Bentley met several times with Earl Browder in the weeks after Golos’s death, and continued seeing him regularly after she returned from her Washington, D.C., forays every few weeks. She was determined to carry on with the work Golos had entrusted to her, and Browder appeared supportive. She brought him political and economic material she thought might interest him. She continued to see Akhmerov every two weeks, and, although he never stopped pressuring her about Mary Price, he seemed to accept her role as network handler and liaison. One of Akhmerov’s colleagues, New York operative Gaik Ovakimyan, seemed pleased, too. In a report to Moscow, he referred to Bentley as a “genuine American Aryan,” which was clearly meant as a compliment. But to Ovakimyan and Akhmerov and their superiors at the KGB, this was all just a temporary situation. They saw Bentley’s role as transitional. Although they valued her work, they wanted direct Russian control over the American sources.
American sources were necessary, of course. They provided the access to confidential information. But American handlers were not. That’s what the Russians were now thinking. With espionage enjoying a wartime heyday, the material was flowing, and the networks were productive. But the operation, it seemed to the KGB, was amateurish. American handlers like Bentley were not trained professionals. They weren’t running their affairs as cleanly or as clinically as the secret police now wanted them run. For example, Bentley both collected intelligence information and supervised her sources’ secret participation in the party, a practice now considered risky at best. The Silvermaster Group knew each other socially, a dangerous and potentially compromising situation that would never be allowed if true tradecraft were being followed. Duncan Lee, one of Bentley’s OSS sources, and Mary Price were lovers. Worse, Lee’s wife knew of his secret work and had been present at meetings between her husband and Price. Should Lee’s wife discover the affair and want revenge or need leverage, she had it—at the expense of two important sources. Another contact in the OSS who reported to Silvermaster apparently belonged to a second spy network as well, another incautious and amateurish blunder.
It might have been acceptable to run the apparatus this way back in the 1930s and early 1940s when the government was largely unaware of Soviet espionage, and the FBI wasn’t paying close attention. But now that the U.S. intelligence community was beginning to catch on, the Russians felt it was imperative for KGB-trained taskmasters to take American sources in hand. For the moment, however, it was expedient for the Russians to continue using Bentley. She busied herself at World Tourists and USS&S. She made her biweekly trips to the capital. She spent long hours buying Christmas gifts for her sources—vodka and caviar, baskets of fruit, bottles of rye and Canadian Club whiskey—the value of each present commensurate with the usefulness of that person to the Soviet enterprise.
Early in 1944, Browder urged Bentley to approach a group of federal government employees who had previously been active intelligence sources but had become a “lost tribe” in wartime Washington. Some of the group, including its putative leader, Victor Perlo, had been members of the Ware Group, the original espionage apparatus established in the early 1930s, but the network had been moribund for some years. In November 1943, just before his death, Golos had made contact with the leading figures. Now Bentley was being asked to follow up. In the early spring, at a meeting set up by Browder, Bentley went to the Central Park West apartment of labor lawyer John Abt where she met Perlo and three other members of the group. Their group had been neglected, they told her, and they were eager to be useful again. Bentley quizzed them on the positions they held in government and the type of information to which each had access. They talked about the other members of the group who were not at the meeting and what they might contribute to the effort. At one point, Perlo asked if “Joe” would be getting this information, a reference to Joseph Stalin that everyone in the room clearly understood. Bentley also set up a meeting schedule and discussed collecting party dues from the group and providing them with literature, just as she did with the Silvermaster people. She left the initial meeting impressed with the group. They were, she reported, reliable party members who were “politically highly mature.”
The network consisted of Victor Perlo, a Columbia University–trained mathematician and economist who was, at the time, a statistician with the War Production Board. A slender, sharp-featured man with an angular face and a penetrating gaze, Perlo was the son of Russian immigrants. At the first meeting, Bentley also met Edward Fitzgerald and Harry Magdoff, both War Production Board employees like Perlo, and Charles Kramer, an economist with the Senate Subcommittee on War Mobilization. John Abt, whose apartment served as the rendezvous spot, was the longtime legal council for the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union and a member of the original Ware Group. She learned that the group also included Harold Glasser, a Treasury Department employee on loan to the War Production Board; Donald Wheeler, an Oxford-trained OSS employee whom the Soviets considered the group’s most valuable member; Allan Rosenberg with the Foreign Economic Administration; and Solomon Lishinsky and George Perazich, both employed by the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration.
Like the Silvermaster network, the Perlo Group was less a phalanx of trained spies than a loose association of men who knew each other through their work. Under Bentley’s similarly loose guidance, they operated with the kind of off-hand American informality that drove Akhmerov crazy. It was not just that the members met each other regularly, coming together every other week in one person’s apartment to discuss the materials they had gathered. It was not just that their wives knew of their clandestine activities, often typing their notes for them. But on top of that, the group appointed a different representative each time to take the documents to New York and hand them over to Bentley. Although Perlo was more often than not the one who made the trip, a number of the others did as well, which meant that, in flagrant violation of professional tradecraft, at least six members of the group knew that Bentley was their handler. Whoever would be in charge of the materials that week—often it was whoever was slated to make a business trip anyway—would rendezvous with Bentley at the apartment Mary Price now rented in the West Village not far from Bentley’s own Barrow Street place. Price had left her job with Walter Lippmann and moved to Manhattan, but as in Washington, her apartment served as a regular meeting spot.
