INVESTIGATIONS: The Network

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Newspapers had described her as blonde, beautiful, glamorous—a Mata Hari who had vampired information out of Government employees and slipped it to Communists to send on to Moscow.

The truth about her was not so exciting. When she appeared before two congressional committees last week, she proved to be neither beautiful nor glamorous. She was plump and had a sharp nose and receding chin. She was not blonde; her hair was dark brown. But she was—or had been—a spy. There was no doubt about that. And the torrent of her confession was far more shocking than the fact that she was no Mata Hari.

"Easy Prey." Her name was Elizabeth Bentley. She was born in Connecticut, graduated from Vassar (1930) and had taken an M.A. degree at Columbia. In 1933 she went to Italy, where she was revolted by what she saw of Fascism. On her return, she said, she was "easy prey" for the Commies. She joined the party's Columbia University Unit No. 1.

Then she met Russian-born Jacob Golos, an American citizen but a Russian spy. She fell in love with him. After Golos suffered a heart attack in 1941, he launched her on her own spying career.

She took over his work of collecting "secret information" from Communist members and sympathizers in Washington. There were about 20 Communists she saw in Washington every other week or so; she said that there were 20 or 30 more men & women in the Government feeding information to her contacts. They were in wartime bureaus and in the Army, the Air Force, the State and Treasury Departments —almost every place except the Navy and the FBI. There was also "a man around the White House," who helped to place her informants in strategic spots.

Where did the information go? She was sure it went to Russia, via Golos and his friends at Communist headquarters in Manhattan. After Golos died, she frequently saw Earl Browder, then the boss of the U.S. Communist Party, and showed him her political information. But her military information, she said, was turned over directly to "the real Russians." Sometimes she and some of her Washington contacts met at the Manhattan apartment of John Abt, onetime Government employee, now a moving spirit in Henry Wallace's Progressive Party (see Third Parties).

"In a Good Spot." How did the spy ring operate? Elizabeth Bentley detailed her furtive meetings with a young bureaucrat named William W. Remington. In 1942, she said, Remington was "in a good spot" with the War Production Board, where "he was dealing with aircraft production figures." (Until six weeks ago, when he was suspended, Remington was chairman of a Department of Commerce committee which collated secret information from many Government offices, including the Atomic Energy Commission. His committee's job: to determine what materials and goods should and should not be exported to Russia.)