Clever Girl Read online

  Clever girl

  Elizabeth Bentley,

  the spy Who Ushered in

  the McCarthy Era

  LAUREN KESSLER

  To Tom,

  again, and always

  Contents

  Introduction

  Prologue

  PART ONE

  The Romance

  1. Connecticut Yankee

  2. Sad Sack

  3. Awakenings

  4. Circle of Friends

  5. A Steeled Bolshevik

  6. Yasha

  7. Tradecraft

  8. Konspiratsia

  9. Clever Girl

  10. Russian Roulette

  11. Closing In

  PART TWO

  The Reality

  12. In from the Cold

  13. Hoover’s Turn

  14. Red Spy Queen

  15. The Lady Appears

  16. Un-American Activities

  17. She Said, He Said

  18. The Spotlight

  19. My Life as a Spy

  PART THREE

  The Ruin

  20. The Center Cannot Hold

  21. Back in the Act

  22. Under Attack

  23. An Unsettled Woman

  24. The Wayward Girl Comes Home

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Searchable Terms

  About the Author

  Praise

  Other Books by Lauren Kessler

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Introduction

  HER CODE NAME was “Clever Girl,” but some contacts knew her as “Myrna,” and others called her “Helen.” To the New York City tabloids in the late 1940s, she was the “Red Spy Queen.” She ferried secret documents from covert communists in the federal government to her Russian lover, a KGB operative. She recruited informants. She debriefed agents. During the “golden age” of Soviet espionage, Elizabeth Turrill Bentley, the well-bred, Vassar-educated descendant of Puritan clergy, ran two of the most productive spy rings in America. And then, one day in 1945, she “turned”—and started naming names.

  Bentley’s lengthy statement to the FBI awoke the Truman White House to the possibility that Soviet spying was more than just J. Edgar Hoover’s paranoia. Bentley’s testimony before grand juries and at House and Senate subcommittee hearings exposed scores of Communist Party members working for the federal government who were passing confidential information and secret documents, and otherwise aiding the Soviets. Harry Dexter White, assistant secretary of the Treasury and a member of one of the spy rings Bentley managed, was one of them. So was FDR’s assistant, Lauchlin Currie. And so was Duncan Lee, a top aide in the OSS, the precursor to the CIA. Bentley’s statement to the FBI helped point the way to Julius Rosenberg, and her testimony as the last witness for the prosecution at the Rosenbergs’ trial sealed their fate. Her disclosures and accusations put a halt to Russian spying for years and helped to set the tone of American political life for nearly a decade.

  But who really was Elizabeth Bentley? Was she a smart, independent woman who made her choices freely—right and wrong—and had the strength of character to see them through, or an emotionally unstable and needy spinster in search of love and excitement? Was she shrewd and self-possessed, a woman who calculated her moves and called the shots, or had she been used and manipulated by others? Was she protagonist or victim? Saint or sinner? Traitor or patriot?

  Two generations of writers and historians have largely steered clear of her story, and it’s not hard to understand why. The excesses of the McCarthy era, a period Elizabeth Bentley helped to usher in, have until recently blinded most of us to the more complex realities of that time. Senator McCarthy made headlines claiming, with much malice and little proof, that communists had infiltrated the government, that hundreds, even thousands of people who believed in perfectly legitimate liberal and progressive causes were in fact dangerous radicals intent on disabling democracy and killing capitalism. McCarthy’s faked evidence, his egregious tactics, his smear campaigns that ruined innocent lives, the often offensive and sometimes clearly unconstitutional behavior of the House Un-American Activities Committee and its Senate sibling, the Internal Security Subcommittee, made anticommunism not just a dirty business but a highly suspect one.

  What many people who witnessed that era and many historians who wrote about it later came to believe was that communist subversion was a myth invented by Joe McCarthy, that communist spies were a figment of J. Edgar Hoover’s overheated imagination, that the entire “communist conspiracy” was a fabrication born of paranoia and right-wing political intrigue. Because McCarthy was wrong about so much, because he was so visibly and dangerously out of control, it was easy to believe that he, along with the congressional committees that paved the way for his excesses, was wrong about this, too. Given this understanding of history, of what importance could Elizabeth Bentley be? How could she be taken seriously? How could her life be anything more than a sad footnote to an indefensible time?

  But history is not immutable. Sometimes the present rewrites the past, and the story we thought we knew, the story we were so sure of, begins to unravel and reweave itself into different cloth. It can happen in an instant: documents no one knew existed are discovered or declassified; secret archives are opened; people who had been silent speak out. And we are forced to reevaluate, to literally re-view history. This is what happened when suddenly, dramatically, in the mid-1990s, the United States government first revealed the existence of a top-secret project, code-named Venona.

  Venona was a World War II–vintage, Army counterintelligence scheme that set a group of ace cryptographers to work trying to break coded cablegrams sent from Russian embassies in the United States back home to Moscow. That Army intelligence was intercepting and working to decipher messages sent by our then staunch wartime ally speaks to the flimsiness of the friendship between the two countries. And it says much about the basic distrust and fear that underlay the relationship between the most powerful capitalist country and what was the most powerful communist nation. Few people beyond those directly involved knew of the Venona project at the time. FBI director Hoover guarded the secret zealously, cutting the CIA, the Congress, the cabinet, the White House, and almost, but not quite, the president, out of the loop.

