Last of the Cold War Spies (50 page)
Read Last of the Cold War Spies Online
Authors: Roland Perry
After the election of President Lyndon Johnson, Straight considered his work options. Again, as was the case with his decision to leave
The New
Republic
in 1956, they were few. Now approaching a decade later, at age 48, he had no career to follow outside KGB espionage and his subtle anti–federal government activity, often using his own money to achieve goals.
Straight had found the novelist cover hard work. When the KGB called on him again, he would need something simpler and easier to use as a front for his spying. He let friends and contacts know he was toying with being a painter, but that could cause problems. He could hardly set up his easel at a hot trouble spot and pretend he was an artist while spying. Straight began talking up a yearning to write a play or an opera. He was waiting for the muse to strike, he told anyone who would listen. These two areas—especially the playwright angle—were clever covers and less difficult to pull off than being a novelist, with the need to follow through with published books.
The year 1965 rolled by with time taken up by overseas trips, including two to London and Dartington in April and October, where he responded to more MI5 queries. These meetings, which Straight did not attempt to avoid or discourage, allowed him to monitor where Wright and company were in their investigations.
In the United States Straight chaired the board of the American Dance Theatre and had his commitments at the Whitney Foundation. It swallowed more of his time as he presided over donations to a wide variety of groups. The Whitney Museum in 1965 received a three-year grant, about which Straight expressed ambivalence. He didn’t like its art collection, which had concentrated on unappealing mainstream impressionism.
Straight maintained his usefulness to the KGB cause by putting an anti-American, pro-Soviet spin on major issues. Amnesty International, which was often anti–federal government, was an obvious vehicle for this. The Whitney Foundation kept the organization solvent and paid its debts. Straight organized the U.S. section of the group, which sought to inform public opinion about violations of human rights.
Amnesty International publicized government wrong-doing in newsletters, annual reports, and background papers. With its genuine altruistic and humanitarian aims, the organization provided a vehicle for Straight consistent with the strategies of political protest that he had involved himself in for more than thirty years. He noted that by the mid 1960s Amnesty International had taken over the role of American liberals after the failure of disarmament and other protest groups. Like Straight and the KGB, Western intelligence groups, such as the CIA and M15, attempted to influence Amnesty International.
Straight did not find any fulfilling occupation in 1965 or 1966. This left him open to again taking up a KGB mission in 1967. Now 50 years of age, he was on his way to Malta. Three years earlier the withdrawal of British military and naval personnel from its famous Dockland created economic and political problems. Malta was governed by the Nationalist Party, which was aligned to the West. But the developing strength of the opposition Malta Labor Party, backed by the Chinese, was causing concern in the Kremlin. At a time of growing tension between the Soviets and the Chinese, the Soviets did not want the Labor Party, even though it
was communist-leaning, in power if it meant the Chinese filling the political vacuum left by the British withdrawal. The Soviets were keen to replace the British in terms of influence. Straight was sent to assess the political and economic climate.
He needed a new cover. Straight knew that the tempestuous homosexual sixteenth-century painter Caravaggio had exiled himself in Malta after escaping prison. Straight contrived to write a play on him. He was a student of Caravaggio’s revolutionary technique of tenebrism (the dramatic setting of brightly-lit figures against a dark background) that created a resurgence of art in the seventeenth century. It influenced Rubens, Velazquez, and Rembrandt. Straight also fancied Caravaggio as a subject because, in his terms, he was politically correct. His approach overthrew a hundred years of idealism in art representing human and religious experience while keeping an eye on the ordinary man. Straight was attracted to his story of rebellion against Catholic doctrine and authority that dictated style in art at the time. The church wanted ethereal works, such as when Caravaggio was commissioned by the Spanish Order of the Discalced Carmelites to paint the death of the Virgin Mary. They expected a work that would express the doctrinal belief that she passed through death without dying. Caravaggio’s brilliant
Death of a Virgin
portrayed a corpse. It was not quite what the commissioners had in mind.
Straight would also have been drawn to the complexities of the painter’s sexuality. Though heterosexual himself, Straight had been caught in the underground homosexual web at Cambridge, which was inextricably bound to the other secret demimonde of espionage.
The subject had many threads of interest that he would have to pull together while gathering information for his report to the KGB.
After a trip to London and Dartington in mid-1967, he toured Malta, where Caravaggio had escaped after being imprisoned. Straight wanted to search archives, including those at the Royal Maltese Library. Once more, he was suspected of being an intelligence agent, but this time for the CIA.
