Clever Girl

by Lauren Kessler

  In the course of the trial, Saypol endeavored to introduce much evidence concerning the radical politics of the defendants. Identifying the Rosenbergs as stalwart communists was important to building the case against them. But the judge ruled that the evidence was admissible only if the prosecution established some connection between communism and the offense charged, between being a member of the Communist Party and being a spy. Enter expert witness Elizabeth Bentley, the woman who understood that connection well, who had seen it operate firsthand.

  Sitting on the witness stand in late March, she bore an uncanny resemblance to Ethel Rosenberg. They had the same high forehead, the same crimped brown hair, the same thin, tight lips painted dark. Bentley was eight years younger than Ethel, but the two women had aged the same way, with skin still smooth but soft jowls at the jaw-line. They could have been sisters.

  “Miss Bentley,” said Irving Saypol, guiding his witness to the key point, “had you learned what was the relation of the Communist Party of the United States to the Communist International?”

  Bentley answered that the American Party was under the direct jurisdiction of the Soviets. “The Communist Party,” she said, amplifying her response, “…only served the interests of Moscow, whether it be propaganda or espionage or sabotage.”

  With one sentence, she had done it. She had linked the party to spying. The thrust of her testimony was that any party member with whom she and Golos had had contact was also in the service of Moscow. The Rosenbergs had already been identified as party members. Now Bentley was used to help establish a link between them and Golos. The link was weak, but in the face of the other testimony, it did not have to be more than a seed planted in the minds of the jury.

  Repeating a story she had told the FBI years before, Bentley testified that in the early summer of 1942 she and Golos were driving through the Lower East Side when he stopped the car and told Bentley to wait while he met someone at a street corner. It was dark, the car was parked some distance away, and Bentley had caught only a fleeting glimpse of the man, whom she remembered as being thin and wearing glasses. Golos told her later that the man’s name was Julius and that he was one of a group of engineers with whom Golos was in contact. He told her that he had given Julius her home phone number so the man could reach him whenever he needed to.

  During the following months, she told the FBI, a man identifying himself as Julius called her several times in the “wee hours,” wanting to get a hold of Golos. She could not identify Julius Rosenberg as the man she had seen meeting with Golos, but the circumstantial evidence pointed to him. Rosenberg was a thin man who wore glasses, an engineer and a resident of Knickerbocker Village, which was near the location of the street corner meeting with Golos. This testimony alone would not have amounted to much. But coupled with the specific allegations of David and Ruth Greenglass, the persuasive backup testimony from Harry Gold, and the link Bentley forged between the party and espionage, it was enough to convince a jury.

  The trial of the “crime of the century” lasted only fourteen court days. On March 29, the Rosenberg jury returned with a guilty verdict. And then, on June 19, 1953, after more than two years of appeals that reached to the Supreme Court, first Julius and then Ethel Rosenberg were executed in the electric chair at the federal penitentiary in Ossining, New York.

  The Rosenberg case was the big show for the Department of Justice. The Attorney General’s Office sent in its best men. Hoover put his considerable weight behind it, and the Bureau worked doggedly to collect intelligence. But even in the midst of such a high-stakes, high-profile case, no one could quite forget a certain small fry who had thus far escaped prosecution. He was no thief of atomic secrets. He was no government bigwig. But William Remington stuck in the craw of too many people at too many agencies to be ignored for long. Exonerated by the loyalty review board, victorious in his libel suit against Bentley, and now back at work in the Commerce Department, he was despite this—or more likely because of this—an accident waiting to happen.

