Last of the Cold War Spies (47 page)

Walton told him that the president was ready to commence the position right away. There were only two provisos. He had to be cleared through congress, then the FBI had to run a check on him.
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Straight showed no reaction. Then he went home and thought about those FBI checks. He was confident they had nothing on him, but he could not be sure what Golitsyn had on him. He guessed he would be exposed in some way, and there was no point now in trying to get another job in government for whatever new assignment the KGB may have had for him. He could now use the handy excuse that he could not face the media coverage if his appointment led to someone like Eliot Janeway in 1946 again stepping forward and accusing him of communist connections.
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The sudden rush to join the government—twenty-two years after his hasty rejoining of State in 1940 for the Krivitsky assignment—had to be aborted. Straight now had to cut his losses and back off. The prospect of FBI checks offered a useful, if not risky, excuse to withdraw with limited damage in the face of possibly problematic revelations from Golitsyn.

Straight rang Walton and told him he couldn’t accept the chairmanship, using the excuse that there was too much explaining to do about Louis Dolivet and Gustavo Duran, all the family ghosts, and his own past as a radical. Walton remarked that Kennedy knew they had all been radicals. Straight replied that he was from another age. It was difficult to explain one age to another.
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Walton informed the president that Straight had turned down the chairmanship. Kennedy was skeptical.

“Why?” the president asked.

“I don’t know,” Walton replied. “There’s something in his background. . . . ”

“What?” Kennedy said. “Is he a queer?”
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The matter could have ended there. Straight had every right to reject the offer and walk away without explanation. But he stunned intelligence agencies by insisting on making a statement to the FBI. Newton “Scotty” Miler, a CIA agent involved in debriefing Golitsyn, said: “We were all taken by surprise and totally unprepared. The FBI had nothing on him.”

Straight first went to see presidential assistant Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. in the East Wing of the White House and alleged that he told him his complete story. (This was not accurate. Schlesinger did not ask any questions. It took the FBI and MI5 the next twelve years to extract information from him. Neither organization considered that it had the complete, accurate narrative.) Schlesinger phoned the attorney general, Robert Kennedy, and he directed Straight to the deputy director of the FBI, William Sullivan, on Connecticut Avenue.

Sullivan was polite. He told him that there was a young agent on his staff who knew him. Sullivan thought Straight might prefer to give his statement to him. A lean man came into the room and shook hands with him.
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It was Jimmy Lee, the second son of his mother’s head gardener at Old Westbury.

Straight said that any pride left in him was stripped away because Sullivan had acted out of kindness. Straight noted that his humiliation was complete. Yet despite being so humbled, it was an easy introduction to the FBI and its methods of interrogation. During his statement to Lee and a stenographer, they chatted about their families. Later, feeling relieved of a burden, he went to a movie at the MacArthur Theater. He was shocked to be greeted by the stenographer in the kiosk, who had a second job issuing tickets.

Straight spent many hours in the next few days with Sullivan. It led to nothing more than a number of searching questions about the appeal of communism for the intellectuals of Europe. Sullivan told him stories about his early days in the FBI hunting killers like John Dillinger.

Through June, over fifty or so hours, the FBI began its methodical, efficient, and nonthreatening interrogation with pairs of agents—“impersonal
and interchangeable”—who would ask “unexpected” questions. It caused Straight no anxious moments. His inquisitors, with their trim haircuts, well-shined shoes, and drip-dry shirts, were out of their depth. They were intent on checking the addresses in which he lived and were reassured when his information could be verified.

Straight found them easy to deal with. Much of his “confession” was incomprehensible to the FBI agents, who had Dickensian views of old England, if anything at all. The only Cambridge they knew was in Massachusetts.

Straight’s training for such occasions would make sure that any vaguely tangible clues were few and far between (as he would later do in his memoirs, which were devoid of chronology or form). The agents showed him pages of photos of heavy-set, scowling, Slavic faces. One he did admit to knowing was Michael Green, his control.
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Yet this too was a safe revelation. Green would have been gone from the United States nearly two decades.

Straight described Green’s wife then innocently asked about her and what had become of them. The FBI agents didn’t know who she was at that point, and Straight was told they had returned to Moscow.

