Clever Girl

by Lauren Kessler

  She told the people at McClure’s that she’d been sent by an employment agency. Waldo interviewed her and, to her surprise, hired her as his personal secretary. Golos was delighted. He told her to watch Waldo as closely as she could to determine who was contacting him and to whom he was in contact, either by letter or phone. She found the job particularly grueling. It was not just because she had to be constantly on the alert and not just because she had to figure out how to smuggle out documents and correspondence without getting caught. It was also because Richard Waldo was a terrifying boss. He had a sharp tongue, and he flew into fits of rage. Everyone in the office was constantly on edge. Bentley had to handle the stress of the job itself in addition to the anxiety of the undercover work. Golos was sympathetic and encouraging at first, but, as time went on and he determined that the information she brought out had little value, he lost interest. Both of them were probably relieved when, four months later, in the midst of one of his frequent explosions, Waldo fired Bentley. Golos had other work for her anyway.

  When leading Canadian communists came to New York to confer with him, Golos asked Bentley to help. The meetings had to look like social occasions. The rendezvous were set for restaurants, and the men brought along their wives. It was Bentley’s assignment to keep the wives occupied and engaged in conversation while Golos conducted business with the men. But there were also more exciting opportunities. One time, she drove with him to Brooklyn where they staked out a dentist’s office. It seemed that the dentist’s car had been used by a man wanted by the Russians, a diplomat who had fled to the United States with $50,000. Golos told her all about it. He had tailed the diplomat from Hoboken, where his boat docked, into Manhattan. He lost him on Canal Street but not before noting the license plate number on the car he was driving. Another time Golos tried to enlist Bentley’s services to soften up a man named Jaffee—an enemy of the underground movement, he told her—who was living in a Manhattan hotel. Golos told her, pointedly, that the man was “susceptible to women.” He proposed the assignment to her as he would have to any operative. But she wasn’t any operative. She was his lover. Bentley wanted to be a good Bolshevik, but being asked to seduce another man by the man she considered her life’s partner was too much to ask. She told Golos she didn’t want to have anything to do with the assignment. He was probably relieved and dropped the matter quickly.

  Meanwhile, she continued operating as a mail drop and a mail courier. But, because of her connection to Golos and because of Golos’s standing both in the party and in the underground, Bentley was not just another worker bee. She was, although it took her some time to realize it, near the center of the hive. Through Golos, she was introduced to a number of important people and heard about many more. Several times, she and Golos visited Earl Browder, head of the Communist Party, at his summer home in Monroe, New York. Her position was clearly privileged.

  By the end of October 1939, Bentley was still performing various tasks for Golos, and the two were meeting regularly, even chancing being seen together at the Fifth Avenue offices of World Tourists. But on October 20, the U.S. Attorney General’s Office, the State Department, and the U.S. Marshals Service served Golos with a subpoena demanding that he turn over all World Tourists’ records to a grand jury. The Justice Department suspected (correctly) that Golos’s company was really a front for the Soviets and was engaged in a variety of illegal activities. The plan was to prove that World Tourists, along with the Daily Worker and a communist publishing enterprise, were agents of the Soviet Union. The government hoped the subpoenaed documents would nail the case.

  With guards stationed at the door to prevent the removal or destruction of records, Golos was stuck. He was compelled to hand over nearly two truckloads of documents, including all the telephone number indexes in his office. “Some of that material is going to involve our comrades badly,” he told Bentley. He was right. As federal agents soon discovered, World Tourists’ records showed that Earl Browder had traveled abroad under a pseudonym and with the aid of faked papers. He was arrested for passport fraud. Golos himself made more than twenty appearances before grand juries in New York and Washington, D.C. He was on the stand hour after hour for days, and the strain began to show. His face was pale. His shoulders sagged. He was short of breath. He began having chest pains when he climbed stairs. Bentley was worried about him but could do nothing. He made her keep her distance.

  In March 1940, the grand jury returned indictments on various violations of espionage and neutrality laws. But ten days after the trial hearings began, Golos was allowed to plead guilty to a lesser charge of failing to register as an agent of a foreign power. His attorney had orchestrated the plea bargain, with the Central Committee of the Party urging Golos to accept. He was incensed. He told Bentley that the deal his attorney worked out sacrificed him while the other communist organizations under investigation walked away unscathed. But he was a good party man, so he went along. The government came away with a quick victory. Golos came away with a suspended sentence and a $500 fine.

  Overnight, World Tourists became the place to avoid. Customers, alarmed by press accounts of the long investigation and wary of becoming involved with an organization publicly labeled a Soviet front, took their business elsewhere. Golos sat in his quiet, empty office, exhausted, angry, and as close to self-pity as a good Bolshevik would let himself get. But this was only the beginning of his problems. The FBI was now on his tail, literally, with federal agents keeping him under close surveillance and a Soviet double agent regularly reporting on his activities to the Bureau. It was not just the Justice Department investigation that put Golos on the FBI radar screen. It was also the Bureau’s surveillance of an official at Amtorg (the USSR’s state-run trading company that legally operated in the United States), Gaik Ovakimyan, who, it turned out, was actually the chief of scientific intelligence in the United States for the KGB. Agents noted with interest that Ovakimyan met with Golos a number of times “under suspicious circumstances.” In fact, Ovakimyan was at the time Golos’s direct link to Moscow.

