Elizabeth responded to the Soviets' orders to turn over her sources by simply ignoring them and continuing to expand her own spy network. Shortly after 1944 began, Browder told her that he had another group of agents ready to deliver information to her. Their current handler, attorney John Abt, was an organizer of labor's political action committee, the CIO-PAC, and could no longer risk any involvement in espionage. Although Golos had planned to take over the spy ring, he died before he could. Browder wanted Elizabeth to be the group's new courier and controller.

In March 1944, Elizabeth had her first meeting with the "Perlo group." On a rainy afternoon in his Manhattan apartment, Abt introduced her to Charlie Kramer, Edward Fitzgerald, Harry Magdoff, and Victor Perlo. She soon learned that there were five more sources who shared information with the group.

The four members of the group she met that day held various jobs in the government: three of them worked for the War Production Board, while Kramer was a staff member of Senator Harley Kilgore's Subcommittee on War Mobilization. Perlo was their undisputed leader.

Perlo's parents had been Russian Jews who had fled to the United States, and the young statistician had an almost reverential awe for the new leaders of his ancestral homeland. One Communist acquaintance remembered him as a dogmatic Leninist who condemned "fuzzy-minded liberals" for promoting inadequate reforms that only delayed the moment when the workers would seize power. At his first meeting with Elizabeth, Perlo asked her anxiously, "Is Joe getting the stuff safely?" At nearly every meeting he would ask if Stalin had personally seen the documents." (In 1992, after the collapse of the country for which he had sacrificed so much, Victor Perlo would denounce Mikhail Gorbachev's "opportunistic petty-bourgeois capitulation to capitalism" and pine for the days of Stalinist order.) His enthusiasm for "Uncle Joe" caused headaches for his fellow agents. For example, he insisted upon publicly accosting fellow spy George Silverman and demanding if he had "anything for Joe." But despite his reputation as a "bull in a china shop," Perlo was indispensable to his spymasters...

At the War Production Board, Perlo gathered information on aircraft production. Magdoff and Fitzgerald also contributed data on industrial production from the WPB, while other members of the group transmitted intelligence from the oss, the Treasury Department, and the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration." Kramer added information from congressional investigations of multinational corporations."' When the Soviets impatiently ordered him to give them fewer tales of capitalist perfidy and more intelligence about U.S. foreign policy, he lost his enthusiasm for helping them." Like Remington, Price, and other idealists caught in Elizabeth's web, Kramer discovered that the men in Moscow who wanted his documents were not the romantic People's Warriors he wanted them to be.

Elizabeth's connection with the Perlo group very nearly led to her arrest and exposure. Just one month after she began meeting with Perlo, the FBI learned that it had good reason to begin tailing him. In April 1944, President Roosevelt received a letter naming Victor Perlo and several other Bentley sources as Soviet spies.

The FBI determined that the letter had been written by Perlo's recently divorced wife, Katherine Wills Perlo. A diagnosed schizophrenic, Katherine had lost a bitter battle for custody of their daughter. When agents confronted her, she confirmed the contents of her letter.

But the Perlo letter did not ignite the enthusiasm of the bureau the way Elizabeth's confession later would. There were no urgent telegrams in the middle of the night; no one assigned dozens of agents to follow and bug the people named in the letter. Possibly, the men of the FBI discounted the tale of an unstable, vengeful ex-wife. Or perhaps the tale of Russian espionage did not seem so sinister in 1944, when the brave Soviet allies were battling the Nazis. In any event, Katherine Perlo failed in her quest to destroy her ex-husband, and Elizabeth survived to spy another day.

Victor Perlo (1912-99), like Weyl, was an original member of the Ware Group. He graduated from Columbia University in 1933 with bachelor's and master's degrees in mathematics and statistics. Perlo served the Roosevelt administration in various agencies, including the NRA. He left government in 1937 to work for the Brookings Institution, then returned in 1939, working for Harry Hopkins at the Department of Commerce. In 1940 Perlo moved to the Office of Price Administration and by 1943 he was chief of the Aviation Section of the War Production Board. After the AAA purge in 1935 and Ware's death, the Ware Group re-formed under the leadership of John Abt, then Victor Perlo. Mrs. Katherine Perlo, the estranged wife of Victor Perlo, confirmed the existence of the Perlo Group in an anonymous letter to the White House as well as the FBI in 1944, naming Abt, Collins, Kramer, and Witt, and others, as members of the Group.'' In addition, Perlo was named as a Soviet agent by Elizabeth Bentley. When he was called before congressional committees investigating Soviet espionage in the 1930s and 1940s, Perlo invoked the Fifth Amendment and refused to provide answers. From the 1960s until his death, Perlo served as the chief economist of the Communist Party in the United States. He was also a board member of the party.

