Clever Girl

by Lauren Kessler

  But not everyone found the book worthy of praise. The Saturday Review faulted the author for her lack of subtlety and precision, concluding that Bentley was neither an acute observer of herself nor of those around her. In a lengthy and lukewarm review, the New York Times found that Bentley had “not a great deal more to say” in her book than she had already said in public testimony. Her account was neither interesting nor convincing, wrote the reviewer. “In fact, for a spy thriller, it is surprisingly dull.”

  Other reviews were downright scathing. Writing in The Commonweal, nationally syndicated newspaper columnist Joseph Alsop found it hard to decide whether to treat the book “as tragic, or as ludicrous, or as terrifying, or as pathetic.” He found the account worthy of True Confessions, “with the Communist Party in the role of fascinating villain who receives his comeuppance after many a titillating scene…with the pretty heroine.” The style of the book offended him as well, “at once so vulgar, so girlish, and so portentous.” The author he deemed “obviously unstable.” The reviewer for The New Yorker had some of the same concerns but expressed them with sharper wit. Bentley, said the reviewer, wrote “in a fashion that suggests she may have had almost as grievous a tussle with Freshman English at Vassar as she had later with her New England conscience.”

  Book reviewers were not the only ones keenly interested in Out of Bondage. The FBI was all over it, assigning agents to parse the book line by line, comparing names, dates, and details to her FBI statement and congressional testimony, an effort both to pick up new leads and to cross-validate her story. The New York agents assigned the task were happy to find some hidden clues in the book. In a three-page, single-spaced memo to headquarters, the agent in charge pinpointed eighteen instances in which Bentley had concealed a person’s identity in the book, either by using a single name only or a descriptor. These were, or could be, people Bentley had not mentioned before, people the FBI might be very interested in. The Bureau seized on this as an opportunity to reinterview Bentley with the goal of compiling a list of new names to investigate.

  Agents comparing the book to Bentley’s other statements found that her various accounts agreed in essence but not always in detail, a problem they considered to be literary rather than substantive. Bentley had told the FBI that for her book “it was necessary to add human interest and reader appeal to a lot of characters.” There were instances, she said, where she had added drama to the material and other times where she had enhanced the narrative by telescoping events or combining several meetings into one. The agents conducting the detailed analysis were not overly concerned.

  Elizabeth Bentley knew she was not a writer, and she was probably not expecting literary praise for Out of Bondage. She was also well aware of how controversial she was. She had been publicly criticized, even pilloried, since she had first come forth to testify three years before. So the criticisms and generally bleak reviews were not altogether unexpected. But that did not make them any easier to take. She had to swallow the disappointment and move on.

  The advance money and the check from McCall’s made that easier to do. Out of Bondage may not have been a commercial success in publishing terms, but the project provided Bentley with more money than she had ever had before. Her income was so substantial in 1951 that she ended the year owing $3,700 in federal taxes, a sum she could not pay because, true to form, she had already spent all her money. In September 1951, a month after the fourth installment appeared in McCall’s and within days of the publication of the book, Bentley bought her first house, a five-room cottage on several acres in Madison, Connecticut, a small town on the Long Island Sound. She posed for reporters in her new living room with a cat sprawled on her lap, an image of quiet domesticity that she hoped would become a reality. She would spend her time furnishing her new home and tending a good-sized garden, she told reporters. She hoped she might find a teaching position at some point. She intended, she said, to live a much less hectic life. Her days in the limelight were over.

  Part Three

  The Ruin

  Chapter 20

  The Center Cannot Hold

  IF BENTLEY THOUGHT she could retire to a quiet life in her little house by the Sound, if she thought she could become, overnight, Elizabeth Bentley: Private Citizen, she was badly mistaken. Writing the memoir may have been for her a public and dramatic way to shut the door on her previous life, but her new friends in the Department of Justice didn’t hear it slam. To the FBI and the Attorney General’s Office, she was still, as she had been since 1945, “a most valuable informant.” After her move to Connecticut, agents from the New Haven and New York field offices continued to contact her three or four times a month, quizzing her on a wide variety of espionage matters, consulting her on loyalty cases and using her to help build dossiers on suspected subversives. She was their resident expert, their touchstone. She was, as far as they were concerned, on call permanently.

