Overview

When Elizabeth Bentley slunk into an FBI field office in 1945, she was thinking only of saving herself from NKGB assassins who were hot on her trail. She had no idea that she was about to start the greatest Red Scare in US history. Bentley was a Connecticut Yankee and Vassar graduate who spied for the Soviet Union for seven years. She met with dozens of highly placed American agents who worked for the Soviets, gathering their secrets and stuffing sensitive documents into her knitting bag. But her Soviet spymasters suspected her of disloyalty - and even began plotting to silence her for ever. To save her own life, Bentley decided to betray her friends and comrades to the FBI. Her defection effectively shut down Soviet espionage in the US for years. Despite her crucial role in the cultural and political history of the early Cold War, Bentley has long been overlooked or underestimated by historians. Now, new documents from Russian and American archives make it possible to assess the veracity of her allegations. This biography rescues Elizabeth Bentley from obscurity and tells her dramatic life story.

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Reviews

"""What distinguishes Red Spy Queen... is Olmsted's determination to write about a life, not just hand down a criminal indictment. She seeks to understand the forces - personal, circumstantial, and ideological - that led Bentley into the shadowy world of espionage."" - Maurice Isserman, author of Which Side Were You On?: The American Communist Party During the Second World War"

Olmsted (History/UC Davis) chronicles the rise and fall of a Communist-spy-turned-informer from her early days as an antifascist at Columbia to her Cold War defection to the FBI. Descended from true-blue Yankees and raised by devoutly Christian parents, Bentley was unlikely spy material. But after achieving her graduate degree in 1934 under shady circumstances (she passed off someone else's master's thesis as her own), she found herself an orphan in the midst of the Great Depression, with dismal job prospects and few friends. The Communist Party, with its offer of acceptance, a sense of purpose, and friends and lovers aplenty, proved as irresistible to Bentley as she, with her impeccable pedigree, was to party recruiters. She was tapped as a spy and was soon intimately involved with her controller, a Bolshevik defector who taught Bentley all the basics of spycraft. Enthusiastic but notoriously sloppy, the two gathered information for both the American Communist Party and the Soviets. As her partner's health failed, Bentley stepped in to run his spy ring, but Moscow was dissatisfied with her maverick ways and tried to push her out. Invited to pay a visit to Mother Russia, she realized she was a target for execution and in 1945, fearing for her life, turned herself in to the FBI. A string of congressional hearings followed, and Bentley, who seemed positively enthusiastic about the prospect of informing on her friends, named more than 50 former spy associates. After this swan song, she endured some sordid years, succumbing to alcoholism, squeezing more and more money out of FBI agents who wanted her to remain a cooperative witness, and losing teaching jobs due to her loose morals. She succumbed to abdominal cancer in 1963 at age 55. Far from a thriller, but a valuable addition to the annals of spy lore. (Kirkus Reviews)

What distinguishes Red Spy Queen... is Olmsted's determination to write about a life, not just hand down a criminal indictment. She seeks to understand the forces - personal, circumstantial, and ideological - that led Bentley into the shadowy world of espionage. - Maurice Isserman, author of Which Side Were You On?: The American Communist Party During the Second World War

Author Information

KATHRYN S. OLMSTED is assistant professor of history at the University of California, Davis. She is author of Challenging the Secret Government: The Post-Watergate Investigations of the CIA and FBI.

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