After years of inactivity, the group was eager to be of use and almost immediately began to provide Bentley—and her KGB contact, Akhmerov—with a wealth of information on the American war industry. Perlo and his friends brought complete, up-to-date information on aircraft production and distribution by countries and theaters of action. They brought minutes of the War Production Board and its different committees, interdepartmental economic summaries, plans and proposals for the occupation of postwar Germany, documents on trade policies after the war, and reports on commodities in short supply in the United States. Kramer contributed Capitol Hill gossip; Glasser supplied Treasury Department information; and Wheeler provided copies of OSS reports about worldwide political development. Virtually the entire range of OSS analytical and planning documents on Nazi Germany came across Donald Wheeler’s desk—and made it to KGB headquarters in Moscow. Bentley thought the group was “really going to town.”
But just as the operation was at its most productive, Akhmerov had to tell Bentley to put a halt to Perlo’s visits. It seemed that Katherine Perlo, Victor’s ex-wife, had written a letter to President Roosevelt exposing her husband’s activities and mentioning by name a number of his associates. They had recently gone through a bitter divorce, and there was an ongoing custody battle for the children. It was exactly the kind of messy situation that reinforced Akhmerov’s opinion of undisciplined American communists. Yet he needed Perlo and his group. He needed the American sources Golos and Bentley had developed in Washington. But Perlo would have to be put on ice, at least temporarily, and the delicate job fell to Bentley. “He must not realize we are removing him from work….” Akhmerov to
ld her. “He will be very upset by it.” Bentley handled the situation competently, but her position as a top handler was anything but secure.
At almost every meeting, Akhmerov brought up the question of Mary Price. Bentley continued to put him off, but the whole business was becoming increasingly unpleasant. At one point, he lashed out at her, demanding that she turn over Price immediately, threatening, even calling her a traitor. But the more he wanted Price, the more reasons Bentley found to stand up to him. She was not sure Price was in good enough physical or psychological shape to continue with clandestine work, an argument she made to both Akhmerov and Browder. But more than that, she knew that the Russians had been pressuring Golos to give up his contacts, and she knew he had resisted, believing that his former countrymen were incapable of dealing with American sources effectively and sensitively. So, protecting sources like Price from the Russians was one of Golos’s legacies, a fight Bentley felt compelled to carry on. It was also part of a complex chess game she was being forced to play, a battle over the territory she and Golos had carved out. To give in was to be checked, and later checkmated. And the game was the only thing she had.
Bentley managed to finesse the Price situation, neither giving her up nor keeping her. Instead, she persuaded Browder—who persuaded Akhmerov—that Price was suffering from both ill health and nervous exhaustion and should be retired from espionage work. Although the Russians were somewhat dubious about this, by mid-1944, Price was taken out of commission and soon thereafter moved to political work. No sooner was this resolved than Bentley faced pressure from Akhmerov to turn over the entire Silvermaster network, the group she had been handling with considerable success since 1941. Again, she balked. She was undoubtedly motivated by a sincere concern for the people who had essentially entrusted her with their professional lives and reputations. And she genuinely liked Greg and Helen Silvermaster. But, as with the Mary Price situation, she was also motivated by self-interest. If the Soviets stripped her of her work, of the work Golos had trained her to do, of the work they had done side-by-side, who exactly would she be? What would she do with her life?
So she put up a fight. Her dealings with Akhmerov became so contentious that Moscow, when alerted, began to doubt Bentley’s usefulness. From KGB headquarters, Pavel Fitin suggested to his state-side colleagues that Bentley might be “unbalanced.” He criticized her inconsistency. While she professed loyalty to the cause, she was refusing to obey orders. But Akhmerov, despite the difficulties he was having with her, remained steadfast in his support. “I think she is undeniably one hundred percent our woman,” he wrote to Fitin. “With a tactful attitude and friendly treatment and firm businesslike relations, it is possible to correct her behavior.” Akhmerov continued the pressure and also enlisted Earl Browder in his campaign. Browder had been loyal to Golos and Bentley, but he understood better than most who had the real power in this situation. He sided with the Russians. Between Browder and Akhmerov, they managed to wrest the Silvermaster Group from Bentley’s control in the late summer of 1944. She allowed it to happen, but Bentley was not a happy comrade. She was, Akhmerov wrote to Fitin, “very much taking to heart [our] direct contact with Silvermaster, evidently supposing that we do not trust her.”
Now the tide had turned, and there was no way Bentley could stand against it. That fall, she was forced to give up the newly acquired Perlo Group. In December, she was told to hand over six of her solo agents, including Helen Tenney, Duncan Lee, and Maurice Halperin. It was for her own protection, her KGB contact said. Helen Tenney, she was told, had shared a taxi with a man who turned out to be with military intelligence. J. Julius Joseph, another of her sources, had been associating with a man who turned out to be an undercover counterintelligence agent. Maybe this was true. Maybe it wasn’t. It very well could have been part of Akhmerov’s plan to squeeze Bentley out with the greatest of tact and consideration. The sources themselves were also left in the dark. Bentley was instructed to tell them that she was anticipating going into the hospital for an appendectomy and that during the time she was incapacitated they would be contacted by another individual. They had no idea that Bentley’s role had been terminated.
