Out of Bondage: The Story of Elizabeth Bentley

New York: The Devin-Adair Company. Very Good in Very Good dj. 1951. First Edition. Hardcover. [modest shelfwear, tiny dent in top edge of front cover, apparently an ex-library book but marked as such only by the remnants of a removed circulation slip on the rear endpaper; the jacket is moderately worn at the edges and corners, with some mild scuffing to the front panel, small tape mark at bottom of rear flap]. Hoo-boy, how to even begin to summarize the convoluted saga of Elizabeth Bentley, who spied for the Soviets from roughly 1935 to 1945, then turned on them and began spilling her guts to the FBI, ratting out dozens of her former comrades. The Soviets got onto her game pretty quickly, though, and when it became apparent that her prospects of becoming an effective double agent were tainted (in part at least because details of her cooperation with the Feds began leaking to the press), she did a very media-savvy thing by attempting to seize control of her own narrative by feeding her story to a couple of reporters for the New York Journal-American. This resulted in a four-part series of screaming-headline newspaper stories in July 1948 ("Red Ring Bared by Blond Queen"; "Citizens Tricked into Spy Ring by U.S. Reds"; etc.), which promptly got her subpoenaed by the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC). Her sensational public testimony before that tribunal, on five separate days over the span of two weeks in late July and early August -- concurrently with that other famous recanter, Whittaker Chambers -- fed the media frenzy, and made her (along with Chambers) the public face of the "reformed ex-Communist" who had seen the error of her ways and set about to make patriotic amends. That's pretty much where this particular narrative leaves off (she summarizes her HUAC testimony in a single short paragraph, just three pages before the end of the book), because the story she's telling is really just about how she fell in with, and then out with, the CPUSA. She remained in the public eye, though, for years afterward; to get a little perspective about where this book belongs in the HUAC/Red Scare timeline, consider that it hit the bookstalls in September 1951, just a few months after Julius and Ethel Rosenberg (at whose trial Ms. Bentley had testified) were convicted of espionage and sentenced to death. It's generally accepted today that she was a somewhat disturbed woman who played a little fast and loose with the truth (although many of her allegations and accusations have been corroborated by later research). As one reviewer of a 2002 biography wrote, "the fragility of her personality -- an odd combination of fear, arrogance and desperation, all exaggerated by alcohol -- led to mental breakdowns." So it might be advisable to read this one with more than a few grains of salt at your disposal. .