Elizabeth Bentley knew something was wrong the moment she woke up during the night in a panicked state. It was early evening and she had fallen asleep next to her boyfriend on the couch for what felt like only an hour. Her boyfriend was apparently still sleeping, but he was now choking with strange sounds emanating from his throat. She tried to shake him out of his state. “Wake up, Yasha,” she pleaded. “You’re having a bad nightmare.” He did not respond and the choking sounds continued. She misremembered her Red Cross training and got out a bottle of brandy from the kitchen. “Never give an unconscious person water or other liquid, as it may enter the windpipe and strangle him,” the 1933 edition of the American Red Cross First Aid textbook stated. “Whiskey and brandy are not proper first aid stimulants and should not be used. Their use may do considerable harm.” It was now 1943 but their caution had escaped her memory. She poured the brandy into his mouth but try as she might, he was not swallowing the alcohol. Was this a death rattle she was now hearing? She thought back to her mother’s death fifteen years before and the sound was eerily reminiscent of those terrible final moments.
She picked up the phone and dialed the operator, requesting an ambulance immediately. “Just a moment,” a calm woman replied. “I’ll get you the Police Department.” Getting the police involved was the last thing Bentley wanted; their work could be exposed. She decided to proceed anyway, his health being the priority at the moment. “A man has just had a heart attack,” she explained to the police officer on the other end of the line, “and he needs immediate medical attention. Can you help me?” “Certainly,” he answered. “I’ll have an ambulance there right away.”
With her boyfriend, Jacob “Yasha” Golos, still unconscious nearby, Bentley took off her pajamas in a hurry and got dressed. “Hold on, darling,” she called out to the man still making strange noises. “Just hold on for a few minutes longer. There’s help coming.” Her apartment buzzer rang and she quickly pressed the button to let in the medical professionals. She turned her head towards Golos; his eyes were glazed over and now looking upwards. Instinctively, she closed his eyes with her fingertips, as if she knew it was already too late. Two men dressed in white from St. Vincent’s Hospital in New York knocked at the door. “Which of you is the doctor?” Bentley asked upon opening the door. One of them cheerfully replied: “Neither of us. There’s a shortage of medics right now and we’re not sending out any interns on ambulance calls.” Noticing the look of fear on her face, he added: “Don’t worry, ma’am, we’ve both had first-aid training and we can help you.” Having already tried giving him brandy, she thought, Good God, I’ve had the same course of training that you’ve had, so what can you do that I can’t? The other man was already over top of Golos. He first lifted Golos’ eyelids and then listened to his heart. He looked at his partner without saying a word and then dialed a telephone number. “Hello. Yes, it’s me. No, pal, it’s too late. He’s DOA. What’ll we do now? Wait for the police? Okay, see you soon.” The man hung up the phone and calmly lit a cigarette. Bentley knew that DOA meant “dead on arrival” from her uncle who was a doctor. She felt the room begin to spin and tried to steady herself. Golos was dead, she thought; she would never hear his voice or see him again. She grabbed onto a chair and tried to maintain her composure, holding back tears. Nothing seemed to matter any more now that he was gone. She eventually came to realize that the two ambulance men were arguing over when to move their vehicle and one of them said, “Let’s wait ‘til the police come.”
Bentley needed to cover up what Golos had been working on; there were coded telephone numbers in his pockets she had to retrieve. While thinking this, she had to battle the thought that, The man I loved is dead and for me life is over. She had made a promise to him, however, to carry on the work. Despite not wanting to leave her alone with the body, she managed to convince the workers to move the ambulance right away. Once they left, she rushed to bolt the door behind them and rifled through Golos’ pockets, removing pieces of paper and putting them in her pocketbook. She tried to turn him over to access his back pockets, but his body was too heavy for her to move. Deciding that his back pockets likely contained only insignificant items like a handkerchief, she abandoned her search, put her pocketbook away, and unbolted the door. The ambulance workers found Bentley where they had left her, sitting on a chair. Close to 10:00 pm, two policemen arrived, one of them stating sympathetically: “You look worn out, ma’am. If you can just get in touch with his doctor, we can settle things up real fast.” As she tried to remember who Golos’ current doctor was, she began to feel faint. A policeman noticed the bottle of bandy and poured her a glass. “Better drink this,” he instructed her. “You’ve had a shock.”
