by Roland Perry
Meyer did a careful review of the taped broadcasts that had been made in the weeks before the revolution. “We could not find evidence that in this period RFE had violated the standard instructions against inciting to violence or promising external assistance,” Meyer wrote in his autobiography, Facing Reality.2 “Far from having planned or directed the Uprising, both RFE and officials in Washington were taken very much by surprise when the fighting broke out.”
Since the collapse of communism in Hungary, the evidence is that the CIA had nothing to do with the uprising. Yet Straight’s accusation came just three days after the first piece of propaganda came out of a Romanian paper. At the time Meyer had been cultivated as a friend by Straight, and he had no idea of his KGB links. (Meyer wondered later how much confidential information passed on in conversation between friends was reported to Moscow, especially in the light of Straight’s regular lunches with Sergei Striganov.)3
A contributor to The New Republic in 1957 was H. A. R. (“Kim”) Philby from Beirut. He had been eased out of British intelligence after Maclean and Burgess defected. He was suspected of being the so-called Third Man in the Cambridge ring, but Philby had enough supporters in the establishment to prevent his being charged. MI6 thought he might be useful as their man in the Middle East. It arranged for him to work as a journalist for The Observer and The Economist. With these credentials and his acute understanding of the Middle East problems, it was not surprising he would write for the left-leaning magazine.
Straight was asked about the connection by British intelligence when interrogated by it in 1964, but he maintained he knew nothing of Philby’s link to the magazine, saying he had left it when the Englishman began writing. But this was not accurate. Straight had relinquished his role of editor, yet he was still associated with it. His name was on the masthead as Editor-at-Large and his by-line appeared early in February 1957 on a light article about mules titled, “Are the Joint Chiefs Erring Again?”4 Straight had written the light piece after ten days in Wyoming and Colorado as part of his research into Carrington.
There is no doubt Philby would have known of Straight after he was recruited by his close friend Burgess. Straight would have realized Philby’s position at the very least after he denied publicly in 1955 that he was the Third Man.
For a short while, The New Republic was the outlet for two Cambridge ring members, one of whom was living in the West on borrowed time.
The wedding of 1957 in the United States was between businessman-professor Newton Steers, 40, and the beautiful 19-year-old Nina Gore Auchincloss, in the tiny St. John’s Church, Washington, D.C., famous as a place of Sunday prayer for presidents. Among the groomsmen were three sometime brilliant aspirants for the White House. All had fine intellects, a capacity for public speaking, and the mandatory massive egos. One was Straight, who could aspire no more; another was writer Gore Vidal, the half-brother of the bride, who may have been a fine Oval Office occupant in the nineteenth century or the twenty-first; the third was Jack Kennedy, who would make it, along with his sensational wife, Jackie, the bride’s stepsister and matron of honor.
A black-and-white photograph featured in Vidal’s “memoir,” Palimpsest, captured the three hopefuls at the wedding. Vidal, self-assured and superior, stood at the front, looking every inch the front-runner in the race for highest office. Behind him, Straight was just in the picture but not the race. At the far right was Kennedy, the only one of ten faces not looking directly at the camera. In half-profile, he seemed to be looking at Straight, as if he were an interloper. But he was far from that. Straight had cultivated Steers, the former Atomic Energy Commissioner (1951–1953), as a friend and tennis partner and had admired the string of attractive women he brought to play on Virginia summer weekends. One of them was Nina.
