Last of the Cold War Spies

by Roland Perry

  Furtseva made the arrogant, if not ignorant, assumption that the U.S. government could abuse its powers concerning civil rights the way her own regime did. She insisted that the Jewish Defense League be curbed after it caused the cancellation of the Bolshoi’s first ballet performance at Carnegie Hall. She was told it could not be done. Furtseva responded with scathing remarks about the United States’ lack of resolve to stop violence.

  Aware of her attitudes, Straight was thrilled to play host to her, as she was to be received by him. Furtseva was impressed by his home as she eyed the tall columns of the ancient Georgetown house. She seemed confused (Straight alleged) to learn that his boss, Nancy Hanks, lived in a much smaller house.

  Furtseva was not impressed by Straight drinking champagne while she plied herself with strong gin and tonic. Real men in Russia wouldn’t touch it. She illustrated this with a story about a 1905 Russian revolutionary feeding champagne to his horse after czarist officers offered it to him in a restaurant. Not even the horses would drink it.10

  The next night Straight took her to the heavily policed premier performance of the Balalaika Orchestra at the John F. Kennedy Center. The two got on so well that she sent him an ironic gift—Soviet Champagne Number 4—at the end of her stay.

  Clearly, Furtseva appreciated Straight’s work. Intelligence contacts suggested that this was the time when Straight was honored with the high Soviet/KGB award—the Order of Lenin—for his lifelong services to the cause. It would explain Furtseva’s singling him out for a private audience and their cozy relationship.

  While he enjoyed more public status than ever before, Straight’s clandestine past continued to nag him as MI5 reviewed his file and compared it with information supplied by Blunt. The frustration caused by not being able to identify the mole inside British intelligence had caused a resurgence in the early 1970s of interest in the responses by the Cambridge ring.

  Straight’s discussions with MI5 had been going on for about a decade, and he was wondering when they would finish. His case had been taken over first by Cecil Shipp, MI5’s top interrogator (later its deputy general). He had a tough reputation after his ruthless inquisition of Alister Watson in the mid-1960s. Yet Straight was handled gently. He was categorized as a voluntary “confessed” informer, not a suspect. His manner and breeding made him someone not to be trifled with, so “chats” were agreeable. Straight used his well-practiced charm to secure the confidence, trust, and in some cases the friendship of his interrogators. The FBI men had been easy. The British, with their mannerly and apologetic approach, were deceptive. They prefaced their requests with “would you mind awfully if . . .” and “it would be most helpful if you could . . .” when in reality he had no choice but to oblige.

  On one visit to London he found another MI5 officer, P. A. Osmond, had reviewed Blunt’s interviews and had discovered apparent discrepancies. The question arose as to whether Blunt had recruited Brian Simon, a Cambridge man of their era and a staunch Communist Party member. MI5—namely, its boss, Sir Dick White—wanted Straight to find out. The way Straight handled this quaint “mission” exemplified just how much he was in control of the situation. He played along, took Brian Simon out to dinner, and had lots to eat and drink. After a convivial evening with this fellow traveler, he came back and told Osmond (who reported to White) that Simon was in the clear. He never left the party, Straight told his MI5 masters, and he certainly did not go “underground” for the KGB.

  The story that Straight reported to MI5 was that Blunt had tried to recruit Simon but that Simon had said any move by him would be too obvious since he (Simon) was close to Blunt (so close, in fact, that they were lovers, Straight alleged). This seemed a feeble bit of intelligence on Straight’s part, but it was apparently accepted by MI5, although Peter Wright thought this excuse was too thin, and he remained suspicious of Simon. Straight also reported to MI5 that Simon was in love with Tess Rothschild and that the two had a relationship in 1939. This was after the time (1938) when many sources believe Tess was recruited by the KGB. Any relationship in 1939 would have been directed by the KGB, which points to Tess attempting to seduce Simon into the Russian intelligence network. She may well have failed to have him recruited.

