by Roland Perry
While Straight was on call as a spy, he again could be also most useful to the KGB as a publisher hiring or gaining accreditation for journalists and as a financier. Green asked him to get accreditation papers from unsuspecting Ruth Shipley for U.S. entry of a female Swedish KGB agent, whose work cover was journalism, and another communist, Mark Julius Gayn, also a reporter. He had worked for the Chicago Sun and the Washington Post as its Shanghai correspondent. Gayn was a Chinese expert affiliated with the International Pacific Relations group, a communist front, which was receiving financial support from Straight through the Whitney Foundation.22 Though obedient to Green’s demands, Straight was irked by them, especially as he was near the end of a book, which needed his full concentration.
He finished it in November 1942 about the time of the birth of his first son, David, and then he joined the US Army Air Corps Reserve, starting as a private.
In December 1942, Straight attended an Institute of Pacific Relations conference held at the Canadian resort of Mount Tremblant in Quebec. There he met two fellow communists from Cambridge who valued his financial support for the group. One was Canadian-born Egerton Herbert Norman, a rising diplomat in Canada’s External Affairs Ministry attached to the staff of General Douglas MacArthur. The other was the “very egotistical, very self-indulgent” Michael Greenberg, a former Trinity-cell member from Manchester who, like Straight, had been recruited to the KGB.23 Greenberg was helping to shape U.S. policy toward China and had diligently worked his way up the ranks in the Far East Division of the State Department.24 After Cambridge, England, he went on to Cambridge, Massachusetts, in October 1939 on a Choate Scholarship to continue his studies of the development of British trade with China. It was a useful mask to hide his espionage agenda.
Apart from their indoctrination at Trinity, he and Straight had a connection with China. Straight was conscious of his father’s fascination with the world’s most populous nation and was keen to help it on the road to communism, which was Greenberg’s role as a clandestine operator.
In late December 1942 Straight had another meeting with his control at a dimly lit restaurant, Longchamps, in New York. Green brought along his wife Helen Lowry, who was Earl Browder’s niece. She went under the cover name ELIZA. Straight told the FBI that she was in early middle age and of “nice appearance.” Her speech indicated she was American by birth. Helen, like her husband, was an “illegal.” According to Straight, they “comported themselves like a happily married couple.”25
The meeting demonstrated how valuable they thought Straight’s work and services could be. Otherwise Green would not have introduced him to his wife, another important player in the Washington network. (She had been involved in running the rings associated with Elizabeth Bentley, the courier and later defector from the Soviet espionage setup, and Whittaker Chambers.) This would have been a waste of time and an unnecessary risk if Straight had not been regarded as a big asset, even if he were yet to reach his potential.
Straight handed over the accreditation papers for the KGB agents, the woman from Sweden and Mark Gayn. Helen Lowry urged Straight to see her uncle, which he again promised to do at the launch of his book in a few months time. Browder was then trying to set up a “back channel” link between the White House and the Kremlin. He wanted a contact close to Roosevelt who could carry messages to him from the Kremlin and get responses to them. Straight, a White House frequenter and friend of the Roosevelts, would have seemed a likely candidate for this role, but he would not like being used as a courier. It would also have exposed him to the Roosevelts as a communist, rather than the high-minded liberal that he purported to be. Someone else was chosen.26
Green asked Straight to recommend other people who were friendly and who could be of use to the KGB. He mentioned Greenberg, but Green showed no reaction. Straight realized that the KGB had already recruited him.
Straight assumed that Green was looking for a replacement for him in Washington, as he was soon due to join the Air Corps. This did not mean that they expected Straight to drift away from them while he was on reservist duty in other parts of the country. Green would have wanted a flow of data and/or assistance from all his agents for the hungry Moscow Center at a critical time as U.S. intervention in the European conflict increased. However, Straight intimated (to the FBI, when interrogated two decades later) that he took their restaurant conversation to mean he was free of Green’s grip.
