INVESTIGATIONS: The Network

Newspapers had described her as blonde, beautiful, glamorous—a Mata Hari who had vampired information out of Government employees and slipped it to Communists to send on to Moscow.

The truth about her was not so exciting. When she appeared before two congressional committees last week, she proved to be neither beautiful nor glamorous. She was plump and had a sharp nose and receding chin. She was not blonde; her hair was dark brown. But she was—or had been—a spy. There was no doubt about that. And the torrent of her confession was far more shocking than the fact that she was no Mata Hari.

“Easy Prey.” Her name was Elizabeth Bentley. She was born in Connecticut, graduated from Vassar (1930) and had taken an M.A. degree at Columbia. In 1933 she went to Italy, where she was revolted by what she saw of Fascism. On her return, she said, she was “easy prey” for the Commies. She joined the party’s Columbia University Unit No. 1.

Then she met Russian-born Jacob Golos, an American citizen but a Russian spy. She fell in love with him. After Golos suffered a heart attack in 1941, he launched her on her own spying career.

She took over his work of collecting “secret information” from Communist members and sympathizers in Washington. There were about 20 Communists she saw in Washington every other week or so; she said that there were 20 or 30 more men & women in the Government feeding information to her contacts. They were in wartime bureaus and in the Army, the Air Force, the State and Treasury Departments —almost every place except the Navy and the FBI. There was also “a man around the White House,” who helped to place her informants in strategic spots.

Where did the information go? She was sure it went to Russia, via Golos and his friends at Communist headquarters in Manhattan. After Golos died, she frequently saw Earl Browder, then the boss of the U.S. Communist Party, and showed him her political information. But her military information, she said, was turned over directly to “the real Russians.” Sometimes she and some of her Washington contacts met at the Manhattan apartment of John Abt, onetime Government employee, now a moving spirit in Henry Wallace’s Progressive Party (see Third Parties).

“In a Good Spot.” How did the spy ring operate? Elizabeth Bentley detailed her furtive meetings with a young bureaucrat named William W. Remington. In 1942, she said, Remington was “in a good spot” with the War Production Board, where “he was dealing with aircraft production figures.” (Until six weeks ago, when he was suspended, Remington was chairman of a Department of Commerce committee which collated secret information from many Government offices, including the Atomic Energy Commission. His committee’s job: to determine what materials and goods should and should not be exported to Russia.)

Remington and his wife, said Miss Bentley, were dues-paying Communists. She had met them with Golos in New York City. When she was in Washington she would telephone him and say, “This is Helen” (to some others she was “Joan” or “Mary”) and arrange to meet him. Some times it was at a drugstore across from the Willard Hotel; some times it was at the National Gallery of Art. Did Remington understand what she wanted? Said Elizabeth Bentley: “Certainly.” At their meetings, Remington was “very nervous, very jittery, obviously scared to death that anybody would find out he was doing this.” But, said Miss Bentley, he brought her “scraps of paper”—notes about aircraft production—and once he brought her “a formula for making synthetic rubber from garbage.”

“Man Around the White House.” That ended Miss Bentley’s testimony before one committee. Next day she appeared before J. Parnell Thomas’ House Un-American Activities Committee. There she got down to naming names. Who was that “man around the White House?” Elizabeth Bentley’s reply startled her audience. He was, she said, Lauchlin Currie, one of Franklin Roosevelt’s closest advisers, a White House special assistant for six years who had twice headed missions to China.

Miss Bentley calmly said that Currie was one of those who had given her information, although she never had direct contact with him, and thought that he was not a Communist. She said Currie and one George Silverman, a former Government employee, were “very good friends—they went to Harvard together.” Silverman, she said, reported Currie’s information to Nathan Gregory Silvermaster, who worked at the Board of Economic Warfare and was the Communist she saw most frequently in Washington.

One day in 1944, she recalled, “Silvermaster said that Currie dashed into Silverman’s home and said the Americans were on the verge of breaking the Russian code.” That information made the Russians “very excited.” They asked her to find out which code; she never could.

She added another once-big name to her list of informants: Harry Dexter White, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, one of the architects of the World Bank. Like Currie, said Miss Bentley, Harry White helped put Communists in strategic offices and supplied information to her through Silvermaster. She added: “Mr. White knew where it was going but preferred not to mention the fact.”

The B-29 and DDay. In the course of her testimony, Miss Bentley spilled more than 30 names. All were former employees of the Government and most of them, she said, were Communist Party members who supplied information through either Silvermaster or Victor Perlo, a WPB employee. She also told what kind of information she gathered. From agents in the hush-hush Office of Strategic Services “I got all types of highly secret information on what OSS was doing . . . secret negotiations in the Balkans, and that parachutists were being dropped.” From George Silverman and one Ludwig Ullman, both in Air Force headquarters, she got some details of the B-29 bomber, data on other new types of planes, and the destinations of planes to war theaters. Between nervous puffs on a cigarette, she said: “We knew about D-day long before D-day happened.”

Currie and White heatedly denied all of Miss Bentley’s accusations. Currie, now the head of a Manhattan import-export firm, said he had never to his knowledge associated with a Communist. Cried White (now a Manhattan financial consultant): “Fantastic . . .”

Tall, Dartmouth-bred William Remington had his day in court. He told the Senate committee that he felt no sense at all of having been involved in a spy ring. Yes, he had given information to “Helen Johnson,” as he knew Elizabeth

Bentley, but it was no more than “what was available to any reporter.” Was he a Communist? No, but he said his mother-in-law was, and he had gone to some meetings of the American Youth Congress, a Communist-front outfit of which his wife was a member. Said Remington: “It was not unusual for Mrs. [Eleanor] Roosevelt to appear at the American Youth Congress. I once had the privilege of actually tripping over Mrs. Roosevelt’s feet at a congress meeting. She was sitting on the floor.”

The others named by Miss Bentley would also have their chance to explain before the committee—and perhaps before a grand jury. This week Louis Budenz, another reformed Communist (onetime managing editor of the Daily Worker), told the investigators that he had known about Miss Bentley’s spying and that she was telling the truth. Fragmentary as it was, Elizabeth Bentley’s testimony had touched off a real spy hunt.