Last of the Cold War Spies

by Roland Perry

  Restrictions did not subdue Straight’s enthusiasm. At the hotel, he put on some drab clothes and asked Charles Rycroft if he looked like a proletarian. “No,” Rycroft replied, “you look like a millionaire pretending to be a proletarian.”

  Undaunted, Straight later was observed caressing a mantelpiece in the hotel dining room and mumbling: “This is made from Soviet timber, Soviet marble. . . . ”

  A highlight in Moscow that excited some of the group was a visit to the Home for the Rehabilitation of Prostitutes. The visitors were led to believe that the women at the home had been taken off the street, given psychiatric counseling, and directed toward retraining in factory work. The Intourist guide (a KGB agent), with the help of the home’s “manager,” babbled on about how the women were guided into seeing the error of their ways by “instruction in the moral values engendered in the State by the teachings of Marx and Lenin.”

  “It was run by the KGB,” Young remembered with a smile sixty-one years after the visit. “We were far more interested in the women themselves than how they were being rehabilitated. They were of all ages, and stunning, very beautiful.”

  In actuality the KGB controllers of the home were the women’s pimps. It was the practice of Russian intelligence since the czars to use prostitutes to gain information. Stalin’s era had seen the increased development of the “honey-trap,” where women were forced at home and abroad to seduce diplomats, foreign agents, and businessmen into relationships in order to blackmail them. Not every woman at the rehabilitation center was used this way. But by controlling them, the KGB could pick, choose, and direct whom they liked.

  Some of the party wanted to take pictures of the women. They pretended to be interested in the home and its inhabitants. But shots were forbidden. Once a photograph was taken, the women pictured could never be used in operations against Westerners.

  Again Blunt was able to leave the tourists with his brother and spend time at the Pushkin Museum, but they did attend a shoe factory. They were also entertained by Noel Charles, the acting counselor at the British Embassy. The dinner they attended at the Embassy, without dinner suits, verged on farce.

  Over predinner drinks, Wilfrid was asked if he intended to publish any more diaries. “I have not published my diaries,” Wilfrid replied tartly.

  “Oh,” the host replied with a frown.

  “Perhaps more poetry?” the hostess inquired, expecting to restore the moment.

  “I’m not a poet,” Wilfrid responded. “I think you are confusing me with Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, our cousin.”

  “Oh, yes, of course,” the host said, ushering them into dinner.

  At the table, while other guests chatted, Charles remarked to Blunt: “I thought your brother appeared somewhat young to be the Blunt we were expecting.”

  A miffed Wilfrid, aged about 30, overheard the comment and butted in: “Yes, Scawen Blunt would be more than ninety.”

  “Oh, and how is he?”

  “Dead, actually.”

  “I am sorry.”

  “I shouldn’t be,” Wilfrid said. “He has been gone since 1922.”12

  The evening at the embassy seemed even more bizarre in retrospect to Wilfrid when he learned that the butler at the embassy was a Soviet agent.

  For a short time in Moscow, Blunt moved more easily with other members of the party, including Straight and Young. There were conversations, but Straight and Young claimed they could remember nothing of substance. Blunt was keen to engage Straight. He liked to cultivate the wealthy for his own purposes and those of his true masters. He had already ingratiated himself at Trinity with Victor Rothschild, the rich scion of the banking family, whose generosity was appreciated for both causes. Blunt had benefited from the future lord’s largess in loaning him money for paintings and his willingness to be involved, for the time being, on the fringes of the Comintern’s plans for the United Kingdom. In turn, Blunt had been most supportive when Rothschild was on manslaughter charges (which were later dropped) in 1932 when he killed a cyclist outside Cambridge while speeding in his Bugati.

  In Straight’s case, the trip was designed to ease Blunt into a relationship with the teenager, which he did to perfection. Straight was impressed by his cultivated air.