“Did you know that Golos wasn’t his real name?” one of the policemen asked her. She panicked momentarily, then remembered her instructions: when in doubt, deny everything. “I’m sorry, lieutenant,” he said, playing dumb. “I know very little about him. We were officers in the same company but I had practically nothing to do with him outside of that. However, I wouldn’t be surprised. I remember he once told me that he had been a writer and they often take pseudonyms, don’t they?” The policeman seemed to buy that explanation, describing how the police had found a draft registration card of his in a hotel room under the name Reizen. By the time the medical examiner had come and gone, it was now 1:00 am. The room was quiet and Bentley looked towards Golos’ body, hidden under a blanket, and she was overcome with grief. She pulled the blanket down and stared at his face. “At long last he had escaped from this mad world into blessed nothingness,” she later recalled of her thoughts. “He would lie quietly under some tree, a part of the earth again, and I was left to go on alone.” With the passing of her partner, Bentley was now to take over Golos’ Russian spy network in the United States.
Secret Government
Through this network, Bentley and Golos had access to secret information from the highest echelons in the U.S. government during World War II. “I doubt if there were very many people who were quite as well informed as we on what was happening in Washington,” Bentley recalled. This reach extended to the State Department, the Navy, the Army, the Department of Justice, the White House, as well as the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the CIA. Bentley worked with what was known as the Silvermaster espionage group. Soon after she joined Golos in overseeing the group, Treasury Department official William Ludwig Ullmann was recruited and, through the assistance of other Treasury officials such as Abraham George Silverman and Harry Dexter White, secured a posting at the Pentagon, where his access to sensitive military information made him more valuable than ever. Gregory Silvermaster, the group’s namesake who was initially sidelined in a minor agency, was eventually shifted into the Board of Economic Warfare with the aid of White and FDR’s chief economic advisor Lauchlin Currie, gaining access to confidential economic data. From Harry Dexter White, Assistant to the Treasury Secretary, in addition to receiving sensitive documents, Bentley secured one of her biggest coups: having the printing plates for Allied military currency in occupied Germany shared with the Soviets: “The Russians were delighted,” she remembered, “as they were planning to counterfeit them.” The Russian secret police, the NKVD, recorded in a 1945 memo how “following our instructions,” they had “attained the positive decision of the Treasury Department to provide the Soviet side with the plates for engraving German occupation marks, namely the consent was given to produce for the Red Army two billion occupation marks.”
The Russians’ demands for information was, in Bentley’s words, “practically limitless.” This included information on potential Communist recruits, anti-Soviet elements in Washington, and the attitudes of influential U.S. officials such as William Batt of the War Production Board. They also pursued sensitive military data—including production figures, aircraft performance tests, troop strength, and experimental weapons like the RDX explosive and the B-29 bomber. In addition, the Soviets were eager for political intelligence, such as secret U.S. negotiations with Britain, deals with governments-in-exile, and plans for foreign loans. Silvermaster would look over the list of requests, running his fingers through his hair in despair. “How do they expect us to find out all this?” The demands would also annoy Silvermaster when they would repeat the same questions continuously, such as requesting information on a War Production Board employee they thought would be sympathetic to their cause. When this same request would appear periodically, he would complain: “What’s the matter with those people over there? Don’t they keep their files in order?” After two years of repetition, it became a joke to him: “Well, are you going to ask me about Mr. X this time?” he would say with amusement to Bentley. Mostly, he was dedicated to the cause: the two would spent hours going over the microfilms and carbon copies of documents he had made, while Bentley transcribed the information Ullman had smuggled out of his office on small pieces of paper.
