Clever Girl

by Lauren Kessler

  Even more highly placed was a man named Harry Dexter White, the undersecretary of the Treasury, and as such, Henry Morganthau’s right-hand man. Bentley never received material directly from White. She never met him. But she understood from her talks with Silvermaster and Ullmann that he was a contributing member of the group. The son of Lithuanian immigrants, White distinguished himself at Stanford and Harvard and was tapped for government service early in the New Deal. He came to Washington in the summer of 1934, a liberal progressive, openly sympathetic to some of the ideals of international communism but not a party member. He was, like many left-of-FDR New Dealers, a “fellow traveler,” a man who could reconcile his sincere patriotism with his equally sincere enthusiasm for the communist experiment. White rose quickly in the Treasury Department and, by the early 1940s, he was one of the most influential men in international affairs at Treasury, entrusted by his boss, Secretary Morganthau with vast responsibility and discretion. White handled virtually all matters relating to foreign affairs for Treasury and managed a $2 billion stabilization fund that helped control currency rate fluctuations between the Allies. He was the dominating figure at the groundbreaking Bretton Woods Monetary Conference and was considered by many to be the real author of the so-called Morganthau Plan for the pastoralization of Germany after the war.

  Bentley understood from Silvermaster that White was supplying a variety of reports concerning the financial activities of the U.S. government in relation to foreign governments, and that he also contributed memos and documents that came across his desk from other departments and agencies. But White’s most valuable asset, Bentley learned, was his ability to place people in the Treasury Department. It was said that he found jobs for Ullmann, William Taylor, and Sonia Gold, thus facilitating espionage by sponsoring the employment of Soviet-friendly sources. He also used his position to protect Silvermaster when his friend came under scrutiny for communist leanings. Bentley came to think of White as one of the most important members of the Silvermaster Group because he was in a position to influence U.S. policy in a pro-Soviet direction.

  With the Silvermaster Group, William Remington, Mary Price, and all her other individual sources, Bentley found herself taxed to the limits. It was sometimes hard to keep it all straight, the appointments, the rendezvous spots, the cover stories. She had different relationships with the sources she met, each involving different fabrications. Some sources knew her only as Helen, a researcher for left-wing journals. Some knew she was a communist; others did not, or claimed later they did not. Some sources believed the material they passed along to Bentley went to the U.S. Communist Party headquarters. Others were aware it went to Moscow.

  Throughout the early 1940s, Bentley kept it all going—and without much help from the ailing Golos. She may have started as his stand-in, but she had quickly became a top handler in her own right. Maintenance of the entire apparatus was now her responsibility, and she was paying the price in exhaustion and a mental weariness that segued into depression. She found herself falling asleep on buses, on trains, even standing up. Each morning she would awake already tired and trudge through the day, doubting that she could make it to bedtime. Each day it became harder and harder to concentrate on anything other than the task of the moment. It was an effort to remember what happened the week before. And all of it was made worse by what was happening to Golos.

  It seemed increasingly obvious, by early 1943, that the Russians were intent on pushing him aside. He found himself struggling with several professional Soviet agents for control of the network he and Bentley had built. The men were new arrivals whom Golos thought culturally ill-equipped to work with his American contacts. These Russians didn’t know how to talk to Americans. They didn’t understand what it was like to live in America and be a communist. They couldn’t fathom the delicate balance of bourgeois culture and communist ideology, of patriotism and collaboration. Golos would come home from his meetings with these men weary and beaten, alternately pacing the floor and sitting immobile with his face in his hands. He told Bentley that the Russians were pressuring him to turn over Mary Price. Not only that, they wanted the Silvermaster Group to report directly to a Russian agent and not to Golos through Bentley. And they wanted Bentley, too. They wanted her to report to a Russian operative, not Golos. But out of pride, out of a sense of responsibility for the people he brought into his apparatus, and out of a firm belief that the Russians would do damage to the network, Golos held on tightly. In May he wrote to his old friend Pavel Fitin, head of intelligence at KGB headquarters in Moscow, explaining how difficult espionage work was in the United States. But “we are producing quite a lot,” he wrote to Fitin, not bragging but rather trying to defend his position and hold on to his leadership role. Still, he was pressured by his superiors in New York and Washington, D.C., to hand over the reins.

