Clever Girl

by Lauren Kessler

  In New Haven, in New York, and at headquarters in Washington, D.C., the FBI considered what to do about Bentley. She was valuable, but she was also volatile. She had been enormously useful, but she had also been, at times, a nuisance, a burden, and a hazard. But there were cases pending. The Cold War was still being waged. The communists—abroad and at home—were still the archenemy. In the end, it was decided that the Bureau would refrain from contacting her unless there was a matter of “great necessity.” No agent, no field office should contact her without prior authorization from headquarters. New Haven was instructed to keep informed of Bentley’s address and employment but stay out of her life.

  Meanwhile, Bentley did what she knew how to do: She survived. In the fall of 1958 she found a position teaching English and French at St. Joseph Academy in West Hartford, where she rented a room in a private home.

  Chapter 24

  The Wayward Girl Comes Home

  DEAR MR. HOOVER,” Elizabeth Bentley wrote in the summer of 1959, “lately it has come to my attention that there are still some unenlightened people who still believe that I am not a loyal American. This is a great handicap, especially since I am at present in search of a position.” Again. For the fourth time in as many years, she was on the job market, a fifty-one-year-old woman with a spotty employment record and a checkered past. Her one-year stint at St. Joseph ended in the spring, and, for reasons unknown, she had not been rehired. Now she was spending the summer looking for work, and it was not going well. Hunting for a new position every year was exhausting and humiliating. It kept her perpetually anxious and permanently rootless. She had to do something about it. So she turned, once again, to those she had become accustomed to turning to when she was in trouble, the FBI. This time, she went straight to the top.

  Bentley had never met Hoover, or even spoken with him, but she knew her name would be familiar to the director. And she knew that a letter of reference from a man who might be considered the nation’s single most impeccable source could help her. Would Hoover write a letter on her behalf, Bentley asked, which would “for once and all allay doubts in the minds of school superintendents and principals and in the minds of the general public as well”?

  Hoover answered three days later with a curt but serviceable note. He was a careful man, and given what he knew about Bentley’s instability and past problems, he was not about to go out on a limb for her. He had not gotten as far as he had by giving much away. “Your cooperation with this Bureau is a matter of public record,” he wrote, neatly finessing any personal endorsement on his part. Then he quoted from a public statement he had made before SISS in 1953: “All information furnished by Miss Bentley, which was susceptible to check, has proven to be correct.” The terse letter was probably not the enthusiastic endorsement of loyalty that Bentley was looking for, but it was something, and she was deeply grateful for it. “It was most kind of you to rescue me,” she wrote to the director when, using his letter as collateral, she finally secured a position for the fall.

  That September, she began teaching English at Long Lane School for Girls, a job she took gladly not just because it was gainful employment but because Long Lane was a special kind of school. Located on a hill overlooking Middletown, Connecticut, Long Lane was a residential institution run by the state for girls who had gotten into trouble with the law. It was not a prison or a place of punishment—there were no bars or wardens—but rather an old-fashioned home for wayward girls that had been established in the 1860s to instill “friendless children” with moral rectitude. The girls, 175 of them between the ages of eleven and seventeen, were runaways and truants, shoplifters and petty thieves, girls who drank and smoked and ran with boys. They were girls whose “personality and behavioral disorders” were “unacceptable to the community,” girls who could not be controlled by their parents or who had no parents or who suffered from, as the Long Lane mission statement delicately put it, “poor family relationships.” For many, Long Lane was the nicest place they had ever lived. For Bentley, it was a place she could fit in, a misfit among misfits.

  The sprawling facility included ten brick cottages set in a circle on the treed campus, each with its own fireplace, each staffed by a housekeeper who taught the girls how to cook and a housemother who greeted them in the afternoon with cups of hot chocolate. There was a working farm on the grounds, with an orchard, vegetable and flower gardens, and a greenhouse, all of which supplied the school with fresh produce in season and flowers for the dining-room tables where the girls took their meals. There was also a fully accredited twelve-classroom school building where a dozen or more teachers, supported by a psychiatric consultant, a full-time psychologist, three counselors, and six social workers, attempted to turn these girls’ lives around.

