Last of the Cold War Spies (30 page)

Straight could talk freely to a wider circle and not be afraid of being branded a red. Rather than being restricted to a small clique in the United States, he could communicate with everyone from sympathizers at Dartington Hall and his old Cambridge companions to Prime Minister Atlee and his government ministers, such as Herbert Morrison, the leader of the Commons. Morrison visited Dartington to see Dorothy and Leonard and met Straight, who impressed him with his grip on world and domestic affairs. After a lengthy chat, Morrison turned to an aide
and commented in his vigorous way: “The man’s brilliant. Why can’t I find people like him to work for me?”
⁸

Straight’s main task, however, was not to win over the government, but rather his mother. He had, with support from his sister Beatrice, persuaded Dorothy to sanction the $250,000 investment in KGB agent Louis Dolivet’s magazine,
United Nations World
. Then Straight had appealed to his mother’s desire for international peace in a war-free world. The magazine had been going only a few years and was shaky financially. Other investors were threatening to pull out (they did, later in 1946), which would leave the Straight family investment vulnerable. Rose, well-prepared by Straight beforehand, forwarded the pitch for big changes at
The New Republic
. Straight supposed he knew how to boost circulation from 20,000 to 100,000 and how to make the magazine pay. He envisioned its being far more adventurous, thrusting, and influential.

There was no one to state the case against the proposition. Ruth (just 19 years old) and William (17 years old)—happy with their finances— were too young and inexperienced to have any considered input. Beatrice, in the United States, was in no position to block Straight’s plans, even if she wished to, given that he had backed the large investment for her husband.

That left Whitney, who had been occupied during the war. While Straight and Beatrice were helping Dolivet start the magazine, ostensibly to assist in creating a voice for a more peaceful world (in reality a KGB propaganda sheet), Whitney, the air ace, was busy actually fighting for it. He was shot down twice over enemy territory in France and each time escaped. By the end of the war Whitney was weighed down with medals (MC, DFC and bar, Norwegian War Cross, Legion d’Honneur, and Croix de Guerre). He became an air commodore and the youngest acting air vice marshall in the air force. His nice income kept coming into his London bank account for play when he wasn’t locked in battle with the Luftwaffe. This was all that mattered during his most distinguished service.

It meant that Straight was unopposed in his ambitions to fulfill his aims for power and influence, made more urgent by his rejection for political backing a few months earlier. Dorothy agreed to his becoming the magazine’s publisher later in the year, and also to his plans for its expansion bid to gain another 80,000 readers.

Buoyed by his appointment as publisher-elect, Straight traveled to London to speak with left-wing Labour members of parliament and communists to see, he claimed, if he could gain support for Oppenheimer’s concept of international control and development of atomic energy which had been approved by President Truman.

He met Margot Heinemann, now well up in the Communist Party, and had a long chat to his old KGB confidant, Harry Pollitt. The British party’s secretary general, to no one’s surprise, including Straight’s, was as hard-line a Soviet mouthpiece as ever. Straight faithfully reported Pollitt’s unilluminating views and filed an article for
The New Republic
.

Pollitt, doing the bidding of his Kremlin masters, was putting out the imaginative and improbable line that the United States should share its knowledge so that the Soviet Union could produce a bomb of its own. This was in the interest of restoring the balances of forces in the world. It was where the arms race would head, but both sides were going all out to gain the ascendancy. This was in contrast to the Oppenheimer proposal (supported by Atomic Energy Commission chairman David E. Lilienthal and Dean Acheson, the Truman administration’s secretary of state) for international control of nuclear weapons that had currency during the heady first months after the war.

Straight had a cover, or alibi, for public consumption after he learned that MI6 and the CIA had been monitoring his numerous meetings with key KGB figure Pollitt in the United Kingdom. He claimed that all he wanted to do was to use Pollitt to reach the Kremlin and the KGB and point out the insanity in opposing the Acheson/Lilienthal/Oppenheimer plan.

This was an instance of Straight’s attempt decades later to justify to the FBI and others why he kept in contact with yet another KGB operative. His main job was to help retard U.S. bomb manufacturing while the Russians developed their own.

