Last of the Cold War Spies (57 page)

O
ne of the most telling comments in Michael Straight’s career was the acknowledgment by his publisher and survivors of the exceptional potential in his writing. Straight would have thought about the what-might have-beens in his life. Had he not been recruited by the KGB, would he have been a successful politician, even U.S. president? If he had gone to an American university and not Dartington, London School of Economics, and Cambridge in the 1930s, would he have taken his place as a respected writer or playwright?

These ambitions welled in him in his stated aim to “gate-crash eternity.” They could not be reconciled with a subterranean life as a Russian espionage agent that he chose in 1937 as his main career. His truer career instincts surfaced postwar when in late 1945 he tried and then backed away from endorsement from the Democratic Party. When the reviews for his first two fiction works were favorable, he pondered what it would be like to go on as a creative writer in the early 1960s. But he did not. He had other more lasting and demanding agendas.

After knowledge of his student communist days was leaked to the Democratic Party machine, he had barely recovered from the shock when he was working as an important backer, strategist, and speechwriter in Henry Wallace’s bid for the presidency. If Wallace had succeeded, he may
have offered Straight a place on the ticket or a position in the cabinet that could have prepared him as a future candidate. His final facing-up to the impossibility of ever having a political career came in the early 1950s when he appeared before congressional committees that were hunting subversives. The hostility toward his views and suspicions about his motivations would have driven home to him that he was not electable to public office in the United States. After that, his disdain for most candidates running for the Oval Office, especially Jack Kennedy, was caused in part by the frustration of not being able to reach for the position himself. He had met them all and considered he was better equipped as a thinker, speaker, idealist, and even administrator. Yet he would never have a chance to prove it.

When his insipid third novel—the only contemporary fiction—failed in the mid-1960s, he didn’t need to work hard at it or follow through. But his play on Caravaggio, in contrast, was a more thorough performance. It was another clever cover for a KGB assignment. After that, he dried up. There would be no more smoke screens of that exhausting proportion. And anyway, the CIA and British intelligence would be on to him, if they were not already.

In the beginning at Cambridge, the allure of the cause was understandable, given the time and the company he kept. For all the denigration of “grubby” Guy Burgess, his contemporaries were dazzled by his intellect and dedication. Blunt with his cultured manner and knowledge of the arts represented something superior. Their combined loyalty to the cause was seductive in itself. They romanticized the higher political creed of international Marxism with its emphasis on the right economic interpretation of history. No thoughts were expressed that could lead to penetrating analysis of the Stalinist state, propped up by terror. Within the secluded cloisters of Cambridge, gullible idealists like Straight were fed sugarcoated propaganda that played to their privileged backgrounds and juvenile guilt over them. There were other characters on the scene that reinforced Straight’s move, including Victor Rothschild, John Cornford, Tess Mayor, and James Klugman. He could not feel superior in breeding or intellect to these impressive peers and several more like them.

Another important factor was his wealth. He never needed to work. He was therefore open to a movement offering other than monetary remuneration. Straight’s covers were as a bureaucrat, political official, administrator, writer, publisher, and journalist. His own money facilitated
them. Wealth placed him from birth in an insulated establishment structure. He learned to use his connections, as exemplified by the way he manipulated Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, and later Jackie Kennedy, when they were in the White House. His inherited fortune also allowed him to buy the best legal advice to protect him against prosecutors in search of subversives and media probes into his life. But because he didn’t sustain a career, there were voids in his life. The KGB manipulated those empty periods by flattery and cajolery. Russian controls played to his ego and made him feel important and wanted.

As Straight was being drawn into the network, he acted himself as a recruiter of others into the Apostles Club. In the 1930s, it was an important breeding ground at Cambridge for the KGB.

It all helped secure him in the Soviet web. The knowledge that Stalin himself connived in his placement in the United States propelled him into a dangerous yet thrilling clandestine world when barely out of his teens. Rebecca West in her book,
The Meaning of Treason
, wrote of the peculiar attraction of the espionage demimonde and the sentiment and adrenaline rush which kept Straight inspired from age 21.

Straight did not quite fit Rebecca West’s description of the mid–twentieth-century espionage agent: “The life of the political conspirator offers the man of restricted capacity but imaginative energy excitements and satisfactions which he can never derive from overt activities.”

She was writing just postwar based on analysis of Nazi spies and the few insignificant Soviet agents then exposed. She would have revised her thinking had she been aware of the “talents” like Philby, Blunt, Maclean, Cairncross, Burgess, Rothschild, Mayor, Straight, and others. They all had abilities that would have facilitated other brilliant careers. Straight’s skills would have allowed him thrills and satisfactions in “overt activities” such as politics. But where he differed from the others was in character. Despite their talents, they were able to sublimate them to a degree where these other aspirations did not interfere with their main occupations as Russian agents. By contrast, Straight thought for some time he could combine a very much more public career with his covert life.

A shocking point of realization that he was captured forever, and that it might restrict his public ambitions, came early in 1941 when Walter Krivitsky was murdered in a Washington hotel room. Straight, whom Burgess directed into the web of complicity in the assassination, was reminded that no agent should ever stray or turn against the cause once recruited. Not
that Straight ever deviated. Once presented with an assignment, he did his spying and agenting his way.