Bentley recalled being under near-constant FBI surveillance while engaged in espionage activities. Initially, she viewed the surveillance as a high-stakes game and tried to remain calm, strategic, and unemotional. With the help of Golos, Bentley studied traditional underground methods and develops new tactics to evade detection. They employed ruses to evade the Bureau, including using multiple exits, deliberately interacting with her pursuers to confuse them, and employing the “double tail” method with Golos to ensure meetings with contacts were safe. Over time, she believed she had developed an instinctive “sixth sense” for danger. Bentley never felt strong hostility toward the FBI agents, viewing them as diligent young men simply on the opposing side. Bentley and Golos assumed their phones were tapped, relied on radio noise and jiggled receivers to disrupt potential listening devices, and ensured that sensitive documents were either securely stored in a safe with booby traps or destroyed immediately after use. The two would burn documents while a nearby secretary was puzzled by the presence of smoke in the office. “More than once,” Bentley recalled, “alarmed by the smell of smoke, [the secretary] dashed into his private office to find both of us calmly stirring a flaming mass in the ash tray.”
By early 1941, Golos assigned Bentley more underground responsibilities. One of her tasks had been handling “the Penguin,” the moniker of chemical engineer Abraham Brothman, who provided her with stolen blueprints. Because of his chronic lateness, Bentley was relieved when his case was reassigned in September 1944. Their network of agents in the U.S. government continued to grow, aided by Golos’ recruiting efforts. Unlike the Silvermaster group, these recruits were individual contacts, often young and nervous. One of them was William W. Remington, a promising economist from Dartmouth and Columbia who secured a government position. Remington was vetted and brought into contact with Bentley and Golos, who saw him as a respectable, middle-class American with great potential for infiltration.
From 1942 until he joined the Navy in 1944, Remington supplied Bentley with Communist Party dues and secret information from the War Production Board, including aircraft production data, agency policies, and even a formula for synthetic rubber. However, he was timid, evasive, and constantly afraid, often passing along scraps of notes rather than documents. Both he and his wife Anne attempted to join public left-wing organizations, seemingly to disqualify themselves from covert work, and Bentley ordered them to cease this activity.
While Bentley found Remington unreliable and more trouble than he was worth, Golos insisted on keeping him, since his information helped corroborate reports from other sources and he hoped Remington would eventually rise to a more influential government position. A crisis in their network began when Army Intelligence, supported by the FBI and Naval Intelligence, accused Silvermaster of being a Communist and demanded his dismissal. “It’s no use fighting this thing,” Silvermaster said to Bentley in despair. “They’ve probably got enough information to hang me. I’d better resign now before they kick me out.” She insisted that he fight back rather than resign, encouraging him to present himself as innocent and to rally his allies. With support from Currie, White, and sympathetic officials, Silvermaster ultimately weathered the storm, returning to the Department of Agriculture with his record cleared.
Once this danger passed, the group intensified its espionage. What began as scraps of political gossip and low-level Treasury documents evolved into a systematic operation: secret government files were “borrowed,” photographed at the Silvermaster home, and returned overnight. Initially producing only a handful of microfilm rolls, the group’s output grew until Bentley was carrying up to forty rolls to New York every two weeks for the NKVD. Bentley encouraged Julius Joseph, an economist from Pennsylvania, to leverage his contacts to secure a role in the OSS, where he gained access to valuable intelligence about American plans regarding Japan. He also exploited his proximity to the Russian division in the Library of Congress to obtain confidential material. Despite his usefulness, Joseph often bungled underground procedures. Instructed to either burn documents or flush them down the toilet, he once did both: accidentally setting a toilet seat on fire while trying to dispose of incriminating documents. His landlord was aghast at the sight of the destruction: “I don’t see how that could possibly have happened,” he remarked puzzledly as he left the apartment.
