Clever Girl

by Lauren Kessler

  But what exactly was she to do about her situation? She was in no shape to make a decision about her life. Through the spring and into the summer of 1945, as she experienced more and more stress, both her mental and physical health suffered. She was sleeping poorly, battling either insomnia or terrifying nightmares about firing squads. She was losing weight. Her face looked thin, tense, and drawn. She hardly recognized herself in the mirror. And she was drinking. At the Hotel St. George, where she now lived, she was regularly being treated by the house physician, a Dr. Herbert Mann, for what she called aches and pains, but what he recognized as severe hangovers. The drinking was making her sick, but it was also blunting her anxiety and taking the edge off her isolation.

  One lonely evening in the spring of 1945 Bentley found herself at the hotel bar again, drinking alone and to excess. That night she picked up a man. It may not have been the first time. This man was an ordinary-looking fellow, perhaps forty years old, with thinning reddish hair and glasses. He looked a little like Yasha, she thought. He said his name was Peter Heller and that he was a New Yorker, but he was vague about the details of his life—perhaps because, as Bentley would learn much later, he was married with several children. Bentley got the impression that he was a lawyer or an investigator of some kind. It really didn’t matter. At least not then, not at that moment in the bar. She took him up to her room. But Heller was no one-night stand. He and Bentley began to see each other often, and Bentley began to eye him as potential husband material. Then, abruptly, Heller stopped calling and disappeared from her life, resurfacing several weeks later with a tale about being a “big-shot government spy.”

  Bentley knew the FBI was nosing around USS&S, and she had suspected an agent was making inquiries about her at her old apartment. Maybe this was a trap. Was Heller employed by a federal agency? Had he been hired by the Russians to spy on her? One night, while he slept, she went through his wallet, where she found an identification card with a shield on it, like the police or the FBI might issue. But she couldn’t make out the name of the agency. It seemed to be purposefully obscured. She told her New York contact, “Jack,” about Heller, and “Jack” told Gorsky, who felt sure Heller was an FBI agent. Bentley was advised to discontinue the liaison immediately, cutting off contact diplomatically so as not to arouse Heller’s suspicion.

  But she didn’t cut it off. She was too lonely, and he was too willing. It was easier for her to compartmentalize her suspicions, dissolve them in alcohol, and keep seeing him. If she could no longer enjoy the camaraderie of the party, if she could no longer enjoy the emotional intimacy she had with Yasha, at least she could have a warm body in her bed at night. They saw each other often that spring, and together they played a dangerous game. Her lips loosened by drink, she probably told him tales of her espionage activities, or at least broadly hinted at them. It made her an exciting person, an extraordinary character, something more than a plain-faced, thirty-seven-year-old woman living in a hotel room in Brooklyn and picking up men in bars. Heller may have fashioned an elaborate response to her tales to keep up with her or to keep his real life secret from her. At one point, Heller apparently told her that he had taken part in investigations of communists and that he knew the Russian language.

  When Gorsky warned her again to end it, she defended her new lover, telling the Russian that Heller would be an ideal husband. Heller, however, was apparently not as taken with Bentley as she was with him. To him, she was little more than a sloppy drunk who was generous with her favors. But the relationship satisfied them both enough that they kept it going. And so Bentley’s loneliness was temporarily relieved even as her situation worsened. Now Gorsky was more than ever concerned that his “Clever Girl” was an accident waiting to happen. And Bentley, although she tried to repress it, was now more than ever paranoid that someone was after her.

  That summer, the summer of 1945, she left the city to spend several months in Connecticut, commuting into Manhattan from time to time to help at the USS&S office and traveling down to Washington to see Gorsky. But mostly she kept to herself, walking and thinking and drinking, alternately trying to make sense of and forget the frightening situation in which she found herself. Later, when she needed to create a sympathetic picture of herself, she would tell a story about her epiphany in Old Lyme, the small, picturesque town on the shores of Long Island Sound where she spent part of that summer. It was here, she said, that she got back in touch with her New England self and with the values of the sturdy and independent people who lived there. The story, as she told it, went this way: One summer day, walking the streets of the town, she found herself inexplicably drawn to the pretty, white-steepled Congregational church. She went in. It was quiet and peaceful. She sat down in a back pew and suddenly, without thought or volition, she began to pray. She cried out for help and, in response, the words of the Twenty-third Psalm filled her head. Yes, she was indeed walking through the valley of death. She was fearing evil. And now God was coming to the rescue; God would walk beside her. She heard the voice of her own conscience —You must make amends— and when she walked out into the bright sunlight, she knew what she must do. She must come clean. She must renounce her past. She must go to the FBI.

  It made for a powerful tale of faith and redemption, of patriotism lost and found, and she wrote it later in lush, melodramatic prose. But it wasn’t the truth. Or at least it wasn’t the whole truth. Elizabeth Bentley might have had a revelation. She might have been transformed in one shining moment from Elizabeth Bentley, Communist Spy, to Elizabeth Bentley, God-fearing, New England Patriot, sitting in that back pew. But it is more likely that the metamorphosis was a longer and far more painful process than that, owing more to fear and paranoia than divine intervention.

