It helped that she secured temporary employment that winter, doing research and clerical work for Alfred Kohlberg, a wealthy anticommunist bigwig. A hardliner who had founded the American Jewish League Against Communism and financed Plain Talk, an anticommunist magazine, Kohlberg was likely asked to employ Bentley by one of her supporters. But however the job came to be, it provided not only income but a reason to get up in the morning, something to do other than worry about having nothing to do. Along with the $50 a week she was continued to be paid by the FBI, the job now at least somewhat alleviated her financial problems. But more than anything, Bentley pulled herself together in January of 1953 because she had to. The Department of Justice needed her: William Remington was once again on trial.
Remington had been convicted of perjury in 1951 and sentenced to five years in prison, but his lawyer immediately appealed the decision, claiming that the trial judge had not given good instructions to the jury. The jury had been asked, among other things, to determine if Remington was lying when he claimed he was not a member of the Communist Party. But the judge had not instructed the jury on what constituted party membership. It was a technicality—but a convincing one. The court of appeals ruled in Remington’s favor. The verdict was overturned, but the indictment stood, and the case was sent back to district court for a new trial.
The government, however, was not eager to try Remington again on the same charges, both because of the difficulties in establishing just what it meant to be a member of the party and because the original indictment was based, in part, on testimony gathered by the questionable Brunini grand jury. On the other hand, the Department of Justice was not about to give up. Too much had been invested in the Remington case, including the credibility of the government’s star witness. And so in October 1951 another grand jury had been impaneled, and five witnesses—including Bentley—had been called. Remington was subsequently indicted on five new counts of perjury, including his denial of passing secret information to Bentley. To the ACLU, the new indictments were morally, if not technically, double jeopardy. To the leftist magazine The Nation they were “a mean, vengeful and subversive act.” The trial began on January 13, 1953.
Unlike the first trial, the second was short, almost perfunctory, with a whittled-down witness list and a no-nonsense attitude. Now reduced to its essence, it pitted Remington against his ex-wife and Elizabeth Bentley, and the outcome would hinge on whom the jury believed. That meant Bentley had to be in top form, which meant, in turn, that the government had reason to be nervous. Based on her recent behavior—her emotional instability had been noted in numerous FBI memos—prosecutors were undoubtedly afraid of a melt-down on the witness stand. Could Bentley handle the pressure? Could she rise to the occasion? Prosecutors would also have been concerned that Remington’s lawyers had discovered Bentley’s recent problems and would use them in their cross-examination to attack her character and damage her credibility.
Their latter fear was unfounded. Remington’s legal team had not unearthed Bentley’s car accidents or her arrest for hit-and-run. But it seemed, as she took the witness stand, that their fears about Bentley herself might be justified. The star witness seemed testy and quick to anger, not her usual composed and controlled self. At one point, she was downright surly. When John Minton, Remington’s new lawyer, began questioning her about her book, Out of Bondage, she didn’t attempt to hide her disgust. “I thought that would turn up sooner or later,” she said.
“Who did you write the book in collaboration with?” Minton asked, eager for the jury to hear about John Brunini.
“I sat on a Manhattan telephone directory and wrote it myself,” she snapped back.
Unfazed, Minton continued: “Who is Mr. Brunini, with reference to the book?”
“Oh, again Mr. Brunini,” Bentley said.
“Just what did Mr. Brunini do with you on the book?”
“Not a thing,” Bentley said.
Despite this nasty interchange, Bentley did manage to repeat her previous testimony against Remington calmly and with the same directness and precision she had in the first trial. The FBI was pleased, noting that Bentley “conducted herself in a creditable fashion.” The former Mrs. Remington backed her up once again, this time adding that she had been present at meetings when her husband had turned over secret material to Bentley.
