Book Review | Red Spy Queen: A Biography of Elizabeth Bentley

Red Spy Queen: A Biography of Elizabeth Bentley

By Kathryn S. Olmsted. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. 288 pages.

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

Vassar graduate Elizabeth BENTLEY was a Soviet agent for nearly ten years. In November 1945 she walked in to the FBI field office in New York and began revealing all she knew about the NKGB network of U.S. government employees she had supported as a courier and agent handler. When the Soviets learned of her defection, thanks to Kim PHILBY, they shut down their U.S. networks bringing to a close the era of the ideological Communist spy in America. In 1948 she went public in testimony before Congress naming those with whom she had worked. Yet only one of those she identified went to jail, and that was not directly due to her testimony. Though not given immunity she was not prosecuted.

Why had she first betrayed her country and the Communist cause she had worked for so long? Why wasn’t the FBI able to send those she identified as agents to jail? What happened to BENTLEY after her days in the spotlight ended? Kathryn OLMSTED answers these questions in dramatic style in The Red Spy Queen. Drawing heavily on primary sources, she tells of BENTLEY’s early life, her student days in Fascist Italy, her Conversion to Communism at Columbia University, her recruitment and her operations as a NKVD agent, the real reasons for her defection, the trashing she endured in the liberal press, and her lonely, bitter, alcoholic, sex starved life until her death in obscurity in 1963.

OLMSTED paints a largely negative, one might say excessively so, portrait of her protagonist. She identifies the truths and the lies BENTLEY told in an effort to sustain her role as an esteemed FBI informant and the struggles she experienced trying to hold a job once out of the public limelight. BENTLEY never learned that the truth of her allegations was supported by the VENONA decrypts, and since she had not had the foresight to provide any documentation when she defected, had to live with the constant challenges to her story by those whom she named and their many supporters. She wrote her memoirs, Out Of Bondage, in an attempt to set the record straight, but as OLMSTED documents, the reasons she gave for her actions were not the whole truth.

OLMSTED’s powerful well-written characterization of Elizabeth BENTLEY adds much that is new about her life. Whether one sees her as a heroine or traitor, it is a valuable contribution to the literature.