Last of the Cold War Spies (6 page)

Dartington’s radical approach to education even attracted the Soviet ambassador, Ivan Maisky, who was invited to visit the Hall in mid-May 1933. Pom Elmhirst, Straight, Young, and the other students warmly greeted him and his wife.
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Maisky gave his usual glowing chat about the Soviet Union, stayed two days and nights, and dined with the Elmhirsts. No doubt Straight, then 16, impressed the ambassador with his keen mind. Over dinner on May 14, the estate patriarch, Leonard—a liberal and open-minded humanist—spoke about his visit to Russia in 1930 and how he admired its scientific developments in artificial insemination and in cattle. Leonard told the ambassador how he had tried to introduce
such techniques in England, a point that would have raised the ambassador’s eyebrows. Ever since Trotsky’s instructions soon after the revolution for communists to steal everything they could from the capitalist nations, Soviet representatives abroad had been desperate to “gather” as much data of any kind, including scientific information, for the advancement of “the great Soviet experiment.” Leonard’s effort on behalf of his more modest experiments at Dartington was a case of plagiarism. It was no worse than what the Soviets were doing.

Dorothy too was open to the superficial Soviet line of propaganda. She espoused “internationalism”—international peace, the breaking down of national barriers, goodwill to all men and women. All Russia’s key representatives preached internationalism while planning the undermining of the British system and all other Western democracies, in their various states of decay and fragility in the 1930s.

The school itself, at least, became international and fashionable in an eclectic circle of, as Aldous Huxley remarked, the “‘odd, the odious, the famous and the fatuous, the accomplished and the artistic.” He sent his son Matthew there but was not pleased that he chose carpentry as his main subject. It wasn’t sufficient for Matthew to plead that it had been good enough for Christ, so why not him? Bertrand Russell took a liking to the school too and sent along his two children, Kate and John, by his second wife, Dora. Sigmund Freud’s architect son, Ernst—a refugee from Nazi Germany—enrolled his three sons. The eldest, Stefan, complained that it lacked games and competition in work. He missed racing to finish his algebra sums.

Among the other talented creatives to put in cameo appearances were the painter Ben Nicholson and his later wife, the sculptor Barbara Hepworth. Victor Gollanz, the publisher and life-long Stalin enthusiast, turned up, as did the controversial Jacob Epstein, another notable sculptor.

Dartington started as “alternative” and took a huge left turn as it developed and departed radically from traditional schooling. Leonard had disliked his own establishment schooling and wanted something different. Dorothy veered away from the norm too as a follower of John Dewey, an American educator and philosopher. He was also one of the founders of
the philosophical school of pragmatism, a pioneer in functional psychology, and a representative of the progressive movement in U.S. education, which was only too willing to embrace the far left. Dartington was also a coeducational boarding school, something unheard of in the establishment system. British institutions and conventions were not studied or lauded at Dartington. In other words, this new radical facility was looking for a utopia that would overthrow tradition where learning was a preparation for a vocation. Dartington wanted education to relate to the here and now. For instance, the students would be shown how to tend pigs and clean out their pens, the latter being a solitary lesson for most in what they would never do for the rest of their lives.

Dartington was a state within a state—self-enclosed and self-governing. There was little to relate to in outside communities in rural Devonshire, which was isolated enough as it was. The headmaster, W. B. Curry, was a pacifist whose guru was Bertrand Russell. Curry was cut off from the British establishment and essentially a radical, although he would not have seen his politics in this light. (When World War II broke out, Curry couldn’t cope and committed suicide, which in a perverse way meant that he stuck to his anti-war principles.)

The school also had a heady atmosphere of sexual freedom and liberal thought. It absorbed the “in” ideology of Marxism. It looked to a false and idealized vision of the mysterious Soviet Union as a trendsetter for life, society, and political development. Not surprisingly, seven of Straight’s final-year class of ten went on to join the Communist Party. Dartington was a wonderful breeding ground for communism despite the fact that only Straight’s “lover,” Margaret Barr, was the one raw and knowing Communist, although she never taught it. (Barr moved to Australia, where she joined the communist movement there.) She limited her Dartington teaching to dancing and to “hands-on” sex education, with Straight chosen as the only one-on-one student. Straight absorbed the naive communist indoctrination while making the banal claim that he was naturally the creative type, particularly in writing and art, although Dartington offered nothing in these fields.