Remington himself, having been through two loyalty hearings, a lawsuit, three grand juries, and now two criminal trials, was understandably less cocky. He was also more honest. He admitted being a “philosophical”—but not a “card-carrying”—communist in his younger days. And he was more penitent about his relationship with Bentley, admitting that he was “very indiscreet in…having this contact at all” and that he could not in all honesty say that he knew he made no mistake at the time. But he continued to lie under oath about Bentley, maintaining that he did not know she was a communist and did not pass her any sensitive information.
On January 28, after sitting through ten days of testimony and deliberating for twelve hours, the jury found William Remington guilty of two counts of perjury, including his claim that he had not given Bentley classified information. The next day, Judge Vincent Leibell sentenced him to three years in prison. Once again, Remington appealed. But this time, despite a strong dissent by Judge Learned Hand who was appalled at Brunini’s behavior during the original grand jury, the verdict was upheld. A few months later, after the Supreme Court refused to hear the case, Remington began serving his time at Lewisburg Penitentiary in Pennsylvania, the same prison where Alger Hiss was being held. The government—and Elizabeth Bentley—had finally prevailed.
But the Remington verdict was a small victory after almost eight years of government investigation. Abraham Brothman, the engineer from whom Bentley had picked up blueprints on Golos’s orders, had also been convicted of perjury, but none of the other dozens of sources Bentley named had even faced indictment. The FBI was ready to mothball the Bentley file and move on to more promising cases.
But not agent Bob Lamphere. An Idaho farm boy who had joined the FBI a few months before Pearl Harbor, Lamphere found himself, more than a decade later, in charge of a seven-man unit working on the top-secret decrypted Venona messages. The unit’s task was to scour the voluminous Bentley file checking for names, dates, and facts, and pinpoint anything that would help the government identify those called only by code names in the Soviet cables. As he painstakingly cross-checked, the pieces began to fit together, and he became absolutely convinced that Bentley was telling the truth. Venona held the key to convicting a number of Bentley’s sources, and Lamphere knew it. But he also knew that the Bureau—particularly his boss, J. Edgar Hoover—was dead set against making Venona public, which is what would happen if the information in the cables was used in a trial. Lamphere knew all the arguments: Making Venona public would expose American counterespionage operations and alert the Russians—now the sworn enemy—to U.S. intelligence activities and the success of the code-breakers. It might anger the international community, given that the United States intercepted the messages when the two countries were supposedly allies. And it might be all for naught. The Venona material was itself problematic—incompletely deciphered, full of code names—and perhaps not admissible in court. As a good Bureau man, Lamphere agreed with the arguments, but that didn’t prevent him from feeling frustrated about the situation. Constrained by Hoover’s policy but eager to pursue others who, he firmly believed, had betrayed the government, Lamphere hatched a bold FBI-CIA plot. Operatives would kidnap Joseph Katz, a communist spy then living in Israel, who, Lamphere believed, would corroborate Bentley’s allegations. Ironically, Katz was the man the KGB had chosen to liquidate Bentley back in 1945. At the last minute, Hoover pulled the plug on the scheme.
The government’s frustration deepened as congressional committees continued their unsuccessful attempts to wrest incriminating testimony from the people Bentley had accused of spying. In April of 1953, the SISS called hearings to inve
stigate what it referred to as the “interlocking subversion in government departments,” using Bentley’s past testimony as a guide not only to whom to subpoena but also to what specific questions to ask. The committee, under the chairmanship of Senator William Jenner, hoped to expose “the design by which Communist agents were able to infiltrate the executive and legislative branches” and how they were able to “move with great facility from one government agency to another.” Bentley was never called as a witness, but her presence permeated the hearings. Every witness called was a person she had named.
On April 16, Nathan Gregory Silvermaster took the stand, proclaiming in an opening statement that he was “a loyal citizen [who] never betrayed the interests of the United States.” Using Bentley’s August 1951 testimony before the subcommittee, the senators proceeded to grill Silvermaster about his alleged spy activities. But in two hours and twenty minutes of questioning, all the committee got was 148 invocations of the Fifth Amendment. Silvermaster not only refused to answer questions about his activities and associations, he also declined to tell the subcommittee the subject of his doctoral dissertation (Leninist economics) and whether he had read Whittaker Chambers’s new autobiography. Once again, as they had done in the past, the senators tried to shake—or at the very least, malign—Silvermaster’s use of the Fifth Amendment by insisting that an innocent man would not need constitutional protection.
