Elizabeth Bentley
Elizabeth Terrill Bentley was an American NKVD spymaster, who was recruited from within the Communist Party USA. She served the Soviet Union as the primary handler of multiple highly placed moles within both the United States Federal Government and the Office of Strategic Services from 1938 to 1945. She defected by contacting the Federal Bureau of Investigation and debriefing about her espionage activities. Her writings include Out of Bondage: the Story of Elizabeth Bentley.
Bentley became widely known after testifying as a prosecution witness in a number of trials and before the United States Congress' House Un-American Activities Committee. Bentley was subsequently paid by the FBI for both her assistance in counterespionage investigations and her testimony before Congressional subcommittees. Bentley exposed two spy networks and ultimately accused more than 80 American citizens of both treason and espionage for a foreign power.
Early life
Elizabeth Terrill Bentley was born in New Milford, Connecticut, the daughter of dry-goods merchant Charles Prentiss Bentley and schoolteacher May Charlotte Turrill. Her parents moved to Ithaca, New York in 1915 and, by 1920, the family had relocated to McKeesport, Pennsylvania. Later that year, they returned to New York, settling in Rochester. Bentley's parents were described as straight-laced Episcopalians from New England.She attended Vassar College, graduating in 1930 with degrees in English, Italian, and French. In 1933, as a graduate student at Columbia University, Bentley won a fellowship to the University of Florence. While in Italy, she briefly joined the, a local fascist student group, in Italy. She was influenced by, her anti-fascist faculty advisor with whom she had an affair at Columbia.
During work for her master's degree, Bentley attended meetings of the American League Against War and Fascism. Although she would later say that she found Communist literature unreadable and "dry as dust", she was attracted to the sense of community and social conscience she found among her friends in the league. After Bentley learned that most were members of the Communist Party USA, she joined the party in March 1935.
Espionage activity
Bentley became active in espionage in 1935, when she obtained a job at the Italian Library of Information in New York City; the library was Fascist Italy's propaganda bureau in the United States. She reported her employment to CPUSA headquarters, informing them about her willingness to spy on the fascists. Juliet Stuart Poyntz, who also worked at the library, approached and recruited Bentley. The Communists were interested in the information Bentley could provide, so NKVD officer Jacob Golos was assigned as her contact and controller in 1938.Golos, an immigrant from Russia who became a naturalized United States citizen in 1915, was one of the Soviet Union's most important intelligence agents in the United States. When they met, Golos was involved in planning the assassination of Leon Trotsky. Bentley and Golos soon became lovers and, at this point, she thought she was spying solely for the American Communist Party. It was more than a year before she learned his true name and, according to her later testimony, two years before she knew that he was working for Soviet intelligence.
In 1940, two years into their relationship, the Justice Department forced Golos to register as an agent of the Soviet government under the Foreign Agents Registration Act. This increased the risk of contacting and accepting documents from his network of American spies, and he gradually transferred this responsibility to Bentley. Golos needed someone to take charge of the day-to-day business of the United States Service and Shipping Corporation, a Comintern front organization for espionage activities; Bentley took on this role as well. Although she was never directly paid for her espionage work, she would eventually earn $800 a month as vice president of U.S. Service and Shipping. As Bentley acquired an important role in Soviet intelligence, the Soviets gave her the code name "Umnitsa", loosely translated as "wise girl" or "clever girl".
Silvermaster group
Most of Bentley's contacts were in what prosecutors and historians would later call the "Silvermaster group", a network of spies centered around Nathan Gregory Silvermaster. This network became one of the most important Soviet espionage operations in the United States. Silvermaster worked with the Resettlement Administration and, later, with the Board of Economic Warfare. Although he did not have access to much sensitive information, he knew several Communists and Communist sympathizers in the government who were better placed and willing to pass information to him; using Bentley, he sent it to Moscow. The Soviet Union and the United States were allies in World War II, and much of the information Silvermaster collected for the Soviets concerned the war against Nazi Germany; the Soviets were bearing the burden of the ground war in Europe, and were interested in American intelligence. This intelligence included secret estimates of German military strength, data on U.S. munitions production, and information on the Allies' schedule for opening a second front in Europe. The contacts in Golos's and Bentley's extended network ranged from dedicated Stalinists to, in the words of Bentley biographer Kathryn Olmsted, "romantic idealists" who "wanted to help the brave Russians beat the Nazi war machine".Conflicts with Soviet spymasters
In late 1943, Golos had a fatal heart attack. After meeting with CPUSA General Secretary Earl Browder, Bentley decided to continue her espionage work and took Golos' place. Her new contact in Soviet intelligence was Iskhak Akhmerov, the leading NKGB resident spy. Under orders from Moscow, Akhmerov wanted Bentley to report her contacts directly to him. Bentley, Browder, and Golos had resisted this change, believing that using an American intermediary was the best way to handle their sources and fearing that Russian agents would endanger the American spies and possibly drive them away. With Browder's support, Bentley initially ignored a series of orders that she "hand over" her agents to Akhmerov. She expanded her spy network when Browder gave her control of another group of agents: the Perlo group, with contacts in the War Production Board, the United States Senate, and the Treasury Department.Since her days in Florence, Bentley had experienced bouts of depression and alcohol abuse. Despondent and lonely after the death of Golos and under increasing pressure from Soviet intelligence, she began to drink more heavily. Bentley missed work at U.S. Service and Shipping, and neighbors described her as drinking "all the time".
