November 3, 2002 By DOROTHY GALLAGHER There may still be people who, despite the mountain of evidence, will not believe Whittaker Chambers against Alger Hiss. Nor will these same people, no matter what the evidence, believe Elizabeth Bentley. But in ''Red Spy Queen,'' her serviceable biography of the woman who ushered in the cold war, Kathryn S. Olmsted shows clearly that Bentley told the truth about Soviet espionage in high places. She shows, further, that Bentley was a truly disturbed, and disturbing, woman. Bentley was born in Connecticut in 1908. She studied, with no particular distinction, at Vassar and at Columbia. In 1933 she won a fellowship to the University of Florence, where she briefly joined the Fascist student movement. Returning to New York a year later, she met a few Communists and soon joined their party. But what distinguished Bentley from the others, and particularly from Chambers, her fellow defector from Communism, is that she seems never to have held any strong beliefs. A Vassar classmate described her as ''kind of a sad sack.'' All her life Bentley remained that ''sad and lonely girl,'' adding alcohol to the mix. She was desperate for friends and lovers, and when she happened to find them she adopted their ideas as her own. In 1938 Bentley met her fate in the person of Jacob Golos, who became the love of her life. Golos was a high-ranking Communist Party official and Soviet agent; he controlled a network of party members who worked for New Deal agencies, and who passed him information useful to the Soviet Union. He took Bentley into the business that served as his front, and eventually used her as a mail drop and courier to his sources. When Golos died of a heart attack in 1943, Bentley carried on his work and became the link between the Washington networks and the Soviets. As Olmsted reports, the Russians soon became dissatisfied with Bentley's tradecraft; they tried to ease her out of the espionage business, which essentially meant wrecking her life. Bentley became distraught. She feared (incorrectly) that the F.B.I. was closing in on her, and (correctly) that she was in mortal danger from the Soviets. She decided to pre-empt the F.B.I., and by the end of 1945 she had given the bureau about 80 names, some of them Communists she had worked with directly, others whom she had only heard mentioned. Among the latter was one ''Eugene'' Hiss, and someone called ''Julius.'' But, again, unlike Chambers, who would become her corroborating witness, Bentley had no documentary evidence of her allegations. And, worse luck for the F.B.I., two weeks after Bentley gave them her most detailed statement, the British spy Kim Philby informed the Soviets of her defection. Like the cessation of a summer rain, Soviet espionage in the United States came to a halt. F.B.I. raids, wiretaps and surveillance of Bentley's named suspects came up empty. Nevertheless, J. Edgar Hoover sent Bentley out in public. In 1948, with great fanfare, she appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Through most of the 1950's, Bentley remained in the spotlight. She testified at several Congressional hearings and criminal trials, including that of the Rosenbergs. She wrote articles for newspapers; she wrote a melodramatic memoir, ''Out of Bondage''; she hit the lecture trail. And, to please her audiences and keep her story fresh, she was no longer always scrupulous with the truth. But the fragility of her personality -- an odd combination of fear, arrogance and desperation, all exaggerated by alcohol -- led to mental breakdowns. A New Orleans F.B.I. agent reported that ''her talk impressed me as being that of a demented person.'' By the end of the 1950's Bentley had become an obscure figure. She died of chronic alcoholism in l963, at the age of 55, her death barely noticed, though, in fact, she had gone some way to change the world. Occasionally, in her capable recounting of Bentley's story, Olmsted, an assistant professor of history at the University of California, Davis, offers an incongruous feminist interpretation: ''The real Bentley,'' she writes, ''had been a strong woman who defied limits, laws and traditions.'' Olmsted is fighting the weight of her own evidence here. Closer to the mark was Rebecca West, who believed Bentley's allegations utterly, yet thought her ''a queer fish, because she does not know what it was all about. . . . She would have stayed right there if Mr. Golos had not passed on to the next world.'' Dorothy Gallagher's most recent book is ''How I Came Into My Inheritance and Other True Stories.'' Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company