Technical difficulties and Moscow’s inadequate supply of film often drove the Silvermasters to exhaustion and frustration, yet the volume and value of material steadily increased. The Pentagon, in particular, became their richest source: through Ullman and Silverman, they obtained aircraft production figures, allocation charts, performance data, and details on secret military projects. Bentley recalls one occasion when she returned to New York loaded with documents. “What have you got this time?” Golos asked her. “I think I’ve brought you the entire Pentagon,” she joked. She later reflected: “I was not far wrong.”
Mary Price, secretary to journalist Walter Lippmann, brought to the spy network some of its most important agents. In addition to sharing “very interesting material” from Lippmann’s files, she also shared her top-floor apartment with Bentley when she was looking to avoid staying in Washington, DC hotels because they believed “the FBI kept a strict watch on all of them.” The small extra bed Bentley used she found was difficult to sleep on, and with a lack of blankets available in the wintertime, this meant that she had to put newspapers underneath the mattress to mitigate the cold draft disturbing her sleep. “I would often awaken in the morning stiff in every joint,” she remembered; however, her spy work was so exhausting, “I could have slept on anything.” Fatigue was now her “constant companion; I was so tired that I could fall asleep on buses, on trains, and even standing up. Each day I would say to myself: I can’t go on any longer—I'll just lie down and never get up again.”
Bentley pressed on without giving much thought to the future. Price brought Golos and Bentley in contact with Duncan Lee, senior assistant to the head of the OSS, William J. Donovan. At first, Price had discouraged contacting him when he and his wife, Isabelle (nicknamed “Ishbel”), moved to Washington, DC. “What does he look like?” Bentley wondered. Price answered: “Nothing outstanding. Average height, medium-brown hair and light eyes, glasses, rather studious looking. He’s a good person, only he’s never before been mixed up in this sort of thing.” Lee would give pieces of information to Price, but only orally, making her promise not to write anything down but to carry the secrets in her head. Price would rush home and transcribe the information down in shorthand. This carried the risk that the secrets could contain errors, and they urged Price to change Lee’s information-sharing approach. Golos reported to the Soviets: “Telegrams going to the State Depart[ment] go through him. He chooses among them and shows them to Donovan for his consideration. In addition, agent reports from Europe and all over the world go through him…Koch [Lee’s code name] wants to work with us and provide us with any information he can get. He cannot take any documents out of his department, but he will memorize them as much as possible and then write them down and give them to Dir [Mary Price’s code name].” Sometimes Lee’s wife Ishbel would be present when he shared secrets with Price; whereas Ishbel knew he was sharing classified information, she did not know he was carrying a secret love affair with Price.
Price was too new to espionage, they thought, and since the Russian secret police was growing impatient, Bentley began to contact Lee directly. “He was one of the most nervous people with whom I had to deal,” she recalled. The “cloak-and-dagger” posture of the OSS meant that Lee was completely paranoid in his dealings with Bentley. He would not talk over the phone, fearing that it was tapped. They would instead sit close together in a living room, where Lee would quietly whisper secrets to Bentley, fearful that there might be recording devices nearby. Bentley believed the information she was getting from Lee was better than what Price had managed to obtain; however, he would rarely hand over documents, sometimes only scraps of paper on which he had captured some key data points. The political intelligence he shared included the plans of Chiang Kai-shek, rumors involving what Churchill had told Stalin, and Argentina’s push to have Pope Pius XII negotiate an end to the war with Hitler.
By 1943, Price had quit her job working for Lippmann and was continuing her affair with Lee, hoping he would divorce Ishbel and marry her. She was obviously “cracking up” under the pressure, Bentley thought. After an extended vacation, she returned to her top-floor Washington apartment and applied for confidential jobs at the OSS, State Department, and U.S. Army Signal Corps. They all rejected her application and Bentley wanted to know why. Through Lee, Golos and Bentley discovered that Price had been turned down for “past Communist associations.” They urged Price to pursue work in Washington-area newspapers in lieu of work with the government and she agreed.