  In the spring of 1950, just before the FBI began questioning David Greenglass and piecing together the Rosenberg case, HUAC was listening behind closed doors to two self-confessed former communists who swore they had known William Remington as a communist when he worked for the Tennessee Valley Authority in 1936–37. These were the two men discovered by an investigator sent to Knoxville during preparations for the Remington libel case. The investigator, working for Bentley’s attorney, had uncovered a number of leads that would link Remington to the party—important information that could win the case for Bentley—but pursuing these leads would cost just as much, perhaps even more, than settling the case. The lawyers settled the case out of court, and the matter was dropped. But not really. Very soon thereafter, perhaps even while the libel case was being negotiated in the lawyers’ offices, it is probable that either Bentley herself or her attorney or someone in the loop at the FBI turned over the Knoxville information to the eager Red-hunters at HUAC. However the information made its way to the committee, in April the congressmen heard the secret testimonies of Kenneth McConnell and Howard Bridgman, admitted members of a communist cell of TVA employees.

  McConnell, a former party organizer, testified that Remington had been a member of the TVA cell and had, in fact, been under “Party discipline” for, of all things, dressing more like a prep-school boy than a rough-and-tumble communist. McConnell recalled for the congressmen several party meetings he had attended where Remington was present. Bridgman corroborated, naming Remington as one of a half dozen members of the Knoxville cell and swearing that he had seen him at five or six meetings of the cell. In early May, HUAC reopened the public investigation of Remington, calling him and then Bentley to testify. Remington, who had previously sworn to the Ferguson Committee and before two loyalty boards that he had never been a communist, now sat in the hearings room listening to HUAC chairman John Wood reading the Knoxville testimony against him.

  When it was his turn to testify, Remington first angrily denounced the reopening of his case, calling it “not merely double jeopardy…[but] triple jeopardy.” Then he vehemently denied the new evidence against him. “I am not now nor have I ever been a member of the Communist Party,” he told the congressmen. “And when I say never, I mean never, whether at age three, eighteen, or thirty-two….” He went on to say that any person who charged he was a communist was either “quite ignorant of the facts” or “engaged in deliberate falsehood.” But it was Remington who was engaged in deliberate falsehood. He had been a communist in Knoxville in the late thirties, just as he had been a source for Bentley in the early forties.

  Bentley’s story—which she retold in detail before HUAC the following day—remained uncorroborated. But now there were two witnesses—and perhaps others who could be located from those days—who swore that Remington had been a communist. This wasn’t nearly as dramatic, or as important, as finding witnesses who swore he had passed confidential material. But it was something. It was the start of a perjury case against Remington. The FBI, heavily invested in Bentley’s integrity and keenly interested in seeing Remington indicted for whatever was possible, leapt at the new opportunity. Remington was a secondary player at best. But his lies had made him vulnerable, and criminal action against him would help dispel doubts of Bentley’s credibility. The case, Bureau officials declared, would receive “continuous attention looking toward successful prosecution,” which translated into the involvement of forty-four field offices, agents in seven foreign countries, and the special attention of J. Edgar Hoover. In Washington, D.C., a grand jury was impaneled to hear the evidence.

  When Bentley testified on May 18, she repeated the story she had told the Ferguson Committee, but she also spoke more forcefully—and more damagingly—about Remington than she had in previous testimony. Remington, she said, was a “conscious agent,” not, as she had implied elsewhere, a confused idealist who may not have known that he was aiding the Soviets. But the grand jury was not going to be
able to indict Remington on espionage charges. The 1947 jury had not been able to do it, and nothing had changed since then. The evidence the jury was looking for now concerned Remington’s affiliation with the Communist Party. The two men from Knoxville helped build the case against him. Bentley stated, once again, that she collected party dues from him and gave him literature. But the most damning testimony came from Remington’s ex-wife, who began that morning as a reluctant witness. She had assured her former husband just the day before that he had nothing to worry about concerning her testimony. But, in the hands of the government, she became, that afternoon, the agent of Remington’s demise.

