grand jury): Don’t worry when you go in. This is double riveted from top to bottom.
Corcoran to McGranery
McGRANERY: [James] McInerney said that he’d take personal responsibility to see that nothing happened.
Corcoran to Service
CORCORAN: We checked with the A.G. [Tom Clark] and understand that you are all right. Do you feel you are?
SERVICE: Yes.
Nor was Service the only beneficiary of such benign attentions. Indeed, all the Amerasia suspects would gain from this solicitude for Service, as it would have been next to impossible to get him off if the facts about Jaffe and all the others had been aired in court. Also, it happened that Amerasia co-editor Kate Mitchell had some contacts of her own. Her uncle was an influential attorney in Buffalo, New York, a partner in the same prestigious law firm that, by an odd coincidence, would later become the employer of Robert Hitchcock. Through her uncle, Mitchell obtained a high-powered lawyer in New York City with connections at Truman Justice, which he used to assure her of kindly treatment by the prosecution.*57
All such assurances would prove to be on target. Service was no-billed by the grand jury in a vote of 20–0, Mitchell by a vote of 18–2, Gayn by a vote of 15–5. Thereafter, the State Department, Service himself, and a legion of his defenders would claim his innocence was now established and that he should never have been arrested in the first place. J. Edgar Hoover and his men, pondering their stash of wiretaps, would reach a very different verdict.
CHAPTER 10
When Parallels Converged
THE case of Philip Jaffe’s confederate Emmanuel Larsen was settled on November 2, 1945, thus stuffing all but a few scattered remnants of the Amerasia scandal into the closet at Truman Justice. That door had, for the moment, closed. Others, however, were about to open.
On November 7, Soviet espionage courier Elizabeth Bentley, having hesitated for some weeks, decided to complete her break with the Communist Party and its Moscow bosses and tell her story to the FBI. It was a compelling saga that jolted even the streetwise, seen-everything agents of the Bureau. And it would move surveillance of pro-Red penetration of American life and institutions to new, hair-raising levels.
In many ways, Bentley was the most important of the ex-Communist witnesses of the era. To say this is no slight to Whittaker Chambers, whose story has been more fully told, most famously in his own moving apologia, Witness, and whose confrontation with Alger Hiss would be the stuff of Cold War legend. Yet, measured by what’s in official records, the testimony of Bentley had greater impact—far more than one would gather from the usual treatments.
Betty Bentley, as she was known, came from a respectable New England family and was an intelligent, well-educated woman—a graduate of Vassar who did further academic work at Columbia and Italy’s University of Florence. Like others of her generation, she was drawn to the Marxist creed for both intellectual and personal reasons. In 1935, she joined the Communist Party, and four years later met Soviet master spy Jacob Golos (real name Jacob Raisin), who would become her mentor, friend, and lover.
Golos, a Russian, was one of the top-ranking Moscow agents in the United States, with far-reaching authority over espionage and other operations. He was, however, in ill health (he would die of heart failure in November 1943) and was already on the radar screens of the Bureau from a previous runin. For these and other reasons, he used Bentley as a go-between in many dealings. An articulate, native-born American, she could go places and talk to people in a way the obviously foreign Golos couldn’t.
Bentley spent some ten years in the party, five as courier and Golos assistant, two more after his death as manager of their many official contacts. In this role, she went back and forth between her Manhattan base and Washington, D.C., where she met regularly with a formidable crowd of Communists and fellow travelers, mostly federal workers moonlighting for the Soviet interest (though sometimes told, as a salve to conscience, that they were merely helping out Earl Browder). On these visits, she collected purloined official data, often in documentary-photographic form, and dues money for the party.
Bentley’s knowledge of the Soviet/Communist setup was thus extensive and, at the time she went to the FBI, fairly current. This she proceeded to divulge in a protracted series of debriefings. Before she was done, she would name approximately 150 people as members of or collaborators with the network, many of whom had been in the federal government, or still were, and who had been involved in spying, job placement for fellow Reds, policy sabotage, and pro-Communist propaganda efforts. For the FBI, it was probably the single greatest data haul of the Cold War, rivaled only by Venona.