The wedding was a setting in which Straight, with his endless charm, reveled. He engaged the guests with his sharp mind and broad knowledge of major issues. Those on the political right, on rarefied occasions such as this, would listen to the torrent of carefully placed and articulated words coming from the acceptable face of liberalism. To those of the left, he seemed to have a position of wisdom on every issue from McCarthy to missiles. Straight’s social fluidity allowed him to develop relationships with whomever he pleased. There were useful pickings at this wedding, from senators to CIA men, business tycoons to academics. After such events, he could write a voluminous report on what he picked up that would be useful for the KGB. He was also in his element with a feast of stunning young women, some experienced and elegant like Jackie, others virgins such as her stepsister about to step down the aisle. He fancied them both, and they were attracted to him too. Straight, in fact, was just the type that these upmarket women gravitated to. He was rich, good-looking, and urbane, and he knew his art. What more could a socially conscious girl want?5
After the wedding service, Kennedy and Vidal drove across the Potomac river for the reception at the Auchincloss family home, Merrywood, on the Potomac palisades. They spoke of politics, then the event at hand. Kennedy, in his usual analytic style, reckoned that Nina should have married his brother Teddy.6 But she had chosen Steers. (Seventeen years later, when marrying a second time, she would again avoid the Kennedy clan and elect Straight.)
Soon after the wedding, Straight prepared to take off with Rose for England for the less pleasant task of sorting out the legal tangles into which his family had stumbled. Whitney was engaged in the costly withdrawal from the family trust now that all its “operational losses” had been sold. The problems had multiplied since their half-sister, Ruth, had—with her husband Maurice Ash—complained about the failure of the trust to generate more income for them.
Aware that a wedge had been driven between Whitney and matriarch Dorothy since the confrontation at Dartington in 1951, Straight had written to Whitney in an attempt to clear up misconceptions. Dorothy had remained distant and cool to Whitney, who had advanced his already successful business career by becoming a director of the prestigious Rolls Royce company. Yet Whitney held firm in his quest to rid himself of financial links to a family he no longer trusted.
Ruth and Maurice proved less tricky when Rose and Straight learned that Maurice was behind the fresh attempt to leave the trust. He wanted Ruth’s “share” of the Trust 11 capital to invest in a vineyard in France. Rose told him it was not suitable for the trust to indulge in because it was a foreign investment. He and Ruth were easily dissuaded. Rose was able to head off their implied threat to follow Whitney out of the trust.7
Straight spent the next eighteen months researching Carrington in and around Wyoming and Nebraska in extraordinary detail, all the time gathering the sort of material that would please Barkovsky.
The cover story was set mainly at Fort Phil Kearney. He traversed the country, sometimes on foot, notating and photographing the area with the diligence of a map surveyor. Straight described his approach in a 1970 television interview with John Milton, the then-professor of English at the University of South Dakota, an expert on the American West:
I kept going back [to the fort], at all seasons, so that I could see and feel just how it had been when Carrington and his garrison were there. So I stayed there when it was very hot, in thunderstorms, and by moonlight. I made a great many notes, and I took many colored slides, and studied them later on, as I described each scene.8
Straight later related how he visited Kearney, Nebraska:
[It] was the settlement where the Battalion wintered before it set off for Laramie. And, from Kearney, I tried to retrace its journey, mile by mile. It meant leaving the road at times, and driving along dirt trails. Later on, it meant riding up to Cloud Peak . . . and rolling down ravines where the troops had fun, under Indian fire. I spent one day scrambling around the sage bush and gullies near the Crazy Woman’s Crossing of the Powder River . . . 9
The timing of this 1970 interview with Milton is relevant. By then, Straight had already been interrogated for six years by British and American intellige
nce services. The CIA was particularly fascinated by his 1956–1962 roaming in the West. They were far from convinced by his novel researching explanation. The 1970 interview was opportune. He could use it to air his impressive literary mien and lay out the elaborate background to his very literary Western.
Milton seemed puzzled by this excessive research. If “mile by mile” is taken literally, Straight covered up to 350 miles from Kearney, in the middle of the southern region of Nebraska, to Laramie, inside Wyoming’s southeast border. Each step of the way, he took notes and photographs, in what may have been the best backgrounded Western ever written. The professor was further perplexed by why an Eastern liberal would bother to write a novel about the Wild West. Straight skipped over that, saying that the ruins of the frontier fort near where he had vacationed in 1956 took hold of him. Milton was further furrow-browed about his approach. Carrington was a novel, but Straight approached it more like an historian. The historical novel was a hybrid, Straight explained. The writer started off as an historian “and then pushes on, by himself, while the historian stands watching him and shaking his head.”