  “I don’t understand what’s happening,” he told Bentley. “They’re trying to sabotage my work. They want to get rid of me.” Bentley listened, but what could she do? The only way she could help Golos was to keep on doing what she was doing, to make sure the information kept flowing from Washington to Moscow. She must maintain the apparatus. It was the only way to keep his position viable. So she put herself on the train every two weeks, and she met her contacts on park benches, and she came home with a secret stash to give to Yasha, her gift. He was still her hero. He stayed at her apartment more often now, and at night, she lay awake listening to the sound of his ragged breathing.

  Chapter 9

  Clever Girl

  BENTLEY AND GOLOS celebrated Thanksgiving Day 1943 with a late-afternoon dinner at a restaurant opposite London Terrace, followed by an early movie. It should have been a relaxing time, a quiet interlude in their otherwise hectic and stressful lives—maybe even a romantic moment—but it wasn’t. They were nervous and distracted. Bentley kept stealing worried glances at her lover. He looked worse than ever, pallid, short of breath, unsteady. She had reconciled herself with his illness—he was not going to recover from heart disease—but that didn’t make it any easier to watch him growing weaker, to see the man she admired more than anyone in the world growing more frail. Yet, sick as he was, she knew he would not slow down, whatever she said, for Golos was struck with the sense of urgency that a dying man has about time. He was increasingly obsessed with work. He worried about his agents. He needed to know what was going on, to keep track of them, to touch base, to tie up loose ends. Even as they celebrated Thanksgiving that afternoon, he was distracted by thoughts of an agent he needed to contact. As they walked the block from the bus stop to Bentley’s apartment, he insisted she stop at a phone booth to place a call to the source. Bentley was overwhelmed by his sense of loyalty.

  She didn’t know it, and neither did he, but that intense and unwavering loyalty was, at the same moment, being recognized in Moscow. After his tenuous position during the Purge years and his more recent battles for control of his sources, it seemed that the KGB was finally appreciating his value. Just the day before, November 24, Pavel Fitin, head of intelligence for the secret police, had recommended in writing that Golos be awarded the Order of the Red Star in recognition of his many years as a “talent spotter, personal data gatherer, group controller, and recruiter.” But there was such a thing as too much loyalty, Bentley must have thought as she helped Golos climb the one short flight of stairs to her apartment. His breath came sharply. Loyalty was killing him.

  Once inside her apartment, he stretched out on the living room couch, exhausted, and fell asleep fully clothed. She changed into pajamas, set her hair in pincurls and then fit her body next to his on the sofa, lying still, dozing on and off. The scene could not have been more prosaic.

  She awoke suddenly an hour later with the sense that something was wrong, but for a long, disconcerting moment, she couldn’t figure out what. Then she knew: It was Yasha. He was making strange, guttural sounds in his sleep, a rattle deep in his throat. She tried to shake him awake. “You’re having a bad nightmare,�
� she told him. “Wake up.” But he didn’t wake up. The living room was filled with the sounds of him choking. She ran to the kitchen and returned with a bottle of brandy, which she tried to pour down his throat. But he couldn’t swallow. It took a moment for it all to register. Yasha was not having a nightmare. He was having a heart attack. She was in a panic. She called for an ambulance. She rushed back to the bedroom, pulling the pincurls from her hair. Then she sat by Yasha, helpless, listening to his strangled breathing, then listening to his silence. By the time the medics from St. Vincent’s Hospital arrived a few minutes later, there was nothing that could be done for him. Yasha was dead.