One night, Bentley was to bring Julius Joseph, their other spy in the OSS, to meet Price at her apartment, instructing her in advance to be alone at the meeting. When Price opened the door at the appointed time, Bentley could hear male voices in the background. Price put her finger to her lips and led them to the back porch. She happened to be entertaining two men from the Office of War Information, she explained. Bentley was horrified to learn that one of them could recognize her from her days as a Communist at Columbia University. Bentley whispered: “Go back and get rid of them as soon as possible. I’ll talk to you later.” It took two hours for her guests to leave, with Bentley and Joseph whiling away the time behind a stove, hoping no one would find them there. Tired from the ordeal, Bentley chastised Price regarding the dangers of inviting men such as this to her home. “I don’t care,” Price cried. “I can’t take any more of this. I want to live like a human being.” Bentley winced at that statement, later writing, “She was right of course. None of us were living like human beings. We had become a pack of hunted animals.”
By the spring of 1944, Lee was also having his doubts. When he failed to keep up his appointments with Bentley, she approached Ishbel at home, asking to meet Lee in a public park. This he did and they spoke for three hours; Lee expressed his fear that he would be executed for treason for his actions. He nevertheless agreed to continue spying, summarizing cables being sent between the State Department and the OSS. However, Lee became increasingly cautious, shifting meetings with Bentley to drugstores or neighborhood walks, while juggling family life in their new Georgetown home. His fears peaked when the OSS began investigating communist sympathizers in its own ranks. Though he was not on the resulting “Special Cases” list, Lee refused Bentley’s request to provide a roster of OSS employees in Moscow. Still, he did give her a handwritten version of part of the list he had seen, containing twenty-six names—including Donald Wheeler and Maurice Halperin, both major Soviet sources. Lee transferred to the OSS’s Secret Intelligence Branch, becoming head of the Japan-China Section. Already planning for life after the war, he saw opportunities in China and, guided by his father’s advice, tried to keep future options open despite the risks to his career presented by his espionage activities.
Deep Six
There had always been something off about Juliet Glaser, Bentley thought, but she could not put her finger on it. When they had first met in 1936, she had promised to give Bentley some work, but all she ever did in their meetings was talk. What disturbed Bentley first was Glaser’s mention of the underground movement in Europe requiring women to drink heavily and “sleep with many men.” Bentley likened the talk to “something out of a lurid book” and while she did not think of herself as a prude, she was bothered that Glaser “took such morbid delight in dwelling on ugly details.” Bentley thought Glaser would finally get to the point when she phoned one night while Bentley was asleep. Seeing that it was midnight, Bentley crawled out of bed to grab the telephone. “Come on over,” Glaser requested. “I want to talk to you.” Bentley was still trying to get her bearings. “At this hour? Why, Mrs. Glaser, it’s 12:00 and I have to be at work at nine tomorrow. I can’t come now!” Glaser was insistent: “There’s something important that’s come up and I must see you.” Bentley thought this must have been the work that had been promised all along. “All right,” Bentley allowed. “I’ll be there just as soon as I can get dressed.”
Bentley threw on some clothes and clumsily made her way down the stairs to the freezing wind outside. She struggled to keep her hat on her head as she walked the ten blocks to Glaser’s house. Along the way, in her thoughts she cast doubt on Glaser’s intentions: “was she drunk or crazy or what?” She fought the urge to turn around and head back home, arriving at Glaser’s front door, where she greeted Bentley as if nothing were out of the ordinary. Glaser offered her a drink and a seat on the sofa, prattling on about the underground movement in Italy. Growing weary of the conversation, Bentley looked at her watch: an hour had passed. “Mrs. Glaser,” she intoned impatiently, “you have dragged me out of bed at an ungodly hour to come down here on some supposedly urgent business and yet you have said nothing about it. Just what do you want? After all, I do have to earn a living and it’s important that I get enough sleep to keep on going.” Bentley’s anger was mounting, but Glaser smiled: “My dear, you don’t have to keep that miserable job in the Home Relief Bureau. You don’t like it and there’s no reason why you should beat out your brains there. What did you tell me you really wanted to do? Oh, yes, you said that if you had the money you would get a Ph.D. in sociology and then find a teaching position. Well, that dream can easily be realized. I have inherited a great deal of money—more than I can ever use myself—and I will be glad to finance you until you get your degree.”