Straight spent four decades as a KGB agent and an agent of influence. His most enterprising work was done in the Midwest from 1956 to 1962. Perhaps his most daring espionage effort was his spying on Cheyenne Mountain and its surrounds while pretending to do research for his second novel.

Many people provided evidence of his KGB operations and witnessed his long service. They began with his lifelong friend Michael Young, who in an interview with me went out of his way to emphasize Straight’s long KGB service. Others included Blunt, Anatoli Golitsyn, Cord Meyer, Whitney Straight, and some FBI and CIA members.

On top of that, Straight’s actions as an agent of influence and agent provocateur for the KGB, as well as his financial donations, were further proof that he was always supportive of the Kremlin’s ideology, aims, and views. He backed the U.K.
Daily Worker
with his substantial pocket-money contributions for several years. He poured funds into communist fronts and supported KGB agent Dolivet to the tune of $250,000 in his publication of a propaganda sheet. Straight’s first book,
Let This Be the
Last War
, published when he was 26, demonstrated his continuing accord with Soviet propaganda. Though submerged, refined, and made more digestible to a wider audience, that hard intellectual base, constructed at his educational institutions in Great Britain, never left him.

Straight was directed to work for “peace” over nuclear weapons with people the KGB had targeted for retarding U.S. weapons development, while the KGB worked overtime to gain the technology for the Russian’s own bombs. He was a campaign strategist and main financier for the first part of Vice-President Henry Wallace’s bid for the 1948 presidency. Wallace was the only serious U.S. presidential candidate in history who stood for appeasement with Russia and would have been the nearest thing to a Soviet puppet in the White House.

Straight’s work at the AVC, particularly from 1945 to 1948, according to Cord Meyer, always had a procommunist agenda directed from the Kremlin. Meyer wondered what information Straight fed back to the Kremlin from his insinuation into the most powerful circles in the United States. He was a master at networking where it counted, even cultivating the wife of a U.S. president (Kennedy) all the time he was in power.

Straight also financially supported the Institute for Pacific Affairs that played its part in helping bring communism to China, a development that made him proud. Buoyed by this sudden surge of hope for communists everywhere in the late 1940s, Straight in early 1950 felt compelled to put the case for maintaining a Communist Party in the United States while attempting to maintain the image of an anticommunist. He put his convoluted arguments with dazzling effect to the HUAC, but nearly tripped up on his own feverish rhetoric:

The HUAC committee left the hearing confused at a higher level by Straight’s testimony. Once they were over their bamboozlement, the hearing’s transcript was pored over by them and other congressmen. Straight’s attempt to appear open and anticommunist backfired. He and the Whitney grants to communist fronts came under closer scrutiny.

In explaining contact with Burgess in Washington in 1950, Straight wrote in
After Long Silence
:

Straight’s critics saw his failure to denounce Burgess before or at the time of the Korean War as an inaction that made him complicit in causing the deaths of those American soldiers. Furthermore, if he was the Western spy who convinced Mao to attack U.S. forces, his complicity was even greater. But this possibility aside, his critics judged the failure to act over Burgess as his greatest travesty. It demonstrated that at this critical time Straight put his former allegiances to the Apostles and the KGB ahead of his country and countrymen. His loyalties were never in doubt.

His contact in 1954 with Sergei Striganov, the KGB agent at the Soviet embassy, went on for at least two years. It highlighted that he had to
make such contacts, even if they were dangerous for him. As mentioned earlier, Cord Meyer wondered what tidbits of information from his connection with Straight may have been passed on to Striganov.

Straight had hope in the mid-1950s that there may still be a revival of mainstream support for far-left agendas in the United States. Yet as the Cold War temperature dropped, mainstream opinions hardened against countenancing in the United States anything remotely like even Communism in Italy or France. There wasn’t a moderate liberal candidate in sight who had any real chance of becoming president and thus setting the pace for political change.

In 1956, Straight followed the Soviet line over the crushing of the uprising in Hungary and blamed the attempted revolution on the CIA. In discussing “neutralism”—the proposal that England give up its nuclear weapons program—with Nixon in 1963, Straight’s case for it was parallel with Moscow’s position and propaganda.

He was always on the lookout for ways to act as an agent of influence and to shore up radical liberalism, lost from American mainstream politics by the mid-1960s with the failure, Straight felt, of disarmament and other protest groups. He directed Whitney Foundation funds into Amnesty International, which kept it afloat. Like the Australian radical communist writer Wilfred Burchett, Straight often responded when the whiff of revolution was in the air. In 1968, he rushed from Martha’s Vineyard to Washington when blacks rioted in response to the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Yet Straight was disappointed the rioters were more interested in looting than in revolution.

His final act of influence came from his own political use of federal government funds to support protest through drama and dance. Instead of the 1930s youthful, messianic drive to revolution in the streets, he was satisfied, in his late 50s, with dramatized revolution on the stage. In post-1968 language reminiscent of German-born U.S. Marxist/Freudian philosopher Herbert Marcuse, Straight supported artistic vehicles showing feelings of “bitterness, rage and alienation” toward the establishment.