  Sometime during the summer of 1945 Bentley did indeed decide to go to the FBI. But if she did it because God and her conscience spoke to her in a church in Old Lyme, she also did it because she was afraid the FBI would get to her first. She did it out of anger at the Russians, out of a desire for revenge against those who had taken away all that was exciting and meaningful in her life, out of disgust with those who degraded the principles for which Golos had died. Bentley may have been a woman enlightened. But she was also a woman scared and a woman scorned.

  Part Two

  The Reality

  Chapter 12

  In from the Cold

  BENTLEY KNEW SHE couldn’t go to the FBI’s New York field office on Foley Square. The KGB would be watching, she was sure. And Washington, D.C., was out of the question. She couldn’t chance being seen by any of the people she knew down there, all her erstwhile sources and contacts. FBI headquarters would be staked out, anyway. For all she knew, the capital might be crawling with KGB. But she didn’t panic, and she didn’t rush. Her years underground had taught her to think like a chess player, to examine every move and imagine every counter-move, to spin scenarios until she came up with the right one, to play the game in her head until she knew it well enough to play it for real. The move that made the most sense was to find a small field office in an unobtrusive location not far from New York. She found what she was looking for in New Haven, Connecticut. Connecticut was home turf, and she was not unfamiliar with the town. It turned out that the field office was located on the ground floor of an ordinary downtown office building. Perfect.

  The night of August 22 was hot and humid. It was almost 80 degrees at midnight, the air thick and heavy, the pavement still radiating that sluggish, enervating heat that drives New Yorkers out of the city in the late summer. But when Bentley awoke in her hotel room in Brooklyn the next morning, a front had moved in, bringing clouds and unseasonably cool temperatures; a break. Good traveling weather. She took pains not to be followed as she negotiated the subway into Manhattan. Once in the city, she went through the repertoire of evasive moves she knew so well, ducking in and out of stores, crossing and recrossing streets. By the time she boarded the train at Grand Central, she was satisfied that no one was following her.
But in New Haven, she checked again, cautiously making her way to the building that housed the field office, taking an indirect route, passing it on foot and doubling back. She took the elevator to the third floor, then walked down the service stairs and slipped into the office.

  Bentley was scared. But the fear didn’t make her stupid. It made her smart. She had a plan. Before she considered saying anything to the FBI about her communist activities, she wanted to know what the Bureau knew about her. She wanted to know how close the FBI was to nabbing her. She wanted to know if her lover, Peter Heller, was part of some scheme to keep her under surveillance. But more than anything, she wanted to know—or at least get some instinctive sense about—whether she could trust the FBI any more than she could trust the Russians or the party. Golos had hated the FBI on general, ideological grounds and, more specifically, because of the crackdown on World Tourists. But Bentley had to trust someone. She had to extricate herself from her old life while she still had the choice, while she was still in control. Later, because it would put her in the best light, Bentley would write that she went to New Haven that August and “told the highlights” of her story. But she didn’t. She played the whole scene close to the vest, like a poker player with a good hand who doesn’t know if the guy sitting across the table might have a better one.

  In the New Haven field office, she was interviewed by Special Agent Edward J. Coady, who listened with interest as she talked about having “associated” with a Peter Heller who claimed, she said, to be a government investigator and a government spy. This man Heller had told her to keep her eyes open at her place of employment, United States Service & Shipping, which did business with the Soviet Union. He suggested that there might be information about the Russians she could pass along to the U.S. government through him, and she was willing to go along with the scheme, she told Coady, if Heller was legit. Was he? Or was he impersonating an agent?

  Heller was, in fact, an investigator. He worked for the New York State Division of Parole in the Executive Clemency subdivision, examining the records of prisoners under consideration for release or pardon by the governor. But, as the FBI quickly discovered, he had no connection with the Bureau, the OSS, or any counterintelligence group, although he was a lieutenant in the Amy Reserves. Mostly, he was a man involved in an extramarital affair with an unstable woman. Heller spun his story to keep Bentley interested but also to keep her off balance, to keep her wary of him so she didn’t make demands. Bentley believed Heller might be a threat to her, but she also thought the impersonating-an-agent story would be a good cover for her initial personal investigation of the FBI.

  But Special Agent Coady was not so easily fooled. Why, for example, would a New Yorker take a 75-mile train trip to Connecticut to report her suspicions about another New Yorker? And what would a prim and proper, obviously educated woman be doing “associating” with a man who claimed to be whom Heller claimed to be? It didn’t make sense. All through the two-hour interview, Coady was not sure what to make of Bentley or her story. When he tried to ask questions about her own activities—wasn’t she hinting that she was or had been involved in something questionable?—he got nowhere. She would not veer from the Heller story. Yet he also got the distinct impression that she was observing him, taking it all in, attempting, subtly but perhaps not subtly enough, to find out if the name Elizabeth Bentley meant anything to him. The interview was, he concluded later, a “fishing expedition.” When it was over, neither Bentley nor Coady was satisfied with the catch.

