Clever Girl

by Lauren Kessler

  The task was easier than it seemed, for since the early 1930s there had been an espionage network operating in Washington, D.C., the brainchild of an Austro-Hungarian-born communist known in the Party as “J. Peters.” A communist cell known as the Ware Group was funneling information to the Soviets from various agencies in the federal government as early as 1933. Through the 1930s, the New Deal added thousands of new jobs to the federal workforce and attracted liberals and progressives to government service, some of whom joined the Popular Front and were subsequently tapped for underground work.

  By the end of the decade, when Golos’s underground duties began to include the handling of sources, the konspiratsia had spread to the State Department, the Treasury Department, the Bureau of Standards, and the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland. Soon there were sources in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the Justice Department, Interior Department, Army, Navy, and, after the United States entered the war in the winter of 1941, the Office of War Information. Many of these sources did not think of themselves as spies. After all, the USA and the USSR were allies, united in battle against the Nazis. And Russia, it seemed, was bearing the brunt of the war, suffering almost unimaginable casualties. Those in positions to know felt that the U.S. government was not giving its communist ally the same helpful information it was giving Great Britain, information that might save lives or shorten the war. It was their duty, many thought, to intercede, to pass that information to Moscow through intermediaries like Golos and Bentley. Others, of course, were ideologically motivated. They saw themselves as part of an underground resistance movement, a revolutionary force, secretly waging war against what they considered to be an oppressive government: their own.

  Whatever the motivation, for the most part, they operated unmolested throughout the 1930s and into the war years. The U.S. government was not well prepared to deal with espionage at this level. The response was hobbled by a hodgepodge of internal security laws and no clear executive order on what constituted government secrets. The FBI was busy keeping tabs on the German American Bund. The various counterintelligence agencies didn’t talk to one another or share information. Compared to the hundreds of thousands who worked in some way for the federal government, the number who passed information during those years was miniscule—not the legions that Joe McCarthy would later claim. But they were often in the right place at the right time. The war years were, for all those reasons and more, the golden age of Soviet espionage, and Golos—and now Bentley—were at its center.

  Bentley made her first trip to Washington as Golos’s substitute in July of 1941. Her job was not just to gather information from a number of sources and ferry it back to New York but also, as Golos instructed her, to collect party dues and distribute party literature. She was, he told her, to “treat them as communists,” to be their link to the party just as Golos was hers. But she soon learned that her duties were more expansive. As a “handler,” she had to keep an eye on everyone, calming those who were nervous about the work they were doing and assessing the stress levels of others, paying attention to their sometimes messy private lives and making sure their problems would not compromise their work. At Christmastime, she bought them presents.

  But her main objective was the acquisition of information. The KGB was looking for anything and everything. Moscow wanted to know about “interesting information and activities” in virtually every cabinet-level department, the Congress, the national committees of the Republican and Democratic parties, the OSS, FBI, trade unions, and U.S. foreign embassies and missions. Moscow was interested in political and diplomatic information, like internal debates on policy, America’s relations with Britain, the attitudes of U.S. officials toward Russia, the personalities of policymakers, and Capitol Hill gossip. And, after the United States entered the war, Moscow wanted technical and military information, such as production figures on planes and tanks and the deployment of forces. Through the latter part of 1941 and into the early war years, the gathering of this information along with the careful tending of sources kept Bentley very busy.

  She made contact with a few sources in New York, most notably a Long Island City chemical engineer named Abraham Brothman, who knew her only as “Helen.” Perhaps ten times, the two met at their prearranged rendezvous, the corner of 32nd Street and Fifth Avenue, and walked to a restaurant. During the course of dinner, Brothman would hand her a thick envelope with folded blueprints, which she then delivered to Golos. She didn’t look at the blueprints, and even if she had, she wouldn’t have had the technical expertise to make sense of them. Brothman told her they had something to do with commercial vats, filters, and shafts used in the manufacture of chemicals.

