Helen Tenney

Helen Barrett Tenney was an American Broadway performer and intelligence operative whose life spanned careers in theater and covert espionage activity. She appeared on Broadway in 1931 in the play Peter Ibbetson.

During the 1930s, Tenney became involved with the Comintern apparatus, passing information to the Soviet Union on behalf of Spanish Communists and acquiring espionage tradecraft in the process. By 1942, she had taken a position with Short Wave Research, a New York City firm under contract to the Office of War Information that recruited individuals with foreign language expertise.

In the late summer of 1943, acting on the advice of Jacob Golos, Tenney relocated from New York to Washington, D.C. to seek employment with the Spanish section of the Office of Strategic Services. She took up residence in the former apartment of Mary Price, a location that served as a meeting point between government employees engaged in espionage and their Soviet handlers and couriers. From her position at the OSS, Tenney began providing reports and memoranda that covered the activities of OSS personnel across virtually all sections and countries of operation, and she additionally supplied information about a monitoring station on Long Island.

Starting in 1944, Tenney received a regular monthly stipend of fifty dollars, an arrangement made through Joseph Katz. In December of that year, Joseph Gregg assumed the role of her handler, but Tenney raised objections to his methods and Gregg was subsequently replaced by Inez Munoz.

Tenney left the OSS in June 1946 and moved to the United States Department of State, by which point the FBI had already placed her under surveillance. The State Department eventually removed her from her position and revoked her passport. In January 1947, Tenney suffered a nervous breakdown and was admitted to a psychiatric hospital following a near-fatal combination of alcohol and phenobarbital, which investigators regarded as a suicide attempt. She remained unconscious for five days, and upon regaining consciousness was observed to be in a severe hallucinatory psychotic state. During this period, those monitoring her overheard her speaking about being followed, having her telephone tapped, her associates being surveilled, and her role as a Soviet spy. She also exhibited a pronounced phobia toward anything associated with Russia. Physicians declined to discuss her case with FBI investigators, citing patient confidentiality.

Unknown to Tenney, her Soviet contact Elizabeth Bentley had defected by February 1946 and was cooperating with counterintelligence investigators. Bentley subsequently met with Tenney and concluded that the suicide attempt had been genuine, attributing it in part to Tenney's isolation following the Soviet controllers' decision to sever contact with their American agents. Tenney showed no remorse and appeared to want to reestablish contact with Soviet handlers, which ended the FBI's efforts to secure her cooperation. When agents interviewed her in June 1947, they found her to be in poor mental and physical condition.

In 1998, analysis of the Venona project transcripts identified Tenney under the code name "Muse," a designation linked to her transfer from the dissolved OSS to the Department of State.