They were both wrong. Juliet Glazer, whose real name was Juliet Stuart Poyntz, was a Barnard-and Oxford-educated, Moscow-trained member of the Soviet secret police. Ten years before, she had been a prominent member of the American communist party, running for Congress on the Workers Party ticket in 1924 and serving as the director of the Communist Workers School for several years. But she had left the open party to go underground and was in New York to recruit espionage operatives. Bentley had been targeted as a prime recruit.
Through Poyntz, Bentley met “Joseph Eckhart,” a Lithuanian who said he was a businessman looking for a secretary. They had dinner together at Longchamps several times, but although Eckhart repeated his need for help, he never offered her a job. Over the course of several months, he went in and out of her life, calling frequently, then disappearing suddenly, then reappearing and taking her to dinner again. Bentley was confused by his odd behavior but flattered by the attention. At some point during their peculiar relationship, Eckhart introduced her to a man he called Marcel. A voluble and dramatic sort, Marcel told Bentley that he was a member of an organization similar to the Catholic Church, except, he told her pointedly, “if you left the Catholic Church, all you lost was your soul.” Bentley couldn’t help but be titillated by the mystery, the implied danger. After Eckhart disappeared again, Marcel started taking her out to dinner, and she began to learn more about what he did. One time, he told her he had been in Paris “terrorizing a communist who had gone astray of the party.” He had called the man from a phone booth every five minutes, hanging up each time.
“I don’t like this kind of work,” he told her grimly.
“Why don’t you get into something else?” Bentley asked. He stared at her for a long time.
“You don’t know what you’re saying,” he said. “No one ever leaves the organization.” Both Eckhart and Marcel, whose real name was Michael Endelman, were KGB agents.
Bentley might have suspected something, or she might have thought that the overly theatrical Marcel was just being overly theatrical. At any rate, she was just a neophyte who knew relatively little of Soviet politics or secret organizations or underground operations. What was important to her was that odd and interesting things were happening to her, that strange men were treating her to expensive dinners, that her life was suddenly quite exciting.
It was not difficult to see why Poyntz, Eckhart, and Marcel had all apparently considered recruiting Bentley into the espionage business. She was a willing and enthusiastic new party member. She was smart. She was unattached. She had an impeccable background, a Vassar grad with a DAR pedigree. And she wasn’t Jewish. A woman with these “credentials” would be among the last to be suspected of undercover work, not to mention communist affiliation. But nothing came of it. The moment passed without Bentley even knowing that there had been a moment.
After she resigned from the Home Relief job, Bentley went back to Columbia to finish her master’s degree while working part-time at a succession of odd jobs. She found work typing manuscripts, translating, and tutoring. She did publicity for the Brooklyn Institute. She did research for the Consumers Union. She did temp work at Cue magazine. She was a telephone operator at Macy’s. During the summers, she worked as a counselor, one year at an upstate New York camp for the children of Soviet nationals, another summer for Macy’s Fresh Air Fund camp. All of the jobs were temporary, and none of them paid well, but she managed to support herself, take classes, and faithfully pay her party dues. She was persistent and indefatigable, a woman who had to take care of herself and did. Gone was the despair and lethargy of those terrible months back in the fall and winter of 1935 when it was all she could do to drag herself out of bed each morning. Her life wasn’t easy now, and it wasn’t the life she imagined she was going to live. But she was making her own way. She was part of something. She had comrades and lovers.
In June 1938, the Columbia University Placement Center came through with another full-time job, this one with the Italian Library of Information on Madison Avenue. Hired to do research and secretarial work, she soon discovered that the library was part of the Italian government’s Ministry of Propaganda whose purpose was to spread positive information about Mussolini’s regime. She saw stacks of fascist literature. She saw anticommunist and anti-Semitic pamphlets. She was appalled. Antifascism was the bedrock of her own progressive beliefs. This was not the kind of place where she wanted to work. Or was it? When she stopped to think about it, maybe she could do some good being there. Maybe this job was more than it seemed. Maybe it was an opportunity to find out what propaganda the fascists were foisting on the American people. Perhaps the party would like to know, too.
She asked a comrade, a woman she knew from the party and the American League Against War and Fascism, whom she might talk to about all this. The woman gave her a letter of introduction to “F. Brown,” a high-ranking party functionary, and Bentley went downtown to headquarters to talk to him. He listened carefully and told her to keep an eye on what was going on at the library and collect copies of any anticommunist or anti-Semitic material she saw. Bentley took her assignment seriously, making it her business during the next few months to bring Comrade Brown all such material. She had essentially taken herself undercover, using her legitimate position as secretary to secretly gather documents she thought would be embarrassing or compromising to the fascists.
