Meanwhile, the Taylor case was still very much alive. Initially, the board examining Taylor ruled that there was reason to doubt his loyalty, but, ever the fighter, he appealed, and in early January of 1955, the panel reversed its earlier decision. Taylor’s attorney told the Associated Press that his client’s victory cast doubt on Bentley’s credibility, and the press touted the reversal as a direct repudiation of the Red Spy Queen. But in fact, it had nothing to do with the thirty-seven discrepancies or Taylor’s claim that Bentley had lied so often and about so much that all of her testimony was suspect. Instead, the reversal was based on the confused and suspicious circumstances surrounding a piece of evidence originally used against Taylor, a letter allegedly written by Lud Ullmann concerning Taylor’s appointment to a Treasury post. Byron Scott, Taylor’s lawyer, was able to successfully challenge the authenticity of the letter, presenting evidence that it had been manufactured. Taylor was cleared, and the lawsuit fizzled. But that was not the end of it.
Bentley told the agent in charge at the New Orleans field office that Byron Scott’s comment to the press was just the “opening barrage of an attack” on her integrity. She was half right. Her integrity would continue to be attacked, but not by Taylor, who proclaimed himself “just too happy” to be in the clear or his attorney, who probably felt he had made his point. Instead, a confidential source associated with the American Civil Liberties Union alerted the FBI that one of the congressional subcommittees now had a “maniacal fixation” on Elizabeth Bentley. Benjamin Ginzberg, research director for the Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights, was an opponent of the loyalty and security programs that had been created in the wake of Bentley’s—and others’—allegations. Around the time of the Taylor affair he hired someone at the Library of Congress to work full-time “studying the inconsistencies in the various testimonies of Elizabeth Bentley” and building a case against her. A few weeks later, the FBI was relieved to learn that one of the senators on the subcommittee had submitted his resignation along with the strongly worded statement in opposition to Ginzberg’s investigation. The subcommittee chair assured the senator that there would be no investigation and that the Library of Congress researcher was “off the committee payroll.”
But as one challenge faded, another flared. The next one came in the stocky form of a brash, garrulous, and unstable young man named Harvey Matusow. A purported genius who flunked out of high school, he had joined the Army in 1944 and the Communist Party shortly thereafter. Early in 1950, he turned informer, finding a niche for himself with the FBI as a self-proclaimed expert on communist infiltration of youth organizations. He had testified before congressional committees, and, egged on by Senator Joe McCarthy, he had named more than two hundred names. He had made headlines and had become, like Bentley, one of the darlings of the anticommunist movement. But unlike her, he used the position to enhance his social standing, bragging that he had dined with J. Edgar Hoover at the Stork Club, ridden in Walter Winchell’s Cadillac, and gone out on double dates with Roy Cohn. A few years later, struggling with his conscience—and perhaps mental illness—he converted from Judaism to Mormonism, took the middle name of “Job” from the Bible, and publicly repented his sins—not the sins of working for the Communist Party but the sins of falsely accusing others of subversive activities. Matusow now said that he had lied to Congress and the FBI, that everything he told them was a fabrication. Early in 1955, his book False Witness— an obvious play on Whittaker Chambers’s autobiography Witness— appeared in bookstores. Stewart Alsop, promoting it in his column, called the book “a remarkable political confession which may cause major explosions.”
In his book, Matusow wrote that Bentley, Louis Budenz, and others were “hailed as heroes” and that he wanted to climb on the bandwagon. “It was the easy way up—to let the world know that I was not just another guy.” He confessed that he wanted to be “in the limelight,” that he loved “the headlines, the flashbulbs and the pats on the back.” Seeing himself on TV and hearing reports of his doings on the radio fed his ego, he wrote. “I considered myself a success. I was a national figure.” He mentioned Bentley six times in the book, five times to lionize her—the famous witness, the headliner, a member of the Big Leagues, where he wanted to be. But in the sixth reference, he cut her down to size—his size.
