Last of the Cold War Spies (39 page)

MacArthur sent light American columns—the First and Twenty-fourth Cavalries—to the Manchurian border to see if there would be any resistance. On November 24, he announced that U.S. troops would be home by Christmas. The next day, the Chinese struck. Waves of massed troops bore down on the surprised Americans. Guerrillas sprung from behind them and destroyed their communication lines along the west coast. After heavy fighting, thousands of U.S. soldiers were left dead. Many were wounded, captured, and tortured. Over the next month, the United States and its allies were pushed back to the 38th Parallel. The communists began a second invasion of 500,000 troops, but their attack faltered in the face of incessant allied bombing. The U.S. troops held their positions, and the front lines stabilized along the Parallel. Mao’s gamble on Stalin’s advice had paid off thanks in large part to the accurate intelligence from Philby, Burgess, and Maclean. Instead of Mao’s worst fear of atomic bombs dropped on major Chinese cities, there had been a “conventional” conflict against the might of the allies with “acceptable” losses. The end was a bloody stalemate, without communism losing ground in Southeast Asia. If Stalin, and Mao in turn, had not had such precise intelligence, it’s highly probable that the Chinese would not have
invaded. Many American and allied soldiers would not have been killed or injured.

In his book, Straight wrote of another chance meeting with Burgess, in March 1951, a few months after the height of the Korean crisis. Earlier he claimed he had bumped into Burgess in Pall Mall and that on another occasion Burgess had turned up uninvited at the Savoy. All these instances were concoctions for his (later) FBI interrogations. Straight was still a fully fledged agent in the business of dealing with other fellow agents of whom Burgess was just one of many. Yet Straight persisted with his fabrications. In this “story” he was driving along when he happened to come across Burgess trying to hail a taxi near the British embassy in Washington, where he was working. Burgess hitched a ride. In their brief conversation in Washington, Straight ascertained that Burgess had been in the city during the Korean conflict.

Straight claimed he thought that if Burgess was in Washington, he would have known of U.S. plans to advance into North Korea. In turn, Straight suggested, Burgess would have sent the information to Moscow. The Kremlin then would have handed it to Beijing. Straight said that in this way, Burgess could have caused the deaths of many American soldiers.
⁵

Straight’s claims to chance meetings with Burgess are at odds with the testimony of Alan Baker, one of Blunt’s lovers who visited Washington at this time. Blunt was keen for Baker to get in touch with Burgess and give him Blunt’s latest book,
The Nation’s Pictures
. There is little doubt, according to Yuri Modin, that there would have been a message in the book for Burgess, warning him to get out of the United States. The intelligence services were closing in on him.

Baker, unaware he was a middleman for key Soviet spies, felt uncomfortable with his mission of delivering a book. Burgess knew which hotel he was staying at, but Baker wasn’t given his address. On his third day in the American capital he had a phone call from Burgess. Burgess claimed he didn’t have time to meet Baker. Instead, according to Baker, he told him that a Mr. Straight would come to his hotel at a specified time, take him to dinner, and collect the book. Baker always assumed that this was
Michael Straight. Straight, however, sticking to his version of events at this critical time, could not recall meeting Baker.

Straight has never denied that he was fully aware of the value of his comrades in the Cambridge ring in the Korean conflict. The ring collectively would have judged its outcome as another vital victory for them and the cause. Straight’s critics construed that if he was taken at his word as being anticommunist at this point, his failure to inform the United States and the United Kingdom about the spying of his Cambridge comrades made him a tacit accomplice.

Writer Sidney Hook, in a review of
After Long Silence
in
Encounter
magazine of December 1983, commented:

William Safire, in a
New York Times
review, thought Straight’s “greatest contribution to the Soviet spy system” came in this Korean War episode. “Did he turn in his old friends?” Safire asked. “Hardly. . . . ”
⁷

Raymond A. Scroth’s assessment in the magazine
America
was that this encounter with Burgess was “the high point of the story.”
⁸

Straight alleged that on learning of Burgess’s probable involvement in traitorous activity over the Korean War, he became angry and said to Burgess that in 1949 he (Burgess) had told him he was going to leave the U.K. Foreign Office. Straight wrote that he accused Burgess of breaking his word.