They were closer now to creating their own nuclear weapon than even Pollitt or Straight could have realized. By May 1946 they had built a nuclear reactor but had trouble with plutonium accidents and could not get the reactor to work. KGB Department S head, Pavel Sudoplatov, was desperate. His first plan was to send a scientist, Yakov Terletsky, direct to the United States under the cover of a peace delegation to ask Oppenheimer, Szilard, and Fermi to inform them on how to fire up the dormant reactor.
⁹
The KGB foresaw FBI surveillance problems. Terletsky was instead sent to
see Niels Bohr in Denmark. Bohr was nervous, realizing that the help he and his three U.S. companions had given had finally come to fruition. The Soviets all but had the means to produce the fuel for the bomb.

Bohr insisted that only Terletsky, with a translator, was present, but not his KGB bodyguard, before he explained where the Soviet reactor’s problem lay. While poring over diagrams, the Nobel prize-winner pointed to a place on a drawing and declared, “That’s the trouble spot.” His direct help led to the Soviet reactor working by the end of 1946.
¹⁰

Straight used the London trip also to make contact with some of his former Cambridge friends. He learned that Victor Rothschild was about to marry Tess Mayor. Straight may have realized for the first time why Blunt a decade ago had used him to split Rothschild from his first wife Barbara. This created the chance for Rothschild to have a relationship with Tess. As Straight later suspected (and probably knew), the couple proved a most successful team for the KGB at MI5, at Cambridge during the war years, and in the Cold War.

Straight returned to Washington and began reshaping
The New Republic
. He upped the magazine’s political tempo in support of hard-left positions and even took ads for “Soviet Records—originals Made in the USSR, and books such as Behind Soviet Power—Stalin and the Russians.”
¹¹
The magazine’s layout was improved and made more lively, and front pages became more daring. Yet sales didn’t budge much above 20,000 each issue. Straight and his staff knew that they had to put the “new” into the magazine to attract readers.

Straight saw his opportunity when President Truman forced his secretary of agriculture, Henry Wallace, the former vice-president, to resign on September 12, 1946. Wallace had delivered an anti-Republican speech on foreign policy at Madison Square Garden, which he went through “sentence by sentence” with Truman beforehand.
¹²
Wallace’s remarks were heckled and hissed. He later characterized the speech as “neither pro-British or anti-British, neither pro- nor anti-Russian.” He had endorsed the administration’s stated objective of seeking peace through UN cooperation. Yet the speech had three points of departure which Truman let slip through the net. First, Wallace warned against allowing U.S. foreign policy to be dominated by the British. Second, he warned that “the tougher we get with Russia, the tougher they will get with us.” Third, he spoke of a tacit acceptance of a Russian sphere of influence in Eastern Europe, much as the Monroe Doctrine had implied an American sphere of influence in Latin America.

This appeared to be a definite softening of the line being put out by Secretary of State James Byrnes. There were protests from senior people at State and others. Truman backtracked. Wallace was forced out of government.

Straight had never met Wallace, even though he had visited Dartington Hall as early as 1929 for a World Agricultural Economics Conference. He knew Dorothy and Leonard and had written articles for
The
New Republic
. Straight persuaded the current long-suffering editor, Bruce Bliven, and the rest of the staff that Wallace should be editor of the magazine. It would be a radical move. But Wallace’s politics as unofficial leader of the progressive movement were not a departure for the magazine. He would fit well and widen its appeal to blue-collar groups and a greater variety of liberals.

Straight also saw him as a Trojan horse to reinstall a left-wing Democrat of the New Deal school back in the White House. He regarded him as Roosevelt’s heir apparent, behind himself, if he had been given the chance. More than that, Wallace needed no manipulation to accommodate the Soviet view on all foreign policy and a liberal view on domestic issues. Stalin and the KGB viewed him as the best candidate in the United States for their purposes, besides Straight himself.

And right beside him was where Straight planned to be.

H
enry Wallace in 1946 seemed far from a long shot for the U.S. presidency given the political climate and the disenchantment with Harry Truman, who was looked upon with derision by unfortunate comparisons with his predecessor. At the July 1944 Democratic Party Convention Wallace had beaten Truman in the first ballot for the vice-presidency by a solid 429.5 votes to 319.5, with the other 428 votes divided up between fourteen favorite sons and local choices. But a second ballot saw the party bosses start a bandwagon rolling for the middle-ofthe-road Truman. He won the second and decisive ballot fought out between the two front-runners.

Wallace had fallen short by just 160 votes on regaining the vicepresidency, which he held through Roosevelt’s second term from 1940 to 1944. If it had been a best-vote-wins ballot, Wallace would have become president in April 1945 when Roosevelt died. That closeness to winning the highest office touched Wallace, the ideas man, who desperately wanted the opportunity to be president at a key strategic time in postwar history. He was genuine about his fears for further war and nuclear confrontation. Wallace was certain that his politics would mean peace on earth and goodwill to all peoples. He wanted that second chance.