  We’ll just have to wait for the police, the medics told her. The police? A switch flipped somewhere in Bentley’s brain. She was in shock. She was trembling and teary. But part of her knew there was business to attend to. In Yasha’s pockets were the coded telephone numbers of most of his agents and who knew what else that must not fall into police hands. When the medics left her alone for a few minutes to move the ambulance, she bolted the door behind them and systematically rifled through Yasha’s pockets, transferring their contents to her purse. A few minutes later, the police arrived, and she told them the only story she could tell them: “He was a business associate of mine,” she explained. “And he had a bad heart.” He was in the neighborhood when he began to feel ill, she told them, so he came up to my apartment. The scene looked innocent enough. They had little reason to doubt her. But there was a dead body, and there had been no doctor in attendance, so they questioned her closely. Where did this man work? What did he do? What did she do? How long had she known him? Who was his doctor? Did she know of any close relative? Did she know any of his friends?

  It took all of Bentley’s concentration to answer each question, revealing about Golos only what might be known by a business associate, allowing herself to be upset—after all, a man had just died in her living room—but not overcome, not inconsolable, like a woman who had just lost her lover. When asked about Golos’s friends, she named no names, for all of his friends were party members or in some way connected to his espionage activities. She would not get them involved. She would not give these local police any reason to suspect that Golos was anything other than a Manhattan businessman with a fatally bad heart.

  The scene played itself out slowly. Bentley phoned Golos’s doctor, who refused to interrupt his Thanksgiving to travel across town just to sign a death certificate. The police called in the medical examiner who arrived complaining that a holiday was a “hell of a time to die.” Bentley threw back a slug of brandy to quiet her nerves. At some point—she had no idea when, the evening was endless—Lem Harris, a friend of Bentley’s who was a prominent New York Communist Party functionary, happened to call the apartment. She explained the situation tersely. Don’t say anything more, he told her. I’ll help with the arrangements. A while later, undertakers from the International Workers Order, a party-friendly union, arrived. They carried Golos out of the apartment in a canvas sling.

  Alone, finally, Bentley collapsed in a chair in the living room. She knew she should try to get some sleep, but the effort of walking into the next room, of pulling down the bedspread, of turning off the light…it was all too much. Everything seemed too much. She sat, unthinking, staring across the living room, staring across the couch where Yasha had died, but she saw nothing. Time passed. When her eyes focused again, she saw by the clock that it was five A.M., the beginning of a new day. She had much she had to do, much that Yasha had counted on her to do. She forced herself to get up, run a comb through her hair, and put on her coat and hat. Before inertia could pull her back, she was out the door.

  The elevator operator at the World Tourists building wondered why she was coming to work so early. She told him her alarm clock had gone off by mistake. She made her way to Golos’s office, opened the safe, and quickly but methodically removed every incriminating document she could find, stuffing them in a suitcase Golos had left in the office for such an emergency. Among the papers, she found almost $12,000 in cash. Golos had told her many times that any money in the safe should go to Earl Browder, head of the party. But that would have to wait until she disposed of the documents. In the gray dawn, she trudged down to the subway and back to Barrow Street where, page by page, she burned the documents in her fireplace. At 10 A.M. she was in Browder’s office, handing over the money and seeking his advice. She didn’t know what to do about all of Golos’s contacts. Should she turn them over to a Russian go-between, as he was being pressured to do, or should she carry on, as he did? Browder told her to carry on, that he would help her fight the Russians for control of the sources. That sounded good to her. It was what Yasha would have wanted her to do, she was sure. A few hours later, Bentley was back at the World Tourists office, dealing with the press. The Daily Worker, Freiheit, New Masses— everyone wanted details. Golos was one of the old-timers, a legend. Bentley fielded the questions and provided some basic facts, revealing nothing about Golos’s secret work. She handled it because she had to, because there was no one else. And she handled it without dropping her guard.