  She had made a bold move in going to the FBI, but it was not bold enough. She hadn’t learned what she needed to know, and she hadn’t come clean. She was still in limbo, still unsure how close the FBI was to knocking on her door. So she stepped back. She continued seeing her KGB contact. She continued working at USS&S, despite intense pressure from Gorsky to quit. She continued sleeping with Peter Heller. Weeks went by. She heard nothing from the New Haven office, no word of the investigation of Heller. Then, in mid-September, news broke in the New York papers about Igor Gouzenko, a Soviet agent employed as a code clerk at the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa. Earlier that month he had defected, taking with him a thick batch of incriminating documents. Based on that material and a number of follow-up interviews, Canadian intelligence and the FBI were in the midst of discovering a North American spy network centered on atomic espionage with operatives in both Canada and the United States. Bentley was not connected to this network, but one exposure could easily lead to other exposures, one crack could fissure into many. Undoubtedly people in the now-uncovered network knew Golos. Hadn’t Bentley, years before, collected mail from Canada for Golos? The Gouzenko defection must have been, at the very least, disconcerting.

  Then, in early October, came the defection of Louis Budenz, which threatened to touch Bentley directly. Budenz had known and worked with Golos and had met Bentley several times. He knew, at least by implication and association, about her clandestine work. If the FBI had somehow missed her before, surely these two investigations, Budenz and Gouzenko, would point fingers in her direction. If she needed more motivation to get back in contact with the FBI, she had it.

  Almost immediately after learning about the defection of Budenz, she wrote a letter to the New York field office repeating her concerns about Peter Heller. Perhaps she could get more out of these agents than she had out of Coady. It was worth a try. Her letter resulted in an appointment on October 16 with Special Agent Frank C. Aldrich. She would have to go down to Foley Square for the interview, which did not please her, but at this point, it was a risk she’d have to take. At first, Bentley told Aldrich that she wished to make a complaint about an individual representing himself as an FBI agent, but as the interview went on, Aldrich saw that this was not exactly why she was there. It seemed she was more interested in getting information than giving it. When she switched gears and told him that she thought she was being followed, and that it was her impression that it was the FBI, he knew she was fishing. He tried, like Coady before him, to turn the conversation to Bentley and her background, and if he had a bit more success than his New Haven colleague it was only because Bentley was more ready to be honest.

  But not ready enough. She told Aldrich that she was “closely tied in” with people about whom she “had suspicions” and whom she “believed to be Russian espionage agents.” She made vague references to “contacts with communists.” She talked about the possibility of arranging a meeting with a Russian agent that could be monitored by the FBI. When he pressed her for details, she refused to elaborate and retreated into generalities. She talked a lot, probably because she was nervous and because she was hiding much more than she was revealing. The less she said, the more words she used. Aldrich was outwardly courteous and noncommittal. As he listened to her rambling on, it occurred to him that he might be sitting across the desk from a certified nut case. But if she wasn’t, if she was on the level, then something was going on here. He didn’t quite know what, but he meant to find out.

  He took down a phone number where Bentley said she could be reached. Then, as soon as she left, he called Special Agent Edward W. Buckley, the office’s Soviet expert, and told him of the strange interview. Buckley thought there might be something worth looking into. A few days later, he called the number Bentley had left with Aldrich—it was her office phone at USS&S—but she was not there. He persisted, calling several times in October and early November, but she was apparently home with the flu. When he finally got through to her on November 6, she said she was upset and had a great deal on her mind and that she was undecided whether she should come forth with the information in her possession. She was still struggling with her conscience, still weighing her fear of the Russians against her fear of the FBI. If she came forth, there would be no turning back. She would be saving herself, but she would also be closing the door forever on the most exciting period of her life. Maybe those days had ended when Golos died, but she could still remember the passion she once felt for communist ideals, t
he sense of belonging to something big and important. She felt it now like a phantom limb, but she felt it nonetheless. Buckley told her that if she had any information regarding un-American activities, the Bureau needed to know it. If she was troubled or concerned, Buckley could offer guidance and assistance. She agreed to come in the next day.

  On November 7, just after lunch, Elizabeth Bentley, dressed in a dark suit and matching hat, was ushered into Ed Buckley’s office in the FBI building in lower Manhattan. It had been almost two and a half months since her enigmatic visit to the New Haven field office, and now, finally, it seemed that she was ready to talk. Buckley had made all the arrangements and was intending to conduct the interview by himself, but that morning he ran into fellow agent Don Jardine in the hallway and asked him to sit in. Jardine was then in the midst of developing a file on a writer for the Daily Worker whom the Bureau suspected of espionage. If anyone was familiar with the New York communist scene, it was Jardine.