Clever Girl by Lauren Kessler

Author:Lauren Kessler [Kessler, Lauren]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780061740473
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2007-07-15T04:00:00+00:00

God help that country where informers thrive

Where slander flourishes and lies contrive.

Not surprisingly, the Communist Party was particularly displeased with Bentley and began a campaign of smears and slanders against her, including planting a story that she had spent time in a mental institution. Among themselves, American communists dismissed her as a neurotic, lonely woman who was never serious about communism in the first place and was now starved for attention. She received threatening letters in the mail. “Dear Betty,” read one of them. “Congratulations on your spy story…. It will be the last story you will ever write. We will wright [sic] the last chapter.” In San Francisco, police found a pile of women’s clothes, a handbag, and a letter addressed to Bentley on the Golden Gate Bridge. The letter accused Bentley of betrayal and said that the anonymous writer had jumped off the bridge along with her baby daughter. It was a hoax, the police discovered a few days later. But meanwhile, the story went out across the country through the wire services. If Bentley had been looking for the spotlight when she testified that summer, this, surely, was not the spotlight she had in mind.

Part of what kept her in the public eye after the hearings ended was William Remington. When she testified to the Ferguson Committee that he was one of her regular Washington, D.C., sources, she set in motion an epic drama that would be played out at three congressional hearings, and before two loyalty boards, a grand jury, and in two courtrooms. It would be part of her life—and great fodder for the press—for years to come.

Remington himself was not a particularly important figure in government, like Harry Dexter White, nor was he a network leader like Silvermaster or Perlo. But he became the test of Bentley’s credibility, just as Alger Hiss became the test for Whittaker Chambers. Remington was not like the others Bentley had named. Silvermaster, Ullmann, Perlo, and most of the rest effectively took themselves out of the game by invoking their Fifth Amendment privilege and refusing to answer questions that might link them with Bentley—or each other. They were not going to be indicted for espionage, and they and their lawyers knew it. They knew they were safe when the 1947 grand jury didn’t return indictments. When it was evident that Bentley could offer no more corroboration in the congressional hearings than she had to the grand jury, it became a simple matter of keeping quiet and toughing it out. Silvermaster and the others had no way of knowing that Venona could prove their involvement in espionage. But even if they had known, it didn’t matter, because Army Intelligence and J. Edgar Hoover had no intention of making Venona public. All Silvermaster and the rest had to do was not say anything that could later be used against them in a perjury trial. All they had to do was leave their government jobs and remove themselves from the crossfire.

Of those

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.