Milton began to pursue Straight on his approach to factual material. He responded by explaining how he covered everything from an ancient manuscript written by Colonel Carrington’s first wife to the Old War Records Branch of the National Archives in Washington. He studied photographs at his former workplace, the Department of the Interior, where he had once pilfered files for his KGB control. In the end, he amassed “more material about the fort than anyone else had put together.”10 Once he had the detail, he took off his historian’s hat. Straight said:
For me, the important truths lay beyond verification, in the realms of human motivation. . . . Aristotle said that the historians tend to the particular, and poets to the universal. I was after the universal, seeking to reach it through some grasp of the minds and feelings of the men who played the leading roles in the story. For I sensed . . . the story was contemporary and relevant. I did not want to reconstruct the past. I wanted to interpret the present.11
This further confused Milton. By all means, research, but instead of behaving like an historian, why not perform like a novelist from the beginning?
Straight went on with his sophisticated explanation. It would be a useful public outpouring that he hoped would explain satisfactorily his heavy leg work day and night. But this daring attempt to scramble his tracks backfired. The CIA didn’t buy it. Yet unless they could prove that he passed on the data to the KGB, they couldn’t charge him with anything. And as Straight was very careful about what, when, and where he conveyed things to the KGB, it was unlikely that anything would be uncovered.
While Straight was wandering remote areas of the West with his trusty Leica, occasionally ducking bullets from hunters, Michael Young was publishing his book, The Rise of the Meritocracy, a satirical, sociological appraisal of a futuristic British society run by an IQ-justified hierarchy. Young’s tongue-in-cheek account made use of his pent-up communist sympathies, nurtured in the 1930s at Dartington and the London School of Economics. Those sympathies had been released through his membership in the Communist Party and endeavors to develop progressive institutions in consumerism and education. The final, almost science-fiction, section predicted a 2034 revolution against the new elite by the “poor, bloody-minded and unintellectual.”12
Young wrote:
The movement of protest had deep roots in our history . . . opposition even to the greatest institutions of modern society is inevitable. The hostility [in 2034] has long been latent. For more than half a century [since, not coincidentally, 1984], the lower classes have been harboring resentments which they could not articulate, until the present day. . . .
May 2034 will be at best an 1848 [the revolution in Germany, which Marx observed was a precursor to bigger things in industrialized societies], on the English model at that. There will be stir enough. The universities may shake. There will be other disturbances later on as long as the Populists survive. But on this occasion anything more serious than a few days’ strike and week’s disturbance, which it will be well within the capacity of the police [with their new weapons] to quell, I do not for one moment envisage.13
The cataclysmic upheaval in Britain that Young had hoped for fervently as a student had been reduced twenty years later to creative yet unconvincing science-fiction. This last part of the book was taken less seriously than the rest by all critics, while the treatise as a whole made Young’s reputation as a sociological thinker.
While The Rise of Meritocracy was being received by a wide range of criticism (mainly positive) that created much discussion in the United Kingdom, Straight, in early 1959, was finishing a draft of Carrington with the help of editors at Alfred A. Knopf. The publisher had decided to publish the book despite the inconsistent standard of the writing. Knopf disliked Straight’s philosophizing.14
Carrington’s reviews in early 1960 were generally good and seemed to endorse Knopf ’s assessment of Straight’s potential to become a successful novelist. The Chicago Star and Newsweek called it “an American Classic.” The Chicago Daily News said it was “a virtuoso performance, vivid, brilliant, overwhelming and profoundly moving,” while The New York Times saw it as “a deeply moving tale . . . spare, poetic, and thrillingly timed.”