  He suggested Blunt was remote and mysterious for most of the tour, which was not Wilfrid’s perspective, for he was with him almost all the time. Nevertheless, according to Yuri Modin, Blunt slipped away alone one night in Moscow to meet Nikolai Bukharin, the Bolshevik and Marxist theoretician and economist. Guy Burgess, a member of the Cambridge Soviet ring of agents, had met him in Moscow a year earlier.13 Bukharin, 46, was then editor of Izvestia, the official government newspaper, and was busy writing the new Soviet constitution, but his star was in decline following Stalin’s purges. He was a prominent member of the Comintern, and as such advised Burgess and Blunt on tactics. Their discussions covered methods in selecting and managing likely new agents. Burgess had been advised to change his image and pretend to be a fascist supporter in order to infiltrate right-wing circles in England. Blunt, who had not been as militant and vocal as his lover Burgess, was told to continue his work as an art historian and stay at Cambridge as long as possible.

  Straight would have loved to have met such a romanticized figure as Bukharin, but no one at the Moscow Center was ready to allow it. Nor was he then a fully fledged Soviet agent. Yet he and Young did manage to break away from the rest of the party, albeit for a less exciting assignment—an attempt to arrange an exchange of theater companies. The Jooss Ballet Company, which was at Dartington, wished to come to Russia. Straight and Young went to see if the Vakhtangov Theatre Company, named after its director, would like to visit England. They saw the director’s widow and a deal, in French, was struck.

  Straight tried to impress Vakhtangov’s widow that his stepfather ran an experimental enterprise, with special socialist significance, which was a bit like a Greek city-state. Straight only made Madame Vakhtangov understand that Leonard was a farmer—a Kulak. She was disdainful. Farmers were class enemies of the workers. She inquired about Straight’s mother. “He tried again in French to portray Dorothy in her full artistic milieu at Dartington, but could only make her comprehend that she was a farmer’s wife,” Michael Young recalled. Madame Vakhtagnov frothed about the iniquity of a woman’s lot as a Kulak slave. It was the fate to which women were condemned in capitalist societies.14

  After visiting Moscow, the tiny party went on an arduous two-day train trip to Kharkov and Kiev, while the Blunts stayed behind. Wilfrid continued his art pilgrimage. Anthony met his KGB masters from headquarters at Dzerzhinsky Square for further inspiration and instruction.

  Straight, Young, and the others were forced to suffer the airless discomfort of a primitive train. The depressing atmosphere caused them to dwell again on the scatological. The lavatory had a poster for those who could not read. It showed the difference between a peasant, whose aim and method was inadequate for reasonable hygiene, whereas an enlightened worker demonstrated how it should be done. Most of the tourist’s fellow passengers were apparently not enlightened, Young recalled.15

  It was a case of welcome to the real world of the workers’ paradise, yet most of these youthful communists were kept ignorant of more pertinent realities, such as the mass arrests going on across the country, the torture, and the general development of the then-worst police state in the world, fascist Germany included.

  The Russians encountered on board the train seemed a little primitive and xenophobic as they drank vodka, smoked, and boiled tea. They gave no clues to the blinkered bunch of foreigners of the nation’s plight. No communication meant no hints about the Stalinist malaise that had gripped Russia and turned it into a state of fear. An instance of harsh scare tactics and the nation’s poverty came when the students were stunned at night to hear gunfire. The train shunted to a halt. The curious travelers hurried to the end of their carriage to see a small group of starving children cowering on the steps. They had stolen
on board at a remote stop in the middle of the night. The guards were searching for them. The shots were meant to make them flee the train.

  At Kiev such incidents became dim memories in between slumber as the tourists were taken by bus to a hotel, then a horse race meeting. “It was rather like the Melbourne Cup,” Young remembered imaginatively. “All the jockeys wore brightly colored caps and there was a big, raucous crowd.”

  The tour was also taken to a camera factory in Kiev. “The plant was run by a big fat man who happened also to be the headmaster of a school,” Young said, putting a benevolent spin on Russian intelligence operations once more. “The school was set up and controlled by the KGB. It was composed of homeless children from the Russian Civil War who had been brought together by the KGB. In the morning they would do their school work, have lunch, and then go to the factory to make cameras.”