Straight, now 30, bore this in mind in a rehearsed speech when he
knocked on the door to Wallace’s apartment in the Wardman Hotel, Washington, one week after Truman had pushed him out of government. Mrs. Wallace answered the door and ushered him through to her husband on the terrace, sorting out telegrams with a beefy Texan adviser. Some were offers from publishers.
¹
Straight delivered his speech. Wallace looked down at his shoes, stony-faced. The terms that were put to him were alluring. The salary was attractive. Straight was prepared to put an enormous amount into supporting him and the magazine, whose circulation would go up with marketing plans the management had already begun implementing. It would be a strong forum for Wallace, especially with his presidential ambitions, and also for Straight and his political ambitions.

Straight was sure that Wallace dreamt of himself as a peacemaking president, and admitted that he himself dreamt of becoming a political leader, especially in the years 1946 to 1948 when the two were closely linked.
²

Straight then would be a strategist, if not the key planner, behind a Wallace run for the presidency. His strategy was daring, precarious, and on paper impressive. The best way for those dreams to become a reality was to broaden Wallace’s appeal among liberals and a wide range of Democrats, who were disillusioned with Truman and who wanted someone in Roosevelt’s mould. If the communists wished to tag along and add their votes for Wallace, that was fine, Straight reckoned. But his expertise and experience told him that they should not be allowed to hijack support for Wallace and fulfill their impractical hopes for a third party with him as its candidate.

Straight had always been kept independent of U.S. communists while a secret agent for Stalin, and he wished to remain that way. If their methods of achieving an end coincided with his work for the Kremlin, then it would give him the ultimate satisfaction. A problem lay in the communist movement in the United States. It was unruly and disunited. There were no guarantees that Straight could keep them out of the way while he ran Wallace’s campaign. Straight’s aim was to get Wallace elected by putting an acceptable spin on his liberal positions that would widen his appeal to Democrats. U.S. communists hovering too close would ruin the image-building and limit the candidate’s attractiveness.

The political view from September 1946 looked smooth enough. If it remained that way, the communists could be kept out of the headlines and away from the candidate.

Straight’s first task was to use
The New Republic
to give Wallace a suitable platform and to build his support base throughout 1947. This would be the springboard for a run to the Democratic Convention in mid-1948. Once Wallace was elected, Straight was confident he would beat any Republican candidate for the presidency.

In the last months of 1946,
The New Republic
would build expectations for Wallace’s editorship. The December 2 edition had a tantalizing sketch of his eyes and forehead without mentioning who it was. A fortnight later Straight introduced him and his weekly editorial with great fanfare: “This week
The New Republic
is published under a new editor.
The New Republic
was founded to express the promise of American life. No American can express that promise as well as Henry Wallace . . .”
³

Then followed a glossy short biography showing Wallace’s farm-belt background as a corn-growing son of an editor of a farm paper.
The New
Republic
stepped up its campaign for new readership with advertisements to “JOIN HENRY WALLACE” and generous starting subscription rates of $6 for the year and a “Special 10-weeks’ offer for $1.” Straight was nearly giving the paper away to build the readership and so become more attractive to advertisers. The Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, “on behalf of its 350,000 members,” greeted the appointment with a page ad. Century High Speed Drills followed with another page, as did Harcourt, Brace & Company, the book publisher. But apart from this and other sporadic support, the magazine seemed to be struggling at the beginning of its hoped-for renaissance.
⁴

Straight, with Milton Rose behind him and his mother’s green light, was now on the masthead as publisher and spending fast and big. Straight got hold of every mailing list he could and lured some of the best writers from Henry Luce’s publishing empire.
⁵
He hired experienced editors and brought in the sophisticated, academic-like James Newman to work with Wallace. The new editor advocated innovative programs, but Straight wrote most of the editorials himself. He, Newman, and Wallace would meet Tuesday morning each week in the editor’s office to discuss the next editorial. Wallace would sit between the others on a sofa, jingling keys in his pants pocket. Newman would read aloud a couple of paragraphs of a draft he had prepared. Wallace would appear to drift off to sleep. Then he would snap out of his reverie and agree with what had been said.
⁶

Wallace did not attend conferences at the magazine, nor did he read it. According to his publisher, he often failed to recognize the prized staff Straight had spent a small fortune hiring. Wallace managed to escape from the office for an hour’s walk with a friend through the streets on New York’s East Side. Most of the time he would stay shut away at his desk, enveloped in his own thoughts.