Such praise would normally have been a motivation to go on. But Straight would have no reason, beyond a curiosity or perhaps a vanity, to proceed. His excuse for not capitalizing on this impressive start was that he didn’t see himself as a novelist, charting a course over a lifetime. Carrington had been a metaphor for his New Republic years when he wished he had been doing something else. His book writing interlude was similar and transient. Again, the two demons that had torn him when he wanted to run for politics in 1946 were still there. One part of him craved the public fame and the glory of the successful writer, while his main occupation of spying restricted him as before.
Straight decided to go on with a second book, but without the true creative writer’s desire, and without strong support from his publisher. The project would again be a cover for spying, the most dangerous and daring assignment he had yet undertaken.
Early in President Kennedy’s administration, the United States decided that there could not be any sanctuary from the hydrogen bomb that the Russians had now developed. Kennedy sanctioned the building of a massive blast- and shock-protected military headquarters well below Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado. It was to be the biggest such installation ever built. It would house the US-Canadian North American Air Defense Command (NORAD). Part of its operation would be to warn (later by satellite) allies, particularly the United Kingdom, of a nuclear missile attack by the Russians.
When Vladimir Barkovsky was informed by his Pentagon agents of this development, he wasted no time in dispatching Straight to map and photograph the entire area where the military site was to be located. It would now have to be top priority for disabling and destroying in the event of a nuclear encounter.
22
THREATS FROM THE PAST
Straight’s new assignment meant he had to find some historical base for a second novel so that he could repeat his cover. It had to be set in Colorado’s mountains somewhere in the vicinity of the proposed mighty military bunker. It took him no time at all to settle on another massacre story that occurred in 1864 at Sand Creek, some 15 miles south of Cheyenne Mountain. Sand Creek was about 10 miles north of the town of Chivington on State Highway 90.
While his mission was more specific, the story was much harder to create. He decided to base it not on Chivington, a fanatical army colonel who massacred the American Indians, but a friendlier, warmer character discovered by Agnes Wright Spring, the head of the Colorado State Historical Society. She researched the files surrounding the massacre and came up with a manuscript written by Ned Wynkoop, a young follower of Chivington’s who once fought, then sided with the Indians. Wynkoop felt betrayed by Chivington when the Indians were slaughtered. This was
more like the image Straight wished to explore.
Wynkoop then was the good guy Straight could build something around. He had his manuscript, which would be more than useful. He rented a car and drove south to Colorado Springs to see another author who was writing a book about Wynkoop’s wife and her two sisters. Then it was on to Sand Creek, where Chivington had led the massacre of defenseless Indians. Straight took out his camera and notebook. He had his route to book two, titled A Very Small Remnant. This title was in reference, Straight claimed, to the minority who have been willing to die for their beliefs. They had saved what was “best” in their society by resisting the abuse of authority. Straight no doubt had in mind liberals like himself and, for instance, fighters for civil rights.
Thus he began his second big mission for Barkovsky in gathering detail about the area in which the military bunker would be built. It meant that when it was constructed in the early 1960s, the KGB had all the intelligence it wanted concerning the area. Should there be a nuclear encounter, the Soviet military had plans to destroy the bunker and its surrounds.
Soon after finding his way to make the cover story work, he had a flirtation with Carrington’s being made into a film. An agent from Famous Artists Incorporated met Straight and in the time-honored tradition of Hollywood told him how to make it more marketable for the movies. Straight wasn’t impressed. Then his publisher urged him to write a contemporary fiction.
Knopf was mystified by Straight’s need to set another book in a particular, remote point on the map in the West and then make it viable by finding a historical story to work around it. The publisher saw the author’s capacity at handling characterization as something that could be worked up into a real skill. Knopf felt it was squandered by a writer with no real background in the West, who did not have a natural feel for its rhythms. Straight had huge sensitivity to the major issues of the day and the hub of world political power in Washington. Why wouldn’t he focus on the contemporary, the publishers wished to know. It would be more salable to a big reading public, rather than competing in a saturated market dominated by Western writers since the war.