He wrote in a foreword to the script of the play that some were intrigued by his plan to write about Caravaggio, while others accepted it as “an amusing cover story.” The British were moving out of Malta, Straight recorded, and the Russians were ready to move in. According to him, there were also plenty of CIA agents with their cover stories.
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The research done and his KGB report filed, Straight wanted to follow through with a script. He planned to begin the search for a producer. He
needed to make the Malta exercise convincing, given that he was now in an ongoing process of being interrogated by Western intelligence, particularly MI5. It was hardly demanding. In a perverse way he enjoyed the game with the British agency and the thrill of always keeping several steps ahead of them. By being in such close contact, Straight could assess how much British intelligence knew. He had let them know his plans for writing the play, and they had been only mildly interested. He now had to follow through on production, if possible, just to keep his cover credible.
Straight ran into all the usual problems that faced producers of plays. Possible backers took their time assessing it before sending him rejections. He spoke to Jackie Kennedy about the play and then enlisted her stepsister, Nina Steers, and her half-brother, Gore Vidal, to help. Despite the hard work put in, it did not take off. It was only performed a few times in obscure theaters from 1968 to 1971, including the Vineyard Players of Ithaca College; the H. B. Studio; the Gallery Circle Theatre in New Orleans; and the Playhouse-in-the-Park in Cincinnati.
How good a cover was it? Did it measure up to the books that gained some critical acclaim?
John Slavin, an arts critic for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and a Caravaggio expert, reviewed the play’s script, self-published by Straight’s Devon Press in 1979:
The Boston Herald
critic’s response to this play raises the correct avenues: “It would,” he writes, “make a striking motion picture.” Hollywood’s treatment of the artist is heavily biased towards the visual artist, not only because he/she is immensely pictorial but also because it offers the paradigm of the tortured, isolated individual suffering for his art. Who could forget Kirk Douglas’s Van Gogh slurring: “I jest want you to be my friend,” or Charlton Heston’s Michelangelo announcing: “I am answerable to no one but God.”
Straight’s Caravaggio falls easily into such cinematic typecasting. From the moment he appears in Del Monte’s palace as one of the hired boys, he is, improbably, convinced of his greatness. He continues to broadcast this as a forgone conclusion until the close of the play. Contrasted with this hyperbole is the detailed depiction of his scandalous, antisocial behavior. This is drawn without much dramatization from the police records, scrupulously recorded by Baglione, one of his victims and chief detractors.
Baglione was also his earliest and least reliable biographer. This is the Hollywood cliché: “the boy is a genius”—a syndrome combined with the melodrama of the misunderstood, original artist. Straight suggests that Caravaggio is dangerous, difficult and violent because he didn’t receive the recognition that he deserved.
Such a line is not supported by the historical record. Caravaggio was certainly a revolutionary artist who shifted the focus of aesthetic values. But . . . he was highly successful in the stream of commissions both public and private that he received from the Roman elite. Straight himself acknowledges that “the whole world was traipsing through the Contarelli Chapel to look at the St. Matthew paintings.” It was only the conservative element at the lower end of Church sponsorship (whom Straight trots out as archetypal betrayers of genius at S. Maria della Scala) who complained about his challenge to orthodoxy.
This distortion is in keeping with Straight’s principal theme. The reader is left with the impression that the great artist is being exploited by unknown forces. This figure is being used to explore not just the dilemma of the originating artist in society, but also the dilemma of the author in society. The play may be a kind of psychic X-ray of the author himself projected onto the figure of Caravaggio. As violent and unpredictable as he is, Caravaggio is consistently painted as a victim of his circumstances. In the final scenes he confesses that his main resentment is that of class, which lowers his value in the eyes of his peers. He is the innocent transgressor. Concomitant with this idea is the astonishing erasure of the most dramatic event in Caravaggio’s life—the murder of the Ranuccio Tomassoni on 26th May 1606. It is simply reported as the trigger that fires him into the stronghold of the Knights of St. John of the Cross on Malta. . . .
An astonishing omission is Caravaggio’s homosexuality . . . but for every hint of a relationship there is resistance and rebellion . . .
All this is wrapped up like a Christmas bon-bon in the forlorn gestures of rejected masterpieces.
In short, it was a superficial, unconvincing flop with ideological tendencies. But it didn’t matter. Only experts like Slavin would recognize it as such. The fact that Straight had written the play and tried to get it up was all the evidence he needed if someone ever suggested it was other than a bone fide creation by a would-be playwright/producer.
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