Not that the Bureau simply took Bentley’s word about such matters. After recording elements of her story, Hoover’s men set out to check the material she provided. In one vivid instance, she told them cell leader Nathan Gregory Silvermaster had a photographic laboratory in his basement, used for copying official papers. The Bureau confirmed the existence of this setup by the disarmingly direct technique of entering the basement, there observing—and photographing—the photographic apparatus.1
More typically, the FBI found that much of the Bentley information could be verified from other sources—which members of the group were in close contact with others, where they worked, whom they worked for. Time and again, the Bureau noted, details supplied by Bentley would be confirmed by its backtracking methods. Equally important, there were overlaps between the Bentley cases and disclosures from other investigations, including the seminal Louise Bransten–Gregori Kheifetz inquest of the early 1940s involving the Radiation Lab at Berkeley.
As for Amerasia, this was of course fresh in memory for Hoover’s agents, and some Bentley revelations concerned players in that drama—Sol Adler, Lauchlin Currie, Frederick Field, and others. The Bureau also went back and looked at its Chambers file and found that, in many cases, suspects named by Bentley were named by Chambers also. Alger Hiss was one such, Currie another, Sol Adler yet another. Also, at this period, other witnesses were emerging who would add to the mosaic. In September of 1945, Igor Gouzenko, a Russian code clerk, had bolted from the Soviet embassy in Canada, and in October Louis Budenz, managing editor of the Daily Worker, defected from the Communist Party. Both would provide information congruent with the Bentley-Chambers data.
However, by far the main development in the case was the FBI’s decision to lay on a dragnet investigation of Bentley’s suspects. At the outset, the Bureau focused on fifty-one of these, of whom it found some two dozen or so then working for the federal government (a number that would later grow), and zoomed in closely on the latter. Others who had recently left the federal payroll—most notably, Currie—were on the watch list also.
From this roundup the FBI assembled a massive file on Bentley’s people. Somewhat confusingly called the “Gregory” case (the Bureau’s code name for Bentley), this file takes up some 50,000 pages in the declassified FOIA archives and touches on literally thousands of people, scores and possibly hundreds of whom would become potential cases in their own right.*58 The network, as the Bureau soon discovered, extended out in all directions. There were government staffers in contact with the Bentley people, contacts of those contacts, and so on in ever-widening circles. Also, deeper in the shadows, were identified Russian agents or, in some cases, Red diplomats stationed in D.C. who had dealings with the Bentley suspects.
Piecing all this together, the FBI began to revise its thinking on the nature of the Communist penetration problem. Its West Coast inquiry had spotlighted workers at the Berkeley Lab with links to the Bransten-Kheifetz combine. Amerasia had been an eye-opening experience for the Bureau, but the government staffers in that case were few in number. The picture emerging from those probes was one in which sinister outside forces were trying to develop official contacts, and in some cases succeeding, certainly bad enough but seemingly finite and focused.
The Gregory case show
ed something different—something not only large but already inside the gates, rather than outside looking in. What the Bureau now found itself observing was a vast infiltration, the extent of which was as yet unclear, that affected nearly every significant aspect of the government, including many officials in key positions. (And this didn’t include the New York angle, involving still other Bentley cases.)