He began to use his charm. He could measure how much they knew and how he could respond without giving anything of substance away. The FBI agents were suspicious, partly because of their ignorance, and partly because they were suspicious by nature. There had to be something more than the loose threads that Straight was presenting to them. The agents continued to phone him over the next four years (until 1968). But the connection was not threatening. In time, the debriefing was controlled by one man, whom Straight knew as Agent Taylor. It was easy, even cozy, and pressure free. He was an “old-timer” who wanted his weekends free for golf. He was preparing for retirement. Straight claimed that they trusted each other and even became friends.
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The decision to take the initiative and “confess” was fortuitous. He had the upper hand. If he had waited until any Golitsyn evidence had borne fruit or for a confession from Blunt, and the FBI had knocked on his door first, Straight would have had a lot tougher time.

He spent the summer of 1963 at Chilmark attempting to settle into his third novel after his FBI statement and questioning. The writing had no motivating force. He had to show something in the first two. If he had not, they might have been seen for what they were, just fronts for his espionage work. But now his authorship was purely indulgent. He didn’t need to put his heart into it, and it was going nowhere special. It certainly wasn’t substantial enough to ever be published other than by himself.

Straight was also preoccupied with the intelligence probes, which led to some anxiety. Yet he had learned to live with this emotion.
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A major concern was Golitsyn’s return to the United States in August for continued debriefing under the control of James Angleton, the CIA’s head of counterintelligence. The Russian had been successful in gaining a look at British files from March to July 1963 in order to make judgments on moles and double agents. Now he was demanding the same treatment in the United States.

Despite the terrors that haunted him in the summer of 1963, Straight managed to enjoy the good life at Chilmark with sailing, the occasional party, time with the children, and plenty of visitors. His spirits seemed lifted by the visit of his half-brother, William, from Dartington, who idolized him. There also would have been a measure of relief to learn at this time from his brother Whitney that Guy Burgess was dying in Moscow.
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Whitney also reported to MI6. It was leaked in Fleet Street in the summer that Burgess would soon be dead. On August 30, 1963, Burgess finally succumbed to the ravages of alcoholic poisoning—virtually a slow act of suicide over the twelve years since his defection. The man who had devised the emotional blackmail to help ensnare Straight in the KGB web was no more.

Milton Rose arranged a meeting between Straight and Nixon when he was appointed head of Rose’s firm, Mudge, Stern, Baldwin and Todd, which became Nixon, Mudge, Rose, Guthrie, and Alexander. Nixon’s
move from California to New York meant he was leaving his political power base and moving into Nelson Rockefeller’s Republican stronghold, thus ruling himself out of a bid for the 1964 presidential election. But as Straight predicted, Nixon was never going to be as interested in the law as he was in politics.

Rose took Straight and Nixon to lunch for that first meeting at the India House restaurant. They walked down Broad Street in New York’s banking and financial district. Straight told William Elmhirst, who, like Dorothy, was still distressed about Nixon, that bankers who passed them acknowledged him (Nixon) and welcomed him to Wall Street. Waiters in the restaurant were also most deferential. It set the scene for an uncomfortable meal.
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Nixon, awkward on social occasions at the best of times, was ill at ease. But he was a pragmatist; he could play the accomplished diplomat and turn on his own brand of charm when necessary. Now, as head of the law firm, he had to be diplomatic. Straight was one of the firm’s most important clients, having represented his family since 1926.

That constraining factor apart, Nixon enjoyed, perhaps in a challenging way with someone like Straight, engaging and pinning down “the enemy.” Nixon was proud of his native intellect. If he felt inferior about his social status or background, he fell back on his sharp, well-read political mind. His knowledge of the grand art of international relations on one level, and parochial gutter politics on another, was unmatched in American history. Straight, too, had few peers in the United States in both his comprehension of international events and his experience in the backalleys of political intrigue.

Straight was nervous because of all the harsh attacks he had made on him, but he felt Nixon was even more on edge. Nixon babbled on for a while. After a short silence, Nixon took the opportunity to shift the conversation to politics by asking Straight what he thought of the political situation in England. It was a useful opening and loosened up Straight. He spoke about the Labour Party’s historic contradictions and conflicts. Nixon nodded his agreement. He said that a Labour victory in the next general election would indicate a trend toward “neutralism” in England. This meant it would give up its development of nuclear weapons and its own deterrent to any attack by the Soviet Union.

Straight disagreed, putting another view on the issue by saying that if British Prime Minister Harold Wilson surrendered England’s
independent nuclear deterrent, it would lead to a greater dependence on the United States. England would need the United States to defend it from attacks. Nixon would have been more aware than most that the United States wished to use the United Kingdom as a huge floating aircraft carrier off the coast of continental Europe—a massive forward base for its nuclear arsenal. The concept of going neutral would mean that the United States would not be allowed to place its nuclear weapons on U.K. soil because England would not be a Soviet nuclear target.
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