Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America (42 page)

Bernard Redmont was born in 1918 in New York to immigrant parents.
He attended CCNY, where he edited the student newspaper, served in
ROTC, and joined the left-wing American Student Union. After obtaining
an MA from Columbia Journalism School in 1939, he traveled to Europe
and was in the USSR when the Nazi-Soviet Pact was announced. He lived
in Mexico, serving as a stringer for several papers, before returning to the
United States. After Pearl Harbor, he moved to Washington to become a
news writer for the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs (CIAA).63

His friend, William Remington, introduced him to Elizabeth Bentley,
whom he claimed he innocently knew as Helen Johnson, a reporter for
PM, the left-wing New York newspaper, whom he briefed several times
and gave publicly available materials. In her initial statement to the FBI,
however, Bentley revealed a detailed knowledge of Redmont's background and career at odds with his claim that he barely knew her and insisted that he supplied confidential material from his CIAA office along
with cable intercepts. She said that Golos judged Redmont's material to
be of low value. Redmont joined the Marines in the summer of 1943 and
was wounded while serving as a combat correspondent during a landing
on the Marshall Islands. Mustered out of the service in the summer of
1944, he returned to the CIAA. According to Bentley, he telephoned and
suggested a meeting. But the KGB was then phasing Bentley out of her
liaison role, and she never met with him again. She told the FBI she assumed the KGB had assigned someone else to contact Redmont but
noted that in the spring of 1945 Joseph Katz mentioned to her that the
KGB had no further need for him.64

While Redmont always denied any Communist affiliation, Ann Moos
Remington later testified to a U.S. grand jury that she and her ex-husband
had been close friends of the Redmonts and that both couples were Communists. William Remington had testified to a congressional committee
that Bernard was a Communist, but he later repudiated that statement
and apologized for it while trying to persuade Redmont to testify for him
during his perjury trial. An FBI wiretap on the Redmont phone in 1946
recorded a conversation between Joan Redmont and Helen Scott (herself
a Soviet source) in which Joan jokingly referred to her son, Dennis Foster Redmont, as William Foster's (chief of the CPUSA) "namesake ."ss

Redmont might have escaped trouble, since Bentley had barely mentioned him publicly, except that he agreed to testify on behalf of Remington in his perjury trial. He was immediately fired by his boss, William
Lawrence, publisher of U. S. News and World Report. He moved to France,
where he worked for a series of newspapers and, ultimately, Westinghouse
Broadcasting Group. In 1976 he became Moscow bureau chief for CBS.
Five years later, he returned to the United States to teach and then served
as dean of the College of Communication at Boston University, resigning
in 1986 after a disagreement with BU president John Silber over plans to
train exiled Afghan journalists to cover the Soviet occupation.

Redmont continued to hew to the position that Bentley was a fantasist, linking her to "pathological liars, cranks, seekers of attention or publicity, or paid purveyors of tales and innuendoes." He insisted that he had
been a victim of hysteria: "Tens of thousands of us, who in some way had
not conformed, who had joined the wrong organizations, or had the
wrong acquaintances, or had been denounced, anonymously or not, by informers, crackpots or self-styled patriots, were caught in the gears ."ss

The evidence is, however, that Bernard Redmont, distinguished American journalist and dean of a college of journalism, was the fabricator, not
Elizabeth Bentley. An October 1944 KGB report lists his real name and
cover name ("Mon") and identifies him as one of Bentley's sources. A January 1945 report again lists him as a Bentley contact with his real name
and "Mon" cover name and adds that he had a Communist Party name of
"Berny," that he worked in the press department of the CIAA, and that he
had become an inactive source. In December 1945 the KGB station in
London informed Moscow Center that Kim Philby had turned over a copy
of Bentley's 1945 FBI statement given to British SIS. The KGB report
listed forty-one KGB sources Bentley had identified to the FBI, adding
their KGB cover names (which Bentley had not known). The last one on
the list was, "41. Bernard Redmont (Mon)." A 1948 report, again giving his
real name and "Mon" cover name, listed him among the Soviet intelligence
contacts exposed by Bentley's defection. He may have been a minor source,
but documentary evidence is that he was a source.67

I. F. Stone assisted in recruiting William Dodd, Jr., as a KGB agent in
1936. Initially Dodd provided the KGB with inside information from the
U.S. Embassy in Berlin. Once his father's ambassadorship ended, Dodd
returned to the United States, worked as a journalist for a time, and then challenged an incumbent member of Congress, Howard W. Smith, for
the 1938 Democratic nomination in Virginia's eighth district. Dodd ran
as an ardent New Deal supporter and as part of a White House effort to
replace conservative Democrats with liberals. Eager to have one of its
agents in the House of Representatives, the KGB New York station gave
Dodd $1,ooo (nearly $15,000 in zoo8 dollars) for his campaign.