In this rarefied atmosphere of alleged political and creative enlightenment and inspiration, in the summer of 1933 Straight, then 16, took the
school certificate exam. He failed mathematics, which meant he would have to sit out a year before going on to Cambridge. He thought of himself as a poet/writer but was made to realize that to attain his vague, unshaped dreams of saving the world through revolution, he should comprehend economics, especially at Cambridge. It was reputed to be the most radical university in the country next to the London School of Economics (LSE). In the 1930s, especially the early part of the decade, economics was viewed by the leading left-wing intellectuals as the key to understanding Marxism.

This was made clear to Straight when he used family contacts to meet liberal American jurist Felix Frankfurter, who was living in Oxford in 1933, on sabbatical from his job as professor at the Harvard Law School. The New Dealer and close friend of Franklin Roosevelt suggested he see the leading academic Marxist, Harold Laski, professor of political science at LSE, even though Straight’s mediocre exam performances didn’t warrant entry there. Laski, who was a regular contributor to
The New Republic
, was impressed enough by Straight to use his influence as chair of its admissions committee in order to get him in.
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Straight moved to London and joined his brother Whitney, who had left Cambridge. They rented an “elegant” house in Mayfair from the writer P. G. Wodehouse, who gave a dinner in their honor. He spoke in support of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini.

Whitney showed his eccentric side by having the dining room redone in a luminescent paint, purchasing six big paintings by Ben Nicholson, and buying a monkey, which had its home on the top floor. Soon Whitney, a racing car driver, took off for the European circuit, with his team of mechanics and Maseratis, leaving Straight with a footman to look after him and the monkey. It was a bizarre start for the budding revolutionary, but despite these upper-class trappings, Straight tackled his new life at the LSE with zeal. He become a member of the Communist-controlled Socialist Club, joined in debates, attended radical rallies, and used his wealth to get noticed. He became a card-carrying member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, associating rarely with anyone at the university except like-minded Soviet-supporting Communists, such as Geoffrey Marmont, editor of the radical magazine
The Student Vanguard
, who late in 1934 committed suicide; American Frank Meyer (expelled and deported to the United States in 1934 for his radical activities); Oxford graduate Peter Floud, who became a leading communist intellectual;
Krishna Menon (later the foreign minister of India); Leo Silberman, a German refugee, later murdered in an intelligence operation involving South Africa; Michael Young, who studied law; and many others.

Frank Meyer ran a fund for refugees from Nazi Germany, and Straight donated twenty pounds, which was ten times that raised in seven weeks. It allowed him to ingratiate himself with Meyer, LSE’s most militant Communist. Straight got on the LSE hockey team by using his Ford convertible to chauffeur other players to games. These were undergraduate lessons in how he could buy access to what he desired, a practice he would call on as a matter of course to far greater effect for decades to come.

T
he London School of Economics had given Straight experience at communism beyond Dartington. Cambridge, he hoped, would provide the opportunity to embrace it further, although he was not aware of how that would occur and what form it would take. He began, age 18, at Trinity College, in the autumn of 1934. Its style and atmosphere attracted him from day one.

His digs were in a lodging house on Trumpington Road, and he still had a “gentleman’s gentleman”—bequeathed by Whitney—to prepare his daily wash basin and once-a-week bath and to lay out his clothes. Wellscrubbed and nicely attired in shirt, tie, and student’s gown, the young freshman set about organizing the best tutor for his purposes in economics. First there was Maurice Dobb, a leading member of the British Communist Party and a “spotter” for the Comintern. Straight moved from him on to a classical economist, Denis Robertson, but he was angling for tuition under Joan Robertson, reputed to be the most brilliant of John Maynard Keynes’s disciples. Straight was a big supporter of Keynes. His economics represented a break from the noninterventionist classicists, who thought government interference should be kept at a minimum and who were shocked by Keynes’s articles and lectures on the General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, which would later (1936)
be published in book form. This theory embraced big spending and expansion of government, especially during recession, to escape a slump and to reduce unemployment.

