by Amy Knight
In fact, although this was purported to be a collective agreement, it appeared that it would be the Canadians who were sticking their necks out. The precise meaning of “action” by the Americans and the British was vague, giving the impression that the Canadians might be the only ones actually carrying out arrests. An annex relating to British action was attached to the draft, pointing out that, unlike the Canadians, the British did not have the emergency powers of the Canadian Order-in-Council, and “Primrose” would have to be questioned without being arrested. He could only be arrested if he confessed to spying. Furthermore, “primrose gives the impression of being a strong and determined character who will not be likely to lose his head and confess to the authorities unless he is confronted with evidence of his activities of a much stronger nature than is at present available. For the above reasons, the authorities are not very sanguine of obtaining a confession from primrose on which it will be possible to bring a charge against him.”33 This annex was doubtless attached at the request of Hollis's colleagues in MI5, who did not want to take responsibility for a failed outcome with Alan Nunn May.
For their parts, the Americans were not in any position to arrest the spy in the State Department, whose identity, although thought to be Hiss, had yet to be verified. And Hoover had made it clear that the FBI, constrained by a lack of evidence, would be making no arrests of the other individuals (Steinberg, Witczak, and a woman named Freda Linton) connected with the Gouzenko case.34 Furthermore, the FBI was now up to its neck in a new espionage case, that of Elizabeth Bentley, a former Soviet agent who had recently approached the FBI with a story of an extensive spy ring in the United States government. Hoover requested that no action be taken by any of the parties in the Gouzenko case for the next two weeks, pending the FBI's investigation into the Bentley affair. The request infuriated MI5 and the British Foreign Office, which could not understand why action in the Gouzenko case would have any effect on the new FBI case. As the Foreign Office noted, “Meanwhile corby scents are growing rapidly colder since it is already well over two months since first alarm was given.”35
A crucial and more public topic of discussion among the three allied leaders at their meetings on November 11–15 was the related issue of international control of atomic energy. Here, too, there were disappointments, especially for the British and the Canadians and the moderates in the Truman administration, like James Byrnes and Dean Acheson, who wanted to share control of the bomb with the United Nations. Far from a significant step forward, the final accord was a vague and tenuous document that called for the creation of a UN Atomic Energy Commission that would study the question of how to control the bomb. According to the document, “specialised information regarding the practical application of atomic energy” would not be shared until effective safeguards against its military use were established.36 As Truman later recalled, he explained to Attlee and Mackenzie King “that scientists of all countries should be allowed to visit freely with one another and that free inspection of the plans for atomic energy's use in peacetime pursuits should be the policy of every country. But I stressed that this would not necessarily mean that the engineering and production know-how should be made freely available, any more than we would make freely available any of our trade secrets.”37
If King was disappointed, he certainly did not show it to Truman. In contrast to his previous visit, King had this time been invited to stay at the White House. He was evidently thrilled and wrote an effusive thank-you letter to the president:
I cannot begin to express my appreciation of all that this present visit to Washington has meant to my countrymen and myself; and, in particular what I feel about the honour and privilege of being your guest at the White House, and in this most charming of all official residences, for so many days and at so momentous a time. . . . I believe a real service has been rendered mankind by the declaration of the agreement respecting atomic energy announced yesterday; and which, I am sure, is being received with approval in all parts of the world today. Your own many personal expressions of friendship toward myself have touched me deeply. They will ever be gratefully remembered. . . . The hospitality extended, in so many ways and so generously, from the moment of the arrival of members of my staff and myself, has been such as to make impossible any adequate acknowledgement of it. I can only thank you for it, and for all that your friendship means to me, but this I do from the bottom of my heart.38
As a token of his appreciation, King continued, he was enclosing “this somewhat intimate photograph of myself and my old dog Pat.” Truman's reply, a few days later, was much shorter and more muted. He appreciated the chance to become better acquainted, he told the Canadian prime minister, and King's picture would “occupy a place of honor” in his study.39
Although Truman probably considered the Bentley case an unwelcome distraction, it was an unexpected bonanza for the FBI. Elizabeth Bentley, like Gouzenko, was a “walk-in,” a Soviet spy who defected on her own initiative and offered information to the other side. Since 1941, she had acted as a courier between an NKVD agent named Jacob Golos in New York City and his recruits, who were mainly employees of the U.S. government in Washington, D.C. A single woman in her late thirties, Bentley was high-strung, self-obsessed, and had a weakness for alcohol. She approached FBI agents on two occasions (August and October 1945) and hinted at her involvement in espionage. But she had not made a great impression. The FBI agent who spoke with Bentley in mid-October thought that she might be a “psychopath rambling on.” But he wrote up the interview and routed it to an agent in the espionage section of the New York office, who eventually reached Bentley and persuaded her to come in again.40
On November 7, 1945, Elizabeth Bentley was interviewed for a third time at FBI offices in New York City. Bentley's thirty-page statement, signed the next day, was vague and disorganized (and betrayed her intense anti-Semitism), but she did mention enough names of possible espionage suspects to motivate her interrogators to send an urgent telegram to FBI headquarters. Hoover, in turn, took Bentley's information so seriously that he contacted William Stephenson in New York on November 9 to inform him that Bentley had said a former member of his staff at the British Security Coordination, a Mr. Cedric Belfrage, was a spy.41 Given Hoover's dislike for Stephenson, he must have taken some pleasure in passing on this information.