In August 1938 Peter Gutzeit, chief of the KGB New York station,
notified Moscow Center that the funds had been delivered to Dodd and
a receipt obtained. Moscow had suggested that subsidizing Dodd would
be just the first step of a broader effort to secretly sponsor congressional
candidates, but Gutzeit warned Moscow that these plans might be highly
expensive:

"Implementation of the plan arising from the tasks you formulated in your last
letter will require, as has already been stated, enormous amounts of money.
These amounts are far greater than our current expenses. The funding of con-
gressmen's election campaigns, the payment of journalists, the upkeep of newspapers, all of this adds up to costs that are impossible to calculate in advance.

The expenditure on a congressman, for example, can vary from case to
case. It's impossible to say in advance how much it will cost us to be able to
buy the pens of popular journalists. It is very difficult to determine even approximately the sum required to purchase a newspaper. In addition, the nature
of all of this work is such that it's impossible to know in advance the limits of
the spending, just as it's impossible to say in advance whether one journalist is
needed or ten. Whether one newspaper is needed or two, etc. So I frankly
state that I am completely at a loss in determining even approximately an estimate of future expenses. Whether these expenses will be 5oo,ooo doll. or
1,000,000 doll. a year, I cannot say, because of the aforementioned considerations. A resolution of this question should be up to you. The question of how
much funding will be allocated for this work for our country must be raised at
the appropriate levels. And then, based on that sum, we will structure all of
our calculations."

Dodd ran an energetic campaign, and press coverage in liberal-leaning
newspapers such as the Washington Post suggested that it was a tight
campaign and he had a chance. But in the primary Smith swamped Dodd
by a three-to-one margin. Whether it was Gutzeit's sensible skepticism or
Dodd's loss, nothing more was heard of Moscow Center plans of becoming a significant player in American electoral politics.68

The relationship with Dodd, however, continued. In 1939 the KGB
New York station reported that he had passed on inside political gossip
from prominent New Deal members of Congress (Senator Claude Pep per of Florida and Representative John Coffee of Washington), provided
documents his father had kept from his ambassadorial tenure, and agreed
to work as the intermediary between the KGB and Helen Fuller, a
woman employed in the Department of justice whom it hoped to develop into an informant on FBI activities. The KGB also continued to
support Dodd's political ambitions, including his idea to purchase a
weekly newspaper, the Blue Ridge Herald, in the eighth district as a base
for a second attempt to unseat Representative Smith. Moscow Center allocated $3,500 for the venture ($52,000 in 2008 dollars), but the KGB
New York station wanted at least $5,ooo and assured Moscow: "'The direction of the newspaper will depend entirely on us. We will work out
every detail of the newspaper's agenda with `President' [Dodd]. It should
not be too left-wing, and it should not be pro-Soviet-nor, it goes without saying, should it be anti-Soviet. A moderately liberal local newspaper
with a direct connection to liberal Washington journalists and their participation in this little newspaper.- For whatever reason, Dodd did not
purchase the Blue Ridge Herald and did not run against Smith in 1940.
The KGB also temporarily cut contact with him in May 1940, when his
liaison was recalled to Moscow and the undermanned station was unable
to provide a substitute.69

A year later Moscow Center urged that Dodd, then with the left-wing
journal American Week, be reactivated, and the KGB New York station
reestablished contact through Zalmond Franklin. Moscow Center clearly
had high hopes for Dodd. A proposed budget for a revived American illegal station set a monthly stipend for him at $zoo. But plans to revive the
illegal station in 1941 were aborted when the designated station chief
died in transit. The KGB New York station continued contact via Franklin
and thought that Dodd and his sister, Martha Dodd Stern, had provided
some interesting information from an interview with Secretary of State
Cordell Hull. Dodd also raised the possibility that he might get a position
as a journalist assigned to Moscow on behalf of the North American
Newspaper Alliance and Harper's magazine, but the KGB saw nothing to
its advantage in the suggestion and it was dropped.70