  In January of 1952, she was asked to testify before HUAC for the fourth time. The congressmen were then conducting hearings on “the role of the Communist press in the Communist conspiracy,” focusing that month on a woman named Grace Granich, an American communist who ran an international news agency in New York during the war years. Allegedly, the agency had been used by the Daily Worker and the party to obtain party information and directives from Moscow. As it turned out, Bentley had never met and knew very little about Granich. But she was able to link her with the underground, testifying that Granich and Golos had worked together. It was Granich, she said, who suggested to Golos that Helen Tenney might make a useful addition to the apparatus. (Tenney later became one of Bentley’s sources inside OSS.) Her testimony that Tuesday morning in mid-January was quite brief, but it was clear that it piqued the interest of the congressmen. They rushed into executive session before lunch to question her further.

  Next, SISS called on her services as expert witness. Still under Senator Pat McCarran’s aggressive leadership, the subcommittee was continuing its investigation of the Institute for Pacific Relations. Bentley had previously named several people active in the IPR who, she claimed, were part of her espionage apparatus. But, as with her other accusations, there was no documentary proof. Apparently troubled by this—or perhaps reacting to criticism that careers, and lives, were being ruined on the basis of hearsay—the subcommittee used the hearings to point out just how difficult it was to prove that anyone was or had been a spy.

  “Miss Bentley,” asked the counsel for the committee, “while you were an underground agent, was there in existence documentary evidence of the fact that you were such an agent?”

  “No, except in Moscow,” Bentley replied.

  “Did you feel that it was your business to make sure there was no such documentary evidence?” he asked.

  “Definitely,” she answered. “I took every possible precaution.”

  To hammer home the point, the counsel also questioned the former director of the CIA.

  “Sir…what can you tell us of the likelihood that an active underground agent could be proven to be such by documentary evidence?”

  “Well,” replied Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter, “the only way you could ever prove he was an agent by documentary evidence is that he would be very stupid”—that is, stupid enough to fail to destroy evidence of involvement in such activities.

  “It is common practice in connection with all underground organizations to seek to avoid documentation, is it not?” asked the counsel.

  “It very definitely is,” replied the admiral.

  While this testimony was undoubtedly true—a good agent obscured his or her affiliation, a good agent erased his or her tracks—it was also expedient. It created an elegant loop in logic: Rather than weakening the case that someone was involved in espionage, the absence of documentary evidence actually strengthened it. Lack of proof was the proof. The testimony effectively explained why Elizabeth Bentley had no proof to offer other than her own word. It explained why no investigation, regardless of how tho
rough, into the lives of those she accused would be likely to yield documentary evidence. It made the case, quietly and forcefully, that Bentley should be believed, not just in the context of the IPR investigation but in the wider net she had helped the FBI cast.

  The press didn’t pick up on this point. Perhaps it was too subtle compared to the headline-grabbing revelations to which journalists had become accustomed. Certainly it was eclipsed by Bentley’s statement before the committee later that day that two groups of communist spies were still operating within the federal government. She testified that her Soviet contacts had told her, back when she was engaged in such work, that there were four networks operating within the government. She had exposed two of them, the Silvermaster and Perlo Groups, which meant, she said, that there were still two out there. This seemingly out-of-nowhere disclosure—why had she never mentioned this before, during any other testimony?—was both tantalizing and impossibly flimsy. Bentley’s knowledge was indirect. She had no specifics to offer. She could name no names. But that didn’t stop the committee from pursuing the line of questioning, or Bentley from making grand statements. When the counsel asked her if the remaining communists in the government held high offices, she did not reply “I don’t know” or “I have no idea,” which was the truth. If they even existed, she didn’t know who they were, so how could she know what positions they held? Instead, she left the door wide open.