Straight then maintained that he threatened to turn him in if he wasn’t out of the British government inside a month. Sidney Hook, William Safire, and other critics charged that in a decade of opportunity, Straight never got near turning in his comrade and mentor. The apostolic oath, and Straight’s fears of Stalin and the KGB, they felt, seemed stronger than any concern for his country and the people of it.

If Straight had informed on Burgess in the decade before 1951, it would have had enormous ramifications for many agents on both sides in the Cold War. A big section of the Cambridge ring would have been finished. Blunt, the key postwar “middleman agent,” whom many subagents used as a conduit to KGB controls, would have been in strife, as would Philby, the head of Soviet counterintelligence.

Other KGB agents such as Leo Long, brought into the Apostles by Straight and then recruited for the Russians by Blunt, would also have been caught. Long worked in intelligence for the British Control Commission in Germany until 1952, where he was meant to be infiltrating Western agents behind the iron curtain. Instead, according to John Costello, “Long was a link in a major Cold War plot to infiltrate Soviet agents in the U.S. intelligence services with the connivance of their other [KGB] moles in MI5 and MI6.” In his position Long may also have been responsible for the “disappearance” of hundreds of agents in East Germany who were sending information to the West.
⁹
Apart from the rolling up of the Cambridge ring, any confession by Straight up until 1951 would have meant momentous arrests in the United States of such people as his control Michael Green and his wife, Helen Lowry. Straight remained outside the major U.S. rings, but he knew the key people involved.

Yet on all counts, Straight alleged at this time that he was still bound by loyalty to his oath to the Apostles, fear of exposure once he “confessed” his past, or even concern about reprisals from the KGB. For these reasons, he said, he remained mute. But again, none of these claims were true. He had never stopped plotting and consorting with KGB agents.

Straight was still very much one of them.

W
hitney forced a showdown during the family meeting at Dartington in April 1951, a year after he learned of his brother’s KGB links. He had done his homework as far as he could and consulted lawyers on where he stood with the family trust. The problems had been compounded by Dorothy’s decision to appoint Straight along with Rose as the trustees in Trust 11, succeeding the Royal Trust Company of Canada.

Straight could not quite grasp Whitney’s sudden attempt to get out of the trust. He thought it had to be because he was upset, as the oldest child and the only successful businessperson, that he wasn’t given control of Trust 11. But it was deeper than this. Whitney was not going to stand by and watch what he saw as certain destruction of the family fortune, all in the name of communism.

The technical argument against Whitney taking control was that he was now a British citizen, not American, and therefore was somehow less eligible than Straight for the position. But Whitney’s lawyers did not believe this. He and they were concerned about far too much money being used to prop up
The New Republic
, which looked to Whitney as nothing more than a Soviet propaganda sheet.

Straight suggested that money given to the magazine was from an independent corporation, Editorial Publications, which had been set up to
administer Dorothy’s holdings (the magazines
Asia
,
Antiques
,
Theater
Arts
, and
The New Republic
). But this was misleading. Editorial Publications was owned by Trust 11, and Straight and Rose were in charge of it. They had total say on what money went to propping up the hemorrhaging
New Republic
. Before the Henry Wallace episode,
Antiques
earned enough to keep
The New Republic
alive. After the Wallace fiasco, not even the profitable
Antiques
was enough to save the other publication; it needed a big transfusion of money from Trust 11 via Editorial Publications.

Straight, not his better-equipped brother, was now in control of the family fortune. It was a bitter blow to Whitney, especially coming on top of his secret knowledge of Straight and the way
The New Republic
had been used and, Whitney thought, financially abused. Whitney had tried to get hold of the magazine’s accounts, but strict trust rules stated that only trustees and not beneficiaries (unless they were one and the same) could peruse them. He had his lawyers send letters full of queries about the running of the trusts, all to no avail as Rose filibustered.