In early June 1944, Browder acceded to Akhmerov's demands and agreed to instruct the members of the Silvermaster group to report directly to the NKGB. Bentley later said that this was what turned her against Communism in the United States. She testified to a grand jury in 1948: "I discovered then that Earl Browder was just a puppet, that somebody pulled the strings in Moscow". Bentley's biographers suggest that her objections were not ideological, but were related more to a lifelong dislike of being given orders and a sense that the reassignments of her contacts left her with no meaningful role. She was ordered to give up all of her remaining sources later in 1944, and her Soviet superior told her that she would have to leave her position as vice president of U.S. Service and Shipping.
Break with the Soviets
In 1945, Bentley began an affair with a man who she came to suspect was an FBI or Soviet agent sent to spy on her. Her Soviet contact suggested that she should emigrate to the Soviet Union, but Bentley feared that she might be executed there. In August 1945, Bentley went to the FBI office in New Haven, Connecticut, and met with the agent-in-charge. She did not immediately defect; she seemed to be "feeling out" the FBI, and did not begin to tell her full story to the agency until November. Bentley's personal situation continued to worsen; she arrived drunk at a September meeting with Anatoly Gorsky, her NKGB controller. She became angry with Gorsky, called him and his fellow Russian agents "gangsters", and obliquely threatened to become an FBI informant. Bentley soon realized that her tirade might have put her life in danger. Gorsky, when reporting the meeting to Moscow, said he should "get rid of her".Moscow advised Gorsky to be patient with Bentley and calm her down. A few weeks later, it was learned that Louis Budenz had become an anti-communist. Budenz had not yet revealed his knowledge of espionage activity, but he knew Elizabeth Bentley's name and knew she was a spy. Imperiled from multiple directions, Bentley decided to defect and returned to the FBI on November 7, 1945.
Defection and aftermath
In a series of debriefing interviews with the FBI beginning November 7, 1945, Bentley implicated nearly 150 people as Soviet spies. The FBI already suspected many of those she named, and some had been named by earlier defectors Igor Gouzenko and Whittaker Chambers which increased FBI confidence in her information. They gave her the code name "Gregory", and J. Edgar Hoover ordered the strictest secrecy of her identity and defection.Hoover advised British Security Coordination Western Hemisphere head William Stephenson of Bentley's defection, and Stephenson notified London. However, the British Secret Intelligence Service's new Section IX head Kim Philby was a Soviet double agent who would escape to the Soviet Union in 1963. Philby alerted Moscow about Bentley, and it discontinued contact with her network as the FBI was beginning its surveillance. Bentley's NKGB contact, Gorsky, again recommended to Moscow that she be "liquidated"; the suggestion was again rejected.
Philby's breach of the secrecy surrounding Bentley's defection foiled a year-long attempt by the FBI to employ her as a double agent. Additionally, because of the shutdown of Soviet espionage activity, FBI surveillance of the agents Bentley had named turned up no evidence which could be used to prosecute them. About 250 FBI agents were assigned to the Bentley case, following up leads she had provided and investigating people she had named. The FBI, grand juries, and congressional committees would eventually interview many of these alleged spies, who invoked their Fifth Amendment right not to testify or maintained their innocence.
For Hoover and a few highly-placed FBI and army intelligence personnel, the corroboration of Bentley's was the late-1940s-to-early-1950s Venona project decryption of wartime cables between Soviet intelligence agents and Moscow. Bentley was referred to in the cables by the codename she had given the FBI, and several of her known contacts and documents she was known to have passed to the Soviets were discussed.
The classified Venona project was considered so secret that the U.S. government was unwilling to expose it by allowing its material to be used as evidence in a trial. Neither Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt or Harry Truman were aware of the project by name, although the presidents received some of its conclusions as summaries by J. Edgar Hoover in weekly intelligence reports.