  On top of that, Golos discovered in December 1940 that he was the target of another investigation, this one by a congressional committee nosing around the edges of Soviet espionage. When the so-called Dies Committee—the precursor to the House Un-American Activities Committee—turned its attention to Golos, it was clear to him that another subpoena was on its way. He quickly culled through piles of remaining documents and threw the most sensitive in a carton that he carried over to Bentley’s apartment on Barrow Street. That night, she helped him burn the documents in her fireplace. There were many letters and pamphlets in Russian, and thirty or forty American passports. There was also a small folder with Golos’s photograph and signature on one side and, on the other side, in Cyrillic letters that Bentley could now translate, the initials OGPU. The OGPU was a predecessor to the KGB. Bentley was seeing Golos’s secret police credentials. Now she knew for certain what she must have suspected during her year with Golos: He worked not just for the party but directly for the Soviets.

  In fact, at the time he met Bentley and took her underground, Golos was in charge of a network of spies in New York and Washington, D.C. His sources, men—and some women as well—fed him sensitive political, scientific, and technical information that he, in turn, passed along to Ovakimyan who forwarded it to Moscow. Now it seemed, to add to his troubles, that Moscow was not very happy with him. He was an independent-minded, pre-Bolshevik Revolution revolutionary who, although he generally toed the party line, made no secret of his sometimes dissident opinions. Certainly he was not a loose canon, but in the late 1930s, the years of the Great Purge in the Soviet Union, one did not have to be much off the mark, or off the mark at all, to be under suspicion for “tendencies.” What Moscow lacked in evidence, it more than made up for in paranoia. Within Soviet intelligence circles, there was some fear—but no proof—that Golos was a Trotskyite. Others in Moscow thought he was too casual, too informal—too American— to manage s
uch an important spy network. To others, his visibility in the open party was a sore point. And now, after the conviction in the World Tourists case, there was grave concern that he was far too visible to American counterintelligence. Unbeknownst to Golos, the KGB had debated for two years whether to recall, arrest, or execute him. In the end, the political tide turned in Moscow, the purges and paranoia receded, and what remained—what Golos was just now becoming aware of—was an internecine struggle over the control of his network. His place in the espionage scene, once secure, now felt tenuous.

  All these worries were exacerbated by—and probably contributed to—his deteriorating health. Early in 1941 it became clear to Bentley that her lover was quite ill. In March he began suffering again from shortness of breath, this time so severe that Bentley took him to several doctors. He had refused medical attention in the past, and she had to cajole and nag to get him into a doctor’s office. The diagnosis was heart disease and arteriosclerosis. One month later, in April of 1941, Golos suffered a heart attack.

  Chapter 8

  Konspiratsia

  GOLOS RECOVERED, BUT he realized he would always be a sick man. The seemingly inexhaustible well of energy he had tapped for the last thirty years was, in fact, exhaustible. At fifty-one, he was an old man, weary in body and spirit, hunted by the FBI and haunted by the fear that the Soviet secret police no longer valued him. The World Tourists case was over; the Dies Committee had moved on to someone else, but Golos was sure that federal agents would not forget him. That put everything in jeopardy. What should he do about World Tourists, which was not just his livelihood but a significant source of income for the party, not just his job but his cover? What should he do about his network of contacts in New York and Washington, his konspiratsia— the concealed spy apparatus he had developed? These were men and women he’d been cultivating for years who might now be exposed because of him. And what should he do about Elizabeth Bentley, his lover, his protégé, his work-in-progress? He needed her more than ever now, but the greater his need, the greater her peril.

  When the FBI began its surveillance of Golos, agents couldn’t help but notice the matronly looking brunette Golos often met for dinner. Bentley first realized she was being tailed in May 1941. She was leaving the World Tourists office late one evening to meet with the editor of Hemisphere, a pro-communist Latin American newsletter, when she noticed two young men stationed on either side of the next street corner. She kept her head. First, she walked by them as casually as she could and went into a candy store where she intended to call Golos. But when one of the men slipped into the phone booth next to hers, she quickly abandoned that plan. She thought of walking back to World Tourists, but that might alert her pursuers that she knew she was being tailed, something Golos had told her never to do. So she headed up Broadway, thinking on her feet. Penn Station was not far away. She knew that the ladies’ room there was a good place to lose a tail. You could enter it from an upper waiting room, go down the stairs, and then leave from the lower level. That’s what she did. When she left, she didn’t see the men. But to make sure, she walked to the public library on 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue, went in one door and out another. No one was following her when she left.