  Without prompting, Young then began to speak of an incident at the factory involving Straight. “Michael Straight had a Leica camera, and the plant manager took a great interest in it,” Young said. “He asked Straight if he could take it away and examine it. Straight agreed. It was taken to bits, photographed, put back together and returned.”16 It was a mild form of spontaneous industrial espionage that delighted the 19-year-old Straight.

  The group returned to Leningrad and on September 12 joined the merchant vessel Smolny for the return trip to London. Also on board was Harry Pollitt, whom Mayhew recalled spent his time making notes and planning a new offensive against fascists. Pollitt’s appearance made sure that MI5 scrutinized the names of all who sailed with him. Nancy Cunard, the millionaire London hostess, happened to be on board. She provided light relief for the other travelers by flirting with a black Russian dancer and with Wilfrid Blunt, when both would have preferred each other.

  Once back in Cambridge, Blunt reported to Deutsch on the trip and then wrote an art report about it for The Spectator. His experience had only confirmed his dedication to communism. This was more than hinted at in his writing, where under Straight’s precocious influence, he attempted to apply Marxist theory to aesthetics. Works of art, Straight suggested, could be judged by their historical impact instead of their intrinsic worth.

  Blunt continued with this kind of analysis, which damaged his reputation as an art historian and critic. Marxism, rather than a fair aesthetic sense, dominated his judgment. This reached a point of absurdity when he later attacked Picasso, one of the most important artists of the twentieth century, for his painting, Guernica, which had been inspired by the horrors of the Spanish Civil War. Blunt, in a deluded critique, dismissed it as “disillusioning . . . it is not an act of public mourning but the expression of a private brain storm, which gives no evidence that Picasso has realized the political significance of Guernica.”17

  Blunt’s assessment of the potential recruits on the Russian trip was more acute. His job—and to a lesser degree Burgess’s—now was to seduce to a deeper cause those who showed the right temperament and dedication on the tour.

  Top of the list was Michael Straight.

  5

  IN THE RING

  Dorothy became worried as Straight entered his second year at Cambridge and took up residence in suite K5 at Trinity College with another communist, Hugh Gordon. His letters and utterances to her waxed between fanaticism and a callousness she had not before detected in her son.

  He mentioned to her and others the death of the poet, A. E. Housman, who had lived in the suite above his. Straight and his friends had ignored him as he shuffled down the stairs and into the diminishing autumn sunshine for his daily constitutional walk. They laughed him off when he tapped his cane on the ceiling to noisy K5, where the students reveled below playing loud music on Straight’s gramophone. One day the cane stopped tapping.

  Straight demonstrated the indifference and arrogance that touched Michael Young at Dartington when he wrote that they did not pause to mourn Housman. The poets of his generation were the ones who moved them. Cambridge was not now a place for old men.1

  No creative or intellectual writers motivated Straight, although he was inspired, in a limited way, by the ideas behind Keynes’s book, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money. This book was not published until 1936, but all economics students such as Straight were familiar with everything in it long before this. Keynes had been preaching his views in lectures and papers since he first appeared at King’s College in 1909.

  The Spanish Civil War, rather than thoughtful documentation, moved Straight’s generation. If he and his contemporaries read anything it was supporting magazines such as The News Chronicle, New Statesman, and Palme Dutt’s Monthly.

  Straight began misleading his mother and the family, dolling out just enough careful information that would lead her to believe he was a socialist (not a dirty word in 1935) or a liberal working in communist cells, but not out of any conviction. He admitted he was recruiting others to the cause but alleged, disingenuously, that he didn’t know what was driving him to do it.