Glaser paused to gauge Bentley’s reaction, then continued: “You see, my dear, I like you very much and I feel that you would be very valuable in the Italian anti-Fascist movement. But you really can’t do much as long as you are tied down with a job that keeps you worn out all the time. Why don’t you just give it up and let me take care of things from here on in?” Bentley declined her offer of money: “Perhaps someday, when and if I do have a decent job, I can come back and help you.”
Glaser instead requested that Bentley teach her to speak Italian. Bentley acquiesced and when the courses began, she repeatedly encountered a “Mr. Smith” in Glaser’s home when the sessions were to have been private. Mr. Smith, a supposed businessman, made unwanted advances towards Bentley; Glaser revealed she had introduced him to Bentley as a potential employer. Bentley never learned that Mr. Smith was in fact a Russian agent who used his position to recruit and assault American women. Glaser insisted that Smith would give Bentley a lucrative job, but Bentley refused, disturbed both by his behavior and his character. When Bentley mentioned that her Home Relief office would soon take fingerprints for civil service, Glaser became alarmed, warning that such identification would make her useless to the revolutionary movement. This reaction convinced Bentley that something was dangerously amiss. Suspicious of Glaser’s motives, Bentley resolved to cut ties with her entirely and return to her job, planning to report the situation to her Party contact.
Glaser persistently tried to contact her for over a month, which Bentley ignored until she appeared at her door one evening. Glaser pleaded with her to reconsider the “opportunity” she had rejected, but Bentley firmly insisted she would remain at the Home Relief Bureau. To end the matter, she reminded Glaser that her fingerprints had already been taken. At this, Glaser glared at her with hatred, “You fool!” she admonished. “Why didn’t you have sense enough to take my advice?" Bentley then dismissed her, shutting the door on their relationship. Bentley and her fellow comrades soon discussed the odd character of Mrs. Glaser. One woman suspected she was interested in her romantically: “She appeared much too fond of me, to the point where I felt embarrassed.” Another recounted: “She seemed to want us to help her in some project that she was engaged in. But she was never very definite about it. Then she started making passes at my husband and neither he nor I liked it. We decided that something very peculiar was going on.”
In the late spring of 1936, Bentley unexpectedly saw Glaser on a Broadway trolley and decided to approach her, using the opportunity to further investigate suspicions that Glaser might be a counterrevolutionary. Bentley had previously resolved with fellow comrades to uncover Glaser’s true intentions, so she contacted a comrade of the Harlem section to inform him of the situation. He agreed with her concerns, suspecting that Glaser was posing as a Communist to infiltrate and corrupt Party members, and arranged for Bentley to bring along a trusted comrade, a man known to her as “Comrade C,” to observe and confront Glaser.
When Bentley and Comrade C visited Glaser at her apartment, the encounter quickly escalated once Glaser sat down. Setting aside pleasantries, the scholarly looking man commenced with his accusation: “Mrs. Glaser,” he stated firmly, “I am a representative of the Harlem section of the Communist Party. You have been posing as a comrade doing undercover work and trying to involve several of our people. Just who are you and what is your game?” Glaser reacted with panic, her face turning white with fear as she struggled to respond, grabbing onto the back of her chair for support. I don’t think I have ever seen such naked terror in anyone’s eyes in my life, Bentley thought. What is she so frightened of? She acts as if we are going to kill her. As Glaser moistened her lips and struggled for words, Bentley’s gaze drifted past her to the glass doors leading into an inner room. Behind the thin curtains, the appearance of a shadow sent a chill down her spine—there a man stood motionless, his silhouette stark against the dim light. A wave of dread swept over Bentley, tightening her chest as she braced for what might come next.
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