FBI Silvermaster File


The Silvermaster File of the United States' Federal Bureau of Investigation is a 162-volume compendium totalling 26,000 pages of documents relating to the FBI's investigation of GRU and NKVD moles and spy rings inside the U.S. federal government both before and during the Cold War.
Beginning in 1945 with the allegations of defector and former NKVD courier Elizabeth Bentley, the file is also known as the Bentley file or Gregory file.
The file takes its name from Nathan Gregory Silvermaster of the War Production Board, whom Bentley named as head of an underground Communist network known as the Silvermaster Group. Among the people named in the file in connection with this group are President Franklin Roosevelt's Administrative Assistant Lauchlin Currie and Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Harry Dexter White.
Also named in the file are Victor Perlo, chief of the Aviation Section of the War Production Board, and contacts of his Perlo group, including Alger Hiss, secretary general of the United Nations Charter Conference. Among dozens of others named by Bentley in this file in connection with this network is Duncan Lee, confidential assistant to William Donovan, founder and director of the Office of Strategic Services, wartime predecessor of the CIA.

Prosecutions

Original plans for Bentley to serve as a double agent and gather sufficient evidence to prosecute the Soviet agents identified in the Silvermaster files were ruined when her identity was inadvertently leaked and the USSR quickly shut down its operations. The Silvermaster file in combination with other secret proofs such as the Venona intercepts gave US intelligence the identity of many Soviet agents without the practical means to secure convictions. Also, the statute of limitations for an espionage prosecution was quite short. This was a significant part of the backstory of McCarthyism. Bentley's double agent career would have enabled the US to expose the spies without compromising Venona and losing that as an ongoing intelligence source.