In a bizarre twist, Straight told the FBI that Green asked him to help find a place to live in Philadelphia “and in obtaining some small business that he could run.” It was further evidence of the trust the KGB still had in their former star recruit and that he could not easily jettison his underground communist affiliations, even if he wished to. He met Browder as planned at the launch of Let This Be the Last War, in January 1943.
The book was met with mixed reviews. Friends were kind. Felix Frankfurter wrote Straight a “friendly” letter about it. John Maynard Keynes praised the effort in a letter to Dorothy. “But,” he said, “I wish that Michael could regard politics more than he does as the art of the possible,” which was a gentle way of marking down the tome’s impracticality. The doyen of world economists was kinder to Straight than he had been to Marx, for he appeared to have succeeded in finding clues to ideas in Straight’s treatise.
The most provocative review came from John Chamberlain in The New York Times of January 5, 1943. In his memoirs, Straight said Chamberlain found “my overwrought style repulsive.” But the reviewer actually said he was “attracted and repulsed in equal measure” with the book itself. He was concerned more with the content and ideology than the style, which was used as a pretext for the reviewer’s disagreement and irritation.
Chamberlain agreed with the proposition for a federalized Europe and a postwar UN keeping the peace and increasing standards of living everywhere. But he objected to the tone of the book, which “kept getting in the way of the sense. Mr. Straight . . . is so humorless in his style that I kept thinking of all the earnest reformers who have tried to drive fallible men beyond their powers of adaptation.”
Acutely aware of where Straight was coming from, Chamberlain commented that he was even more of a perfectionist than “Lenin or Robespierre. He is long on denunciations of industrialists, politicians and soldiers, and he is short on the type of charitable realism that expects ten per cent of bungling for every 90 per cent of effective effort.”
Chamberlain chided Straight for saying, “We are losing the war,” and “Between the glorious defense of Stalingrad and our own ignominious inaction stands the greatest contrast of our entire war.”
The reviewer commented: “But even as Mr. Straight was busy writing, the ‘ignominious’ and ‘inactive’ staff officers of General Eisenhower were planning a cross-water invasion, which clicked even more efficiently than the Nazi General von Falkenhorst’s seizure of Norway.”
Perhaps Chamberlain was aware of Straight’s own inactivity and exhortations to others to fight. In a burst of perspicacity, given the writer’s secret allegiances, the reviewer asked: “Does Mr. Straight doubt that Americans would fight with a fury comparable to that of the Russians if the Nazis were thundering at the gates of Akron, Ohio, or Manitowoc, Wis.?”
“Mr. Straight,” he noted, “has an intellectual’s fear and distrust of the incorrigible give-and-take of the American people.” He went on to dissect the proposition that the Russians had superior war organization capabilities. Chamberlain pointed out that Americans had given them the plans and designs for power stations and factories making tractors, tanks, and machine tools.
“He can’t see,” Chamberlain admonished, “that our industrial effectiveness and our fighting spirit stem from the same beliefs which also led to 1929 [the Wall Street Crash] and its aftermath [of severe depression]. He can’t see that faults and virtues are sometimes inseparable.”
The reviewer had stumbled onto Straight’s lack of experience of recent U.S. history. He had been in England from
1925 to 1937, particularly formative years in his country of origin. He had also never had much exposure to more pragmatic thought away from Marxist economic theory and philosophy, which left him without instincts for the masses, whom he felt born to lead. His wealth and privilege further removed him from the mainstream political themes, moods, fears, aspirations, and ideas that motivated Americans.
In an unfashionable yet insightful dig at the Soviet Union’s totalitarianism, the reviewer remarked: “We are intolerant of people who would impose form and goals from above. And so we run into terrible troubles. But if we weren’t that sort of people, we would never have invented the submarine and the airplane and the mass production line for the Russians to use. . . . ” “I’m beginning to dislike people who insist,” Chamberlain concluded, “that the only proper clothes for an American are sackcloth sprinkled with ashes.”
Straight claimed in his memoirs to have been devastated by this review because at the time he was in a highly sensitized state. He made no reference later to whether or not, on reflection, he saw any value in Chamberlain’s assessment of his first literary effort.
