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The Shadow Dossier — The Red Spy Queen Who Named Names · The Shadow Dossier

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  The Shadow Dossier. Act I. The Woman Who Walked
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  In. In November 1945, an American woman named
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  Elizabeth Bentley walked into an FBI field office
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  and began describing, in exhaustive detail, a
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  network of Soviet intelligence sources that reached
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  deep into the United States government. She was
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  not a defector from a foreign country. She was
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  an American, a former Vassar graduate, and until
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  recently, one of the network's own couriers.
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  Bentley had drifted toward communism in the 1930s
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  and through a relationship with a Soviet intelligence
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  handler named Jacob Golos. became a courier moving
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  documents and information between Soviet contacts
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  and their sources inside Washington agencies,
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  including the Treasury Department, the Office
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  of Strategic Services, and other wartime offices.
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  When Golos died in 1943, Bentley effectively
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  inherited parts of his network. By 1945, Bentley
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  had grown afraid of Soviet handlers who she believed
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  distrusted her, and of the FBI closing in. She
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  chose to come forward voluntarily, and over months
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  of debriefing, she named more than 80 individuals
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  she said had passed information to Soviet intelligence
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  through her network, including a Treasury Department
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  official named Nathan Gregory Silvermaster. who
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  ran a separate ring of sources and a Justice
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  Department official named William Remington.
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  Her allegations were explosive and, at the time,
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  nearly impossible to prosecute. Much of what
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  she offered was her own testimony about conversations
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  and deliveries, without the kind of corroborating
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  physical evidence that a courtroom demanded.
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  Several of the people she named were investigated,
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  called before congressional committees, and in
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  some cases lost their government careers, but
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  very few were ever criminally convicted based
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  on her testimony alone. Act 3. The press called
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  her the Red Spy Queen. Bentley testified publicly
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  before Congress in 1948, the same year Whitaker
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  Chambers made his own allegations against Alger
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  Hiss, and newspapers gave her a lurid nickname
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  that stuck for the rest of her life, the Red
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  Spy Queen. It was a title that flattened a complicated,
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  frightened informant into a tabloid character,
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  and it shaped how seriously, or unseriously,
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  many people took her claims for years afterward.
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  Soviet intelligence, for its part, took her defection
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  with total seriousness. Internal Soviet cables
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  later revealed that Bentley's decision to go
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  to the FBI forced Moscow to shut down or bury
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  nearly every network she had touched. A mass
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  retreat of Soviet intelligence assets across
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  the American government carried out almost overnight
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  once her cooperation became known through their
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  own sources inside Washington. For decades, Bentley's
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  specific individual accusations remained largely
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  unverifiable. treated by skeptics as the overheated
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  claims of an unstable and possibly self -serving
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  witness. That changed with the declassification
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  of the Venona program's deciphered Soviet cables
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  beginning in 1995. Venona corroborated the substance
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  of her account to a remarkable degree. confirming
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  that Silvermaster's ring existed largely as she
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  described it, and that a striking number of the
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  people she named did, according to Soviet intelligence's
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  own internal communications, in fact provide
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  material to Moscow. Elizabeth Bentley died in
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  1963, having spent her later years testifying
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  periodically teaching, and living with a reputation
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  that outside intelligence circles remained largely
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  a punchline. It took the Soviet Union's own archives
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  and America's own broken ciphers, both opened
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  up long after her death, to establish that the
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  Red Spy Queen had, in her own uneven and self
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  -interested way, been telling the government
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  something largely true. This concludes declassified
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  file number 064 of the Shadow Dossier, the Red
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  Spy Queen Who Named Names. What dangerous secrets
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  an official declassification. This is the shadow
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  dossier. Thank you for listening.