Lauren Kessler - 13 Oct

PART ONE
The Romance

PART TWO
The Reality

PART THREE
The Ruin

H ER 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 turnedand started naming names.

Bentleys lengthy statement to the FBI awoke the Truman White House to the possibility that Soviet spying was more than just J. Edgar Hoovers paranoia. Bentleys 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 FDRs assistant, Lauchlin Currie. And so was Duncan Lee, a top aide in the OSS, the precursor to the CIA. Bentleys 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 freelyright and wrongand 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 its 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. McCarthys 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 Hoovers 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 IIvintage, 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 tempting to see Bentley as a pitiable, unregenerate character. She was deeply flawed, yes, but her story is more complicatedand far more interestingthan 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 bornand who paid the price.

S HE 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 Schraffts on Fourth Avenue. The man reading the paper in the lobby of the Hotel St. George. The man at the bar. She shouldnt have talked to him. She shouldnt 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 couldnt quite remember.