It began as an easy, safe war for Straight, who in mid-February 1943 arrived by troop train at Miami Beach. While he was in Florida, an American agent for the KGB—code named HARDY—was there preparing a succinct report on U.S. aircraft strength and movements for his Washington control, which was transmitted to Moscow on May 5, 1943.27 HARDY’s report “from personal observation and conversations with officers” noted the organization of “airplane runs on the southern route.” It also detailed the activity at all the bases, including the type of aircraft dispatched. It was typical of reports relayed to the Moscow Center at this time when the Soviet high command was tracking U.S. military maneuvers as the war in Europe intensified. HARDY was probably Straight; agents were often known by two or three names, and it’s unlikely that two KGB agents would be sent to Miami.
He finished his training course in Miami and later Marietta College, Ohio, and ended up at Gunter Field, Montgomery, Alabama. He was taught to fly, but where his companions went on to see action (many of them died) in bomber command in Europe, Straight’s knowledge of French was enough to miss the dangers of combat. Instead, from March 1944 he used this knowledge of the language to teach French cadets how to fly.
A few months later, U.S. vice-president Henry Wallace, with whom Straight was soon destined to become bound politically, embarked on a “fact-finding” tour of China. He was accompanied by communist Owen Lattimore, who was on the executive committee running Pacific Affairs, the official magazine of the Institute of Pacific Relations (IPR), which had developed a long way from its 1926 charter “to promote cooperation among the peoples and governments of the Pacific.” IPR had been hijacked in the best tradition of creeping communism by Lattimore. It had developed into an organ for the promotion of Chinese communism. Lattimore was leading a faction of so-called China Hands (including Greenberg) in Washington, D.C., opposed to the then-main political power on the Chinese mainland, the Nationalists, under the command of General Chiang Kai-shek. The Nationalists were after an ambitious $1 billion loan, and the request had split the U.S. State Department into two factions. Veterans of the Far Eastern Division, led by Stanley Hornbeck, supported the loan. Communists and other sympathizers, euphemistically known as “pro-Chinese liberals,” were against it. The latter argued that Chiang Kai-shek might use the money in the civil war against Mao Tse-tung and the communists rather than the invading Japanese.
Wallace, always susceptible to extreme left-wing propaganda, wrote in his diary about the Chinese communists being “agrarian reformers.”28 He visited Mao at his headquarters in Yenan Province and naively volunteered to negotiate a settlement between rival Chinese leaders. Mao was quick off the mark and began mouthing platitudes about democracy and how much he admired it. He even cheekily alluded to the need for “foreign capital and free enterprise in China,” which in fact he studiously avoided for the rest of his life. But to paraphrase Lenin, which he often did in his Little Red Book, why let the truth get in the way of deceiving gullible, greedy capitalists? The ploy worked marvels in the ill-informed popular U.S. press. Even the Saturday Evening Post fell for the deception.
“For the foreign reader it is somewhat confusing that this Chinese agrarian reform movement is called ‘Communism,’” the paper’s Edgar Snow noted.29 “Communism in China is a watered-down thing today.” A chorus of procommunist writers jumped on the popular bandwagon just as Mao began preparing for the last leg of the “long march” that he predicted would take his communists to power. U.S. propaganda, headed by the vice-president, was helping to smooth the path.
Meanwhile, life seemed quite bearable for Straight, based in sleepy Alabama, especially when he could have breaks with Bin and David, who flew to him. The meetings were frequent enough for Bin to become pregnant late in the year, and she gave birth to a second son, Mike, in August 1944. It was a busy period for her as she embarked on a degree in psychiatry in New York.
Straight managed time off in New York and Westbury to see his family. Did he also meet his KGB control on these trips? Straight claimed to the FBI that he finished meeting Green late in 1942. But the KGB still regarded him as an important operative. They did not have a “decommissioning” policy beyond assassination.30
By November 1944, when the wars in Europe and the Pacific were turning in favor of the Allies, Straight wanted a change from the uninspiring routine of instructing three classes of more than four hundred French cadets over fifteen months.