Called to testify before SISS in February of 1955 just before his book came out, Matusow was not the shamed and repentant soul the senators had expected. Instead, he took the offensive, accusing the committee members of creating “an atmosphere of hysteria” that encouraged lies. “You’re the one responsible for my role as a witness,” he yelled at Senator Price Daniel, a Texas Democrat who had been trying to trap Matusow into responses that could form the basis for a perjury indictment. But the real fireworks came when the committee counsel asked the witness if he considered Elizabeth Bentley one of the most important anticommunists.
“I consider her as the most unstable,” Matusow replied.
He went on to testify about an incident he had described in his forthcoming book, his sixth reference to Elizabeth Bentley. He told the committee that he and Bentley had lunched together in a Manhattan restaurant in the fall of 1952. He remembered the date because it was his birthday. Bentley was distraught and weepy, he said. She told him she was broke and had to keep testifying to make enough money to live. The only problem was, she allegedly told him, she had run out of things to testify about. She would have to “find” additional information. In case the implication was not clear enough, Matusow added: “Miss Bentley, I believe, gave false testimony.” Elizabeth Bentley was back in the headlines.
Hoover immediately fired off an urgent teletype to the New Orleans field office. Contact Bentley and detail any conversation she can recall with Matusow, he instructed his agents. See if Bentley would be willing to testify and deny the allegations. Hoover had to have been worried. He knew that Bentley had been in bad shape in 1952. His own agents had reported that she was frequently upset and often seemed depressed, even suicidal. She might have said anything to anybody. There was another reason to worry as well, for the Bureau immediately understood Matusow’s allegations not just as a threat to Bentley’s credibility but as part of a “carefully planned attack on the government’s security program” and, even more important, on the director himself. Hoover was on record stating that all information from Bentley that was possible to check had proven correct. An attack on Bentley was an attack on the director.
New Orleans agents contacted Bentley by phone the next day, reporting back to Hoover that Bentley said she did remember having lunch with Matusow at some point but never mentioned anything about her relations with the FBI. Bentley was emphatic: Matusow was lying. She had never told him she was desperate for information, and she had never testified falsely. She assured the agent that she would be willing to go before the committee and refute Matusow’s charges. Bentley may have been confident that Matusow had nothing on her, but she understood that she might be in real trouble this time. Two days after local agents contacted her, she called New York agent Lester Gallaher at his home. Gallaher had been one of the agents closely involved in her life in the early 1950s. She told him she was “considerably worried” about the allegations. She seemed most concerned about reporters, who were already beginning to hound her, and about jeopardizing her job at the college. That evening she also called Hoover’s office, telling one of his office staff that the “heavy artillery” was now being trained on her. She insisted on speaking to Hoover personally. When that request was deflected, she hung up and called one of the assistant directors at home.
Bentley wanted the FBI to help establish her whereabouts on October 3, 1952, the date Matusow said they had lunched together in New York. She might have been in New York, but she might not have. She couldn’t remember, and her own records weren’t clear. Her friends at the Bureau promised nothing, but they quickly moved into action. They needed to disprove and discredit Matusow as fast as possible before the story
got more out of hand than it already was. Any airing of that period of Bentley’s life, the agent in charge of the New York office wrote to his boss in Washington, “could cause more serious embarrassment to the Bureau.” For it was not just Bentley who had comported herself badly during 1952, it was the FBI as well, assigning agents to chauffeur her around on personal business, working unofficially and behind the scenes to extricate her from various scrapes.
The New York office immediately dispatched an agent to the auditor’s room at the Prince George Hotel, where Bentley generally stayed when in Manhattan, to go through the handwritten registration cards for October of 1952. Yes, the agent reported back, Bentley had stayed at the hotel on the evening of October 3, thus establishing it was at least possible that she had lunched with Matusow earlier that day. Next, presumably following leads from Bentley, agents interviewed, and reinterviewed, six people who had been at lunch or dinner or parties where it was thought both Bentley and Matusow were in attendance. It turned out that three people could confirm that Bentley and Matusow had a late dinner—not lunch—together at the Rochambeau restaurant on West Eleventh Street on the night in question.