Whitney knew from snippets of family discussions that
The New Republic
was in a financial mess and that
United Nations World
had cost plenty. It was enough for him to make demands and even threats, if need be. His prime bargaining position would be a request for Milton Rose’s head. Whitney’s ultimate “weapon,” which he would use as a very last resort, would be to expose his brother to his mother as a Soviet agent.
¹

It heightened the sense of a showdown as Straight, Rose, and Beatrice flew in from the United States to confront Whitney. In essence, Leonard, Ruth, and William were nonparticipants, as was to a lesser extent Beatrice. The real fight was between the other four, with Dorothy in support of Rose and Straight.

The Dartington Hall meeting started peacefully but degenerated into a shouting match. Whitney, very much on his own in the argument, accused Rose of being criminally negligent in the way he was running the trusts in the United States and especially over the near-collapse of
The
New Republic
. This caused Dorothy much consternation. Whitney went on to threaten he would pull out of the trust. “I will not allow my share to support that magazine,” he told them. “It’s losses are a scandal.”
²

Whitney wanted to say more about Dolivet being a KGB agent but because of Beatrice restrained himself to complaining about the disaster of
United Nations World
and its $250,000 loss. “I want [Rose’s] resignation,” Whitney said, “otherwise I’ll put him in jail.”
³

With that, he left for London early the next morning before anyone else was awake. He arranged meetings between the family members and their respective lawyers. Dorothy tried once more to heal the breach before the family feud developed into a costly legal wrangle. She, Rose, Straight, and Beatrice took the train to London and the family house there—the Aviary. Whitney came home from a cocktail party to an acrimonious confrontation with his mother. He was most angry about the way
The New Republic
had been managed and its huge losses. Yet he appeared to hold the whip hand over his threat to sue Rose on the allegation that the trust had been mishandled. Whitney repeated his desire to leave the family trust structure, telling Dorothy that he had no confidence in Straight and Rose.

Dorothy told him that if he forced Rose to resign, a corporate trustee would have to be appointed. She might have to close down
The New Republic
. Whitney thought that was a good thing.
⁴

The family met again the next day in London. Whitney had made it clear he was not bluffing about a lawsuit. Straight conceded that it was acceptable for Whitney to say he did not want his share of the trust supporting
The New Republic
, but he didn’t find it acceptable that Whitney sell his share of the trust to the rest of the trust beneficiaries for cash. Straight claimed that they didn’t have the cash and that there was no way of measuring what the share was worth.

There would, it seemed, be an impasse unless the magazine and some other losing assets were sold off. The money from such divestments after costs would be plowed back into the trust’s principal amount to in part make up for the losses incurred on the magazines.
⁵

A day later Dorothy turned up at a meeting with her solicitor, Ian Wilson, as did Whitney with his advocate, Tom Overy. Straight had Rose beside him. (Beatrice had flown back to New York the day before.) Dorothy gave a speech at the beginning, stating why she had created
The
New Republic
and the Whitney Foundation and why she had made outright settlements on her children. She claimed that she had set up Trust 11 for her grandchildren; the income from the trust was for her children to spend. But she had seen to it that none could get his or her hands on the principal.

This put the onus on Whitney, who wanted to bust the trust and take a share of the principal. He deferred to his lawyer, who said much the same thing as Whitney had at the two previous meetings: the trust had been run in the interest of Beatrice (bearing in mind the Dolivet fiasco) and Straight (the
New Republic
financial farce); the interests of Whitney and his family had been ignored and hurt. Nothing would be left for Whitney’s children under the administration of Straight and Rose. That was the pressing issue, Overy informed the others.

Ian Wilson tried to deflect the argument, but Overy brought it back to his client’s main point of grievance: because Whitney’s heirs could only obtain 20 percent of the income, all “deficient operations” (such as
The
New Republic
and
United Nations World
) were “intolerable.”