At last Peters joined me. He was worried. A crisis, he said, had developed in the Group. Victor Perlo believed that he should succeed Ware as Group leader. He was being stubborn and surly about it. All the other members of the leadership believed that Nathan Witt was Ware's natural heir. A deadlock had resulted, for, though the rest might easily have outvoted Perlo, they did not wish to risk trouble in the Group by alienating him. Peters was also for Witt. So was I. But Peters did not wish to use his authority to act against any member of the Group in favor of another member. Peters asked me if I would come in and, since my personal authority was high with the Group, give my reasons why I was for Witt.

I went in. I said that we must first of all treat the problem that had arisen as Communists, without personalities, and bearing in mind the peculiar nature of underground work and its unusual requirements, especially in the personal character of leadership. I asked Perlo's pardon for observing that he was a tense and nervous man, and that his very belief in his own qualifications for leadership, while perhaps quite justified, would actually be a handicap so long as it was not shared by the rest of the Group. Of course, we Communists did not believe in any mystical rightness of majorities over minorities, but we did believe in practical solutions to practical problems. Witt was acknowledged to be quiet, firm and solid. He had the confidence of all the members of the Group except Perlo. Therefore, I was for Witt.

Perlo, of course, was unconvinced, but he agreed to abide by discipline. Thereafter, he would scarcely speak to me. Later, according to Elizabeth Bentley, he rose to the leadership he coveted in her espionage group.

One major group of American sources for Soviet intelligence had become a "lost tribe" for a time during the late 1930s and early 1940s. Some of its members, including John Abt and Victor Perlo, had taken part during the thirties either in Harold Ware's Group or Whittaker Chambers's (CRU military intelligence) Washington networks or both. Chambers's defection in 1938 and the consequent fear of exposure doubtless caused several in the group to curtail cooperation for a time.

A shortage of Soviet operatives in the United States during this period coincided with the purges underway in the USSR. The result was an unusual situation: a significant number of American sources pursuing a tiny cadre of professional Soviet intelligence operatives. In 1939-40 alone, Moscow recalled seven experienced case officers from the United States, leaving a number of highly placed intelligence sources within the government without couriers or contacts. Until the German invasion of the USSR in June 1941, moreover, the few Soviet operatives still on U.S. soil were more likely to be pursuing Trotskyists and Nazi-fascist agents in their own midst than Roosevelt Administration secrets.

With the emergence of an anti-Nazi wartime alliance of the United States, England, and the Soviet Union beginning in the summer of 1941, NKVD and GRU interest in classified materials related to the war effort increased dramatically.

We set out for our first Party meeting on a mild winter evening. To passersby we must have appeared as we were meant to - just one more strolling pair of lovers. "Act as if you're visiting us socially," Charles had murmured, bending over my desk with his finger on a line of milk-price figures.

As we walked I must have said it felt strange to go to a meeting on the very Euclid Street where at age eighteen I had lived with my mother in a "light housekeeping" room. Refusing to go to Iowa university as a poor "town girl" I wanted to be "independent." But Mother had come with me to Washington.

The Kramer apartment was not in one of those row houses, where everyone sees who comes and goes. In a modern building, with an unusual entrance at the back, it seemed almost too obviously suited for conspiratorial purposes.

There was no lobby, just a bare, open stairway, where we found Charles leaning over the fourth-floor railing. As we reached the top he greeted us with a warm smile I had never seen before.

In the office I had first met him as a morose man named Krevisky. The change to Kramer had not caused much comment, perhaps because he never took part in the camaraderie of the staff. Among all these vocal New Dealers his silence had made me curious. When I came to know him better I would realize that he had to keep his lips shut tight to hold in his rage and scorn.