  Ann Moos Remington was a pretty brunette with a heart-shaped face and dark, sad eyes. Active in various communist causes in the early 1940s, she was a bright but deeply troubled woman, embittered, angry, emotionally fragile, and easily intimidated. Her marriage to Remington, despite two children, had never been a strong or a happy one. Their separation a decade later had its own problems, with Ann initially encouraging her husband to find another woman and then, when he did, suing him for adultery. Still, their divorce was not as acrimonious as it might have been, and they were on speaking terms. The former Mrs. Remington had no intention of hurting her ex-husband that day, if for no other reason than because if Remington went to jail she would stop receiving alimony or child support.

  Over the course of a morning and afternoon, without a break for lunch, Thomas “The Hat” Donegan, who was handling the case for the government, and a man named John Brunini, who was serving as foreman of the grand jury, hammered away at the ex–Mrs. Remington. They immediately sensed her vulnerability and took full advantage of the fact that she, like all grand jury witnesses, appeared without the benefit or protection of counsel. Brunini took an especially active role in the questioning, alternately interrogating, lecturing, and threatening her.

  “I am getting fuzzy,” Mrs. Remington said at one point during the long afternoon. She asked for a recess. “I haven’t eaten since a long time ago and I don’t think I am going to be very coherent from now on.” But the questioning continued. Finally, she refused to answer. She was tired and hungry, she repeated. “Couldn’t we continue another day?” But Donegan and Brunini wouldn’t let her go. They were circling around a crucial question, whether Remington had told his then-wife that he was paying party dues.

  “We are right down to the issue…now,” Donegan persisted.

  “Well, I don’t want to answer,” said Mrs. Remington. Brunini then proceeded to lecture her—incorrectly—on her rights as a witness.

  “You have been asked a question,” he said. “You must answer it. You have no privilege to refuse to answer the question.” But in fact, she did. Brunini, who was not a lawyer, may not have known this. But Donegan certainly did. A spouse cannot be forced to testify against a spouse, and during the time under investigation, the Remingtons were married. But Donegan let Brunini continue as the jury foreman threatened the witness with a contempt citation and a jail sentence.

  “We haven’t shown our teeth yet,” he said menacingly. “I don’t want them to bite you.”

  Finally, Mrs. Remington answered the question. Yes, she said, her husband had told her he was paying dues. Equally as damaging was her testimony that her husband was “a communist from my earliest acquaintance of him.”

  Remington testified for five successive days, swearing once again that he had never been a party member. But on June 8, 1950, on the strength of Bentley’s testimony and Mrs. Remington’s corroboration, the grand jury indicted him for perjury, accusing him of lying about his past communist activities. Finally, the government could claim an indictment that stemmed directly from Bentley’s 1945 allegations. The perjury trial was set for December.

  As the trial date neared, Donegan and the FBI agents closest to Bentley began to have worries about their star witness. Bentley was nervous and jittery, even—the agents thought—paranoid. She claimed that her phone had been tapped by Remington’s private detectives, and that they were tailing her as well. She began to suspect that the communists were after her. Neither suspicion was particularly far-fetched, but Bentley’s disquietude seemed to border on hysteria, and her behavior appeared erratic to the agents. “This writer has no claim of being omniscient,” agent Thomas G. Spencer wrote in a memo to Bureau headquarters. Spencer was one of the agents to take Bentley’s statement in 1945 and had interviewed her many times since. “But it definitely appears from conversations with Miss Bentley…that she may be bordering on some mental pitfall which, of course,” he added unnecessarily, “would be almost disastrous to the…Remington case.”

  But on January 8, 1951, when it was her turn to take the stand, Bentley was as calm and self-possessed as she had been at all of her public appearances. Dressed smartly in a black suit and tailored blouse—which, the press still found it necessary to comment, “belied her Spy Queen label”—Bentley told her story in ninety minutes. The cross-examination, however, took two days and focused not on her testimony but on her relationship with the foreman of the grand jury that had indicted Remington, John Brunini.