Philby was keeping the Soviets apprised of developments in Washington. On November 18, he sent a message to the NKVD about the Gouzenko case, giving extensive details of the discussions the allies were having and the alternatives they were considering, but he made no mention of Bentley.42 The next day MI5 and MI6 received the news that the FBI was requesting a delay in action because of the new Bentley case. Philby duly reported the Bentley defection to the NKVD's London station on November 20. 43
Although Hoover would insist that the Bentley case was entirely separate from the Gouzenko affair, in fact there were several threads that tied them together. In her initial statement on November 8, Bentley had this to say about Fred Rose, the communist member of Parliament in Canada who had been implicated by Gouzenko in spying for the GRU: “Also during this period he [Golos, her lover and NKVD agent] used to get letters from Canada. I think I know now who they were from. Just before Golos died, Fred Rose, who became an mp in Canada, came down and then went back again. He kept sending messages to me asking me to come to see him. [Bentley seems to have fantasized a great deal about men making advances, but Rose was a known womanizer, so her impression might have been correct in this instance.] As I figure it out, I think what Golos was trying to do was to get material from Canada into this country via Fred Rose because the Russians told me they had no organization in Canada. I think this was in 1939.”44
Bentley was interviewed almost continuously for the next two and a half weeks, and on November 30, she signed a second, considerably longer, more coherent statement. In her later statement, Bentley altered her recollections about Rose slightly. There was no mention of Rose's visit to New Yo
rk or messages to her. As for the letters received by Golos, “I subsequently learned that some of the letters that were sent from Canada that I delivered to Golos came from either Tim Buck [head of the Canadian Communist Party] or Fred Rose. I am not certain which one.”45
In this same statement Bentley brought up the name of another Canadian who would figure in the Gouzenko case as it unraveled – that of Mr. Hazen Sise, a wealthy and prominent Montreal architect with communist leanings. Sise was not among those mentioned by Gouzenko or in his documents, but in investigating one of the suspects, Israel Halperin, the RCMP found Sise's name in Halperin's address book (which also, incidentally, contained the name of Klaus Fuchs). Bentley recalled that Rose sent one of his contacts, a Royal Canadian Air Force pilot, to see Golos in New York and suggest that Golos contact Sise, who was residing in Washington while on assignment with the National Film Board. Golos then assigned Bentley to meet with Sise on her periodic visits to the American capital. Sise furnished her with information that was “primarily gossip he had overheard” in the Canadian and British embassies. In early 1944, Bentley was told by her Soviet controller to cut her contacts with Sise, who “was suffering from nervous indigestion” and “consulting a psychiatrist.”46 Although the only connection between Sise and the Gouzenko case was an address book, the FBI would later inform its field agents that Sise “has been implicated in both the [Bentley and Corby] cases but most deeply implicated in the Corby Case.”47
The other individual linked with both the Bentley and Gouzenko investigations was Alger Hiss. In her initial statement on November 8, Bentley did not even mention Hiss. But during numerous interviews later in the month, the FBI repeatedly asked her about him. She finally came up with something in her November 30 statement about a man called “Eugene” Hiss who worked at the State Department as an assistant to Dean Acheson. (Hiss never worked as an assistant to Acheson, although they knew each other well.)48
According to Bentley, “Eugene” Hiss had allegedly recruited two or three communists in the U.S. government to work for the Russians. But she seemed not entirely sure of what she was saying. A telegram sent from New York to FBI headquarters on November 16 read as follows: Bentley “was questioned at length concerning this information but admitted that the information concerning Hiss was vague, and because of this was reluctant to make any definitive statements as far as Eugene Hiss's activities were concerned.”49
In addition to the Gouzenko and Bentley statements, the FBI, we know, had heard about Hiss from another defector from the Soviet camp, Whittaker Chambers, in two previous interviews (May 1942 and May 1945). All Chambers said in those interviews was that in the mid-thirties Alger Hiss had been a member of an underground group organized by a communist named Harold Ware. These three FBI sources of information on Hiss – Chambers, Gouzenko, and Bentley – were all decidedly vague. Neither Bentley nor Gouzenko was even able to provide his exact name. Yet Hoover, on November 28, requested permission from the U.S. attorney general to conduct technical surveillance on Hiss: “In connection with this Bureau's investigation of Soviet espionage activity, it has been reported that Alger Hiss . . . has been engaged in espionage for the Soviet Secret Intelligence (NKVD). I recommend authorization of a technical surveillance on Hiss to determine the extent of his activities on behalf of the Soviets and for the additional purpose of identifying espionage agents.”50
Attorney General Tom Clark sent back a note asking, “Is this man employed at the State Dept. If so, what do we have on him?” Hoover replied with a memorandum citing his evidence briefly. The first section is blacked out in the declassified copies, but it presumably referred to what Gouzenko said, and the next two sections discuss the Chambers and Bentley claims. Chambers was reported as saying Hiss had been a member of an underground espionage group, when in fact Chambers had not even mentioned espionage at this point. And he never brought up the NKVD in regard to Hiss. In fact, all of Hiss's later accusers claimed that Hiss worked not for the NKVD but the GRU, the military intelligence agency to which Gouzenko had belonged. As for Bentley, Hoover neglected to tell the attorney general that her memory on Hiss was so fuzzy she thought his first name was Eugene and that she had told the FBI just days before she could not make any definitive statements about Hiss's activities.51
When asked to elaborate on Hiss in a third interview in March 1946, Chambers insisted he had lost all contact with him after 1937 and could provide no further details. According to the FBI, Chambers stated that “as a matter of fact he has absolutely no information that would conclusively prove that hiss held a membership card in the Communist Party or that he was an actual dues paying member of the Communist Party even while he [Chambers] was active prior to 1937 [italics added]. He volunteered that he knew that in 1937 hiss was favorably impressed with the Communist movement. . . .”52 Hoover did not report this to the attorney general, and the FBI kept up its surveillance of Hiss.