  But the surveillance continued. During the next few weeks, Bentley became accustomed to the FBI’s tails and began to master the art of vanishing. Paying for a seat in a movie theater and then quickly leaving by the fire exit was a particularly successful strategy. Late that spring, agents also began monitoring her mail, but by this time Bentley’s address was not a mail drop, so nothing came of the effort. She was also convinced that the FBI was tapping her phone, although she was wrong about that. In fact, after a flurry of interest that spring, the FBI ceased to pay any attention at all to Elizabeth Bentley, much to the Bureau’s later embarrassment. At the time, the FBI employed only two thousand agents nationwide, and they were spread thin. Government investigators had been interested in “The Reds” since the Russian Revolution and especially since the founding of the Communist Party in America. But since the outbreak of war in 1939, the FBI’s attention had been focused on “potentially dangerous” German, Italian, and Japanese nationals, along with American citizens whose activities might be suspected of aiding the Axis powers. The Russians, on the other hand, were allies. But with the passage of the Smith Act in 1940, which made it a crime to advocate the overthrow of the American government, the FBI began paying renewed attention to Russia and the communists. The Bureau, however, had not yet figured out how to deal with what Hoover called a “tremendous increase in duties” and “growing demand for services.” However it happened, the Bentley file slipped through the cracks.

  But Golos was still under surveillance, and he knew he had to do something to protect himself and the work he and Bentley were doing. Concerned both about his health and the continued presence of the FBI, he thought it prudent to find Bentley an alternate Russian contact. Right now, the only one she could report to was him. That’s how espionage networks were supposed to work, with solitary contacts to protect exposure. No one was supposed to know anyone but the next person in line. But Golos was afraid that something would happen to him, and Bentley would be left out in the cold. And so, late in 1941 a meeting was arranged through intermediaries, at noon in front of a drugstore on Ninth Avenue in the Fifties. There, Bentley, who was to be known only as “Miss Wise” rendezvoused with a Russian secret police agent, whom she was to know only as “John.” Now she had an alternate channel of communication. Now she was one of a handful of Americans reporting directly to the Russians.

  Golos also moved quickly to establish a new company in World Tourists’ stead. With his conviction and the branding of World Tourists as “Red,” the business was a shambles. He needed a new cover for himself, and Bentley, if she was to be available to him for spy work, needed a day job. For years, he had entertained the idea of setting up a business that would handle not just passengers but also all the freight traffic between the United States and Russia. Now he actively pursued it. What the company needed was an ultrarespectable businessman with good connections to the financial community and no visible connections to the party—a front man to deflect suspicion.

  He found the ideal candidate in John Hazard Reynolds, a retired millionaire Wall Street broker who was married to Grace Fleischman, heiress to the Fleischman yeast fortune. Reynolds was perfect. He had a fine pedigree. His family was old money, and his father had distinguished himself as a New York State Supreme Court justice. Reynolds, who had made his own fortune as an investor, served in the military in World War I and had come out a major. He had it all: money, status, and free time. And he was a sympathizer. He had flirted with socialism in the 1930s. He had known communist party pioneers John Reed and Scott Nearing. He called himself a Marxist, but he was not a party member. Reynolds not only agreed to head the new company, which would be called United States Service and Shipping Corporation (USS&S), he also invested $5,000 of his own money to get it started. Earl Browder, on behalf of the Communist Party, put up another $15,000, but the paperwork was managed in such a way as to make it appear that Reynolds was the sole owner. The new company rented office space on the nineteenth floor of 212 Fifth Avenue, just a block from the building that housed World Tourists.

  The only hitch was that Reynolds rejected all the men Golos suggested for the position of vice president. None of them had the “right background,” he said, which was probably code for a family tree well-rooted in American soil and Ivy League credentials. But there was one person Golos mentioned whom Reynolds did find acceptable: Elizabeth Bentley. When the company was chartered in the spring of 1941, she was listed as vice president. For a woman accustomed to scrounging for part-time secretarial jobs, this new position was particularly welcome. The munificent salary of $250 a month—at a time when the average worker was making a third of that—meant she no longer had money worries.

  Reynolds had important connections at the Chase National Bank and hired top-notch ac
countants and impeccable lawyers to get the company off the ground. USS&S was, because of this, above suspicion. Although the company, like World Tourists, would contract for business directly with the Soviet government, the State Department ruled that USS&S did not have to register as an agent of a foreign power. Golos’s strategy had paid off. In fact, the plan finessed the whole World Tourists problem. Now World Tourists could stay in business, rehabilitated as a subagent of USS&S.

  The timing couldn’t have been better. A month after the new company was established, Germany invaded the Soviet Union, and pro-Russian sympathies soared. Business immediately boomed when USS&S announced it would ship any useful items to the Soviet fighting forces without import duty. Reynolds worked hard the first few months, establishing a firm footing for the company and taking an active role in its operation. But he soon began to lose interest in day-to-day supervision and administration, and Bentley took up much of the slack.

  She had to take up the slack for Golos, too. Fearing that any trips outside New York would be closely monitored by the FBI, he asked Bentley to act as his courier to the Washington, D.C., sources with whom he had been working. There would be new contacts, too, for after the German invasion of the Soviet Union, Golos received orders from his superiors to develop additional sources within the federal government. “Moscow must be kept completely informed about what is going on behind the scenes in the American government,” he lectured Bentley.