  Brunini, it turned out, had been helping Bentley with a book she was attempting to write on her life as a communist. Remington’s lawyers had discovered the link in the months between the grand jury indictment and the trial. Donegan had learned about it around the same time, when Brunini, who was living in Bentley’s hotel while helping her with the manuscript, phoned him to ask if it would be all right to accept a fee for his editorial assistance. Donegan listened in horror. His star witness and the foreman of the grand jury collaborating on a book, a book that, of course, mentioned William Remington—how much worse could it get? It got worse: It turned out that Brunini had been responsible for getting Bentley the book contract in the first place. Of course he should not accept a fee, Donegan told him angrily. Accepting money would damage the government’s case. But, regardless of money, the government’s case could be brought down by this absurdly indiscreet, blatantly unethical connection between Bentley and Brunini.

  When Remington’s lawyers found out about it, they must have thought they hit the jackpot. Bentley was forced to admit on the stand that Brunini had done “editorial work” on the book and had given her “moral encouragement.” Bentley denied that Brunini acted as her literary agent, which was perhaps technically true but in fact was not. He had placed the book for her with a New York publisher. She told the jury that she had never signed a contract that named the two of them, and that Brunini was not to receive a portion of the proceeds of the book. But a former secretary from the publishing company testified that she remembered typing just such a contract.

  Remington’s lawyers sprung into action and moved for a mistrial. They argued that there was “gross impropriety” in the grand jury proceedings because Brunini, who not only took an active part in the questioning but was responsible for “breaking” Mrs. Remington, had something to gain by the indictment. If Remington was indicted and convicted, Bentley’s stock would immediately rise. She would be a page-one heroine, the woman who brought down the only alleged spy still working for the federal government. Her book might be a best-seller. If Brunini had a piece of the action—which was the implication, although no document was introduced in evidence to prove the fact—then he benefited, too.

  But the judge rejected the argument and denied the motion. Brunini was only one of twenty-three grand jurors, he said. Whatever Brunini did or did not do, he cast only one vote, and at the very least, eleven other men had voted for the indictment. (In fact, the jury had voted unanimously for the indictment.) Donegan exhaled. The trial went on. In all, thirty-seven witnesses appeared over the course of thirty days, and 107 exhibits were accepted into evidence. On February 7, after deliberating for four hours and twenty minutes, the jury returned a verdict of guilty. The judge sentenced Remington to the maximum term under law, five years. He had been convicted of perjury, not espionage, but the crime, said the judge, had involved disloyalty to t
he country and so should be treated most seriously.

  It had taken two grand juries, two loyalty boards, a libel suit, and a criminal trial, but Bentley—and the FBI—could finally claim a small victory. Bentley was pleased that at least part of her story had now been officially, legally, accepted as truth. But she didn’t feel particularly victorious. The war against Remington had taken its toll. She had given up a job for it. She had lost a measure of control over her life. Private investigators had dug into her past. Lawyers had subjected her to intense and hostile questioning. The press had dogged her. She felt tired and anxious, beleaguered and confused. And the war was not over yet.

  Chapter 19

  My Life as a Spy

  BACK IN EARLY 1950 when Bentley returned to Manhattan after her short stint teaching at Mundelein, she had a phone number tucked in her purse. A Chicago acquaintance gave it to her, asking Bentley to look up an old New York friend, John Brunini. He was a fifty-one-year-old poet and essayist, the director of the Catholic Poetry Society, editor of its magazine, Spirit, and one of the most important, well-connected men in the New York anticommunist Catholic community. In 1948, he had been appointed foreman of a special federal grand jury convened in New York City with a mandate to investigate communist espionage. Bentley had appeared before that jury in 1949, but she and the foreman had no private contact and hadn’t seen each other since. Now Bentley was interested. The two had, at the very least, their religion and their politics in common, which might not be a bad start for a friendship. Bentley phoned him soon after she returned to the city, ostensibly to convey the best wishes of their mutual acquaintance. Brunini was undoubtedly delighted to get a call from one of the most famous anticommunists in the land, and they quickly arranged to have lunch together that day at the Commodore, where Bentley was staying.