One was a man named Llewellyn Watts who said that he saw Matusow and Bentley enter the restaurant together and that, a minute later, Matusow beckoned him over to their table, where he remained for the rest of the evening. Watts told the FBI that at no time during the evening did Miss Bentley show any evidence of tears or depression. On the contrary, she had impressed him as a “charming woman” with a “good sense of humor.” There was no discussion of false testimony that Watts could remember. The only conversation he recalled was a lighthearted one about the uncommon names of Midwest towns. Apparently, a few minutes after Watts joined the table, another man, Earl Henry, sat down with them. He told the FBI that Matusow had at first introduced Bentley using a fictitious name but that he had corrected himself almost immediately. It seemed to Henry that Matusow had enjoyed playing this little joke on him. Henry, like Watts, did not think Bentley showed any signs of despondency. The thing he most remembered about the half hour he had sat with them was that Bentley didn’t have a chance to say very much because Matusow monopolized the conversation. That meshed with Watts’s memory that when he asked Bentley to talk about her Communist Party activities that night she was able to say very little because “Matusow was continuously interrupting to tell about his.”
It had taken some effort, but the Bureau did a good job disproving Matusow’s story. The statements from the other diners that night, along with Matusow’s admitted history of fanciful fabrications, put an end to his attack on Bentley’s credibility. He was a troubled man who made up stories. He had made up the one about Bentley as well. She was cleared, and the latest crisis was over. But once again, she had paid a price for being who she was—or who she used to be. Matusow’s allegations, especially on the heels of William Taylor’s attack, made her feel as vulnerable as ever, unable to escape her past, unable to maintain a normal life for herself. The press had once again trumpeted her name, and the sisters at Sacred Heart were not happy.
Harvey Matusow served five years in jail for perjury. Released in 1960, he went on to play avant-garde music with Yoko Ono, perform as a stand-up comic, invent the stringless yo-yo, and marry fifteen times—nine of them to the same woman.
Chapter 23
An Unsettled Woman
IT WAS BEGINNING to look as if Elizabeth Bentley was doomed to live from one crisis to another, for just as the Matusow and Taylor challenges were being resolved, just when it seemed she might go back to living a quiet life in Grand Coteau, the IRS came after her. Back in 1951, the year Out of Bondage was published and the year McCall’s bought the serial rights to the book, Bentley had earned a considerable amount of money, an income many thousands of dollars in excess of her usual annual salary. Her attorney had recommended that she spread the income across a period of three or four years, paying a portion of the taxes each year, but the IRS didn’t like the idea and ruled against her. The attorney, however, considered the ruling “inconsistent” and recommended that she not pay. Bentley was only too glad to comply with his advice. She didn’t have the money anyway. Now, in the late spring of 1955, the IRS delivered an ultimatum: Unless Bentley paid $1,800 in back taxes within a week, the agency would institute criminal proceedings against her.
Bentley immediately got on the phone to her savior, Roy Cohn, who, once again, began working behind the scenes. He contacted Robert Morris, who had been the counsel for SISS, and Morris in turn got on the phone to one of Hoover’s assistant directors. It would be “tragic” if the IRS proceeded against Bentley, Morris told his highly placed FBI friend. The action would not only stir up sentiment against the IRS among anticommunists, it would fuel the ongoing left-wing attack on Bentley. While the Bureau remained in the loop but not directly involved, Morris took up the matter with Deputy Attorney General William Rogers. But these initial efforts were unsuccessful. In early June, the Louisiana office of the IRS attached Bentley’s bank account.