  “We…rehabilitate the young through kindly and understanding discipline,” Bentley wrote to Hoover late that fall after she had settled in. She was living on campus until she could find her own place. “I am very much interested in this experiment, because I have come to believe that the best way to defeat Communism is to build up good citizens in the coming generation,” she wrote.

  She may or may not have been instilling patriotism in the next generation, but Bentley was teaching writing and literature, and serving as the adviser to the school’s publication, The Tower. She was, by all accounts, a good teacher, interested in her students and particularly adept at bringing out their writing talents. But she also kept her distance. Many of the teachers became deeply involved in the lives of their students, befriending them outside the classroom, acting as surrogate mothers or older sisters, staying after school to join in extracurricular activities. They worked alongside the girls in the gardens in the spring, and ice-skated with them on a nearby pond in the winter. They stayed late to direct the choir, coach sports, and oversee any number of clubs. Bentley gave some time to The Tower, but then she had been hired with the understanding that she would be the adviser. Mostly she just did her job and went back to her quarters. She commuted into Hartford in the evenings and on weekends to complete her master’s degree in education at Trinity College, which gave her little free time. But even after she was awarded her degree in June of 1960, she did not integrate herself into life at Long Lane. After years in the spotlight, she craved, more than anything else, solitude and anonymity.

  The teachers and social workers knew of her past, and it was fodder for gossip, but no one spoke of it openly. In a place built on the understanding that good girls could go wrong, Bentley was not shunned. But neither was she sought after. She never socialized. She was, as she had always been, a loner. One of her colleagues, a woman who taught physical education, was sure she was an alcoholic. Rumor had it that Bentley kept a bottle in her desk. But however serious her drinking problem was, she didn’t give in to it. She was always there for school the next morning, always prepared and always composed. Her colleagues looked the other way. No one confronted her. No one tried to help. What she did on her own time was her own business.

  When she could afford it, she moved down the hill to a small apartment in a particularly shabby section of Middletown. It was an old, working-class Connecticut River town with a Main Street going to seed, a community of quarry workers and fishermen, of tough Italians down by the river, the antithesis of the picture-postcard village of Bentley’s childhood. Within the year, she moved again, this time to a little house on Route 5A in East Hampton, eight miles or so from the school, where she ensured her isolation by having no telephone. But soon she was living at yet another address, a cottage on Cherry Hill Road a few minutes from the small, picturesque town of Middlefield. Surrounded by orchards and cornfields and solid nineteenth-century farmhouses, she at last settled in. She had a life, now, that she could live.

  Although she had severed ties with the FBI after her “blackout,” refusing to be interviewed or contacted by agents, she kept Hoover personally informed of her activities, sending him a number of letters through the early 1960s. Hoover replied politely each tim
e, telling her that he hoped she would continue to keep him advised of her progress. Bentley probably thought she had found a friend in the director, or at least a person sincerely concerned with her well-being. She had no one else like that in her life. But Hoover had other motives, as he was careful to point out to his associates at the Bureau, lest they thought that the director was actually taking a personal interest in Bentley. At the bottom of one of the letters Hoover sent to Bentley was typed, for the benefit of the permanent file: “It is believed that we should express interest in the continued progress of Miss Bentley inasmuch as her services may still be needed at some future date.”

  Meanwhile, the agents themselves kept their distance. Early in 1960, they decided not to reinterview her in connection with a loyalty case, in view of her “emotional condition.” But later that year, agents did try to approach her about an ongoing espionage investigation. She refused to help, insisting once again that that part of her life was over. But her refusal was both amiable and polite. She told the agents that she had only the best feelings toward the FBI and that she and the director had exchanged several friendly letters. But just as Hoover had an ulterior motive for writing those letters, so too, it seemed, did Bentley. It happened she needed the Bureau’s help getting security clearance for a job that summer at General Dynamics.