Through the summer of 1938, she dutifully stuffed her handbag at work and ferried the material to Brown at party headquarters. But after a while, she saw that he was not all that interested. She, however, remained convinced of the importance of what she was doing. She hoped to expose the library for being a propaganda machine. She hoped to expose fascist propaganda for the lies she knew it was. The clandestine work she was doing was not only meaningful to her, it was also exciting. There was always the possibility that she would be caught with material in her handbag, always the chance she would be unmasked as a communist. There was a thrill to that.
If Brown wasn’t interested, perhaps the Italian leftist underground might be, she thought. When she couldn’t find a contact there, she asked Brown to put her in touch with someone in the party with ties to the Italian labor movement in the United States. He gave her a name, but that man proved unreliable, missing arranged meetings and neglecting to call her back. Still, she didn’t drop the matter. She went back to Brown and asked for a new contact, someone dependable, someone who would take her and her information seriously.
In this way, she met the man who would change her life.
Chapter 6
Yasha
IN MID-OCTOBER 1938, Comrade Brown instructed Bentley to meet him in Greenwich Village in front of a little restaurant on University Place. He had a new contact for her, a top man in the communist movement, he told her, a man she could trust. They rendezvoused at the appointed hour and began walking slowly toward Eighth Street when, at the corner, a small, stocky man in a shabby suit and scuffed brown shoes suddenly appeared, seemingly out of nowhere. Bentley was taken aback. Brown merely nodded and introduced the man as “Timmy.” Timmy had a car parked around the corner, an old Dodge sedan, and the three of them got in and drove over to Fourteenth Street, where Brown got out and caught the subway. Then Timmy swung the car around and headed downtown. He knew a restaurant on lower Second Avenue, an out-of-the-way little place where they could sit and talk over dinner.
On the drive over, Bentley stole glances at Timmy, sizing him up. He was a short, homely man, probably in his late forties, with broad shoulders, large hands, and a short, thick neck. He had a high, wide forehead and small, close-set eyes that seemed fixed in a perpetual squint. His nose was small for his face, his mouth generous, with full, shapely, womanish lips. There was a hint of the Slavic in his high cheekbones and his soft, rounded jaw. He was not, she thought to herself, an impressive-looking man. But she soon discovered that he was impressive in other ways. As they sat and talked through a two-hour dinner, she saw that he had a quick, sharp mind. He
had a way of listening that was thoughtful yet intense and alert, a way of paying attention that made her feel that what she said was important. So she said a lot. She told him not just about the Italian Library of Information and her work there but also many personal details, including her odd experiences with Glazer, Eckhart, and Marcel. He listened, his eyes guarded. He asked incisive questions.
After they had lingered as long as they could, Timmy suggested they take a drive and continue their conversation. As he maneuvered the big sedan uptown and then through Central Park, he told her of the misery and suffering he had seen in Europe, and of the new society that he hoped would replace it. Everywhere the communists were working to create a better world, a more humane place. But it was very hard work, and many people, although they started off as good communists, just weren’t strong enough to stay with their commitment, to weather the hardships. Timmy was giving her a pep talk, but he seemed also to be giving one to himself.
“Our movement is like a buggy overcrowded with people going up a steep and rocky road,” he told her. “At every curve someone loses his hold and falls off.”
Bentley felt as if this man, this stranger, could see right through her. Was she one of those people who would fall off? Did she have what it took to be part of this great new enterprise?
Now Timmy was telling her that her Library of Information job was “vitally important to the party.” That’s what she had thought. That’s why she hadn’t given up trying to find a contact. You must stay there at all costs, he told her. Watch what goes on. Bring out any documents you can.
Timmy was overplaying his hand, but Bentley didn’t know that. Her Library of Information job was not really all that significant. The material she might manage to bring out would be unlikely to provide the party with vital intelligence. What was important to Timmy was not Bentley’s current position but taking advantage of the situation, capitalizing on an opportunity that had been handed to him. He needed to encourage this woman, who seemed bright and more than willing to work for the good of the party. She had initiative and guts. He could see that clearly. She had not only taken it upon herself to spy for the party, she had kept at her self-appointed task without any support. She was definitely worth cultivating. And so he told her to report back to him at regular intervals. He told her to contact him through a third party. He gave her a number and detailed instructions.
“You are now no longer an ordinary communist,” he told her. “You are a member of the underground.” He told her that she must cut herself off completely from her old communist friends. No more socializing, no more cell meetings, no more going to demonstrations or rallies or fund-raisers. If she happened to run into someone who knew her from the party, she was to say that she had dropped out. She was to avoid progressive causes, stay clear of anything that smacked even of liberalism. Her only contact with the party would be through him.