  The funeral was that Sunday. Browder made the arrangements, although he did not attend. The service was held in the Gramercy Park Funeral Parlor on Second Avenue, the small chapel filled with comrades and party functionaries. There were no religious rites, only long speeches and testimonials in Golos’s behalf. Bentley did not speak, although she knew Golos better than any of them did. It was all she could do to sit there quietly, showing only as much emotion as would be appropriate.

  As she struggled to keep herself under control during the days after his death, Bentley felt herself split in two: She was his golubushka, his little dove, the woman he would have married had marriage not been deemed a bourgeois indulgence. Yasha was the only man she had ever loved, and his passing left an enormous hole in her life. But she was also umnitsa—“Clever Girl”—the code name the KGB used for her. She was a spy, a trusted underground colleague with important responsibilities. She may not have been a stone-cold professional, but she was accustomed to calculating her moves, to watching her back, to pretending she was someone other than she was. And in those days after Golos’s death, it was necessary for umnitsa to take over. It was the only way she could get through it. She could not share her sadness with anyone. She could not publicly grieve. She could not hope for consolation. The best thing she could do, she told herself, was to carry on as Yasha would have wanted her to do.

  The day after the funeral, Bentley met the man who would take Golos’s place as her KGB contact. The rendezvous involved the usual subterfuge, with a go-between meeting Bentley in a newsreel theater on East 42nd Street and taking her, by cab and on foot, to Janssen’s restaurant on Lexington. There she was introduced to a tall, slender man in his late thirties, a meticulous dresser with only the faintest Russian accent. She was to call him “Bill.” She didn’t know that his real name was Itzhak Akhmerov, that he was the leading KGB operative without diplomatic cover in the United States—he was, in fact, considered one of the most important Soviet wartime agents—and that he was married to Earl Browder’s niece.

  What she did know was that she didn’t like him. The handkerchief that poked out of his jacket pocket was color-coordinated with his tie and his socks. She noticed this right away, and she immediately thought of Golos’s shabby brown suits and scuffed shoes. That was how a revolutionary should dress, not like some suave midtown executive. This new man was an affront to Golos, an insult to the principles of the party. When he ordered caviar and an oyster cocktail, she couldn’t believe it. What indulgence. Was this what Golos had died for? “Bill” was polite and well-spoken, but he quickly got to the main point of the meeting: He wanted Bentley to hand over Mary Price, Walter Lippmann’s private secretary who had been passing information to Golos via Bentley. Price should report directly to him, “Bill” told her. And so immediately, this dapper dresser, this caviar-eater, challenged Bentley’s authority and challenged the
legacy Golos had left her. This would be the first of many such affronts, the first of many such demands “Bill” would make when they met every two weeks at Alexander’s or Schrafft’s or one of the other restaurants he liked to frequent.

  Bentley may have left that first meeting disgruntled and disgusted, but Akhmerov left with a good impression. Bentley was “intelligent” and “sober-minded.” She was a “sincere person,” he reported back to Moscow. His opinion was important, for the Russians were just realizing how central Bentley had been to their operation. Apparently Golos had downplayed her significance to his superiors. Probably to protect her but perhaps also to preserve his own power, Golos had given the impression that Bentley was merely a courier. But now, after his death, it was becoming clear she was something much more. She was, as New York station chief Vassily Zarubin wrote to Moscow after Golos’s death, “his closest assistant from whom he had no secrets.”

  A week after Golos’s death, she was on her way to Washington to check in, as usual, with her sources. Her responsibilities at World Tourists and USS&S had kept her so busy that she was barely able to catch the last train of the evening. It was after midnight when she arrived at Union Station. The next morning, sitting around the Silvermaster’s kitchen table sipping tea, she listened gratefully as Helen, Greg, and Lud praised Golos and his work. She needed to hear stories about him. She needed to hear how much he had been respected. She needed to hear his name. But then it was back to business as usual. Lud Ullmann handed her documents and microfilm. She put them in her big bag and left.