  By the early 1940s, the extraordinarily complex Soviet code had been broken, and slowly, painstakingly, nearly three thousand cables were decrypted and translated. When the job was done, there was little doubt to the meaning of the cables: The Soviets had been spying on the U.S. government throughout the 1930s and 1940s, aided by a number of American citizens working within the government who had passed information and documents to both American and Russian contacts. The cables detailed who was spying, making clear the tie between the American communist party and the Russian espionage effort. And the cables highlighted the critical work of an American-born woman operative who rose to a position of power greater than that of any other American spy. Her code name was “Clever Girl.” Her real name was Elizabeth Bentley.

  And so, a half century after the fact, the story began to reveal itself. The Venona cablegrams coupled with documents found by U.S. scholars in fleetingly accessible archives in Moscow show that the Soviets established a productive espionage apparatus in the United States that made use of American communists and sympathizers. A “communist conspiracy” did, in fact, exist. Spies were real. Elizabeth Bentley did what she said she did. She was near center stage in a drama few knew had even taken place. She was an important part of this moment in history. She made this history.

  Hers is a story of danger, intrigue, romance, treachery, hope, despair, betrayal, and redemption. It is tem
pting to see Bentley as a pitiable, unregenerate character. She was deeply flawed, yes, but her story is more complicated—and far more interesting—than the sum of her personal imperfections. It is a story of good intentions gone bad, of skewed loyalties, of a past that could not be outrun no matter how long the race. It is the story of a woman who lived a life much bigger than the one to which she was born—and who paid the price.

  Prologue

  SHE KNEW THEY were following her. She could feel it with that sixth sense Yasha had helped her develop. The man in the dark suit idling at the street corner when she left work in the late afternoon. The man at the back table at Schrafft’s on Fourth Avenue. The man reading the paper in the lobby of the Hotel St. George. The man at the bar. She shouldn’t have talked to him. She shouldn’t have taken him up to her room, she knew that. But she was lonely and on her third martini, and he was attentive, very attentive. What had they talked about? What did she tell him? She couldn’t quite remember.

  She knew they were following her. She just didn’t know who “they” were. Sometimes she thought it was the KGB. The Russians wanted her out. They had made that clear. But did they also want her dead? It had happened before. People had disappeared. Yasha had told her stories. But “Al,” her KGB contact, seemed genuinely concerned for her security when they rendezvoused in a darkened movie theater in Washington, D.C., a few weeks earlier. He warned her that the situation was extremely dangerous. He told her to take a vacation, to go to Canada or Mexico where she didn’t need a passport. From there, the Russians would smuggle her out to safety. So maybe the KGB had her best interests at heart. Or maybe not. Maybe it was a plot. Yasha would know. He understood the way things worked. But Yasha was gone.

  Sometimes she thought it was her own people, people in the American communist party, who were setting her up for a fall. The company she worked for, her “cover,” United States Service and Shipping, had originally been funded with party money, and now it seemed the party wanted it back. One party official told her he would “blow her to hell” if the money wasn’t returned. Was that a serious threat or a bluff? Was the man just trying to scare her or was the party really after her? She didn’t know.

  Mostly, though, she figured it was the FBI. Agents had tailed her before, back when Yasha had that trouble with the Dies Committee and almost went to jail. That was years ago, but maybe they were back on the trail. They were certainly back on some trail. Two months ago, the papers were full of details about an FBI raid on the offices of a magazine with ties to the party. The agents found stacks of confidential documents, letters, memos, and reports from the offices of governmental agencies. The documents had to have come from someone inside, a government worker passing secret information to the party. The FBI was zeroing in. The papers said it was the work of spies. How soon would it be before some trail led to her?

  And then there was Louis Budenz, a long-time party member and former editor of Labor Age. He had been involved in espionage activities and had known and worked with Yasha. She had met him several times. Now Budenz had publicly denounced communism. He was making headlines. Would he start naming names? And would hers be one of them?

  Her nerves were shot. When she wasn’t at work, she was alone in her hotel room, alternately pouring herself stiff drinks and pacing the floor. The Russians had told her to leave her apartment. They thought it was being watched. So now she was camped out in a single room at the St. George, lonely, confused, afraid. Even the alcohol, as much as she was drinking, wasn’t taking the edge off.

  Yasha hated the FBI, but they might be her best hope. If she could get to them before they got to her, if she could get to them before the Russians got to her, she might have a chance. If she told her story first, she might save herself. She might not be hounded by the party or killed by the KGB or imprisoned as a spy. But how to do it? She couldn’t just stroll into the FBI’s New York office down on Foley Square. They would be watching that, whoever “they” were. If the Russians saw her, that would be the end of it. If someone from the party saw her, even if no one was really after her for the money, she would be branded a traitor, and that could mean trouble.

