Word: bentley
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Charges of intrigue first made headlines in mid-summer 1948 when Elizabeth Bentley and Whittaker Chambers, self-confessed former underground agents, told the House Un-American Activities Committee about organized spying in government. Alger Hiss was high up on Chambers' prescription list and in time went to prison, convicted of perjury committed before an espionage-seeking committee...
Repercussions over the Chambers-Bentley testimony waxed hot. Politicians, spurred by patriotic fervor and desire for national notoriety, shouted of widespread Communist infiltration into key government policy posts. "Red herring!" countered President Truman and he dismissed the charges as cheap political attempts to discredit his Administration. But indications clearly pointed toward infiltration and systematic espionage, especially in the Executive Department...
...distraught Elizabeth Bentley in 1945 spilled her story of Communist spying to the FBI. She listed many whom Chambers and others had named earlier. Loud denials of William Remington, a Commerce Department employee, that he was a member of the Bentley group led to his perjury conviction on an allied charge of Communist membership...
...connection with the sources, I would like to mention one in particular, Miss Elizabeth Bentley. From the very outset, we established that she had been in a position to report the facts relative to Soviet espionage, which she has done. We knew she was in contact with a top-ranking Soviet espionage agent, Anatoli Gromov, the first secretary of the Soviet embassy in Washington, D.C., as late as Nov. 21, 1945 in New York City...
...information furnished by Miss Bentley, which was susceptible to check, has proven to be correct. She has been subjected to the most searching of cross-examinations; her testimony has been evaluated by juries and reviewed by the courts and has been found to be accurate...