  Although it was official policy to leave her alone except in extraordinary circumstances, agents from the New Haven field office contacted Bentley again in January of 1961, driving up to Long Lane to show her photographs in connection with a decade-long espionage investigation. Bentley agreed to take a quick look at the photos but was unable to identify the man in question. In November of that year, gathering evidence for a criminal case against the New York School for Marxist Studies, the FBI contacted Bentley once again. Would she be willing to testify in the case? Bentley told the New York agents that she had no information related to the matter and that she was “absolutely not willing to testify.” Finally, they left her alone.

  And so she settled into her job at Long Lane, becoming a fixture in that cloistered community of women and girls, feeling now that she was living up to her potential as a teacher, that she was making a real difference in the lives of her disadvantaged students. Her mother would have been proud. It was a long way from the classrooms of Foxcroft, the elite boarding school where she began her teaching career almost thirty years before, and it had been a hard journey. But finally, she had arrived somewhere. This was a job she knew she could and would keep. One school year ended and another began, then another and another. In the fall of 1963, she began her fifth year at Long Lane.

  She must have known something was wrong for months, maybe even longer, before she went to see the doctor. There would have been nausea, heartburn, bloating, changes in bowel movements, and stomach pain, a lot of stomach pain. But she had suffered through a difficult and protracted menopause, and she drank more than she should, so it may have been easy for her to dismiss her growing discomfort. Or she may have suspected something was going wrong and just didn’t want to know. In any case, in mid-November of 1963, she could no longer ignore her symptoms. She felt a bulge in her abdomen, a lump that shouldn’t be there. Taking a leave from Long Lane, she checked herself into Grace New Haven Hospital the week before Thanksgiving, the week before Yasha’s death twenty years before. After two weeks of tests and observation, on December 2, she underwent exploratory surgery.

  The doctors found cancer everywhere in the abdominal cavity. There was so much that they knew they couldn’t remove it all. It was so widespread that they couldn’t tell where it had originated. It could have started as intestinal or colon cancer, like her mother’s. It could have started in her ovaries, which might have explained her troublesome menopause. It could have started in her stomach. It didn’t matter. It was inoperable, and it was going to kill her. She was sewn back up and wheeled into her room. When she awoke, the surgeon would have to tell her the bad news.

  But she never awoke. The surgery may have been too much of a shock to her system. There may have been internal bleeding that went unnoticed. She could have thrown a clot. Whatever the cause, less than twenty-four hours after her operation, Elizabeth Bentley was dead. She was just one month shy of her fifty-sixth birthday.

  She made headlines one last time. The New York Times ran the story as its lead obituary, devoting twenty-nine paragraphs to the significance of her life and concluding that her revelations helped “set the tone of American political life for nearly a decade.” The Herald Tribune ran a six-column story that presented Bentley just as she had tried to present herself to the public: a naïve young woman snared by communism who saw the light and repented. The Washington Post credited her with unmasking a “web of wartime red treachery in this country.” Newsweek noted her passing in its Transition section, explaining that she broke with the Reds because of “a good old-fashioned New England conscience.” The right-wing National Review paid homage, calling her a courageous woman whose life should serve as a reminder of “the kind of sacrifice that can be necessary to preserve [the] country.” She would have been pleased that the final spotlight illuminated a brave and loyal American. In death, at least, she was exonerated.

  Elizabeth Bentley left no survivors, no close relations, no grieving friends. Her earlier conversion to Catholicism seemed to afford her little solace. She had not been in a Catholic church for years. Except for Yasha so very long ago, she had forged no strong ties. From her hospital bed, in the weeks prior to her surgery, she reached out to her only enduring connection: the FBI, the agents who had treated her well over the years. They had valued her even when she was at her most difficult. They had seen her through both emotional and financial crises. They had bailed her out, pulled strings, picked her up at train stations, drove her to doctors’ appointments, listened to her troubles. She had depended on them, and on their boss in Washington, D.C., for support as much as they had depended on her for information. And the Bureau had shown its respect. She had been paid periodically for her work, like a professional. And, most important, J. Edgar Hoover himself had kept in touch. As much as anyone was, the agents were her family, from the New Haven group, who had tracked her for years, to the New York office, where she had made her closest contacts, to headquarters, where she was on a first-name basis with Hoover’s top assistants. So it was to the FBI she turned in her last days.

