Elizabeth Bentley Analysis

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Elizabeth Bentley was born in Connecticut in 1907, raised by Republican, Episcopalian parents, who passed away prematurely before 1925. She attended Vassar on a full scholarship, did postgraduate work at Columbia University, and had a graduate fellowship at University of Florence. Despite being a seemingly normal American young woman, she was intrigued by Communism and ultimately joined the Soviet Union as a spy. Elizabeth Bentley has an intriguing story, examined in great detail by both Kathryn Olmstead and Lauren Kessler in Red Spy Queen: A Biography of Elizabeth Bentley and Clever Girl: Elizabeth Bentley, the Spy Who Ushered in The McCarthy Era, respectively. An important point to understand about Bentley is that she had a tendency to mislead …show more content…

However, Olmstead reveals the falsity of this claim, showing that Bentley’s several trips to Europe, particularly Italy, that swayed her towards Fascism, and then Anti-fascism . Bentley was described by her classmates as a social misfit, plain-faced, unusually tall (over 5’9”), and lonely. While in Italy, she was able to shed her New England, Republican upbringing. Olmstead discusses her experiences with alcoholism, a promiscuous sex life, and a suicide attempt. It was while in Italy that Bentley "developed her lifelong taste for political extremism," and her lifelong compulsion for "breaking the rules and deceiving the authorities" (pg 7) . Her advisor at University of Florence was a leading anti-fascist, and also provided a romantic mentorship. Furthermore, it was here that Bentley developed more extreme self-delusion when she took credit for a master 's thesis actually written by one of her advisor 's other students …show more content…

Chambers met with the Assistant Secretary of State Adolf Berle and named eighteen current and former government employees as spies or fellow travelers . This information was not validated until Bentley herself corroborated in 1945, and remained a low priority for the FBI. The significance of this at the time, however, was that the Justice Department subpoenaed Golos for passport fraud, which meant he could no longer use his business for espionage and needed not only a new front, but also a new assistant to operate as both courier and case officer

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