Joseph E. Persico (44 page)

Bentley and Lee began meeting in a drugstore on Wisconsin Avenue and once in a German beer hall on Fifteenth Street. Lee, according to the courier, passed to her “. . . highly secret information on what the OSS was doing, such as, for example, that they were trying to make secret negotiations in the Balkans . . . parachuting people into Hungary, that they were sending OSS people into Turkey. . . .” The Soviets were delighted with Lee. Bentley's superior and lover, Jacob Golos, notified Moscow concerning Lee: “Cables coming to the State Department go through his hands. He collects them and shows them to Donovan at his discretion. All the agent information from Europe and the rest of the world also comes through his hands.”

Bentley, however, found Lee a difficult source. “He was one of the most nervous people with whom I had to deal,” she observed. Lee forbade Bentley to phone him, refused to turn over actual documents, and permitted her no note-taking in his presence. As Bentley described their routine to Moscow, “A long time ago, I had to promise him that I would not write down data communicated by him. Therefore, I have to remember his data, until I am elsewhere and can write it down. . . . [H]e is one of ‘the weakest of the weak sisters,' nervous and fearing his own shadow.”

Still, Lee's take proved worth her pains. On the delicate matter of Poland's future, Lee described an OSS report crossing his desk that revealed Churchill was willing to cede Eastern Prussia to Poland. When Bentley asked Lee about activities at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, “. . . he told me,” she later claimed, “that he had word that something very secret was going on at that location. He did not know what, but he said it must be something supersecret because it was shrouded in such mystery and so heavily guarded.” Oak Ridge was the site of the Manhattan Project's operation to separate U235 from U238 in sufficient quantity to make an atomic bomb. At one of their drugstore rendezvous, according to Bentley, Lee gave her a detailed account of a White House meeting over Donovan's proposed OSS-NKVD exchange, including Admiral Leahy's opposition. At the prospect of NKVD agents coming to Washington, Lee told her, “I'm finished. They'll come to call on me, and when I let them in, they'll shake my hand and say, ‘Well done, comrade.'”

Though fearing exposure, Lee continued to cooperate with Bentley. He told her that the OSS security staff had compiled a list entitled “Persons Suspected of Being Communists on the Agency's Payroll.” A message from the NKVD New York station to General Fitin in Moscow read, “According to Kokh [Lee's apparent code name] advice a list of ‘reds' has been compiled by IZBA,” the code name for the OSS. Four of the names on the list of suspects, Lee revealed, were indeed providing intelligence to the Russians.

By 1944, Lee's personal life was becoming messy and his paranoia mounting. His wife discovered that he was having an affair with another Communist courier, Mary Price. He feared Donovan had begun to suspect him. He distrusted Elizabeth Bentley. Another NKVD contact, code-named X, reported, after dealing with Lee, that he “came so scared to both meetings that he could not hold a cup of coffee since his hands trembled.” Lee eventually broke off with the NKVD and spied no more. The Soviets were just as happy to see this emotional wreck go away. Through him, however, for a period of over two years, whatever the OSS shared with the White House, and vice versa, was often available to the Soviet Union. While representing the prize Soviet catch in the OSS, Duncan Lee was hardly alone. Post–Cold War examination of NKVD documents suggests that the number of Soviet agents planted in the OSS ran into the double digits.

Elizabeth Bentley provides interesting glimpses into how the NKVD taught her to deal with contacts on her courier route. In order to avoid being followed, she was instructed to locate “drug stores with two exits, if possible, and movie theatres and other places that would be suitable for dodging in and out rather quickly, and thereby eluding any surveillance.” Another technique was to have a partner wait behind at a suitable distance to see if she was being followed. If a suspicious car appeared outside a building that she was exiting, Bentley was told to “memorize the last two numbers of the license plate, and then attempt to determine if this particular car was following you.” A way to shake a car tail was “to go down one or several one-way streets in the opposite direction to the regular vehicle traffic.” Bentley was advised to cross and recross the street to determine if anyone was following her erratic movements. She was never to turn around, indicating that she was aware of being followed. As a last resort, if a tail could not be shaken, she was “to turn around and start following the person who was following you.” If she was meeting a fellow agent and suspected she was being followed, she should wait until her contact was in sight and then light a cigarette to warn her accomplice away.