“You understand that if you are not a communist, there is no need for you to invoke the Fifth Amendment?” Jenner asked him at one point.
“I refuse to answer the question,” replied Silvermaster.
Jenner persisted. “You understand, do you not, that if you were not a communist at that time there is no need for you to invoke the Fifth Amendment? Do you understand that?”
“Is this a question?” asked Silvermaster.
“Yes,” said Jenner, hammering away again. “Do you know that if you were a loyal American citizen at the time, if you were not a communist, there is no need for you to take refuge behind the Fifth Amendment?”
Silvermaster once again refused to answer. Lud Ullmann, his friend, former housemate, and now business partner—the two were involved in real estate development in New Jersey—followed suit. When Victor Perlo was called in mid-May, he answered “I can’t recall” and “I don’t have the least idea” to those questions he did not outright refuse to answer. Helen Tenney also stonewalled the committee, declining even to answer matters of public record like whether she held a position at the OSS. The parade of witnesses that spring also included John Abt, Maurice Halperin, Donald Wheeler, Charles Kramer, Edward Fitzgerald, Harry Magdoff, Harold Glasser, and Frank Coe, all named by Bentley, all of whom consistently took the Fifth. Some of the witnesses called the hearings “witch hunts,” to which Senator Jenner tartly replied: “This committee is not so much interested in witch hunts as it is in rat hunts.”
That summer, the subcommittee issued its report, a fifty-page summary of three years of investigation and three and a half months of hearings: There was, indeed, the committee concluded, a communist conspiracy. Communists had infiltrated the federal government, helped each other get jobs and promotions, and protected one another from exposure. Communists had guided research and policy-making, written speeches, influenced congressional investigations, and drafted laws. Communists had stolen thousands of diplomatic, political, military, scientific, and economic secrets. The so-called Jenner Report echoed much of Bentley’s past testimony, lending official credence to her allegations. But in fact, the committee had gotten nothing from its witnesses. No one had admitted anything. No one had slipped up. No indictments resulted.
For once, Bentley was not the center of attention. Neither a witness nor an observer at the hearings that spring, she was more than a thousand miles away in south-central Louisiana. Her friend Bishop Sheen had helped her find another job, this one teaching Romance languages and American government at an obscure little school, the College of Sacred Heart, in an obscure little town, Grand Coteau. The tiny school, serving fewer than a hundred students, was housed in an early-nineteenth-century convent at the center of town and had the distinction of being the nation’s oldest Catholic women’s college. Bentley couldn’t have been more isolated. This woman who had lived most of her adult life in Manhattan now resided in a hamlet surrounded by yam fields, cut off from civilization by dense, kudzu-covered forests, 130 miles from the nearest city of any size. She was still within reach of the FBI, however. Just a few weeks after she left for Grand Coteau, the New York field office informed the New Orleans field office that the southern agents had inherited a periodically depressed, somewhat improvident hypochondriac who, “for the most part, when not beset by her real and fancied worries…is friendly and cooperative.” New York suggested that New Orleans assign an experienced agent to contact Bentley once a month.
Settled comfortably into academic obscurity, far from the spotlight that had burned her so many times, Bentley now had the life she said she wanted. Only it seemed she didn’t want it after all. Why else agree to write a six-part series on espionage based on her book for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, a decision that could not help but focus attention on her again? It may be that she needed, or thought she needed, the money. Surely her teaching position didn’t pay much. But how much would one need to live in Grand Coteau, Louisiana? Perhaps she was still looking for vindication and could not let go of her past. She still wanted to play a role in the unfolding Cold War drama. Despite the rocky road she had traveled, despite the public scrutiny she said she hated, she wasn’t yet ready to retire.