An early attempt to chart this network was made by Special Agent Fred Youngblood in December of 1945, based on the initial Bentley statements.2 (See Chapter 11.) Complex as it was, this graphic was a mere beginning, omitting many important players who would come to view as the probe unfolded. As the scope of the problem became apparent, it jarred the FBI out of its usual uninflected Jack Webb prose to what were, for the Bureau, flights of rhetorical fervor. As Chief Special Agent Guy Hottel summed up the matter in a March 1946 memo to Hoover:
It has become increasingly clear in the investigation of this case that there are a tremendous number of persons employed in the United States government who are Communists and strive daily to advance the cause of Communism and destroy the foundations of this government…. Today nearly every department or agency of this government is infiltrated with them in varying degree. To aggravate the situation they appear to have concentrated most heavily in those departments which make policy, particularly in the international field, or carry it into effect…. Such organizations as the State and Treasury departments, FEA, OSS, WPB, etc.*59 Apart from the Russian espionage inherent in this case, there has emerged already the picture of a large, energetic and capable number of Communists, including our suspects, who operate daily in the legislative field, as well as in the executive branch of government…3
In terms of formal structure, the FBI had found, Soviet espionage and influence operations were usually set up in “parallels”—the term used by the Soviets themselves and adopted by the Bureau. As the word suggests, the clandestine units were supposed to be separate and discreet, not intersecting or overlapping. This was good tradecraft, since it ensured that if one group were blown, it wouldn’t lead the authorities to others. Also, having multiple information circuits, the Soviets could compare the data-take from several sources for greater certainty of knowledge.
However, the Bureau also found, the “parallel” image wasn’t a very good description of what it was now surveilling. There were indeed separate cells in Bentley’s combine, one being the Silvermaster group, another a smaller group headed by a Victor Perlo, plus singleton agents here and there with whom she was working. But the Washington suspects generally speaking weren’t very separate, and in some cases weren’t discreet. Most of the main figures seemed to know one another, and if they weren’t directly linked usually had contacts in common. They also had a penchant for crossing departmental or divisional lines, talking among themselves, and gathering in social/political conclaves. Far from being true parallels, the lines crisscrossed at many places.
THE FBI CHARTS THE SOVIET NETWORKS
This December 1945 diagram represents an early FBI effort to trace the many interconnections among American suspects and Soviet agents in the Elizabeth Bentley–“Gregory” investigation.
Source: FBI Silvermaster file
The resulting hologram seen by the Bureau might best be described, not in terms of linear tables, but as a series of overlapping affinity groups or clusters. These were often based on personal friendship or common avocation as much as job description, though that was a big factor also. Judging from the Bureau records, there were at least half a dozen of these groupings, each including one or more of the original Bentley people plus their contacts, contacts of contacts, and so on ad infinitum. Looked at in this way, the cast of characters broke down, in part, as follows:4
• The Silvermaster Circle. According to Bentley, Nathan Gregory Silvermaster, then of the Treasury Department, was her main agent in D.C., the head of an extensive spy consortium that copied official papers and paid dues money to the Communist Party. Silvermaster was Russian-born, as was his wife and chief assistant Helen, originally settled on the West Coast of the United States, and had taken his degree in economics at the University of California (dissertation on the economic theories of Lenin).
Closely linked to the Silvermasters was William Ludwig Ullman, who had worked for the Treasury and the Air Force, lived at the Silvermaster home, and according to Bentley was in charge of the document copying in the basement. Other Treasury staffers named by Bentley included Harry White, V. Frank Coe, Sol Adler, William Taylor, Irving Kaplan, Bela and Sonia Gold, and several more in contact with this circle. All these, said Bentley, were either members of the Communist Party or collaborators in the apparatus.
However, true to their line-crossing habits, the Silvermasters also had extensive contacts outside the Treasury complex. The most prominent of these was Lauchlin Currie in the White House, who ranked, according to Bentley, with Harry White among the most influential members of the network. Others said to be in the Silvermaster-Currie orbit were the Briton Michael Greenberg, George Silverman, a former economist with the Railway Retirement Board who transferred to the Pentagon, and Maurice Halperin of OSS, later in the State Department. In addition, there was the smaller Perlo group, whose leader was then also at the Treasury and whose members were spread around at several outposts (Alger Hiss, Harold Glasser, Harry Magdoff of Commerce, and Donald Wheeler of OSS allegedly being of this number).5
• The Friends of Robert Miller. Among the most significant of the Bentley cases, Robert T. Miller III had worked in the office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, an interim bureau merged into the State Department toward the conclusion of the war. A graduate of Princeton, Miller was among the hyperrespectable, unthinkable class of pro-Soviet moles, along the lines of Alger Hiss or the Cambridge group in England. In the 1930s, he had hied off to Russia and married an American woman, Jenny Levy, who worked at the Moscow Daily News. Before entering the government, he published a leftward news sheet on Latin affairs called Hemisphere in conjunction with Joseph Gregg, yet another Bentley suspect.
