The Truth-Spiller

Red Spy Queen: A Biography of Elizabeth Bentley, by Kathryn S. Olmsted (North Carolina, 288 pp., $27.50)

On November 7, 1945, Elizabeth Bentley walked into the New York office of the FBI. She emerged after eight hours of interrogation, having signed a 31-page statement that implicated some 80 people in Soviet espionage-including U.S. government officials Nathan Gregory Silvermaster, Duncan Lee, and Maurice Halperin. Bentley would eventually become known to the whole country as a star witness before congressional investigating committees and at trials of Communist leaders.

Today, she is hardly remembered. To the extent that she exists in the current historical consciousness, she is usually treated as a symbolic example of what was wrong with the so-called McCarthy era, defined by most historians as a needless witch hunt perpetuated by the (usually false) stories told by ex-Communist witnesses such as Elizabeth Bentley. Ellen Schrecker, the dean of the anti-anti-Communist historians, refers to her in her 1998 book on the McCarthy era as a "melodramatic, unstable, and alcoholic woman" whom even FBI agents portrayed as "slightly hysterical." In his influential 1978 book, The Great Fear, the British writer David Caute put it more simply: "Elizabeth Bentley was a liar." This new biography of Bentley by historian Kathryn S. Olmsted of the University of California, Davis, will alter the historical landscape considerably: No longer will writers be able to dismiss Bentley's testimony so cavalierly.

Olmsted writes that Bentley helped "trigger an earthquake in American politics.

The Alger Hiss case, the Smith Act prosecutions of Communist party leaders, and Senator Joe McCarthy's denunciations of State Department Reds all stemmed from Bentley's decision to walk into that forbidding FBI office." This is a bit of an overstatement-surely Whittaker Chambers had much more to do with the Hiss case, which first concentrated the nation's attention on the issue of domestic Communism- but Bentley was certainly prominent, and her key role as an ex- Communist witness makes this new assessment of her very important indeed.

Unlike Chambers, Bentley was not a brilliant intellectual; nor was she an individual of deep philosophical conviction or a person of great character. Chambers's masterpiece, Witness, is still read and retains its emotional and intellectual power; Bentley's memoir, Out of Bondage, reads like a 1950s-style potboiler about a naive college girl who joined the Communist underground "with the Man I Loved" (as a 1950s serialization put it). In that book, Bentley depicted herself-falsely- as a conventional housewife who, like any good wife, obeyed her husband. In fact, while she and Jacob Golos-who turned out to be a top Soviet agent within the American Communist party-were lovers, he was married to someone else. Olmsted correctly notes that Bentley's self- portrait was a fraud, and that she had, in reality, "led a most unconventional life, from her rejection of marriage to her choice of careers. She had successfully planned her defection to avoid assassination by the NKGB and imprisonment by the U.S. government."

On one level, then, Bentley's critics were correct: She was a troubled and manipulative woman, prone to alcohol abuse and gross exaggeration. Even as the press was dubbing her the "blonde spy queen," J. Edgar Hoover was privately complaining that Bentley was "making us look like saps." When she began public testimony, she showed sympathy for the plight of those she named, describing them as "a bunch of misguided idealists" led astray by cunning Communist party leaders; she also quickly started engaging in the behavior-in Olmsted's words, "the long and gradual process of 'improving' her story"-that led so many to distrust her.

Nevertheless, despite her foibles, errors, and exaggerations, Elizabeth Bentley told the truth in her major accusations about Soviet espionage; Olmsted makes clear that the Venona revelations of the recent past have all but confirmed Bentley's veracity. When the FBI was carrying out its search for the unknown and elusive courier the KGB used to get data from their spy Klaus Fuchs, they knew only that the mystery man was either a chemist or engineer. Bentley had told them, however, that one Abraham Brothman, her very first source, was a chemical engineer; Brothman in turn pointed them in the direction of Harry Gold-who turned out to be Fuchs's mystery courier, as well as courier for David Greenglass, Julius Rosenberg's brother-in-law.

Many of the offspring of people named by Bentley persist in asserting their relatives' innocence. Duncan Lee, a Wall Street lawyer who became personal assistant to William Donovan, head of the wartime OSS, was cultivated as a Soviet agent by Mary Price, a secretary to Walter Lippman who was herself a key Soviet operative. To this day, Lee's children steadfastly maintain that Bentley lied about his role as a Soviet agent. But, as Olmsted comments, "this interpretation assumes that Elizabeth and [Jacob] Golos perpetrated a massive and complex fraud against their Soviet superiors by systematically taking documents from other sources and claiming that they came from Lee. Some of the documents . . . though, were much more likely to come from Lee than from any other OSS source." Moreover, she correctly adds, one can take the Venona cables "at face value and acknowledge that they confirm Elizabeth's story."