Red Spy Queen: A Biography of Elizabeth Bentley, and: Clever Girl: Elizabeth Bentley's Life in and Out of Espionage (review)

Elizabeth Bentley's decision to visit the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in the fall of 1945 and recount her several years as liaison between Soviet intelligence agencies and scores of sources within the U.S. government ignited an internal security firestorm. Until her defection, the FBI had relegated Soviet spying to the back burner and had devoted most of its attention to the more pressing business of German and Japanese espionage. Although the FBI had concluded that Soviet espionage was under way, the bureau's understanding of the nature of these operations was limited, and it lacked sources within any of the major Soviet espionage networks. Bentley's defection changed all of this.

Bentley's testimony was a disaster for Soviet espionage, particularly the foreign intelligence service. Two of the Soviet agency's largest Washington networks (the Silvermaster and Perlo groups) were totally disrupted, and contact with dozens of major and minor sources who had had contact with Bentley or might be known to her was halted. Additionally, skilled and experienced Soviet intelligence officers who were known to Bentley, including those under diplomatic cover and others who were operating illegally, had to be hastily withdrawn from the United States. Their replacements took months, or in some cases years, to arrive, by which time they faced a far more hostile environment. In large part on the basis of Bentley's information, the FBI launched a vigorous campaign against the Communist Party of the USA (CPUSA), and the bureau's extensive penetration of the party all but destroyed the once great value of the CPUSA for Soviet espionage. Moreover, the tainting of the CPUSA with espionage undermined the party's domestic political influence.

Bentley's information along with other matters convinced the Truman administration, which in 1945 and 1946 had been complacent about Soviet espionage and Communist subversion, to shift in 1947 and 1948 to a much more active stance, including the creation of a massive loyalty and security system for federal employees that removed most Communists from government service, a legal offensive against the CPUSA that led to the criminal indictment of the party's leaders under the Smith Act, and a political offensive that destroyed the once influential Popular Front wing of the New Deal coalition.

Bentley by any reasonable measure was far more important than Whittaker Chambers in bringing about the crackdown on Soviet spying and on domestic Communism. Chambers had provided authorities some information on covert Communist activities, but his information was confined to events prior to mid-1938, and he declined to provide any information about espionage until late 1948. Indeed, the case of Alger Hiss might never have happened if Chambers had not been called in mid-1948 as a witness to corroborate part of Bentley's testimony to the U.S. House Committee on Un-American Activities. Yet, as Kathryn Olmsted notes, eleven prominent college textbooks on American history discuss Whittaker Chambers but do not mention Bentley. Bentley was the target of relentless vilification by the pro-Communist left and their allies, a campaign that gradually took its toll. By the mid-1960s, the historian Earl Latham, in his The Communist Controversy in Washington: From the New Deal to McCarthy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966), p. 160, referred to a consensus that Bentley's charges were the "imaginings of a neurotic spinster." During the first fifty years after Bentley turned herself in to the FBI, no published scholarly or even journalistic biographies of her appeared, and no graduate students wrote their doctoral dissertations or even master's theses about Bentley despite her key role in the early domestic Cold War.

Two key developments in the 1990s—the partial opening of some of the former Soviet archives and the release of the...