A call to Tom Corcoran took him out of the rear cockpit in forty-eight hours and on his way to Lincoln, Nebraska, to be assigned to B-17— “Flying Fortress”—bombers. Just when he was being prepared for combat, Straight learned that his close friend from Cambridge, John Simonds, had been killed flying a glider into battle at Arnhem, Holland.
Corcoran had attended to Straight’s minor problem while in the middle of one of the biggest cover-ups by an American administration to that point. It began soon after the night of March 11, 1945, when a five-man CIA forerunner OSS burglar team broke into the offices of the magazine Amerasia at 225 Fifth Avenue, New York, which was an “unofficial” organ of IPR. Amerasia had been subtly positioned to intellectually guide a “popular front against fascism” as directed by the seventh Comintern congress in 1935. It was a quaint way of not alarming the United States while influencing the State Department, already riddled with KGB agents, and in turn the media and public opinion. According to growing IPR/Amerasia propaganda, Chinese communists were not real communists but—in the language taken up by Henry Wallace and a vocal faction of the U.S. government—liberals wanting “agrarian reform, civil rights and the establishment of democratic institutions.” This was in contrast to Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists, who were being portrayed as corrupt and intractable.
All this caused concern and grumbling but not alarm in the noncommunist sections of the administration, until the OSS break-in discovered Amerasia was publishing some of its top secret reports almost verbatim. The squad found the suite of offices strewn with classified documents. There was a darkroom for developing microfilmed material, which was smuggled from government offices, photographed, and then returned. The OSS turned the case over to the FBI, which obtained a warrant, raided Amerasia, and seized about a thousand classified documents, including papers from the State Department, naval intelligence, OSS, and British intelligence. The FBI arrested six suspects—including the aforementioned Mark Gayn, for whom Straight had obtained accreditation papers; the magazine’s editor Philip Jaffe; and Andrew Roth, a naval intelligence officer. The group was charged with conspiracy to violate the Espionage Act.
The fast-talking Corcoran entered the fray and manipulated a brilliant cover-up for the administration.31 A well-orchestrated response was directed at the FBI, which the liberal and even the popular media accused of curtailing freedom of the press. Consequently a grand jury refused to indict three of the defendants.
The government dropped espionage charges against the others, who faced lesser charges of “conspiracy to embezzle, steal and purloin” government property. Despite this brushing under the carpet, the affair highlighted the depth of infiltration in the Roosevelt administration.
Straight observed all these political developments from a useful distance while being given intensive training on B-17s. He expected to be transferred to England early in 1945, although the European conflict was clearly in its last throes. With the Amerasia case making headlines, his thoughts were always attuned to communism, politics, and the shape of a world he would inherit once hostilities ceased. He saw the war as propitious for a revolution in property holdings, but he bemoaned the fact that there had been a worldwide counterrevolution. The United States was returning all the empires of European states (such as England, France, Spain, Portugal, and Belgium) to their former owners. Straight saw it as a poor base for a lasting peace. He gave the example of France taking back its colonies such as Vietnam in Asia. His revolutionary soul was offended by this.32
On April 12, 1945, President Franklin D. Roosevelt died at age 63, a little way into his record fourth term as president. He had used the federal government’s powers to pull the nation out of the Great Depression in what became known as the New Deal. He had been the great white hope for the development of left-wing America, but his passing would shut the door on the chance for liberalism, and anything politically to the left of it, to flourish courtesy of the White House. Roosevelt had played a leading role in creating an alliance with Great Britain and the Soviet Union. He met with Allied leaders Churchill and Stalin in Tehran, Iran, in 1943. Despite his ailing condition, Roosevelt made it to Yalta in the Crimea in early February 1945 for another meeting with Churchill and Stalin. At that meeting, the big three decided how Germany and the rest of Europe should be carved up after Germany was defeated. It was felt by some British and American observers at the time that Roosevelt had been too much influenced in negotiations by pro-Soviet groups in the State Department. Stalin, it was said, had been conceded too much in the desire to get him to support the Allied war in the Pacific against Japan. More precisely, Stalin was better informed than the other two leaders. He had key spies (including Alger Hiss) in the entourages of both Roosevelt and Churchill.