(In 1934, Elizabeth Bentley came home from Fascist Italy t...)
In 1934, Elizabeth Bentley came home from Fascist Italy to an America still shattered by the Depression. Like countless others, she was drawn to the anti-Nazi rhetoric of the Communist Party. This hypnotic book is her detailed and intimate story of how she joined the Communist Party and rose to become a key Soviet agent in New York and Washington. She reveals the organization, tactics, and strategies of the party, and names her espionage contacts: an assistant secretary of the Treasury, the President’s executive assistant, Julius Rosenberg, high officers in military intelligence, and Communist spies in the media. Finally, she describes her anguish and anger on realizing that the American Communist Party was only the tool of the KGB—the Soviet Secret Police—and the Soviet Union…and how, manipulated and threatened by Soviet agents, she chose to destroy her whole world rather than continue. Out of Bondage is one of the most readable and valuable firsthand descriptions of the Communist underground in America. It is also a moving personal story—of courage, love, betrayal, and loss.
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Elizabeth Bentley was born on January 1, 1908, in New Milford, Connecticut, United States, the daughter of Charles Prentiss Bentley, a newspaper editor and department store manager, and of Mary Burrill, a schoolteacher. Claiming descent from Roger Sherman, a signer of the Declaration of Independence and one of the creators of the Constitution, Bentley described her childhood as "an overly stern, old-fashioned New England upbringing. "
The family moved frequently, and Bentley attended public schools in New Milford, Ithaca, New York, Poughkeepsie, New York, McKeesport, Pennsylvania, and Rochester, New York, where she graduated from high school. She graduated from Vassar College with an A. B. in English in 1930. After brief service from 1930 to 1932 as a teacher at the Foxcroft School, she entered a master's degree program in languages at Columbia University in the fall of 1932; she received an M. A. in 1935. A fellowship enabled her to spend the 1933-1934 academic year at the University of Florence.
Returning to New York City in July 1934, but unable to find work as a teacher, Bentley enrolled in a secretarial training program. In March 1935, Bentley was hired as a caseworker by the Home Relief Bureau of New York City. That same month, she reluctantly joined the Communist party in response to the urging of a woman who had befriended her at Columbia. Bentley left the bureau in July 1935 and held a succession of temporary jobs until June 1938, when she was hired as a secretary by the Italian Library of Information in New York. She rationalized working for an agency of the Mussolini government by viewing it as a useful source of information for the Communist party in its campaign against fascism.
Bentley told of receiving encouragement in this from Jacob Golos, a party officer and Soviet secret-police agent, who was soon to become her lover. At their first meeting, Bentley later asserted, he made her a member of a secret underground cut off from everyone in the Communist party but him. Bentley claimed that by the summer of 1941 she had become the regular courier between a group of Communist agents employed in the federal bureaucracy in Washington and Golos in New York. She made regular trips to the capital to relay instructions about what information Moscow wanted, and in turn received copies of the material taken from government offices, collected the spies' party dues, and delivered the latest Communist publications.
According to Bentley, the operation was so successful that she usually returned to New York with nearly forty rolls of microfilm made of documents containing information from the White House; the Pentagon; the Office of Strategic Services; the Departments of State, the Treasury, and Justice; and other agencies. Bentley portrayed herself as taking a larger role in espionage and Communist party work after the death of Golos in November 1943, but her autobiography reveals a remarkable ignorance of the critical events in the party's tumultuous history from the end of 1943 through 1945.
Alone and alienated, Bentley turned to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in August 1945 and offered to tell her story. She later agreed to serve the FBI as its agent within the Communist party. With her appearance before a grand jury in New York during the last weeks of 1946, her career as a double agent ended. The anti-Communist tide was running powerfully in the summer of 1948. Twelve leaders of the American Communist party were indicted in late July for conspiring to teach and advocate the overthrow of the government by force and violence.
Early in August, Bentley testified before the House of Representatives Committee on Un-American Activities about her life in espionage, naming over three dozen people who, she alleged, supplied her with secret military and political information. Several of them, including Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Harry Dexter White, later denied the accusation under oath before the committee or in statements to the press. Others exercised their constitutional right not to answer questions the committee asked them. None of the people Bentley named were ever indicted for espionage.
Nevertheless, Bentley's testimony at the two trials of William W. Remington, an economist in the Department of Commerce, helped to convict him of perjury. She settled out of court a lawsuit he brought against her for statements she had made about him during a radio broadcast. The legal process was corrupted by the fact that the foreman of the grand jury that indicted Remington had earlier contracted with Bentley to ready her autobiography for publication. Sentenced to three years, Remington was murdered by another prisoner in 1954. Her testimony also helped convict Morton Sobell and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg of spying for the Soviet Union.
Like several other well-publicized ex-Communists, Bentley converted to Catholicism in November 1948 through the ministrations of Monsignor Fulton J. Sheen. She earned her living for a time as a consultant and lecturer on Communism, eventually joining the faculty of a Catholic college in Louisiana. From 1958 until her death in New Haven, Connecticut, she taught at the Long Lane School for Girls, a state correctional institute, in Middletown, Connecticut.
Elizabeth Bentley was known as the "red spy queen, " who spied for the Soviet Union for seven years from 1938 to 1945. But in 1945 she defected from the Communist Party and Soviet intelligence and in 1952 became an informer for the U. S. Bently also exposed 37 government employees that provided her with information for transmittal to the Soviet Union, none of whom was convicted of espionage. However, her testimony lead to the conviction of 11 Communist Party of the U. S. leaders on charges of conspiracy of advocating the violent overthrow of the government.
(In 1934, Elizabeth Bentley came home from Fascist Italy t...)