The series, which began appearing just after Thanksgiving 1953—the tenth anniversary of Yasha’s death—broke no new ground. Parts one and two focused on Harry Dexter White’s influence, repeating the accusations she had made both publicly and in her original statement to the FBI. In part three, she disclosed how White and Lauchlin Currie had saved Greg Silvermaster from being fired, and then went on in part four to summarize the activities of the Silvermaster spy ring. The OSS—“one of the most sensitive United States agencies deeply infiltrated by spies,” she wrote—was the subject of the fifth article. In the last of the series, she detailed her move away from communism, presenting herself as rehabilitated and “restored to the society of decent men.”
The headlines were enticing—OSS YIELDED AN ENDLESS FLOW OF SECRETS, HOW WHITE USED TREASURY TO GET SECRETS FOR REDS—but the editors employed unusual restraint in presenting the articles. The paper placed the series in the editorial section of the newspaper rather than the front page, under standard-sized headlines that announced rather than screamed. The stories themselves were written with journalistic directness in a punchy, “just-the-facts-ma’am” voice that sounded nothing like the voice of Out of Bondage. Either she had been heavily edited or the series had actually been written by a reporter. Whatever the case, she was once again in the public eye.
The St. Louis articles led to her second appearance on Meet the Press—“America’s press conference of the air”—which had moved from radio to television and was broadcast “live and unrehearsed” from NBC’s studios in Washington, D.C. Bentley made the trip from Louisiana in December to appear as the televised program’s first female guest. She looked pasty-faced and tired under the harsh lights, older than her forty-five years. Her dark hair had been too energetically permed for the occasion. It was crimped tight around her face and looked like a bad wig. She was wearing a white blouse with voluminous puffed sleeves and a very large, pointy collar—a schoolgirl’s outfit.
She sat motionless, her hands clasped before her on the desk, back erect, her gaze straight into the eye of the camera, as Lawrence Spivak introduced her. She faced four journalists, including a reporter for the Post-Dispatch, all intent on getting her to publicly reveal more than she already had, all attempting to straddle the line between good, patriotic, communist-hating citizens who approved of Bentley and skeptical newsmen who weren’t quite sure if they believed her. Sitting
quiet and composed, like a schoolteacher at her desk, Bentley was intimidated by neither the questions nor the camera. She faced each journalist in turn, her gaze unblinking. They were the ones who fidgeted, uncomfortable with the lights and microphones, men accustomed to batting out stories in their local newsrooms, not sitting before cameras.
Bentley listened to each question intently, giving away nothing with her eyes or body language. The journalists struggled, phrasing and rephrasing questions, tripping over dates and places—which Bentley patiently corrected. They wanted new information. They wanted personal opinion. They wanted her to name names, to criticize Truman, to comment on the way the FBI conducted its investigations. Bentley nimbly sidestepped a number of questions and answered others as narrowly as possible, confounding the journalists’ best efforts.
“Are any persons whom you did not name publicly still engaged in Soviet espionage?” one of the reporters asked her.
Bentley took a moment before she replied, in her slightly nasal and accentless voice, “I don’t know offhand which ones I have named publicly and which ones I have not. That is why I cannot answer your question.” Stymied, the reporter moved on.
“Why have there been no charges against those you have named?” she was asked a few minutes later. The question was clearly combative, but Bentley didn’t rise to it.
“It is a question of law,” she said, “and I, not being a lawyer, cannot explain it to you.”
She seemed in complete control, answering what she wanted to answer and finessing the rest. The only emotion she displayed during the questioning was when one of the reporters started to ask her what had made her turn “informer.”
“I dislike that term very much,” she said, interrupting the question. Her voice was sharp. “I do wish people wouldn’t use that term when it comes to ex-communists.” She was lecturing the reporter. “We are trying to help this government, and we do not consider ourselves as tattletale people.” The reporter retreated immediately, stumbling over his words as he attempted to rephrase the question.
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