  This report by Straight would have paved the way for him to have a future meeting with Tess and/or Simon should he choose to return for the 1987 fifty-year reunion of the Cambridge class of 1937. If they were both accepted as nonagents—as Straight portrayed them to MI5—then they would be free from surveillance. Since Straight had been involved with Blunt in Tess’s recruitment, his keeping MI5 off the track a half a century after the event would have given him great satisfaction.11

  Dorothy Elmhirst’s passing left a vacuum at Dartington and a change in the control of the trust running it. Leonard was the chairman of the trust. He was fit enough to continue, but was lost and lonely without Dorothy and ready to retire.

  A conflict developed on the board of trustees with William Elmhirst, a trustee since 1957. He had started the Solar Quest, a charitable organization that attempted to bridge the Western esoteric tradition with the Eastern, as practiced by Rabindranath Tagore in India.12

  This rift lead to a crisis in the trustee body. Maurice Ash, William’s brother-in-law, and other trustees objected to the charity being based in the hall. Leonard had often used Tagore’s teaching and philosophy in speeches.13 Dorothy, with her spiritual leanings, had approved also of William’s interests and had encouraged him.

  Leonard was persuaded to oppose William’s work being centered at the hall. The majority of the board was against him. He was forced to leave with his wife, Vera, who was a “visionary,” or medium. The rift between William and his father was never healed. He realized later that his half-brother Michael had “pretended to mediate between me and Leonard” when he had other reasons for wanting them out of Dartington.

  Leonard retired as chairman. He married Susanna Isaacs, a former pupil at the school, in December 1972. She had been offered a teaching post in California for two years, and they moved there. Leonard could never really settle in the United States. He tried to get a loan from the trustees in 1974 to build a house on the Dartington estate. It was refused. He died in the United States in April that year.14

  A few weeks later, Straight, 57, married Nina Steers, 37, at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in Washington. It was a rewarding time for him in his fifth year as deputy chairman of the Arts Endowment. He was enjoying his status and power, first under Nixon before he was forced to resign the presidency over the Watergate Affair in August 1974, then with Gerald Ford’s administration.

  A small hiccup occurred when The Washington Monthly discovered that Garment was renting Straight’s Virginia home. Garment’s high profile in the final dark days of Nixon’s presidency meant he was a target for media attention. Straight complained that the magazine described the rental of his home as a scandal. He threatened a libel suit, and Jay Rockefeller phoned the magazine to support Straight. The Monthly’s reporter, James Fallows, interviewed Straight for a square-off article.

  This incident did not interrupt the enjoyment of his position. There were endless glittering nights, if he desired them, with his attractive new young wife. Ford was beaten by Jimmy Carter in the 1976 presidential election, and it took a year for the new government to decide who would run the Arts Endowment. Hanks thought she might be awarded a third term. Despite personal meetings with the new president, she failed to secure it, so she decided to resign. Joan Mondale, the wife of Vice-President Walter Mondale, was Carter’s adviser on the arts, replacing Garment. She asked Straight to stay on as acting chairman until a replacement for Hanks was found. He accepted the appointment, thinking there was a chance he could slip into the senior role by default. There was always the hurdle of FBI checks, but he may have been able to avoid them. After all, he had been the “loyal” deputy chairman for eight years. He felt also that he was the token Democrat in the Republican arts administration of Nixon and Ford. Cart
er’s choice, Livingston L. Biddle Jr., was not popular. The New Republic and the Wall Street Journal attacked the probable appointment. When Hanks failed to get reappointed, she started a campaign to stop Biddle. It was uncovered by the White House. This caused it to dig in on its choice. Biddle’s name was sent to the senate for confirmation.

  Straight was more than miffed. “I’ve never seen Mike so angry,” William Elmhirst noted. “He was fuming about being fired—or not reappointed—by Carter. He would lose all his power and status. It hurt.”15

  Straight reacted while still acting chairman. He told Los Angeles Times journalist Barbara Isenberg that “President Carter was politicizing our culture by appointing Joe Duffey to the Humanities Endowment, Livingston Biddle to Arts, and George Seybolt and Lee Kimche to the Museum Services Institute.”16

  He repeated it all to Grace Glueck of The New York Times. It seemed odd to many observers, who recalled that Straight had said when appointed in 1969 that he was attracted to the job because it was “a way of combining the two things I care about—politics and art.” His actions in supporting “revolutions” while in the job had done more than anyone to politicize the endowment.