  Several times during what she could not have known were the final two weeks of her life, Bentley called the New Haven office and talked at length to the agents there, keeping them informed of her illness and taking every opportunity to express her “warm regard and affection” for the Bureau. These may have been the only phone calls she made, her most intimate contact during her most vulnerable time.

  Two days after her death, on a frigid and snowy Thursday, a small service was held for Bentley at Roberts Funeral Home in Middletown. She had a cousin or two who probably attended. Some of her Long Lane colleagues would have been there. A few FBI agents showed up. Afterward, her body was transported to Cedar Hills Cemetery bordering one of Hartford’s oldest neighborhoods. The cemetery was a big, sprawling, pastoral place, all rolling hills and grassy knolls, meticulously kept, bucolic, and serene. Elizabeth Bentley’s grave site was across from a small pond and by the foot of a forty-foot sugar maple that would leaf out to shade her in the summer and burn a spectacular scarlet and gold in the fall. It was an idyllic place, the kind of spot one would choose for a picnic. But the day Bentley was put in the ground, the pond was a sheet of ice, and the big tree was bare, its branches stark against an ashen sky.

  She was buried among her father’s people. Above her and to the right, in a neat row, were the graves of her aunt May Bentley, her father’s sister; and May’s husband, Howard. Below her, and off to the right, in another neat row, were the graves of her mother, Mary; her father, Charles; her paternal grandparents; and two more of her Bentley aunts. She is among her father’s people, but she is not of them. Her gravestone—the
plainest of granite markers—sits off to the side, out of line, disconnected. By itself, under the big tree by the lovely pond, it is self-contained and sovereign, unfettered by the rigid geometry that surrounds it, a place for an independent woman, a Clever Girl come to rest.

  Epilogue

  ELIZABETH BENTLEY outwitted her fate. Destined for a tidy little existence lived quietly and anonymously, she instead created for herself a notorious life, a risky life, a life of conflict and contradiction, and ultimately, a life of meaning and importance.

  She was, as the Soviets code-named her, umnitsa—a good and clever girl who knew her job and did it well. But she was far more than a KGB worker bee. She helped to change history. As head of two of the most productive spy rings during the golden age of Soviet espionage, she was arguably the most important American operative working for the Soviet secret police, and certainly the most important American woman in the apparatus. When she did an about-face and became the FBI’s top informant and the government’s star witness, her defection almost single-handedly halted Soviet spying in the United States for years.

  It was her statement to the FBI that provided the first link to Julius Rosenberg. It was her headline-making accusations that forced Truman to take the “communist conspiracy” seriously. It was her public testimony, speeches, and media appearances that set the stage for the McCarthy era.

  But she was no McCarthyite. Unlike the senator and his ilk, she knew what she was talking about. Her statements, many of which were later validated by the Venona cables and by materials in Soviet archives, were truth, not fabrication; an honest report—although perhaps occasionally muddled or exaggerated—not an overheated act of delusion and spite. And what she was talking about was spying—criminal activity—not just whether someone belonged to the Communist Party or a left-wing organization that might or might not have connections to the Party, not just if one had friends who appeared to be a little pink around the edges or believed in certain causes. McCarthy was about innuendo and inference. Bentley was about actions and deeds. But the same congressmen who cut their teeth quizzing Bentley under the klieg lights went on to rally behind Joe McCarthy and create the climate of paranoia and fear that permeated the early and mid-1950s. Elizabeth Bentley opened that door.