  “I assume they [hold high positions],” she replied, “because when the Communists infiltrate the government, they don’t bother with clerks.”

  The FBI was quick to reinterview her following the SISS appearance, but agents looking for leads came up empty. Bentley could tell them nothing more than what she had told the committee. But if her revelations about postwar spy networks led nowhere, her other testimony about the IPR proved so enticing that another congressional committee got in on the act, and the inquiry was expanded. It was not just the Institute that was now under suspicion but the benevolent trust funds and philanthropies that helped bankroll organizations like the IPR. Had the Carnegie and Rockefeller foundations, supporters of IPR, been infiltrated by communists? Were the Guggenheim, Ford, and Sloan foundations knowingly funding subversive groups? When a House subcommittee began exploring this terrain, Bentley was interviewed at great length at her Connecticut home. She had no direct knowledge of party infiltration of foundations—which was, perhaps, why she wasn’t called to publicly testify—but she did provide leads on suspected communists within these organizations. The investigation led to no indictments or arrests, but it did add to the atmosphere of suspicion, paranoia, and disquietude that was the leitmotif of the early 1950s.

  The continued attention by the FBI and various congressional committees, the interviews, the conferences, the frequent calls to testify, meant that Bentley could not get on with her life. She was stuck in her past, tethered to the life she had denounced, the years she now wanted to put far behind her, by those who needed and wanted her to keep retelling her tale. She was an emotional—and, it was turning out, financial—captive of her confessions. Her on-call status with the FBI and her continuing notoriety made finding a job almost impossible, especially the kind of position for which she was most suited. Who, after all, would hire the notorious Red Spy Queen to teach their children, a woman whose name and past improprieties one could read about regularly in the press? Her Catholic friends had arranged the position at Mundelein, but she was less infamous in Chicago than she was in New York and Washington, D.C. And that position had not worked out anyway. Her other “job,” her job as informant and witness, had gotten in the way.

  Now, in 1952, her other job was her only job. But it was work for which she was not paid. Detractors had called her a “paid informant” for years, but the truth was that the only money she had ever received from the government was reimbursement for travel expenses when she was called to testify at hearings and trials. With no income, no savings—the book royalties and McCall’s money were spent on the new house—and little potential for employment, Bentley was not just broke. She was increasingly despondent about her future. Money had been a problem before, but this time it was different. This time her lack of finances was a symptom of a larger ailment, a chronic illness, the dis-ease of being Elizabeth Bentley stuck in a life she could not escape. She had sought notoriety. Now she was its victim. Depressed and lonely, she began frequenting the offices of her publisher, Devin-Adair, where she would tell her troubles to Devin Garrity. Occasionally, he gave her money, although there were no royalties from Out of Bondage, and the company owed her nothing. Garrity gave her money because he felt sorry for her.

  But even in these dark days, Bentley was hardly helpless. She was, despite her financial and emotional problems, a clever and resourceful woman who understood her usefulness to others sometimes better than they understood it themselves. When she was in Washington, D.C., in January testifying before HUAC, she paid an impromptu visit to her friends at FBI headquarters. At first, it seemed to be a social call. She sat in assistant director Alan Belmont’s office, chatting. She wished she could see Mr. Hoover, she told him, but she knew he was a busy man. She wanted to tell the director just how highly she regarded the FBI. It was, she told Belmont, the “one stable government organization which knew what it was doing.” Her praise for the work of the Bureau was effusive. The pleasantries continued until Bentley brought the conversation around to the real reason she was there.

  She was, she told Belmont, very much interested in whether the Department of Justice would return to her the $2,000 she had handed over to the Bureau back in 1945. This was the money her Soviet contact “Al” had given her either in recognition of her services, which was what he said, or as a bribe, which was how she interpreted it. Whatever the motivation behind the payment, it was money given to Bentley by a Russian operative after seven years of underground work. It was astonishing that Bentley would think of asking for the money back. Even more unbelievably, the FBI took her request seriously.