  But most of her sources were in Washington, D.C., and through the early 1940s, she took the train down every two weeks, sometimes more often, to see them. As Golos added more sources or as an established source suggested a potential one, her list of contacts grew. At first it was possible to spend just a day taking care of business in the capital, but before long, she had so many people to meet and so many documents to collect that she was spending several days at a time on each trip. She had to act casually; she had to stay calm. But each trip was a tightly controlled performance, often an exercise in fear and always a test of how much stress a person could take while remaining outwardly unruffled. Conscious of the possibility of being followed, Bentley often took several different taxis from the train station to somewhere near her first meeting. She always stopped the cab a few blocks from her actual destination and walked the rest of the way, zipping in and out of stores, crossing and recrossing streets, taking roundabout routes, watching closely for tails. Her sources worked for the federal government, but she never met them at their offices. They rendezvoused on park benches, in drug stores, and sometimes in restaurants. They knew nothing about her, not even her real name. She was Helen Johnson or Helen Grant, or sometimes Myrna or Mary. Some sources she never actually met. They handed their material to others who in turn reported to her.

  At first she carried a large purse to transport the documents she collected. A briefcase might have called attention to itself, but a woman with a purse was just a woman with a purse. Soon, however, the material became too voluminous to stuff in a handbag, and she had to switch to an oversized knitting bag or a shopping bag, always with a department store name on it. She would rush to see her contacts all over the city, arranging dozens of clandestine meetings, and then come back to New York Friday night on the Congressional Limited, a woman seemingly returning from a shopping spree, a woman quietly knitting a scarf, a woman with a bag full of secrets.

  It was mentally exhausting, emotionally draining work, yet it was also undeniably thrilling. It was like living in a spy novel, like playing a part in a movie. She was Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca. She was Hedy Lamarr in Comrade X. She was living a big life. She was making her lover proud. And she was also doing something important—helping the communist cause she had come to believe in, helping Mother Russia win the war. Fueled by love, by ideology, and by a sense of drama and excitement, she went about her work efficiently. Under Golos’s tutelage, Elizabeth Bentley was now essentially in charge of the most extensive espionage network in the United States, not a single apparatus but several groups and a number of individual agents linked to Soviet intelligence through her.

  One of her first important contacts was Mary Price, personal secretary to the highly influential syndicated newspaper columnist Walter Lippmann. Golos, as “John,” and Bentley, as “Helen,” had first met Price in New York at the Schrafft’s on 13th Street and Fifth Avenue in the spring of 1941, where they arranged for Bentley to visit Price every two weeks in Washington. Walter Lippmann wrote political commentary that Golos found quite interesting. He wanted to get his hands on Lippmann’s background material, his sources, anything in his files that might reveal behind-the-scenes intelligence the Russians would be interested in. Price, a good communist, was willing to go through her boss’s files on weekends or whil
e he was away on business, making copies of his notes or other documents. When Bentley came back with a haul from Lippmann’s files, Golos declared it “extremely valuable” and pressed for more. Price was also important to Bentley because it was at her apartment on Eye Street that Bentley often stayed during her trips to Washington, sleeping on a bed in the enclosed back porch. Price’s other significant contribution to the Bentley-Golos apparatus was her connection to a man named Duncan Lee who offered direct access to the OSS, America’s newest and most important foreign intelligence unit.

  A direct descendant of General Robert E. Lee, Duncan Lee had distinguished himself at Yale, both undergraduate and law, and had been a Rhodes scholar at Oxford, where he became involved in the Communist Party. Fresh out of law school, he secured a position with a prominent New York firm where he became the protégé of General William Donovan, head of the firm. When Donovan left to take over the helm of the OSS, Lee went with him and became part of his staff. There he met Mary Price’s sister, Mildred, who was also on staff, and through her, Mary, with whom he began a messy extramarital love affair. When Bentley came on the scene, Lee was already passing Price bits of information from the OSS.