This theory sat well with socialist thinking despite Keynes’s not advocating full socialism, which meant government “control of the means of production and exchange.” Yet it was acceptable to Marxists, for the time being, given the West’s history. It meant an economy following Keynes would be conditioned to big government spending. This was a step toward total government control that could be implemented by a change from something like a New Deal administration in the United States or Labour in the United Kingdom to something more radical.

Keynes’s main concepts emerged during the Great Depression when the Western world was looking for solutions to mass unemployment as economies declined and big corporations slugged it out with powerful unions. He was the foremost economic thinker of the era, and Straight wanted to be as close to him as possible. Straight showed his prowess by studying hard and coming top out of two hundred students in the first examination in the Economic Tripos. He was one of only four to gain a first. It was proof on paper of what everyone who encountered him on an intellectual level thought. Here was an articulate youth with an exceptional brain and ambition to match. The door was open to Robertson and Keynes. Straight’s diligence ensured he was on the way to matching wits with the most formidable minds on the campus.

His examination success marked him as an academic high-flyer, with money and social position. He was a perfect target for Soviet recruitment, for the odds were that Straight would reach the highest echelons of the profession he chose. What made him even more interesting was the fact that his background meant he could, if willing, be pushed to the top in either the British or U.S. establishment.
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Yet to be assessed were his temperament and commitment: in KGB terms the extent to which he would be willing to go and how far he could be directed.
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Arnold Deutsch, the Jewish Austrian Comintern agent, was already aware of him. Yet Straight was still a raw 18-year-old and could not be simply signed up like a football recruit. He had to be tested, indoctrinated, and inspired before being approached by a Comintern representative—a process that took years in peacetime. Once a new agent was in place, Stalin and the Moscow Center would not accept anything short of a lifetime’s commitment to their
cause, unless he or she were found to be incompetent. A burnt out agent who was of no further use would be pensioned off at a rate commensurate with performance. Rebellion or defection would see the agent marked for assassination.

Straight’s initial steps toward a consolidation of his communist links came when two gowned, second-year Trinity students—the bird-like and clever James Klugman and the dark, brooding, and intense John Cornford— came unannounced to his modest lodgings one chilly evening in November 1934. Klugman was from a wealthy Jewish family and had been educated at Gresham’s, an old and unconventional public school, as had his friend Donald Maclean, a member of the Cambridge ring of Soviet spies then being formed. Klugman had “spotted” and helped recruit John Cairncross, a brilliant scholarship winner from a poor Glasgow background, to the ring. Cornford was the son of Charles Darwin’s granddaughter and a Trinity classics don. He had been a Marxist at Stowe School before he won an open scholarship to Trinity at age 17 in 1932.

The two visitors—the leaders of the Cambridge Communist movement—wanted Straight to become a member of the communist-controlled Cambridge University Socialist Society. The controllers were directed by the British Communist Party, headquartered in King Street, London, which in turn took its orders from Moscow. His name, he was told, had been mentioned to them by comrades at the LSE. Straight had no hesitation in joining; he regarded it as a major turning point in his life.
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He went to society meetings and discussed issues with Klugman and Cornford, who set about ironing out what they believed to be his naïveté concerning the class struggle. Straight was an eager, willing, and quick student. He was passed from “A” to “B” then “C” contacts—each successive person more important in the secret system—until March 18, 1935, four months after meeting them. Then he moved from being one of fifty avowed communists in the society to one of twelve students in the Trinity College “cell” or communist group. It was his introduction to the clandestine world; the cells kept quiet about their membership.

Cells were split into three groups. The first included those interested in communist ideology. The second worked openly for the party and carried green membership cards. The third group of “moles” was more sinister. They prepared themselves for influential posts in British life and later infiltrated the professions and government. Not even close friends or family were aware of their communist affiliations.

Straight enjoyed the intrigue. It gave him a special thrill to add a hidden layer to his busy, more public applications on campus. The experience drew him closer to unsmiling and dedicated Cornford, whom he admired. Cornford introduced him to Harry Pollitt, the working-class leader of the British Communist Party and a Soviet agent. The two men got on well. Straight began “giving as much money (in cash) as I could without feeling the pinch” to the party.
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The contributions had the dual effect of linking him more strongly with the British Communist Party’s hierarchy and of pleasing Cornford, whom Straight wished to impress.