If she had incriminating material in her apartment her instructions were to “place a book behind my front door. . . . In the event that anyone had entered my apartment in the meantime, this book, of course, would not be in the same place I left it.” If she kept sensitive papers or equipment in a trunk, “a thin black thread should be placed around the lock . . . in such a manner that if it were opened in my absence, I would be able to tell upon my return.” For her travels between New York and Washington, “I was to remove all identification marks from my clothing, and was also instructed not to carry anything that would indicate to anyone my real identity.” No conversation of substance was ever to be carried out over the telephone, and she was cautioned to listen for “any unusual buzzing or clicks” suggesting the line was tapped. When using a pay phone, she “should either use a phone booth in between two booths already occupied or else should select a booth which would allow observation of persons going in to occupy adjacent booths.” Either Bentley's training was sound or she was a natural, since this nondescript woman, code-named Good Girl by her controllers, was never caught in the six years during which she carried microfilm and classified documents in her knitting bag between American spies in Washington and her NKVD handlers in New York.

Soviet agents like Elizabeth Bentley were cogs in a spy apparatus dating back to 1933, when Roosevelt granted diplomatic recognition to the Soviet Union. The image the President had of a Russian spy was of a wild-haired, hot-eyed labor agitator. The truth was startlingly different. Among those serving the Soviet cause, many, like Lee, were impeccable members of the American establishment, some known socially to the Roosevelts. Martha Dodd was the beautiful, flamboyant, reckless daughter of William E. Dodd, a historian from the University of Chicago who served as FDR's ambassador to Germany from 1933 to 1938. Miss Dodd openly confessed, “I have a weakness for the Russians.” She displayed this penchant by plunging into a love affair with a Russian diplomat, Boris Vinogradov, a romance stage-managed by the NKVD. About her parent whom she was all too willing to betray, she proudly announced to her Soviet controllers, “[M]y father has great influence on Hull and Roosevelt. . . . I have access mainly to the personal, confidential correspondence of my father with the U.S. State Department and the U.S. President,” she boasted. As an NKVD officer put it, Martha “checks Ambassador Dodd's reports to Roosevelt in the archive and communicates to us short summaries of the contents.” She did not hesitate to use her charms to seduce Nazis as well for whatever intelligence of use to the Soviets she could acquire in bed, numbering among her conquests General Ernst Udet, chief of Luftwaffe plane production.

When her father's tenure as ambassador ended, Martha Dodd returned to America, where the Russians still found use for her. A 1942 cable instructed the New York NKVD station: “She should . . . be guided to approach and deepen her relationship with the President's wife, Eleanor. . . .” Dodd would remain unwavering in her attachment to Marxism, fleeing after the war from FBI investigators to the USSR and Czechoslovakia during which time she and the wealthy Communist she had married, Alfred Stern, were convicted in absentia of spying for the Soviet Union.

Like Martha Dodd, another young socialite who shared her political sympathies had a close connection to the White House. Michael Straight was the son of wealthy parents who were founders of
The New Republic
magazine, and early friends of Franklin and Eleanor. Young Michael had gone to England to study at Cambridge in the thirties. There he joined the Communist Party and was drawn into the web of Soviet spies that included Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, Harold “Kim” Philby, and Anthony Blunt, later curator of the queen's art collection. The Roosevelt archives show at least five visits to the White House by Michael Straight, invitations to tea, dinner, and, on one occasion, a lone session with FDR. The usher's log for October 21, 1941, lists Straight and his wife as houseguests along with “Mrs. Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.” According to
The Haunted Wood
by Weinstein and Vassiliev, who in 1994 were given access to NKVD wartime archives, Straight had discussed with the Roosevelts his interest in finding a job. The First Lady suggested that he take an agricultural credit post in the administration, which Straight found useless for his purposes. Thereafter, he wrote to Theodore Mally, chief of the London NKVD station, that he preferred Treasury or the Federal Reserve Board. “In those places,” he said, “possibilities are great because of the influence on Roosevelt. . . . Treasury has great significance. Its head is Henry Morgenthau, who knows my parents well.” Straight eventually managed a State Department post, but his deliveries to his Soviet contacts were disappointing. The Nazi-Soviet pact of August 23, 1939, disillusioned the idealistic Straight. By 1942, at age thirty-one, he broke completely with Soviet espionage. As the current chief of the NKVD New York station advised Moscow, Straight believed, “[O]ne should render assistance to the Soviet Union only as long as the war which the USSR wages is advantageous for England and the U.S.”