To further exacerbate her sense of insecurity, she was also being shuffled from one KGB contact to another. In the fall of 1944, Akhmerov (“Bill”) handed her off to “Jack.” She was instructed to go to a drugstore on Lexington Avenue in the Fifties, carrying a copy of Life magazine and wearing a red flower. There she met a husky man in his late thirties, an American of Lithuanian descent, whom she would meet at various venues in Manhattan during the next few months. Later “Jack” would turn her over to “Al,” whom she was told to identify, in case she was asked, as a Czech businessman working in Washington, D.C. He was really Anatoly Gorsky, head of KGB operations in America and first secretary at the Soviet Embassy.
Bentley was hurt and angry and scared at the turn of events, and she often lashed out verbally at her Russian handlers. But she had not given up hope that there might be a place for her in the organization. She had told Akhmerov that summer that she didn’t have any other interests besides her work and that she loved Russia more than anything else. This may have been a ploy to keep the Soviets from taking away even more from her, but it was also true—at least the part about not having any other interests. “Her life will lose its meaning without this work,” Akhmerov reported to his Moscow colleagues after one of his meetings with Bentley. He was right.
The situation was confusing for Bentley. Clearly, the Russians were forcing her out, but they were also being particularly solicitous. Her new KGB contacts offered her a salary—Bentley had never been paid, only reimbursed for travel expenses—and later a fur coat and an air conditioner. She declined the offers. In fact, they offended her. Loyalty was not for hire, as far as she was concerned, and money cheapened the whole enterprise. Still, in their way, the Russians were communicating that she was a valued member of the organization. But if she was valued, why was she simultaneously being relieved of her responsibilities? Her confusion only deepened when, in the fall of 1944, “Jack” told her that Gorsky had some good news that he wanted to deliver personally. “You will be very thrilled by it,” “Jack” said. “I do not want to spoil the surprise.”
Gorsky traveled up from Washington to meet her in front of the Edison Theater on Broadway and 103rd. As they started walking toward Riverside Drive, he told her with great formality that the Supreme Presidium of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republic had awarded her the Order of the Red Star in recognition of her extremely valuable services to Russia. This was a great honor, he told her, bestowed on only the most devoted and worthy workers for the cause. He showed her a picture of the award he had torn from a magazine. He told her that the award carried certain benefits, like a monthly salary, preferential living quarters in Moscow, and free vacations. “This is a memorable day,” he told her.
Whatever she might think of the Russians, whatever trouble she was having with them, Bentley nonetheless must have felt deeply honored. She assured Gorsky that she would work “indefatigably” to justify the award. But what was she to make of all this? With one hand they took away; with the other, they gave.
Behind the scenes, the KGB was also helping Bentley keep her lucrative USS&S job. The Soviet foreign-trade commissar was apparently considering authorizing another company to perform services similar to those of USS&S, such as shipping parcels to the USSR. But the KGB warned him off. The new proposal would “directly threaten the existence of [Bentley’s] cover.” And it was not only her professional life that the KGB was taking an interest in. Akhmerov and later Gorsky also discussed with their Moscow superiors the idea of finding Bentley a husband. “She is alone in her personal life,” Akhmerov cabled his boss in Moscow. “Why not send someone from home? Send him as a Polish or Baltic refugee to South America or Canada. We’ll arrange the rest.” Fitin apparently considered the request seriously, cabling back, “The question of a husband for her must be thought over.�
�� But the matter was apparently dropped. Six months later, when Bentley made what her new contact Gorsky interpreted as a romantic overture—she told him he reminded her of Golos—he immediately fired off a cable to Moscow saying that it was urgent to find her a husband. But again there was no follow-through.
The Russians seemed to care about her. Her contacts—first Akhmerov, then “Jack,” then Gorsky—treated her well when they weren’t busy demanding that she give up control of her sources. She was being offered money and gifts and awards, and, unbeknownst to her, being taken care of in other ways, yet the fact was that barely a year after Golos’s death, she had lost virtually all her power. By the end of 1944, she was no longer the leader of the two most productive spy rings in America. She was no longer what Golos had made her. The game, she was beginning to realize, was over.
Chapter 10
Russian Roulette
HER SOVIET SUPERIORS undoubtedly knew of Bentley’s romantic involvement with Golos. Even if they had been blind to it during Golos’s lifetime, they would have seen it in Bentley’s words and actions after his death: her intense loyalty to him, her staunch defense of his work, her desperation to keep things as they were before he died, the obvious fact that she had nothing in her life besides her work. But the KGB’s concern for her emotional health was transient. What the Russians most cared about was building a more professional, highly disciplined spy operation. That meant pushing Bentley out while not making an enemy of her. It meant taking away what she and Golos had built while not angering her so much that she would turn against them. It was a delicate matter that they handled with singular indelicacy.
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