Queen of Lies --- Queen of SpiesA Lies and Detection Episode Miss Elizabeth Bentley walked into the New Haven FBI Offices and told the agents that she feared for her life. She said that she had been a spy for the Soviet Union, serving both as a courier who had completed over a thousand dead drops and as the coordinator for multiple networks of spies, working in New York City and in Washington, D.C. However, the NKGB (the predecessor to the KGB) had determined that she was no longer sufficiently reliable. “I knew they no longer trusted me. They no longer needed me. They certainly did not want me. I knew too much. My life was clearly in danger.”During their interviews, the FBI gained her trust, and she began to provide them with detailed information.“Hello, I’m Jonas Chartogaro, a government polygraph examiner with over 25 years of experience. I am also a former New York police officer. AND, I’ll be interviewing Miss Elizabeth Bentley. She was a former Soviet spy whose confessions to the FBI played a very significant role in shaping America during the late 1940s. Her revelations triggered the extensive anti-Communist loyalty probes that resulted in what came to be called the ‘McCarthy Era.’ ”“What makes Elizabeth Bentley so interesting is that she was a compulsive liar. She lied to the KGB, she lied to the FBI, and she lied in both her Congressional and her courtroom testimonies.”“Yet, hidden amongst those many lies were important slivers of truth, truths that eventually broke the back of the Soviet’s most insidious ring of spies.” Resource:Kathryn S. Olmsted. Red Spy Queen: A Biography of Elizabeth Bentley. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. ISBN 978-0-8078-2739-0.

Ask this episode

“What did the council decide on item 42?” — answered with the speaker and the moment.

Transcript

Related