Inside the apartment his wife Mildred was waiting, a shy southern girl with ash-blond hair and the pallor of the Appalachian children whose pictures we had been publishing in our articles about how Subsistence Homesteads would better their lot. Beyond her, in the light of a bridge lamp, a boy knelt trying to untie a bundle wrapped in brown paper. He looked up distractedly, biting his lip and brushing back his hair, when Charles spoke his name, Victor Perlo. A mathematical prodigy, he had been at City College in New York with Charles. Now at age twenty-one he was a full-fledged statistician. The other member of the unit, Marion Bachrach, looked small and hunched in a deep canvas sling chair. But her face was fine-featured, with intelligent brown eyes and smiling, receptive lips.

Charles began talking in an assured voice I hardly recognized as his. He explained that though there might be changes - a comrade had already been drawn away to head another unit - we would try to limit our knowledge of other members, in case of interrogation, possible torture. Such an idea, he admitted, might seem rather remote in the radical Washington climate, but climates could change fast. In most places members of units knew each other only by their Party pseudonyms, so as not to be able to give real names if questioned. But here in Washington, where the New Dealers were always meeting one another socially, we'd run the opposite risk, of using the Party name at the wrong time. But though they would be used only on official records, we should each choose one now.

I listed myself as Mary MacFarland, after my strong-willed, talented musician aunt who had died in Mother's arms at the age of twenty. To me she was a romantic figure; for exactly the opposite reasons Hermann chose the unremarkable name, Walter Becker.

Continuing about precautions, Charles warned us that Marion's husband, who as a nonmember must be kept in ignorance, caused practical problems. Marion had made every effort to bring him close enough to recruit, but though sympathetic he had the typical liberal's fear of committing himself. Charles turned to Marion. "is that a fair statement?"

"Let's just put it," Marion said, "that he's a wise old bird."

Charles smiled, but in a strained way. Even I, new to the Party, felt a slight shock. It would take a while to learn that under Marion's mischief was a dedication deeper than that of many comrades who religiously parroted the official line.

She would rise to the next-to-highest national rank in the Party, be indicted under the Smith Act, and escape trial only by death. Charles went on to say that Marion was a writer who had published in Atlantic Monthly. We would hear later about her project.

But first came collection of dues. Basically they would be ten per-cent of our salary, plus occasional extras. We had been warned of this. It had given Hermann some concern, since he sent a regular stipend to his friend Ernst, who was on the last lap of his doctorate in chemistry. But we could manage, I was sure. Mary and I had proposed a consumer column to McCall's magazine which they seemed about to take. And in free-lancing I had ranged from Snappy Stories to the New Yorker.

Charles was explaining that more was expected of us as a privileged group. Our salaries - even in the Depression - were far above the average comrade's. We were permitted - in fact, urged - to win career advancement, usually impossible for open activists. Extra assessments from us would help support comrades who could not make public appeals for funds. While rallies in Madison Square Garden could collect money for such causes as the Scottsboro Boys, there were unknown comrades in the South living on almost nothing - eating with the sharecroppers they were trying to organize - alone and always in danger of being beaten up or shot. We could think of our money going to help them.

I hardly needed his persuasion any more, I suppose, than my mother had needed the minister's persuasion to find somehow an extra quarter or half dollar for a foreign missionary. And Party dues of ten percent-thirty dollars out of my three hundred a month seemed quite normal to one whose mother tithed. She had given to the Lord's work ten percent of an income that was sometimes as low as fifteen dollars a month, even including what my oldest brother earned by chopping wood for neighbors.

Hermann was taking out his penknife; he cut the cord that Victor Perlo had been struggling to untie. (When he told me later that he had seen the address - John Smith on Third Street northeast I had visions of a murky cellarway over beyond the Capitol. A dark figure was emerging with this bundle, hurrying across the sidewalk, glancing over his shoulder, tossing his burden into a shabby black coupe and speeding away. One day I would take my turn at being that dark figure.)

On the floor were stacks of the Daily Worker, the thick red Communist, the red and white Communist International, the violent black and white New Masses, and the mimeographed agitprop bulletin.

Hermann declined New Masses, saying he had bought it at the newsstand on Pennsylvania Avenue. Charles told him sharply never to go there again. We must keep away from any place where leftists might gather. We must avoid, as far as possible, associating with radicals, difficult as that would be in Washington. Even liberals, outspoken ones such as Gardner Jackson, Charles said, looking my way, were out of bounds. This saddened me. Pat had been so kind a friend.

Obviously, Charles added, we couldn't go near any public protests or rallies.

