The unbelievable extent to which Americans participated in Russian-directed espionage against the United States during the depression and during World War II has only recently become generally recognized. Many complete books have now been written which summarize the evidence unearthed by the FBI, the courts and Congress.
Whittaker Chambers Breaks with Communism
In 1938, at the very height of his career as a Russian courier and contact man, Chambers found his philosophy of materialism collapsing. It was one morning while feeding his small daughter that Chambers suddenly realized as he watched her that the delicate yet immense complexity of the human body and human personality could not possibly be explained in terms of accumulated accident. Chambers dated his break with Communism from that moment.
At first he was highly disturbed and tried to thrust the new conviction from his mind, but as he opened his thinking to the evidence around him he finally became completely persuaded that he was living in a universe of amazingly immaculate design which was subject to the creative supervision of a supreme intelligence. Consequently, just as Communist philosophy had brought him into the movement its collapse made him determined to get out. It was many months later before he finally disentangled himself and ran away from the Soviet Intelligence Service.
Chambers says that when he ultimately made his break with Communism he did everything in his power to get his close friend, Alger Hiss, to leave with him. Alger Hiss, however, not only refused but, according to Chambers heatedly denounced him for trying to influence him.
From watching the fate of others, Chambers already had some idea of what it meant to try and leave the conspiratorial apparatus of Communism. Nevertheless, the course he followed brought physical and mental suffering that not even he had suspected.
Today, no more complete account of the agonizing experiences of those who dare to wear the badge of an ex-Communist can be found than that contained in the s of Chambers’ autobiography, Witness. At one point he worked with a gun beside him for fear the Russian secret police would take his life just as they were doing to so many others. At another point he tried to take his own life to keep from having to expose those who had formerly been his most intimate friends.
Most of these details can only be appreciated in their full text. For our purposes it is sufficient to point out that up until the time Chambers did finally make up his mind to tell the whole story, the American public was almost completely unaware of the vast network of spy activities which Russia had built into every strata of American society. And this unfortunate condition existed even though the FBI had been carefully gathering facts and warning government officials concerning Communist activities for many years.
Finally, a cloud of witnesses confirmed that it was true.
Elizabeth Bentley Takes Over After Chambers Leaves
Chambers had no way of knowing that after he deserted the Russian espionage system, the Soviets would replace him with a woman. Her name was Elizabeth Bentley.
She came from a long line of New England American ancestors, She had attended Vassar, traveled and studied in Italy for a year and returned to the United States in 1934 to find the country deep in a depression. Having failed to get a job, she decided her only chance was to learn a business course so she enrolled at the School of Business at Columbia University. There she met up with a number of people who were friendly and sympathetic toward her. It was quite some time before she knew they were Communists. As these friends explained Communism to her it seemed rather reasonable—in fact, the way they explained it, Communism would be a great improvement over American Capitalism (which at that moment was bogged down like an iceberg with unemployment and bankruptcy). So Elizabeth Bentley became a Communist. She entered the campaign with all the zeal that could come from a girl in her twenties who suddenly believes that a new era of history is about to open up which will solve all of humanity’s problems.
For some time Elizabeth Bentley worked in New York’s Welfare Department and while there she was made the financial secretary of the Columbia University Communist unit. She attended the Communist Workers’ School and joined so many front organizations under different names that on at least one occasion she went to a meeting and could not remember who she was supposed to be!
Before long the activities of Elizabeth Bentley had tracked the leaders of the Russian underground apparatus and before she really knew what had happened to her she had been carefully shifted from the day-to-day assignments of the U.S. Communist Party to the underground network of Soviet espionage.
She worked for three different individuals before she was finally assigned to an over-worked, old-time revolutionary called “Timmy.” Elizabeth Bentley fell in love with Timmy.
One day he said to her: “You and I have no right to feel the way we do about each other…. There is only one way out, and that is to stick together and keep our relationship unknown to everyone…. You will have to take me completely on faith, without knowing who I am, where I live, or what I do for a living.”
This was how Elizabeth Bentley became the Communist wife of a man who turned out to be Jacob Golos, one of the all-powerful chiefs of the Russian Secret Police in the United States.
Under his training Elizabeth Bentley became what she later called a “steeled Bolshevik.”
In May, 1940, she read that an attempt had been made against the life of Leon Trotsky in Mexico. The attempt had failed but his personal bodyguard had been kidnaped and shot in the back. For years Stalin had been trying to liquidate his old enemy and from the way Jacob Golos behaved Elizabeth Bentley knew her Communist mate was in on the plot. Several months later a killer actually got through to Trotsky and smashed his skull with an alpenstock.
Beginning in 1941, Elizabeth Bentley was used by the Russian espionage apparatus to collect material from contacts in Washington, D.C. She says she first became the courier for the Silvermaster spy group which was extracting information from Communist contacts in the Pentagon and other top-secret governmental agencies. Before she was through she had picked up nearly all of Whittaker Chambers’ former contacts and many more besides.
Occasionally there was near disaster, as was the case just after Gregory Silvermaster got a job with the Board of Economic Warfare through the influence of Lauchlin Currie (an administrative assistant at the White House). She says that after taking the Job he was shown a letter addressed to his superior from the head of Army Intelligence indicating that the FBI and Naval Intelligence had proof of his Communist connections. The letter demanded that Silvermaster be discharged.
The panicky Silvermaster asked Elizabeth Bentley what to do. She gave him the same instruction that other exposed Communists were being given: “Stand your ground, put on an air of injured innocence; you are not a Communist, just a ‘progressive’ whose record proves you have always fought for the rights of labor. Rally all your ‘liberal’ friends around…. If necessary, hire a lawyer to fight the case through on the grounds that your reputation has been badly damaged. Meanwhile, pull every string you can to get this business quashed. Use Currie, White (Harry Dexter White, top official of the Treasury Department), anybody else you know and trust.”{73}
Anyone familiar with the format of defense followed by suspected Communists who were hailed before Congressional investigating committees will immediately recognize the Party’s trade mark on the trite pretension of abused innocence recommended by Elizabeth Bentley. When one considers its relatively naive and childlike simplicity it is almost a cause for national chagrin that it confused and deceived such an amazing number of people for such an inexplicable number of years. As with practically all of the others Elizabeth Bentley’s suggestions paid off handsomely for Silvermaster and he soon gained support from many powerful and unexpected sources.