Rose had been “delinquent,” Overy noted. Whitney had been kept in the dark; information had been withheld from him. Dorothy protested at the attack on Rose. Overy continued, ever so politely. He said his client, “he felt certain,” was entitled to sue for breach of trust because of losses incurred by the two magazines. He hinted that Whitney would use his power as a “life beneficiary” to block the reorganization of the trust and the appointment of Rose and Straight as new trustees. Whitney would go to court, object to the trust accounts, and force a sale of
The New Republic
.
⁶

Wilson, Rose, and Straight retorted that he could not block anything. Straight began a little speech of his own urging Whitney to state that in fairness he had no interest in
The New Republic
. Whitney listened and again turned his case over to his lawyer, who repeated the complaints about Rose and Straight as trustees. “How can I agree to a trust management that sanctioned $250,000 in expenditure on
United Nations
World
?” Whitney asked plaintively.

Straight once more conceded that Whitney should be allowed to segregate his interests in the principal money in the trust, but he added that Rose and the reorganization, that is, Straight’s own appointment as a trustee, should go ahead. After that, the meeting broke up, the main problems unresolved.

Whitney, however, had made up his mind. He was not going to stand for the loss-making operations any more. Further legal threats were made, this time on paper. Whitney was determined to sue if he could not get out of the trust with his share. He would see
The New Republic
sold,
along with
Antiques
and the Old Westbury property, which was another “deficit operation.”
⁷

In return, Rose and Straight could run the whole show. Whitney didn’t care; he would be out.

Finally, Dorothy and Straight were forced to agree. William Elmhirst, now in his mid-70s, remembers supporting Straight against Whitney. “We were all left and liberal-minded, and Mike was the family standard-bearer,” Elmhirst remembers. “We thought he was doing all those wonderful things in America. Whitney on the other hand mixed with an entirely different set in London. All conservatives. I could not understand his motives for splitting the family and the trust. None of us could. He was painted as the villain of the piece.”

However, in April 1951 Whitney, it seems, held all the aces. Elmhirst believes that “Whitney used his threat [over Straight’s KGB links] of exposure to force my mother to agree to his breaking out from Trust 11. But as far as I know she never confronted Mike and asked for the truth. This would suggest that Whitney threatened to expose Mike without declaring in what way. He may have been constrained out of brotherly feeling.”
⁸

Whitney’s win meant he then had to face a costly legal maneuver to extricate himself and his share from the family trust.

A month later, in May 1951, Burgess and Maclean defected from England to Russia after Venona messages from Maclean’s control to Moscow had been deciphered. His code name, HOMER, had been uncovered. The information Maclean was sending, coupled with evidence from Walter Krivitsky a decade earlier, allowed British intelligence to narrow down the suspects to him and another foreign office operative. Modin arranged their departure. Blunt and Rothschild had learned from Dick White and Guy Liddell at MI5 that Maclean was under surveillance, so Blunt alerted him. Burgess, initially his chaperone for the trip, went all the way to Moscow with him.

If Maclean alone had defected, the ramifications for the rest of the Cambridge ring would have been minimal. But Burgess’s departure pushed the crisis for the KGB into a new dimension. Instead of one lead to links, MI5 had two, and Burgess’s connections were greater. It didn’t
take long to learn that Burgess and Blunt had been lovers. Burgess had spent his recent months in Washington living with Philby and his wife. Rothschild and his wife Tess had been close to Burgess and Blunt, and so it went. Many in the ring fell under suspicion and were questioned. Philby was interrogated, MI5 had discreet chats with Blunt, and Rothschild was interrogated eleven times. Cairncross was followed, and Modin narrowly avoided being caught with him in a public toilet near Ealing Common underground in London.

The disappearances of Burgess and Maclean shocked Straight. His mentor may have finally revealed his true allegiances. What if Blunt were arrested? Would he name names? Once the dust settled, Straight felt secure. Only a full confession could endanger him, and while Blunt’s lover Burgess was alive, this would be unlikely. He was expected, perhaps, to return to London. Blunt’s devotion to Burgess and affection for Philby would see him carry on the deception, it seemed, indefinitely.