  Remarks to his mother and family members demonstrated that he was seeking Dorothy’s approval by suggesting that his activities in the communist cells were not carried from a sense of conviction. He even wondered if he was damaging the lives of new people he was drawing into the movement. He claimed, plaintively, he didn’t know why he was doing it.2

  However, by late 1935, he had strong feelings of affection for Cornford, Klugman, and Dobb; they gave him an inexplicable sense of comradeship. But just in case his parents became concerned, he let them know that he had been all evening with Klugman, his brother Whitney’s friend Guy Burgess, and an art historian named Anthony Blunt. This sugar-coated his closeness to the two leading Soviet spies and recruiters at the university. The family knew Whitney was a true-blue conservative, and Dorothy and Leonard would have assumed that Burgess was probably conservative and most likely harmless. Blunt’s profession would have seemed also to be nonthreatening and on the surface, apolitical.3

  By this stage Burgess was cultivating right-wing groups and was using Whitney for introductions to influential conservative figures. The views of Whitney, the playboy sports enthusiast, weren’t in accord with the rest of the family. He had no time for radical politics. A fellow rich racing-car fanatic, Victor Rothschild, had first introduced Burgess to Whitney in 1934.

  Still Dorothy was worried. Implanted in her mind was the 1919 message about Straight from her dead husband Willard via the Maryland medium: he will have a very deep mind and he will have to be taught to meet problems of all kinds. Furthermore, Tagore had spent May and June of 1935 at Dartington and had refreshed her strong spiritual feelings. It was time to dispatch someone like him to her son to assess the situation. She sent her close friend Gerald Heard, a philosopher with spiritual interests.

  He wrote to Straight and said he was coming to Cambridge in November. He was invited to lunch. Straight knew his mother’s concerns and was a step ahead of her. He invited Cornford to the lunch, having forewarned him of Dorothy’s worries. There was small talk for an hour before dictatorship was discussed.4 Heard tried to draw Cornford out on his Marxist views, but he was evasive. The philosopher asked him if he really believed that any individual was wise enough or good enough to hold unchallenged authority, even for an hour.

  Cornford gave an irrelevant light answer to this allusion to Stalin by saying that the communist movement had put the fear of God into the bourgeoisie. Heard reported back to Dorothy, and her fears were lessened. Straight decided he would invite Burgess and Blunt to Dartington as soon as his second-year exams were over so they could allay any further concerns. He knew Burgess, with his capacity for charm and intellectual brilliance, had already become the Rothschild family’s financial adviser. (Dorothy was not in need of financial advising, for she was in the process in the winter of 1935–1936 of giving up her American citizenship and creating a tax-free family trust, which incorporated all her American properties, including Westbury and The New Republic.) Blunt, too, coul
d impress, not so much with his charm but more with his manners and erudition on art.

  Meanwhile on campus, Straight coasted with his studies and threw himself into communist politics, working with Dobb planning demonstrations and parades and even some mornings selling The Daily Worker. He jumped on political platforms wherever he could and railed against fascism, one day in demanding sanctions against Italy in response to Mussolini’s invasion of Abyssinia, the next in questioning actions of the Nazis in Germany, the following week in opposing Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists.

  A contemporary of Straight’s characterized him at this time in the book Anthony Blunt, His Lives by Miranda Carter:

  So compelling was his personality that I was swept along in his wake. He was very left-wing. He was very wealthy. He was English and American. He was handsome, gifted, versatile, precocious, virile. What on earth was he not? He played squash with one of the Sitwells . . . and he loved the masses. How could any of us resist this dynamic combination of playboy and Sir Galahad? The hunger marchers were made to march through Cambridge and we were to entertain them. I can see now the shuffling column taking a wrong turn in the direction of Midsummer Common . . . and being headed off by our hero, leaping along with all the agility with which he had once danced the part of the Dominant Male Principle in the choreography of Sibelius’s second symphony.5

  Straight’s all-encompassing exuberance for matters communist even spilled into his creativity. He wrote and performed jazz songs that celebrated social issues.

  Straight immersed himself further in Marxist theory at the newly formed Political Economy Club. He ran up against ridicule from Keynes, who called Marxism “complicated hocus-pocus, the only value of which was muddle-headedness. I read Marx like a detective story, trying to find some clue to an idea in it and not succeeding.”