Bentley wasn’t sure what to think. It was thrilling to be singled out like this, to be selected, to be told she was of special value. Timmy was telling her that she could play a new role in this struggle for a new society. He was telling her she was too important to be merely a party drudge who went to meetings and carried placards. He was telling her that on that overcrowded buggy that was going up the steep and rocky road, she had a place up front. This appealed equally to her ego and her idealism. It also sounded exciting. She should have stopped to consider what going underground would mean emotionally and psychologically, how it would feel to give up the warmth and camaraderie of the party, the comfort and sense of belonging. But she didn’t. Here was a mysterious, older man who looked at her with almost more intensity than she could handle. He had seen things. He had lived. And he believed in her commitment, in her strength, her perseverance. It seemed she should, too.
“I know this is going to be hard for you,” he was saying. “You will be completely alone except for me. Your fellow comrades may even think you’re a traitor. But the party would not ask this sacrifice of you if it were not vitally important.”
There was something that appealed to her about this, too, this notion of a tough job that called for self-sacrifice. Wasn’t this part of old-fashioned Christian ideals? Wasn’t this part of her New England upbringing? Didn’t her ancestors make sacrifices for what they believed in? Timmy pulled the car over in front of her apartment building and watched her as she thought this through. Then his hard look softened, and he smiled. Bentley found herself drawn to him.
“Good night,” he said. “Sleep well.” Of course, she didn’t.
In the weeks after they were first introduced, Bentley and Timmy met often, always at her initiative. She would call the number he gave her, and, as instructed, leave a message if a woman answered but hang up if she heard a man’s voice. She had no idea where she was calling. She had no idea who Timmy was—of course Timmy wasn’t his real name, she was sure of that—or what he did. She suspected, from how politically savvy he seemed to be and how intensely curious he was about world affairs, that he might be a journalist of some kind. But the mystery didn’t bother her. In fact, it intrigued her.
They met in out-of-the-way restaurants, then drove around the city in his old sedan. She would tell him what she found out that week—who visited the library, who called, what packages had arrived—and hand over any material she had taken out. Patiently, like a teacher coaching a student with little experience but much potential, he would point out what was important and what was trivial and tell her what to look for in the future. One time she told him that she was eavesdropping at doors and going through wastepaper baskets. No one does that except in spy novels, he told her. That’s not the way to operate. Instead, he instructed her to concentrate on impressing her superiors at the library with her trustworthiness so that she would be taken into their confidence. Pretend to be a fascist, he told her. Infiltrate. She listened carefully.
She was beginning to admire Timmy more and more. He was self-assured without being arrogant. He was kind without being soft. He knew so much. He had seen so much. He didn’t tell her details—he kept almost everything about himself secret—but he talked sometimes about the conditions in Europe, about Russia before the Revolution, about the fate suffered by comrades working for a new society. She saw in him both gentle empathy and steely strength. He seemed to work hard and live simply, with what she saw as a pure and unswerving loyalty to the cause. He was, she thought, a man of honor and vision who cared more about the human condition than he did about himself. He was a hero.
On a blustery night in December, perhaps a month and a half after they first met, Bentley and Timmy came out of a restaurant to find Timmy’s car wedged in a snowdrift. They labored together in the dark, digging snow from around the wheels with their hands, scooping snow from the windshield, rocking the car back and forth to find traction. They were exhausted and drenched when they finally got in the car. Her hat was dripping wet. Let me shake that off for you, he said, reaching over for it. Their hands accidentally touched. They stared at each other. It was like one of those bourgeois romantic movies the communists all made fun of. Then they were in each other’s arms.
“Let’s drive for a while,” he said.
He drove, faster than he should have, through the snowy streets, onto Riverside Drive, through the city and north along the Hudson. They passed town after town, Riverdale, Yonkers, Dobbs Ferry, Irvington, Tarrytown. Neither of them talked. They were too involved with their own thoughts, too busy working through what had just happened and how they felt about it. Bentley had enjoyed liaisons with older men before, but she had never been in love. Was this love? How could she be in love with a man she knew so little about? But maybe she knew enough. She knew that, despite his small stature, he towered over every other man she’d ever met. To her, he was the ideal communist, the ultimate self-sacrificing, self-disciplined revolutionary, a true believer.
Finally, near dawn, he stopped the car, and they watched as the winter sky lightened in the east. He held her hand and to
ld her he loved her. And he did. But it was love leavened with need. He needed someone young and enthusiastic, someone whose idealism was untempered by the realities he knew too well. He needed to mold and teach, to create, Pygmalion-style, a worthy compatriot, a true comrade, a revolutionary soulmate, not just someone to help him but someone to whom he could talk and in whom he could confide. And, maybe, despite his selfless devotion to the cause, he needed someone to admire him. He needed to feel like the hero he had been once, in simpler times. He was not an old man, only forty-eight, in fact, but he was slowing down. He had not taken good care of himself. His health was poor. He needed an infusion of energy, a transfusion, new blood. Elizabeth Bentley was it.
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