This disappointed me, remembering Trafalgar Square, feeling part of a huge crowd unified in the same uplifting urgency. But these directives carried their own charge, setting our group apart, preparing us to face our own hard challenges.

The literature we had to buy cost almost ten dollars. This, plus the dues, almost exactly equalled the wages I paid Mamie, the cheerful woman who now brought Claudia home for lunch and put her to bed. Hermann had insisted on hiring her after going once with me to pick up Claudia after work. Sitting on the nurse's lap she had seemed quite contented, but at her first sight of me large round tears had spurted from her eyes, splashing on the floor. Mamie must stay, whatever else we gave up to the Party.

When Victor Perlo had bundled up the leftover literature, he gave a report on the national news, starting with Roosevelt's appointment of Joseph P. Kennedy as chairman of the new Stock Exchange Commission. He called it a capitulation to the most vicious political elements. A Wall Street operator himself, Kennedy had made his millions in bootlegging. Such facts were probably a fraction of the truth, Vic said; but enough to rid us of the illusion that FDR was "any better than a glorified ward heeler."

These words were painful to hear. I knew Roosevelt was a politician, but nothing I learned about his compromises could keep his voice from stirring me physically. Sometimes I spent a night in erotic, idolatrous contact with him, waking to a sense of privilege which might stay with me for days. When I told Hermann about my dream he did not laugh. He envied me in a way; he himself could not remember ever having dreamed. Because I was a posthumous child, he said, I was even more vulnerable than most, but the whole population right now felt a childlike need of a father figure. I resisted this. I had no wish to share that private intimacy with 120 million people.

Marion reported that she was writing a profile of a typical American teacher, one lucky enough to be still employed. A quarter of a million teachers had no job, and a huge number worked without pay. In eighteen states they were paid in IOU vouchers called scrip, for which they could never get the stated value. Low as salaries already were, they were constantly being cut. Even so, Chicago owed back salaries amounting to $28 million.

Marion's figures showed that at least 200,000 children couldn't go to school for lack of clothes. And there would be many more, she said, but for the teachers themselves. In New York City alone they had given over $3 million to buy hot lunches, shoes and so on, for the children who otherwise wouldn't be able to come to school.

Marion planned to show the teacher in her everyday life, handing out her own lunch to hungry-eyed kids around her desk, slipping a sweater or a pair of socks to a cold child in the cloakroom.

If teachers hadn't made these sacrifices the country's educational system would have fallen apart totally in the past five years.

Charles asked dubiously where she planned to publish this. In the Atlantic, Marion hoped, or Scribner's. Vic waved his hand urgently. When he got the floor he asked why she should glorify a group of fuzzy-minded liberals who were only postponing the moment when the workers would seize the means of education. He moved that the comrade point this out, showing how piecemeal charity was reactionary reformism; that these inequities could not be corrected under capitalism.

"But if she put that in," I asked before I could stop myself, "where could she publish her piece?"

"Exactly." Marion's grateful glance may have begun the collaboration that would bind us so close. She said that what Vic had outlined would fit into the Sunday Worker but would come as no surprise to its readers. Whereas she could reach a wider audience, one less political. And mightn't such readers one day become important to us? Having them friendly - or at least not hostile could make a crucial difference when the chips were down.

Charles thought she had a point there. The Party needed to "neutralize" potential class enemies. But Vic insisted that any valuable material we had must be used to strengthen the voice of the Party.

Hermann said in his reflective way that he was struck by how often the Times quoted quite radical statements by New Dealers. Didn't that suggest that the middle class at the moment was more ready to listen than we might assume? He proposed that our comrade use her material doubly. She could first follow her strong impulse, then afterward put her facts into form for Party publication.

"That's the second Gordian knot he's cut tonight," Marion cried.

The group agreed on a plan to have editorials ready to go into Party publications when Marion's article was published, calling attention to it and making any points that seemed strategically desirable.

It was the sort of consensus that Hermann often brought about during the next few months. Soon he would be put in charge of a new unit of high-powered, neurotic economists...

On the way home Hermann was silent at first. I wondered what Charles had asked him to do. But from now on we would have to have secrets from each other.

I couldn't hold back my relief at the prediction of Hitler's downfall. And I remember the doubtful way Hermann said he hoped they were right. But ever since 1924 he had heard the line, "Hitler can't last."

