Book Review | Clever Girl: Elizabeth Bentley, the Spy Who Ushered in the McCarthy Era

CIA's Center for the Study of Intelligence

Studies in Intelligence, 2004

Clever Girl: Elizabeth Bentley, the Spy Who Ushered in the McCarthy Era

By Lauren Kessler. New York, NY: Harper Collins, 2003. 372 pages, endnotes, bibliography, photos, index.

Reviewed by Hayden B. Peake, curator of the CIA's Historical Intelligence Collection

After nearly 50 years of public obscurity, Elizabeth Bentley--Vassar graduate, teacher, former NKGB espionage agent, the first woman guest to appear on the televised "Meet The Press,"8 author of Out of Bondage,9 and post-World War II FBI informant--is the subject of two well-written and informative biographies published within a year of each other. The first, by University of California (Davis) history professor Kathryn S. Olmsted,10 was reviewed by Michael Warner in Studies in Intelligence (Vol. 47, No. 2, 2003). Lauren Kessler, a professor at the University of Oregon, has given us the second and, by doing so, suggests there is still more to be learned about the enigmatic Miss Bentley. She is right.

Despite considerable overlap, there are significant differences in the details and emphasis of the two biographies. One example stems from Bentley's claim that she was descended from Roger Sherman, a signer of the Declaration of Independence. Kessler finds genealogical evidence that this was so and that it was part of the family lore before Bentley was born in New Milford, Connecticut, on 1 January 1908. Olmsted concludes, from different sources, that the link was fictitious to enhance the "shock value of her biography."11 Another example involves Bentley's studies in Italy after her graduation from Vassar. Kessler suggests that her thesis was more the work of her professor or his assistant than her own. Olmsted agrees but devotes more space than Kessler to the topic, describing the problems it caused when Bentley returned to Columbia University to finish her Masters Degree.

It was at Columbia that Bentley became a communist and set off down the road to becoming a Soviet agent in the mid-1930s. During World War II, she was one of the main Soviet agent-couriers servicing other communist agents who had penetrated nearly every department of the US government. By 1944, however, the Soviets had decided to replace her with Russians and her clandestine life began to crumble. Fearing exposure from other defectors, she went to the FBI field office in New York City on 7 November 1945 and began dictating a 112-page statement describing her espionage activities for the previous 10 years. Since Bentley mentioned British citizens with whom she dealt, the FBI notified MI-6, whose head of the Soviet counterespionage section, Cambridge spy Kim Philby, promptly notified Moscow. Thus, the American networks that Bentley compromised were shut down before she signed her statement on 30 November 1945, and the FBI came up with little prosecutable evidence. But, as Kessler makes clear, Bentley brought to an end the era of the communist ideological spy.

In 1948, Bentley testified before Congress in public hearings, naming all those prominent officials she had accused to the FBI. This brought on denials from those she exposed--Alger Hiss; the Rosenbergs; OSS officer Duncan Lee; former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, Harry Dexter White; and Nathan Silvermaster, to name but a few--and vilification by the unsympathetic left-leaning press. With no documents to support her charges, those accused went free, but she continued life as an FBI informant. For a while, the proceeds from her book sustained her life style, including her excessive drinking. But the press coverage made it difficult to hold a job--there was no defector resettlement program then. From 1953 until her death ten years later, Elizabeth Bentley's life was a gradual descent into obscurity and poverty. It is here that there are other significant differences in the Kessler-Olmsted accounts. Olmsted finds evidence that Bentley's latent bisexuality became a factor in her life as her links to the Soviets deteriorated. Kessler does not mention this aspect. On the other hand, Kessler demolishes assertions that Bentley lied in her testimony. Olmsted tends to give credibility to this charge made by another FBI informant, Harry Matusow, who also claimed to have had an affair with Bentley. As Kessler notes, Matusow was a self-confessed liar who served five years in jail for perjury in between his 15 marriages--nine to the same women.

All of Bentley's difficulties might have been avoided but for a single decision by the US government: to keep VENONA secret. VENONA, a made up word with no etymological roots, was a cover name for the message product of a successful American code-breaking operation run against the NKGB. The results became available gradually beginning in 1946. Kessler tells how Bentley, aware only of the FBI's failure to arrest any of those she knew had spied and enduring daily trashing in much of the press, was unaware that she was codenamed UMNITSA or CLEVER GIRL in the VENONA cables and that the decrypted messages corroborated her charges. When the VENONA decrypts were made public in 1995, posthumous vindication appeared to be hers--she had not lied where it counted. But there were still some who challenged her allegations and the validity of the VENONA decrypts, calling them FBI forgeries. These VENONA-deniers--mostly journalists and scholars--are the progeny of those who called Bentley's book the hysterical musings of a neurotic spinster.

In Clever Girl, Lauren Kessler tells the Bentley story with an easy reading style adding many well-documented personal details about her life that had escaped public attention.

8. Washington, DC, NBC-TV, 6 December 1953.

9. Elizabeth Bentley, Out of Bondage (New York, NY: Devin-Adair, 1951).

10. Kathryn S. Olmsted, Red Spy Queen: A Biography of Elizabeth Bentley (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 268 pages, endnotes, bibliography, photos, index.

11. Resolution of this question would require the examination of the genealogical data used by both authors. Olmsted admits hers was not complete. Kessler relies on a privately published history of the Turrill family