In effect, Straight was the unofficial campaign manager and strategist. He provided the money for the mission, which was a campaign all but in name; his magazine was the forum for Wallace’s programs, and he wrote most of his editorials and speeches. As the candidate’s image grew Straight struggled to keep him away from the communist-created and -run Progressive Citizens of America (PCA), which was making claim to liberal support across the country.
⁷

The first few months of the new year 1947 were promising enough, but then in March two unforeseen bombshells were dropped, which threatened Straight’s grand plan. Early in the month, the so-called Truman Doctrine to “contain” Russia was clarified. Truman asked Congress to appropriate $40 million for military and economic aid to Greece and Turkey. He wished to be able to send military personnel to those countries. It was seen by communists in the United States and some liberals as an open-ended commitment to intervene in any nation where communism posed a threat. The Americans for Democratic Action (ADA)—led by Eleanor Roosevelt—which was the other main group vying for liberal support, welcomed the development. The PCA opposed it.

Straight went to his typewriter and belted out a speech for Wallace, which denounced the escalation of the Cold War. It was a chance for “good copy” and to sell Wallace and the magazine. It also happened to be Stalin’s position on the issue. Six days later, the unannounced presidential candidate delivered the speech on national radio. The doctrine meant that the United States would “eventually . . . bleed from every pore.” The move into Greece meant that the Soviets had been provoked into “possible dangerous retaliation.”

Straight expanded on the speech in
The New Republic
a few days later and forecast: “Once American loans are given to undemocratic governments of Greece and Turkey, every reactionary government and every strutting dictator will be able to hoist the anticommunist skull and (cross) bones, and demand that the American people rush to his aid. Today we are asking to support Greece and Turkey. Tomorrow Peron and Chiang Kai-shek may take their turn at the head of the line. American dollars will be the first demand, then American army officers and technicians, then American GIs.”
⁸

The speech and article were enough to rouse the sleepiest communist and frighten the most wavering liberal. According to Straight, Wallace received 5,000 letters from people thanking him for speaking out and begging him to lead them. Those at the PCA loved the speech. They began to mumble about seconding Wallace as their figurehead. Just to compound the upheaval, a few weeks later on March 23 Truman delivered his Executive Order 9835, instituting a loyalty investigation of federal employees. Its aim was to keep those with allegiances to a foreign power— mainly communists—out of government. Anyone could anonymously report another’s “disloyalty” and not be held accountable. Wallace again bounced from his apparent lethargy at a Madison Square Garden meeting arranged by the First Lady’s favored ADA.

“The president’s executive order creates a master index of public servants,” he said in a speech (written and edited by Straight) marked for its verve and passion. “From the janitor in the village post office to the cabinet member, they are to be sifted and tested and watched and appraised. Their past and present, the tattle and prattle of their neighbors, are all to be recorded.”

Two weeks later in
The New Republic
, another Straight editorial struck again at the loyalty program, this time swiping at the magazine’s archenemy, the FBI. It scathingly dismissed J. Edgar Hoover’s recent estimate that one person in every 1,184 in the United States was a communist.

The PCA became vocal in denouncing the loyalty program, whereas the ADA supported it. Straight’s words proved more inflammatory than he anticipated. Yet he still felt he could keep Wallace out of the grasp of local communists. They were now reaching for him.

A group from the PCA led by Beanie Baldwin, the director of the Farm Security Administration when Wallace was secretary of agriculture; sculptor Jo Davidson; and PCA’s “undercover organizer” Hannah Dorner invited Straight to dinner at Davidson’s New York studio. With Wallace present, the group put a request to Straight to allow the candidate loose from
The New Republic
offices for a while.
⁹
The PCA needed money to keep running, and Wallace on the stump was a sure way to raise funds. It
also wanted him to work the Democratic Party precincts in an effort to wrest the 1948 nomination from Truman.

Straight had gambled hundreds of thousands of dollars of family trust funds in an effort to drive up the circulation of
The New Republic
. He knew at that point in March 1947 that if he didn’t attract advertising, the gambling loss of his family trust money would run into the millions. He realized also that if Wallace left the magazine to become embroiled in political battles,
The New Republic
might have to be sold.