The Hemisphere operation would be merged into CIAA, and then again into State. As a result of these transitions, Miller ended up bringing with him to the department several people who had been with him in his previous ventures. The extensive Miller-connected group surveilled by the FBI included Gregg, Philip Raine, Dwight Mallon, E. J. Ask with, Willard Park, Florence Levy, Minter Wood, and Bernard Redmont. Another Miller associate at State—indeed one of his closest allies—was former Budget Bureau official Rowena Rommel.6 (Various of these Miller contacts—and Miller himself—would show up later in the lists of suspects compiled by Joe McCarthy.)*60
• Alumni of OSS/OWI. There were numerous transferees from these wartime units still at work in the federal government in the fall of 1945, particularly in the State Department, and Bentley’s suspects reflected this migration. The OSS staffers she named as Communists or collaborators with her group included Maurice Halperin, Duncan Lee, Julius Joseph, Helen Tenney (from Short Wave Inc.), and Donald Wheeler. Of these, Halperin and Wheeler moved on to State, while Duncan Lee, a China specialist, would go to work for Thomas Corcoran, now finished with his Amerasia labors. Other OSS alumni at the State Department, spotted in the investigation, included Woodrow Borah, Carl Marzani, and David Zablodowsky, a name met with in the testimony of General Donovan before the Thomason subcommittee eight months before this.
While OSS supplied a mother lode of Bentley suspects, OWI contributed also. Some staffers of this agency who had already come to the notice of the FBI have been mentioned in Chapter 7. To the people on that roster, Bentley would add the name of Peter Rhodes, while the FBI investigation would identify still more—Edward Rosskam, Inez Munoz, Alix Reuther, and several others.7
• The Hiss Connection. Though Chambers was the main witness against Hiss, Bentley would say she knew Hiss to be an agent of the Soviet interest (as would ex-Communists Hede Massing, Nathaniel Weyl, and Budenz). Based on the Chambe
rs-Bentley allegations, the Bureau would zero in not only on Hiss himself but on his coworkers and allies. As is well known, this became a major investigation in its own right, eventually the most famous of them all, with a totally separate, extensive file in Bureau records.
In the course of this inquiry, the Bureau followed up on a sizable number of Hiss contacts whose names would later appear in security records at State and committees of Congress. This group included Henry Collins, Richard Post, and Julian Wadleigh (all named by Chambers as members of his network). Other more recent Hiss colleagues, not so identified by Chambers but considered by State Department security sleuths to be especially close to Hiss, included Donald Blaisdell, Clarence Nelson, George Rothwell, Paul Appleby, and George Scharzwalder.8
• Amerasia and IPR. While the Bureau was of course intensely conscious of Amerasia before it ever talked to Bentley (collaterally but less so of IPR), her testimony would fill in certain blanks and add some further names to the list of suspects in that ongoing investigation. Among those in the Amerasia/IPR connection on whom she would provide additional data were Sol Adler, Lauchlin Currie, Frederick Field, Duncan Lee, and Michael Greenberg.
In addition, Bentley would tell the Bureau about the Price sisters, Mildred and Mary, alleged members of the Golos network. Mildred was one of the Amerasia/IPR-style activists on China, while Mary had been a staffer for the columnist Walter Lippmann. The Prices, Bentley told the Bureau, were particularly close to Duncan Lee. (Mary also played hostess to meetings of the Perlo group, including OSS employee Donald Wheeler.) Other contacts of Lee, spotted in the investigation, were Robert and Patricia Barnett, both former staffers at IPR (she also formerly of OSS) and both now on the payroll at State.9
Blacklisted By History Page 16