In January 1942 Moscow told Vasily Zarubin, newly arrived chief of
the legal station, that Dodd's potential had not been realized:

"For the past two years we have made unsuccessful attempts to use "President" [Dodd] in various areas of work.... Even though "President" has communicated with us for a long time, he remains a rough-edged probationer
[agent] and requires a good deal of work both to teach him agent skills and to
instill brutal discipline and the rules of covert work in him." (The aim is to turn him into a journalist-commentator. To direct his appearances in the press
and on the radio so as to earn him a more solid position and reputation. In
order to detach him from "Liza" [Martha Dodd Stern], arrange a trip for Pr.
somewhere abroad (except for Home [Moscow]).71

In 1942 Dodd managed to get a position of mild interest to the KGB:
assistant editor for the Foreign Broadcast Monitoring Service (FBMS), a
wartime arm of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). The
FBMS provided American intelligence, diplomatic, and military services
with translations and summaries of foreign radio broadcasts. However,
by then Dodd's political past had begun to catch up with him. The Dies
Committee called him to testify in 1943. Dodd unreservedly disavowed
any sympathy for communism or links with the CPUSA, but his testimony was confused and often lacking in credibility. He admitted he had
authored a 1938 essay in Champion, journal of the YCL, but claimed he
had no idea that it was a YCL publication. He admitted he had been active in the American League for Peace and Democracy in the late 1930s
but denied that it had been Communist-aligned. He denied he had given
his permission to be listed on the call for a 1941 national conference of
the League of American Writers (by that point an obvious Communist
front) but admitted he had attended the conference. Urged on by Representative Dies, a subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee headed by Representative John H. Kerr (D-NC) investigated a number of government employees, including Dodd, for possible Communist
ties. Dodd testified to the "Kerr Commission" and once again denied any
sympathy for communism while delivering rambling and incredible testimony about his past association with Communist-aligned groups. Congress in 1943 voted to attach a rider to the FCC's appropriations bill prohibiting salary payments to three named individuals, including William
Dodd, Jr.72

The Congress, however, was not the only body that found Dodd's testimony unacceptable. KGB New York station chief Zarubin forwarded
the Kerr subcommittee report on Dodd's testimony and told Moscow:

"As the report makes clear, "President" [Dodd] conducted himself in a foolish
and sometimes disgraceful manner during the interrogations, especially when
the questions pertained specifically to the fellowcountrymen [CPUSA] and the
USSR and its system. "Vardo" [Elizabeth Zarubin], as we have reported to you,
spoke with "President" before the investigation and interrogations began and
gave him specific instructions on how to conduct himself so as, on the one
hand, not to become confused and not get stuck, and on the other, to emerge with dignity from this affair and not denigrate the "fellowcountrymen" and the
USSR. "President" evidently got terribly scared and hoped to keep his job if
he would slander the fellowcountrymen and the USSR.

A great deal has been written in the press on "President's" case and a big
ruckus has been raised. Because of this, and also because P. did almost nothing
for us, we have not been meeting with him in the past few months. He was
very frightened by the investigation and avoided meetings himself.... Based
on the foregoing, President for the moment should be considered deactivated.
The question of his future use can be settled once and for all after his situation
is clarified."73

Dodd and the others named in the 1943 appropriations rider were, in
effect, fired by Congress. Years later the U.S. Supreme Court held that
the rider was a bill of attainder prohibited by the Constitution, and Dodd
received back pay but not reinstatement. Meanwhile, however, he was
out of a job and under a cloud. In 1945 he prevailed on his Soviet friends
to give him a job as a reporter for TAS S. Moscow Center was not pleased.
While it had given up on William Dodd as a productive agent, it still had
hopes for his sister, Martha Dodd Stern, and her wealthy husband, Alfred
Stern. Moscow feared that William's connection to TASS would compromise Martha, and she not only agreed but also wanted her brother
fired. Dodd, for his part, argued that in light of the Dies Committee and
Congress's actions against him, if he lost his TASS position, he was unemployable. The KGB was unmoved, and TASS fired him. The KGB
never renewed contact with him.74