Several communists, including those at the Soviet Embassy in Kensington Gardens, the British party’s headquarters in King Street, and many on the Cambridge campus, were now aware of Straight’s potential. Reports filtered back to key recruiter Deutsch, who was orchestrating a trip to Russia for a group of young communists.
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He made sure Straight was to be included. The three-week trip was meant to give them a sanitized, controlled look at the “workers’ paradise.” The holiday was also a chance for Russian intelligence to assess each student’s suitability for future recruitment. A list was passed on to Trinity’s Charles Rycroft (later a distinguished psychiatrist) and John Madge, who organized the students to pay £15 each for the Intourist round-trip by steamer to Leningrad. Also on board the ship in August 1935 were Straight’s Dartington chum, Michael Young; Brian Simon (another member of the Trinity cell and a future member of the British Communist Party); Charles Fletcher-Cooke, also at Trinity (then a Union radical, later a Tory member of Parliament); Christopher Mayhew (a future Labor minister and lord) and his friend, Derek Nenk, both of Oxford University; art academic and French tutor at Cambridge Anthony Blunt (a member of the university’s growing ring); and his brother Wilfrid, an art teacher. The trip would build Straight’s relationship with the tall, lean Anthony Blunt with the cutaway mouth and aloof demeanor.

The two had a link from 1935, the first year they met. They didn’t fraternize much after hours. Blunt was a predatory homosexual, and Straight had hopes of being a hunter in the opposite camp. Blunt was a KGB recruiter, and Straight was intrigued by the secret communist milieu at the university, thus making himself available. Straight tried to
make out that their backgrounds and circumstances were similar, but he was clutching at straws to explain away the ease of their relationship.

Straight told journalists and family members that Blunt and his brothers were brought up strictly and in an atmosphere of missionary zeal. His father, an Anglican priest, was never close to his sons. He loved sports and was devoted to John Ruskin, the nineteenth-century English writer, critic, and artist who championed the gothic revival movement in architecture and the decorative arts. He had a big influence upon public taste in art in Victorian England. Ruskin inspired opposition to laissez-faire philosophy. By age 13, Blunt hated all sports and loathed Ruskin. By contrast, his mother coddled him. She was linked to aristocracy and in marrying a priest had moved down the social scale.
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Straight tried hard to put a fanciful spin on Blunt’s communism, blaming it on his family relationships. He supposed that Blunt’s mother really loved his father because Blunt Sr. answered to God, a higher calling. Therefore, Straight postulated, Blunt Jr., in yearning for his mother’s attention, himself sought a better calling, communism. This intellectual fairyland avoided certain contradictory points. First, Blunt only accepted certain Marxist doctrine, particularly his Stalinist, ridiculous view of art (and even this died away after he left Cambridge). However, when it came to political power linked with international Marxism, he had limited views and left that to the articulation of others, such as Guy Burgess.

Still, Straight connected Blunt’s family relationship complexities to his own, especially the lack of a warm connection to his mother and a fatherless past. Straight, too, wanted everyone to believe he was drawn to a bigger ideal that would usurp the father-figure role. Then there was the broader claim of the influence, or lack of influence, of a national identity. Blunt, it was pointed out, spent important years (from ages 5 to 14) in France. This upbringing allegedly led to his having no allegiance to England. This idea may have had some credence if Blunt had been brought up in Germany or Russia, who had opposing ideals to England. But France in ideological terms (let alone geographical) was not that far from the island across the Channel.

Perhaps Straight’s biggest stretch in discussions with Blunt’s biographer Miranda Carter was an attempt to fill in the dots between negative feelings for England and homosexuality, which in turn found an outlet in underground communism. One problem with this thinking was that homosexuality at the time was an even bigger crime in the Soviet Union
than it was in England. Straight liked also Blunt’s citing of the dictum of homosexual English novelist E. M. Forster that if he had to choose between betraying his friends and his country, he hoped that he would have the guts to betray his country. Yet this argument went nowhere either, unless that friend was a communist agent. Betraying a fellow spy would see the betrayer on a KGB death list, a more telling test of courage.

Once more, Straight tried to foster parallels with his own background and lack of patriotism, which was again implausible. The United States and the United Kingdom, his two homes, were bound by a democratic ideal that he could not fail to recognize. To suggest that he would drift stateless and find himself in a slipstream toward Russian communism was improbable, even absurd.