By the time Bentley signed her November 30 statement, after being prodded for days on end by the FBI, she had implicated close to 150 individuals in spying for the Russians, and Hoover had got approval from the attorney general to have several of them put under physical, wiretap, and mail surveillance.53 Aside from Hiss, there were two others singled out for surveillance who had, or would have, a connection to the Gouzenko case. One was Harry Dexter White, a top official in the U.S. Treasury, whose case would eventually make headlines when he was accused publicly of spying. Bentley had much more to say about White than she did about Hiss. Specifically, she alleged that White was part of a Washington, D.C., group led by Nathan Silvermaster that passed government documents through her to the Soviets.
Bentley made it clear, however, in her first statement that she had never seen or met White. As one historian put it, “her direct knowledge of White's alleged role in espionage was, at best, sketchy,” and “most of her allegations and knowledge of personal information about Harry and Anne Terry White [his wife] were based on informal conversations she ‘overheard’ in the Silvermaster household . . . or from secondhand gossip.”54 Chambers had never mentioned White in his own interviews with the FBI up to this point, although he would have more to say, and show, later. Secret Soviet telegrams sent in the 1940s that were later decrypted and released by the U.S. National Security Agency in the 1990s – the Venona decrypts – strongly suggest that White was at least an unwitting informant to the Soviets. But at this point the suspicions against White were based solely on flimsy hearsay testimony from Bentley.
The question then arises, how was the FBI able to justify, as early as November 20 (before Bentley had even signed her expanded statement), a round-the-clock surveillance of White that included phone-tapping, mail interception, monitoring of his physical movements, and, by December, recording of his private conversations at home?55 Without doubt the attorney general and others who were informed of the Bentley case were strongly influenced by Gouzenko's claims about Soviet espionage in the United States.
Another suspect put under technical surveillance by the FBI in December was Dr. Arthur Steinberg, the American scientist implicated by Gouzenko, who was now living in Alexandria, Virginia.56 Hoover had known about Steinberg since September but had told RCMP commissioner Wood in mid-October that the FBI did not have any evidence on which to make an arrest. Why did the FBI not start its surveillance of Steinberg earlier, so as to gather evidence? Presumably they had nothing to offer the attorney general to justify such an intrusive violation of individual privacy. Had anything come up since then? Or had the FBI somehow squeezed in Steinberg's name as part of the group implicated by Bentley, thus giving them an opportunity to go on a fishing expedition?
The FBI's trawling yielded nothing, which was hardly surprising. The Soviets knew all about Bentley's defection and told their agents in the United States to cease their activities.57 Two weeks later, on November 27, 1945, Hoover gave the go-ahead for Ottawa to proceed with arrests in the Gouzenko case. The message was passed to Canadian ambassador Lester Pears
on by Acheson, who told him that the United States would not be in a position to take action on the “Miss Corby” (Bentley) case in the near future, because the woman's accusations were unsupported by documents.58
What Hoover did not realize was that in requesting a brief postponement in the Gouzenko case he had given Mackenzie King cause to rethink the Canadian strategy and revert to his original idea of handling the matter with quiet diplomacy. King became more inclined toward this plan when he learned that no overt action (that is, arrests) would be taken by the Americans in the Bentley case. This meant that, with the British still dithering about what to do with Alan Nunn May, the Canadians would be acting on their own if they arrested spy suspects. King was well aware of the possible pitfalls for the Canadian government alone if they went ahead with arrests.
In early December, just as the Soviet ambassador to Canada, Georgii Zarubin, of whom King was very fond, was about to leave on holiday for Moscow (in fact Zarubin never returned), King made up his mind to have a talk with him. King wanted to send a message to Stalin through the ambassador about the espionage revealed by Gouzenko and request an end to the Soviets’ illegal activities (accompanied by the expulsion of the Soviets in the Ottawa embassy who were spying). The Canadian individuals involved would not be arrested, but instead would be questioned by means of “departmental enquiries.”59