  Conferring among themselves the year before, Bureau agents had decided that they could consider the $2,000—which had been sitting in a safe deposit box in a Manhattan bank for five years—either as “espionage money…the result of Miss Bentley’s activities with the Russians,” in which case it should be turned over to the Treasury Department, or as Bentley’s property, in which case it should be returned to her. The only reason the Bureau was entertaining the latter thought at that point was that Bentley had been particularly useful as a witness in two government trials and had received nothing other than travel expenses as compensation. The matter was discussed confidentially with Tom “The Hat” Donegan, now assistant to the attorney general, who opined that any attempt to establish ownership of the funds would lead to “some embarrassment.” The New York office was more forceful. The return of the money “cannot be recommended…in view of the circumstances surrounding the manner in which she obtained the money.”

  But that decision had been made when Bentley was not desperate for funds. Her living expenses were being taken care of by her publisher at that point, and there was promise of income from the book. Now, a year later, the situation was different. Bentley was broke and racking up debts. She was begging money from her publisher. She was worried and distracted. The Bureau was becoming increasingly concerned that this would interfere with her usefulness as a witness—and Bentley did all she could to encourage that worry. She apparently convinced Belmont during their meeting in January. “Her current indebtedness…is jeopardizing our use of her as a source of information,” he wrote in a memo to one of the other assistant directors just after Bentley left his office, hinting that the Bureau might want to reverse its previous decision. Bentley was too valuable an asset to risk losing. Two months later, Hoover authorized the deal. That spring, agents from the New York office handed Elizabeth Bentley the envelope containing the $2,000 in cash she had been paid by her Russian contact.

  For Bentley, the money temporarily made life easie
r, but it didn’t cure what ailed her. Her mood did not improve. She appeared nervous and depressed to those who saw her in public. The New York agents who met with her regularly found her emotionally volatile, alternately weepy and demanding, complaining about her health and, they thought, drinking heavily. She was going through early menopause and not having an easy time of it. But her emotional problems were more serious than fluctuating hormones—or blood alcohol levels. Her problems were, in part, the result of seven years of living an intensely stressful undercover life followed by four years of living an intensely stressful public life. Elizabeth Bentley was shell-shocked.

  Stress had undone two other women from Bentley’s former life. Katherine Perlo, Victor’s ex-wife, had been confined to the mental ward of the Wichita Falls State Hospital on and off since 1946. In 1951 she had undergone insulin shock treatments so that she “might forget her past.” Helen Tenney, meanwhile, had spent most of the past six years as a resident of the Payne Whitney Clinic, the psychiatric division of the New York Hospital. Gripped by paranoia, Tenney had suffered a complete mental breakdown, attempting suicide by taking an overdose of phenobarbital. Tenney’s consulting psychiatrist thought she was suffering from “a severe case of hallucinations” because she talked of being a Russian spy.

  Whatever was going on with Bentley—menopause, alcohol, stress, depression—her personal life was becoming increasingly messy. In August 1951, just as she was about to move into her Connecticut house, she hired a man named John Wright to be her caretaker. He was a rough character, fifty-two, a bit dim-witted and, unbeknownst to Bentley, a convicted felon, having served two jail sentences, one for breaking and entering, the other for assault. Their relationship was of intense interest to the good people of Madison, who whispered among themselves that the two were lovers. When the whispers became loud enough to hear, the local pastor paid a call, warning Bentley of the rumors. She insisted that Wright was a handyman and no more than that. He performed routine chores around the house and grounds, took care of the place when she was away on her frequent trips to New York and Washington, D.C., and picked her up at the New Haven railroad station when she returned. The arrangement apparently worked well until early March 1952, when Bentley discovered that Mr. Wright was charging liquor to her account at the local drugstore. She was about to fire him when she suffered a severe bout of the flu and became even more dependent on his assistance.