Elizabeth Bentley was another American born Soviet agent who turned against the Soviets. Whittaker Chambers became disillusioned with the Communists. Elizabeth was the woman scorned. She was the lover of Jacob Golos who ran quite a few spies. However Jacob died and when she was overlooked for promotion, Elizabeth decided to turn on her former “employers”. She confessed and gave evidence against many Soviet agents. Some of these names had also been given by Whittaker Chambers but once more the wheels of justice turned extremely slowly. It’s almost as though someone was protecting them.
Bentley joined the Communist Party in 1935 while studying at Columbia University. She was studying Italian and had just visited Italy. She was repulsed by the fascists and volunteered to do “anti-fascist” work. She was introduced by a fellow member to Juliet Stuart Poyntz who was recruiting people for ‘underground work’. Elizabeth didn’t sign up for it this time and later heard that Juliet had disappeared. She mentioned this to Jacob and he said Juliet was a traitor and had been liquidated.
Elizabeth started off as the girlfriend of Jacob. He had arrived in the US in 1930 as an NKVD agent. In 1936 he sent his wife and son back to Russia. The Great Terror, or purges, began in 1937 and soon the Russians were short of agents in the USA, Jacob survived but became very busy, by 1940 up to 20 agents were under him. In June 1938 the Columbia Placement Bureau found a job for her at the Italian Government Library in New York. Her fellow member put her in contact with F. Brown, a Comintern representative. He put her in contact with Jacob.
Elizabeth supplied Jacob with information on Italian fascist activities until she was fired in March 1939 when the Italians found she had written an anti-fascist article for her college magazine. Elizabeth soon became Jacob’s lover and he called her his strong right arm. At some point the Russians must have checked out Elizabeth. The normal method was to use the CPUSA to vet potential agents and then the Comintern was asked. The Comintern had, for example, records of all who had served on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War.
Puffins of every persuasion will by now have noticed that these lefties like to put it about a bit. This could be misconstrued as a valid reason for joining them. I urge caution, the right must be having some fun as well, though more discretely, but the most pressing reason to not join in with the left is that the women are invariably munters and although there are ways of shutting them up, listening to their utter drivel day in and day out would drive any man insane. Diving further into this murk could potentially reveal the real motivation behind our Jeremy Corbyn’s dalliance with the idiotic left. His brother seems quite sane in comparison so it’s not necessarily genetic.
At the end of 1940 Jacob was under investigation by the Dies Committee and he brought a large bunch of documents to Elizabeth’s apartment where she had a large fireplace where these could be burned.
In the middle of 1941 Jacob was put in contact with the Silvermaster group, they had been kind of put aside while all and sundry NKVD were summoned back to Moscow to be investigated and often shot. Shortly after this Jacob was ill and sent Elizabeth in his place to meet the group. Gregory Silvermaster had been a communist since the early 20s. He was in the Agriculture Department followed by the Board of Economic Warfare finishing up in the Treasury Department.
Silvermaster’s agents included Harry Dexter White, William Ludwig Ullman and Lauchlin Currie who worked at the White House. In 1942 a decrypted Venona message revealed that Silvermaster was sending highly secret information about American airplane and artillery production.
In 1942 Military Intelligence suspected Silverman of spying for the Soviets: Gregory wrote a rebuttal which was believed by Robert P Patterson, Undersecretary for War. In 1943 the FBI started looking at Silvermaster, was he a communist? They asked, of all people, Lauchlin Currie who naturally said he did not believe it. This is how they protect each other.
Jacob died in November 1943, while in bed with Elizabeth. She naturally assumed she would take over from him, this she did initially. By April 1944 the NKVD wanted to take over the agents Elizabeth was controlling and despite her best efforts, this they did.
By the end of 1945 Elizabeth had has enough and was talking to the FBI naming up to 150 names and details of the spies. Yet again very little seems to have happened even though her testimony corroborated that of Whittaker Chambers. There were so many Soviet spies in the US Government they could cover up just about anything. This testimony was also passed to the British and went through the desk of Kim Philby in Washington and from there straight to Moscow. They had all angles covered.
In 1948 Bentley testified to the House Committee on Un-American Activities. She then went public and gave interviews to various reporters. Her words were reported following the political persuasion of the reporter. She was described as shapely blonde and blue eyed New Yorker who lured secrets from her sources. On the other hand she was described as a nutmeg Mata Hari. There was a certain amount of scepticism over her revelations, the Democrats did not want to be portrayed as a party full of Russian spies while the Republicans accused President Truman of trying to cover it all up.
When called before the Committee, those named by Elizabeth mostly pleaded the fifth while a few flat out denied it. She also appeared in three criminal trials, that of William Remington accused of perjury and more sensationally at the trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, of the atomic spies. Both the latter were sentenced to death, at the time it seemed for remarkably severe for just supplying intelligence to the NKVD. However later decoded Venona messages reveal they were at the heart of everything and up to their necks in it.
After this her personal life went down hill with the usual alcohol abuse, driving offences and relationships with completely unsuitable men who did not treat her well. She died in 1963 of abdominal cancer at the age of 55.
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