Elizabeth Bentley (1908-1963) was an American communist and Soviet spy whose actions helped to shape the political world we live in today. In 1948, the New York Times said she was responsible for the beginning of the hunt for communists as a national obsession.
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Hello, from Wonder Media Network I’m Jenny Kaplan and this is Encyclopedia Womannica.
Today’s secret agent lived many lives. She was an American communist and Soviet spy whose actions helped to shape the political world we live in today. In 1948, the New York Times said she was responsible for the beginning of the hunt for communists as a national obsession. We’re talking about Elizabeth Bentley.
Elizabeth Bentley was born on January 1, 1908 in New Milford, Connecticut. Her parents were Charles Prentiss Bentley, a dry goods merchant, and Mary Charlotte Turrill Bentley, a schoolteacher. Elizabeth would later describe her parents as “overly stern” and old-fashioned.
In 1926, at the age of 18, Elizabeth won a scholarship to attend Vassar College. There she met students who represented what her mother disdained: they wore rouge on their cheeks, shortened their skirts, and smoked cigarettes.
Elizabeth didn’t particularly fit in. She largely stuck to her own devices and did not excel academically.
Still, Elizabeth would later say that her college years were some of her most formative in terms of developing her political ideology. .
After graduating, she traveled to Florence, Italy in 1934. There, she briefly became a supporter of Benito Mussolini and a member of the Facist party. But that association was short-lived. By the time she returned to the U.S. in the following years, she had not only renounced her Fascist membership, but in fact identified as an anti-fascist. It’s unclear just what changed her mind.
Elizabeth wasted little time before joining the Communist Party of the United States. And in 1938, at the height of her political passion, she walked into an encounter that would change the rest of her life: Elizabeth met Jacob Golos, a Russian-born American, member of the Communist Party, and Soviet Agent.
Elizabeth became one of a network of spies in the American Communist Party reporting to Jacob. On paper, Elizabeth was Jacob’s chief assistant and courier, but she was much more active in spywork than her title would imply. She obtained confidential documents traveling between New York City and Washington DC and helped forward them to Moscow. Allegedly, her information contained the likes of the D-Day invasion date and plans for the B-29 bomber.
She and Jacob were also lovers.
In 1943, Jacob died and left the US Soviet spy network in flux. By this point, Elizabeth had already come under FBI suspicion. Still, she took over as the new manager of the US spy ring.
Unfortunately, sources on the Soviet side were less excited to have Elizabeth taking the reins. The KGB saw her as an amateur and grew suspect of her American heritage. Though she initially resisted their infringement on her operation, she handed over most of the agents in her network by the end of 1944. Even after cutting ties with the KGB, she was seen as a threat due to her ties with the American Communist Party and the Soviet intel she still retained.
By 1945, plagued by paranoia and heightening suspicions from both Soviet and American authorities, Elizabeth voluntarily confessed her espionage activities to the FBI in a signed 108-page confession. In it, she admitted to her career as a spy and listed a number of intelligence details she had given to the KGB. For a time after this confession, Elizabeth worked as a double agent between the two countries.
In true spy fashion, however, Elizabeth’s signed confession was intercepted by a KGB agent and forwarded to headquarters in Moscow. This bombshell sent the KGB into disarray as they attempted to recover agents, destroy stray documents, and deny any ties to Elizabeth. It’s said one of the KGB agents Elizabeth worked with even contemplated assassinating her before being recalled to Moscow.
While her confession didn’t lead to many convictions of American-based Soviet spies, Elizabeth’s defection did put a halt to KGB intel work and slowed the process of Soviet espionage in the early Cold War.
In 1948, Elizabeth and another Soviet defector testified about their work and networks before the House Un-American Activities Committee, or HUAC. This was a congressional investigation well-known for its hunt for Communists in American politics and in Hollywood. Elizabeth’s testimony confirmed American fears about Soviet espionage, setting the public ablaze with her story.
Her testimony was, and remains, controversial, as it coincided with the Congressional Committee’s investigation into American Communists and its blacklisting of many American creatives. Elizabeth’s confirmation of Soviet espionage greatly damaged the American Communist party. Her claims were also largely unsubstantiated, as most of her projects and intel were classified — many of the transcripts that provided proof of her stories were only released in 1995, nearly 50 years later.
In her testimony, Elizabeth blamed a lot of her dedication to Communism on her time at Vassar. She traced her attraction to Communism back to a lack of religious and political education at college, which made her susceptible to Communist thought. She even said college “indoctrinated” her with Communist beliefs that “put blinders on her” and “made a fanatic” of her.
In an op-ed in The New York Times, historian Timothy Naftali asserted, “From the moment Elisabeth Bentley…testified before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in July 1948, the hunt for Communists became a national obsession.”
After her trial, Elizabeth turned to teaching. She taught political science at a few colleges, but her career came to an end just a few years later, when her picture was published alongside the review of the movie, “The FBI Story,” which dramatized the Cold War hunt for Soviet Spies. The resurgence of her past led to protests over her position as a teacher, and Elizabeth was fired.
Elizabeth died on December 3rd, 1963, from abdominal cancer. She was 55.
All of April, we’re talking about spies.
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