New York: Harper Collins, (2003) dj. SIGNED hardcover first edition - The first definitive biography of a conflicted American woman and her controversial legacy. "More than a half century after she captured the headlines as the 'Red Spy Queen,' Elizabeth Bentley remains a mystery. New England-born, conservatively raised, she was groomed for a quiet life, which she explored briefly in the 1920s as a teacher at an East Coast boarding school. But in her mid-twenties she rejected both past and future and set herself on an entirely new course. In the 1930s she embraced communism and fell in love with an undercover KGB agent who initiated her into the world of espionage. By the time America plunged into World War II, Elizabeth Bentley was directing the operations of the two largest spy rings in America. Eventually, she had eighty people in her secret apparatus, half of them employees of the federal government. . . .When she defected in 1945 and told her story - first to the FBI and then at a series of public hearings and trials - she was catapulted to tabloid fame as the "Red Spy Queen," ushering in, almost single-handedly, the McCarthy Era. She was the government's star witness, the FBI's most important informer, and the darling of the Catholic anticommunist movement. . But who was she?" Illustrated with photographs. SIGNED on the half title page. Notes, bibliography, index. vii, 372 pp. ISBN: 0-060185198.