  He never took out documents or committed anything to paper. He related the information orally and never let Price take notes. Both because their personal relationship jeopardized the operation and because Price was not getting much out of Lee, the Russians, through Golos, asked Bentley to take over. She added him to her list, arranging to meet at Price’s apartment or a Georgetown pharmacy or a downtown luncheonette. They did not have an easy time together. He was one of the most nervous people she had to deal with, ever fearful of being exposed, acutely aware of his sensitive position at the OSS, concerned that the rival FBI might be making a special attempt to keep him in its sights. But the information he gave her was worth the trouble. He told her about the anti-Soviet work the OSS was involved in, diplomatic activities in Turkey and Romania, operations in China and France, secret negotiations with the Balkan bloc. He told her about the location of OSS personnel in foreign countries and the nature of their activities.

  Lee was important, but he was not Bentley’s only source at OSS. There was also J. Julius Joseph, a communist of long standing who had been an employee of the Social Security Board. At some point in 1942, Joseph made contact with Communist Party headquarters in New York, where his potential was recognized, and Golos was asked to establish contact. The first thing Golos did was suggest that Joseph find a position at a more “interesting” agency, the OSS perhaps. This he did, and as it turned out, his job gave him access to sensitive information from the agency’s Far East and Russian sections, which he passed along to Bentley. Also at the OSS, in the Spanish division, was Helen Tenney, an attractive New York heiress and longtime communist whom Golos had used as a source when she was employed by a New York organization called Short Wave Research, a covert affiliate of the OSS. When that organization folded, he persuaded her to find a job with the OSS in Washington, D.C. From there she was able to pass on to Bentley secret reports from agents in Spain.

  Yet another OSS source was Maurice Halperin, head of the Latin American Division. A Communist Party member since his days as a graduate student at University of Oklahoma, Halperin had lost contact with the Party when he moved to the capital in the early 1940s. But he soon got in touch with the editor of the New Masses, who alerted Golos, who assigned him to Bentley. Bentley considered him the ideal source: a stable, happily married man with a lovely home, a lovely family, and no public association with the party. He was also in an enviable position at the OSS, with apparently unlimited access to daily cabled intelligence summaries compiled by the State Department. He handed these over to Bentley in two-week accumulations, along with copies of sensitive U.S. diplomatic dispatches furnished to the OSS, and bulletins and reports prepared by the agency on a variety of topics.

  The list of contacts went on. There was Hazen Size of the Canadian Film Board who fed Bentley gossip overheard at the Canadian and British embassies. And there were three men from the Council of Inter-American Affairs (CIAA): Joseph Gregg, who had access to naval intelligence and FBI reports on suspected communist activities in Latin America; Robert T. Miller, who also passed along summaries of information appearing in OSS and FBI files; and Bernard Redmont, a former newspaper reporter working for the press division of the CIAA.

  Redmont had been introduced to Bentley by another source, a man she had been meeting regularly since early 1942, a man who would figure prominently in her life for years to come. His name was William Remington, and if ever there was an example of “the best and the brightest,” he was it. A tall, handsome, sandy-haired young man whom Bentley and Golos referred to as their “infant prodigy,” he had been a brilliant student of economics at Dartmouth and Columbia and, in the early 1940s, appeared to be headed for a brilliant career in government service. A mutual acquaintance at the New Masses introduced Golos to Remington, and, after an innocuous luncheon at Schrafft’s during which Golos and Bentley, using aliases, traded pleasantries with Remington and his wife, it was decided that Bentley would meet Remington in Washington during her biweekly visits.

  “This is Helen,” she said when she called him at his office, which she did perhaps a dozen times during the next two years. They would arrange to meet at the Whelan Drugstore on Pennsylvania Avenue or in front of the Mellon Art Gallery or on a park bench somewhere. Their contacts were brief, Remington usually dashing out of his office during lunch hour, leaving just enough time to hand her scraps of paper on which he had jotted down notes. He worked at the War Production Board during those years and had access to military intelligence that interested the Russians. He told Bentley about aircraft production schedules, airplane and high octane gasoline tests. He told her of a process he’d heard about for the manufacture of synthetic rubber. And he was a font of political information as well, commenting on the personalities and opinions of those he knew in government.

