You could call Kathryn Olmsted a spy sleuth, a chronicler of KGB counterespionage, an investigator of intelligence ideology.
Or you could just call her biographer to the Red Spy Queen.
The UC Davis assistant history professor's latest work is Red Spy Queen: A Biography of Elizabeth Bentley, one of the books that will be featured at the annual faculty authors celebration Wednesday in Shields Library.
The book chronicles the tale of the American spy who triggered the Red Scare in the late 1940s. But this "street-smart," ambitious woman who outwitted both the KGB and the FBI has been ignored up until now due to post-World War II sexism, Olmsted says.
"Red Spy Queen" gave Olmsted the opportunity to fold in her interest in women's history with her expertise in U.S. intelligence.
"I started out writing about several different women spying for the Soviet Union because I was struck by the fact that so little work had been done on them - and Bentley just jumped out at me," Olmsted says.
Her book tells the story of how Bentley became the most significant American agent of Soviet espionage ever to defect. Olmsted says much of her information came from hanging out at the FBI headquarters and making freedom-of-information requests. She also tracked down 15 people, including the FBI agent who first debriefed Bentley and a former boyfriend.
"She is the first American in 1945 to 'come in from the cold' and say 'I've been a Soviet spy for the last seven years and here are the names of 80 people who have been helping me,'" Olmsted says. Among the names that Bentley gave to the FBI were Alger Hiss, Julius Rosenberg and Whittaker Chambers.
By the time Bentley was testifying in front of the House Un-American Activit-ies Committee, she was talking about history "and there were no more spies to be caught," Olmsted points out. But the idea of a vast underground spy ring inside the federal government set off the McCarthy witch hunt to find former Communists throughout American society.
Bentley's pivotal role has been downplayed largely because of her image in the 1940s press as being "so pathetic," Olmsted says. Unlike the popular image of Dutch stripper and World War I spy Mata Hari, Bentley was frumpy and dowdy - and most importantly she didn't use sexual favors to get her secrets.
"One of her boyfriends who I interviewed said Bentley was the Linda Tripp of her time," Olmsted says.
The press portrayed two versions of Bentley: The conservative press said she was a beautiful, curvaceous "blond spy queen" that fit into the femme fatale stereotype, while the liberal press depicted her as "a silly woman who listened at keyholes like an 'old biddy,'" which fit into the desperate spinster stereotype. Bentley was neither blond nor a desperate spinster, Olmsted likes to point out.
No Communist idealist, Bentley instead was a shrewd woman who was a traitor to her country and her friends.
"There were many things about her to dislike - she was always out there for herself," Olmsted concludes. "But Bentley played an important role in history, and one can admire her survival skills. The Soviets wanted to assassinate her and the FBI to put her on trial but she defied them both and lived to tell the tale."
Olmsted's first book was Challenging the Secret Government: The Post-Water-gate Investigations of the CIA and FBI. Her next book will be on 20th-century conspiracy theories, including the Red Scare, Roosevelt's supposed prior knowledge of the Pearl Harbor attack and John Kennedy's assassination.
Olmsted also will talk about her book at the UC Davis Bookstore at noon on Nov. 19.