Bentley immediately called the FBI, furious over what she called an “arbitrary action.” Elements in the government were trying to destroy her, she said. It was “more than a coincidence,” she told her FBI friends, that Matusow had attacked her, Taylor had attacked her, and now the IRS was zeroing in. She felt beleaguered and besieged, singled out for especially aggressive treatment. “I seem to be Target No. 1 for my ‘old friends,’” she wrote to one FBI official. Her current problems were not a question of an individual getting into difficulties with the government over income tax mistakes, she insisted. They were a very particular attack on Elizabeth Bentley, Anticommunist, by those who didn’t like what she had done or what she stood for. Moreover, the latest “attack” was having immediate and serious consequences for Bentley, which she was quick to point out to her friends at the Bureau. Three weeks after her bank account had been seized, with the attending local and national reports in the press, the mother superior of the College of Sacred Heart advised Bentley that she was being dropped from the faculty. The publicity was harming the school’s reputation. The school had received, according to the mother superior, “many adverse criticisms.”
Bentley may have presented herself as a victim—and she may well have been, because of her notoriety, a special target—but she was by no means helpless. There was, first, the power of her connections. She not only had Roy Cohn scrambling around for her and the Attorney General’s Office paying attention, but she also had FBI agents in three states and the District of Columbia tracking her concerns. She was not shy about calling agents at home or writing personal “Dear Lou” letters to Louis Nichols, a top official at FBI headquarters. She was not shy about enlisting the help of anyone who might be useful. She made a trip to Washington, D.C., later that summer to pay personal calls on two HUAC congressmen. After hearing her tale, they promised to apply pressure on the Treasury Department to help her resolve her problem. They also said they’d mobilize others, including some powerful Senate allies.
There was also the power of the threat. Bentley told agents in New Haven that unless the Bureau got her out of her present situation, she would be forced to “blow the lid off the Administration” and “blow up the works.” The threat itself was probably meaning-less—it is unlikely that Bentley had any additional intelligence at this point, damning or otherwise—but the idea of Bentley as a loose canon must have been unsettling for the Bureau. She was full of bluster, too, telling New Haven agents that she would settle for nothing less than a full public apology from the IRS. With agents in Louisiana, she took another tack, threatening to call the newspapers and inform them that President Eisenhower had been allowed to spread the income from his book over a period of years, and the IRS hadn’t raised a stink about that.
At first, it looked as if the case could be quickly resolved. Robert Morris had the ear of the deputy attorney general who made a call to the Treasury Department, reporting back in mid-June that the IRS would
be “reasonable” and was willing to negotiate. Assistant FBI Director Alan Belmont got reassurances that the matter had been taken up with the IRS “at a high level” and that the agency was considering her problem “sympathetically.” Meanwhile, the Bureau authorized first a $100 payment to Bentley and then an additional $50 to help her meet expenses while her bank account was frozen. Officially, she was being paid for “value received”—the help she had already given agents investigating other cases and the time she had spent going over William Taylor’s allegations. But it was obvious that the FBI was helping her out of a tight spot.
By August nothing had happened. In fact, it seemed that despite—or more likely because— of the pressure being applied, the IRS had dug in its heels. Robert Morris called Bentley to tell her that he had learned that the agency was refusing to remove the lien on her bank account in Louisiana and, moreover, would be demanding that she sell her house in Connecticut. He had also learned that the IRS would not authorize any public apology or retraction for publication in the Louisiana newspapers, which Bentley had thought might help her save her job.
In late summer her case took on new urgency. Bentley was at her Connecticut house when a deputy U.S. marshal knocked on the door and handed her a surprise subpoena. One of the men Bentley had implicated in espionage activity years ago, Edward Fitzgerald, had just been sentenced to six months in jail for contempt because he refused to testify about the Silvermaster case, even after the government granted him immunity. Fitzgerald was not taking this turn of events quietly. He wanted his day in court, and he wanted Bentley to be there. It was because of her congressional testimony fingering him as one of the Perlo Group, a productive source in the OSS, that he was in the spot he was in. “I am very happy,” he told the press after the subpoena was served, “that at long last we have succeeded in forcing Miss Bentley to come to court and put up or shut up.” It was William Taylor all over again.
Clever Girl Page 29