  She thought about taking the train to Washington, D.C., as she had done so many times before, when she went to check on her sources and gather the documents they had for her. But she couldn’t imagine herself marching into FBI headquarters. Where would she go once she got in the door? It wasn’t worth thinking about anyway because, of course, the KGB would be watching there, too. She would have to go to some small field office, some place more discreet, some place where no one knew her, where she could sneak in and out without being noticed.

  Through that spring and into the summer, she had weighed her options. She was in over her head, she knew that. And she was scared. But she couldn’t let fear get in the way of being careful, of thinking ahead, of planning. She had to keep her wits about her. Her life could depend on it. Finally, she made up her mind. She would go to New Haven. She knew the town—Connecticut was home turf—and there was a field office there. The address was familiar. She would take the train up from Grand Central. If she didn’t panic, if she paid close attention and followed the routine, she could lose the tail, if there was one, on her way to the station. Yasha had taught her how. He’d pointed out restaurants and movie theaters and subway stations where she could slip in one entrance and out another. Macy’s was always a good bet, with all those doors and all those shoppers. In a pinch, there was the ladies’ room at Grand Central. She’d done it before.

  It could work, she decided. She could get herself to New Haven safely and unnoticed. But once there, she would have to play it close to the chest. She’d figured it all out. She wouldn’t tell them her story. She wasn’t going to confess. Not yet. She had to see if they knew about her, see if that man in the bar—the one she shouldn’t have talked to, the one she was sleeping with—really was an FBI agent. She had to meet these Bureau men face to face, see if they were the monsters Yasha told her they were. Then later, maybe, if it seemed right, if it felt safe, she would talk.

  Part One

  The Romance

  Chapter 1

  Connecticut Yankee

  IN THE ROLLING hills of western Connecticut, at the foot of the Berkshires, where the Housatonic River cuts a wide swath south to the Long Island Sound, sits the self-possessed, quintessentially New England town of New Milford. Bucolic, picture-postcard pretty in all seasons, it is a town that could have been engraved by Currier & Ives, with its expansive village green, its tall, white-steepled churches, and its quiet, leafy lanes. Up from the river, on Main Street and Bridge Street and Bank Street, the houses are wood-frame colonials, impressive Greek Revivals and elegant Queen Anne Victorians, one historic building after another, built to last by merchants and farmers, cavalrymen and clergy, doctors and bankers, the solid, and stolid, New Englanders who made this place their home since the early 1700s.

  But New Milford is more than a comely village. It is a town with a pedigree. It was the birthplace of Roger Sherman, a leading colonial statesman and politician who signed the Declaration of Independence and the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution, and served as one of Connecticut’s first senators. A hundred years later, the town was an important stop on the Underground Railroad. By the beginning of the twentieth century, it was a diverse and prosperous commercial center, with two banks, three hardware stores, four blacksmiths, five hotels, six dry-goods stores, seven doctors, eight churches, and one billiards parlor. Its population of five thousand made it the largest town in the Berkshire Valley. Still, it was largely a rural community, the few, well-manicured downtown streets surrounded by rolling farmlands. Out in the countryside, there were one-room schoolhouses to serve the farm families. In town, there was the New Milford Center School, housing grades one through eight, and presided over in 1906 by a bright, well-read, plain-faced, twenty-nine-year-old spinster named Mary Charlotte Turrill.

  The Turrill family had the deepest of roots in
New Milford. Daniel Turrill, Mary’s great-great-great-great-great-grandfather, was one of the original purchasers—from “the Heathen,” as town records indicate—of the New Milford townsite in 1702. But he was not the first Turrill in the colonies. That was his father, Roger Tyrrell, who came to America from Hereford, England, on the ship Lion in 1632 as part of the great Puritan migration. By the time of the Revolutionary War, in which nine Turrill men fought, the family had already been in Connecticut for five generations. John Turrill, Mary’s great-grandfather, was a private who fought at Germantown and survived the winter at Valley Forge. After the war, he married the niece of colonial statesman Roger Sherman, thereby connecting two of the “first families” of Connecticut. Mary’s father, Frederick Jay, a member of the eighth generation of Turrills in America, was an ardent trout fisherman, a vestryman of St. John’s Episcopal Church of New Milford, and owner of one of the finest tobacco farms in the area. He and his wife, Julia Frances Smith—a “conscientious Christian, a devoted wife and mother”—had seven children, the oldest of whom was Mary Charlotte, born in the summer of 1877.

  She was a bright child and an eager learner, a girl of both strong character and strong faith. The Turrills lived close to town, with its venerable public library, its active civic and cultural life, and its laudable public schools, which, by town meeting decree, distributed textbooks free to all “scholars.” Her parents must have encouraged her educational ambitions, for when Mary finished eight grades of public schooling in New Milford, she was sent to Northfield Seminary for Young Ladies in the hills of northern Massachusetts. A college preparatory boarding school founded by a free-thinking evangelist preacher, Northfield Seminary—commonly referred to as “Mr. Moody’s School”—was famous for having graduated a former slave in 1889 and enrolling Choctaw and Sioux students. Mary Charlotte returned to New Milford a young woman enlightened, and a young woman with a vocation, teaching, which she found deeply rewarding. By the age of twenty-nine, she was a veteran teacher at Center School in the village and, by the standards of the day, a confirmed spinster.