  As important as all these men and women were to the Bentley-Golos apparatus, there was no one more significant than a man named Nathan Gregory (Greg to his friends) Silvermaster, a charming, well-read, articulate, Russian-born economist who had held various posts in New Deal agencies since the mid-1930s. A good-looking man with a full head of dark hair just going silver at the temples, he was one of the most prominent agricultural economists in the nation, first with the Farm Security Administration, then the Department of Treasury, then Commerce. His wife, Helen Witte, also Russian-born, was the daughter of a Baltic baron who had been an influential counselor to the czar. She was tall and stately and held herself like the patrician she was. Together they made a winning couple, erudite and multitalented, given to hosting musical salons and weekend parties.

  In June 1941, when three million Axis troops invaded the Soviet Union, various executive departments, including State, Treasury, and War, were working actively through diplomatic and clandestine channels to help the British, French, and Russians slow the Nazi onslaught. It was against this backdrop that Silvermaster approached Communist Party chairman Earl Browder and offered to supply the party with information that might aid the Soviet war effort. Silvermaster had been a communist since 1920 and had served as one of Browder’s assistants during the San Francisco general strike of 1934. It was through Browder that Silvermaster met Golos, who, in turn, dispatched Bentley. She met the Silvermasters at their Washington, D.C., home in August of 1941. Before long, she was visiting them every two weeks, usually midweek to avoid their Saturday-night social gatherings. There, in the late afternoon, she would chat with Helen Silvermaster, who never quite trusted her, and then adjourn to the living room to talk business with Greg and his friend and housemate William Ludwig (Lud) Ullmann. A Harvard Business School graduate who worked in the economics section of the Treasury Department, Ullmann was a short, mild-mannered man with large, soulful eyes and oversized, Bing Crosby ears. A confirmed bachelor, he had been living with the Silvermasters for years,
an arrangement that some in the party understood to be a ménage à trois, while others considered it quite innocent.

  On a typical visit, Ullmann and Silvermaster would refresh their recollections from small pieces of paper stuffed in their pockets, and dictate information to Bentley. They always passed along documents, or carbon copies of documents, the quantity and quality of which were staggering. There were reports on weapons, aircraft, tank, and artillery production; analyses of American military industrial capacity; data on the German war industry; U.S. diplomatic cables; U.S. embassy reports; OSS reports; and technical manuals and pilots’ operating manuals for American fighter planes and bombers. The volume of material became so great that, despite the capaciousness of Bentley’s oversized knitting bag, it was too much for her to handle. Ullmann solved the problem by buying a high-quality camera and setting up a darkroom in the Silvermasters’ basement to microfilm the documents. Soon Bentley was carrying home as many as forty rolls of undeveloped microfilm in her bag every two weeks.

  Not all this material came from Silvermaster and Ullmann, although both were well-placed and highly motivated sources. Much came from others who reported to Silvermaster, forming a loose assemblage of like-minded government employees, a network within Bentley’s larger apparatus. Bentley never met any of the other members of the “Silvermaster Group”—with the exception of one accidental sighting—but she knew of their existence from her many conversations with Silvermaster and Ullmann. There was Solomon Adler, a Treasury Department agent in China; Norman Bursler at the Department of Justice; Frank Coe, an assistant director of the Division of Monetary Research in the Treasury Department; Bela Gold in the Agriculture Department and his wife, Sonia, who worked in Coe’s division at Treasury; William Henry Taylor, also in Treasury; and Abraham George Silverman, an economic adviser in the Air Force. More loosely associated with the group was Lauchlin Currie, a New Deal hero, a senior government economist and a special assistant to President Roosevelt, who, Bentley was told, helped other members of the Silvermaster Group secure jobs in “productive areas” or get transfers.