Next door to the White House, in the Treasury building, the NKVD had made another penetration. Well before Pearl Harbor, on July 2, 1941, Treasury secretary Henry Morgenthau, FDR's garrulous Hyde Park neighbor, received a disquieting anonymous phone call. The next day, Morgenthau contacted Harry Dexter White, his advisor on international monetary policy, lend-lease, foreign funds, and later to become assistant Treasury secretary. “I got a very mysterious call last night,” Morgenthau explained to White. The caller had said that he had found some of White's papers and “this fellow wanted a reward.” The papers contained highly confidential information, and the secretary had been particularly disturbed because the anonymous caller had a “strong German accent.” White, valued by Morgenthau as the man “in charge of all foreign affairs for me,” had an explanation. He had forgotten the classified papers in his government car on the ride home. The Secret Service investigated, but no German-accented caller was ever traced and the search petered out.

Morgenthau's concern about a leak from his office was understandable, but in the wrong direction. Germany was not the threat in this case. Harry White was one of the American officials whom Whittaker Chambers had fingered as Communist agents at the home of Adolf Berle that long ago September night. No evidence exists that Berle ever alerted Morgenthau to this accusation. The Treasury secretary continued to have implicit faith in the man variously code-named by his Soviet controllers Lawyer, Richard, Jurist, and Reed.

Harry Dexter White, heavyset, full-faced, bespectacled, and mustachioed, was apparently a willing but timorous resource for the NKVD. After meeting with him, a Russian agent cabled Moscow that the Treasury official was “ready for any self-sacrifice; he does not think about his personal security, but a compromise would lead to a scandal. . . . Therefore he would have to be very cautious.” Rather than having a Soviet contact come to his apartment, White proposed “infrequent conversations lasting up to half an hour while driving in his automobile.” However gingerly handled, the Soviets knew what they wanted from the Treasury official. Pavel Fitin, after receiving a three-page draft memorandum written by White for Morgenthau, noted, “Timely receipt by us of these materials could turn out to be very useful. . . . [A] secret document of the [U.S.] Foreign Economic Administration about the future of Germany . . . would be of major interest to our leading government organizations. . . .”

Ironically, it was not a spy's misstep but an ugly divorce and custody suit that almost blew the lid off Soviet espionage operations in the United States. Katherine Wills Perlo, wife of Victor Perlo, an American supplying secrets to the Soviets from the War Production Board, became so vengeful after the couple divorced and he won custody of their daughter that she warned Perlo she had written to President Roosevelt exposing his spy cell. No record of this letter has surfaced at the Roosevelt archives, though an NKVD source in the Justice Department, Judith Coplon, later claimed that it had indeed been sent. Coplon's knowledge of the letter suggests that the White House bucked Mrs. Perlo's denunciation to the Justice Department for disposal. If so, no action against the Perlo ring took place as a result.

What prompted privileged and sophisticated Americans, a Lee, a Hiss, a Dodd, a Straight, a White, to become servants of communism? The answer lies in an amalgam of their beliefs—capitalism, as demonstrated by the Great Depression, had failed; an American democracy that accommodated racism displayed rank hypocrisy; and a brighter future for mankind could be glimpsed in the example of the Soviet Union. They found little to forgive in their own country and everything to admire in a romanticized vision of Russia. And, doubtless, they savored the adrenaline rush of playing spy, of living double lives and taking risks in a presumably noble cause. If, as has been said, religion was the opiate of the masses, communism was the opiate of these intellectuals.