I suggested the Party might know things that we didn't know. There was Claud's dispatch in The Week about the illegal publications that kept appearing, in spite of Hitler. Sometimes a folded mimeograph would have "Horoscope" outside, and inside would be items of world news that had been suppressed in the newspapers.

Hermann agreed that this sort of mass operation was encouraging, and the great reason for working in the Party. But it may have been then that he spoke worriedly about the engineer's letter. What would happen if it landed in the hands of someone with poor judgment? Suppose this comrade met the engineer and thought from something he said that he was ready to be recruited. Whereas in fact the engineer was a Trotskyist, say, rabid against the Party. Wouldn't he betray the Consumers' Counsel rather than miss a chance to damage the Party? Our office was already suspect because of vocal liberals like Howe and Jackson. If it got out that a letter to the Consumers' Counsel had been given to the CP, the fat would be in the fire. A lot of powerful people were looking for just such an excuse to get rid of the whole group and put in their own puppets.

That was frightening. But surely, I said, the Party would understand the danger and be careful. Hermann hoped they would, but they were human, with built-in fallibility. I refused to let my spirits be damped. "We've joined," I said, "so we've got to trust them." And he agreed.

After a silent step or two, I suddenly stopped short on the sidewalk. The letter had not even been addressed to us. It had been passed on by the Consumer Board of NRA. Hermann laughed, saying that NRA might as well be hung for a lamb as a sheep. He had been talking out of fatigue, he said. The meeting, like all meetings, had been tiring.
Tiring? In my mood the word was unthinkable.

Arthur Koestler's memoir, Arrow in the Blue, describes his first meeting with a group of comrades as "one of those rare moments when intellectual conviction is in complete harmony with feeling, when your reason approves of your euphoria, and your emotion is as lover to your thought." It was true for me that night, though I couldn't have analyzed it if I had tried - though I wish I had. I just told Hermann that I'd never been so stimulated in my life. That delighted him. We hurried home newly elated toward another night together.

Victor Perlo, a Marxist economist whose career was damaged by accusations during the Red scare of the late 1940's and early 1950's that he spied for the Soviet Union in Washington during World War II, died Dec. 1 at his home in Croton-on-Hudson, N.Y. He was 87.

Mr. Perlo had difficulty finding work after his loyalty was first challenged in 1947 and then in hearings before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1948 and the Senate Committee on Internal Security in 1953.

But he later developed a business as an economic consultant and university lecturer and wrote 13 books. He was known for his analysis of the political economy of American capitalism, comparative economic systems and what he called the economics of racism in the United States.

In one job after the initial accusations, Mr. Perlo worked on the campaign of Henry A. Wallace, the Progressive Party's presidential candidate in 1948.

From the 1960's until his death, Mr. Perlo, who had a master's degree in mathematics from Columbia University, served as the chief economist of the Communist Party in the United States. He was also a board member of the party.

Mr. Perlo, who worked as an economist in government agencies during the Roosevelt and Truman administrations, denied at the Washington hearings that he had spied for the Soviet Union. But like many who were questioned then by Congressional committees, he invoked the Fifth Amendment and refused to provide some answers.

During one hearing in which he sparred with Senator William E. Jenner, the Indiana Republican who led the Internal Security Committee, Mr. Perlo said he did not want to discuss his reasons for invoking his constitutional privilege. But his wife Ellen said last week that her husband had not wanted to begin a line of response that might lead to his being required to testify against others.

At the time of the hearings, Mr. Perlo said in a statement that ''the dragging of my name through the mud is part of a big Roman circus.''

Mr. Perlo discovered he had a security problem in 1947 when he was denied a passport he needed to become treasurer of the Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees in Europe. He had resigned a post at the Treasury Department and suddenly found himself unemployed. The next year, he was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee on the basis of a 1945 memorandum from a federal agency in which a woman who said she had been a courier between Communist espionage groups named Mr. Perlo as the head of one of the groups.

Mr. Perlo published his first book, ''American Imperialism,'' in 1951; his most recent, ''Economics of Racism II'' (International Publishers), came three years ago. He taught at the New School and at the College of New Rochelle and lectured at Harvard and other universities.

Besides his wife, Mr. Perlo is survived by a daughter, Kathy, of Dundee, Scotland; two sons, Stanley of Ithaca, N.Y., and Arthur of New Haven; three grandchildren; and a great-granddaughter.