  Joe Duffey rang Straight and accused him of being a “God-damned elitist.” “You and your snob friends may not know it,” Duffey told him, “but your day is over.”17

  It was, almost. Straight was summoned to meet White House staffer Peter Kyros. He was asked for an assurance that he would not criticize the administration again while acting chairman. He agreed. Kyros then told him why the White House had acted the way it did to Hanks. She had gone behind the backs of White House staff in seeing Carter. She had also started the campaign against Biddle, and then denied it to Kyros’s face.18

  Biddle was sworn in on November 30, 1977. Straight, 61, was out of a job for the first time in eight years. With few prospects in sight for a future career, he set up a publishing group, Devon Press. It produced his books in 1979, except for his paean to communism, Let This Be the Last War. He must have judged it as embarrassingly political in its vision of Stalin and the Soviet Union. With time on his hands, he was able to make a second trip to Australia, which was arranged by Jean Battersby of the government cultural body the Australia Council. She had met Straight when he was at the Arts Endowment.

  In late 1979, Andrew Boyle published The Climate of Treason about the Cambridge ring. It hinted at the identities of the fourth and fifth members. Journalists began speculating, particularly on the fourth man. It became an open secret in late 1979 that it was Anthony Blunt. Until now only intelligence officers from the FBI, CIA, MI5, MI6, and, of course, the KGB knew that Blunt was a spy. Then on November 15, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher confirmed it in parliament. Blunt “had been recruited as a talent spotter for Russian intelligence before the war, when he was a don at Cambridge, and had passed information to the Russians while he was a member of the Secret Service between 1940 and 1945.”

  (Modin would have been pleased that the prime minister of England had accepted the propaganda about 1945 being the end of the ring’s activity. Modin had been posted by the KGB to England to be its control for ten years starting in 1947.)

  The Thatcher statement caused shock waves around the Cambridge ring. Straight realized that his 17-year secret “confession” could come up in relation to Blunt. In order to present an innocent self-portrait to his family, he collated personal diary entries, letters to his mother, and a few to his first wife Bin. He edited them to avoid any remarks that could give clues to his secret life. He placed them in a bound book, For Noah, His Uncles, His Aunts, and All His Relations (Noah was a grandson). He distributed copies in 1980 to the family. Whitney had just died, so Straight felt free to show the letters that painted him unfavorably in the family trust dispute. There was no one then to challenge his version of events. Much of the correspondence was about his children; it created an image of the loving father and dedicated husband.

  There was a lull until March 1981. Straight was asked by the Washington correspondent of the London Daily Mail, Angus Macpherson, to comment on an article appearing in his paper. It was an edited extract from a book by Chapman Pincher, Their Trade Is Treachery:

  A middle-aged American belonging to a rich and famous family was invited to undertake a political task by the White House. Having a guilt complex about his secret past, he went to FBI headquarters in Washington hoping to clear himself before accepting the White House post. There he confessed that he had been a communist while in England and at Cambridge University, had been recruited to Soviet Intelligence and had served the Russian interests for several years. . . . 19

  The long, private game of confession and cover-up was now public. Straight began giving interviews, attempting to explain himself. He emphasized his alleged confession and the image of being the one who blew the whistle on the Cambridge ring. He objected to the flippancy of a Washington radio interviewer who said in an introduction: “And now we go to Maryland to talk to the spy who came in from the cold.”20

  The word “spy” concerned him. Yet in anyone’s language he acted as an espionage agent, or in common parlance, a spy. Seven months later, in October 1981, Straight told Simon Freeman of the London Sunday Times he had informed MI5 that Leo Long had been recruited by the KGB. The ensuing article identified Straight as the American “who had himself spied for the Russians.” Then the Times described him the same way. Straight reacted by writing to the paper saying that to characterize him as a spy was “simply not true.”

  “I did give my own appraisals of the political situation,” he wrote, “to a gentleman who called himself Michael Green.” The difference now was that his audience was much wider than a handful of charmed interrogators at the FBI and MI5.

  A magazine article in 1981 about his wife Nina’s novel, Ariabella: The First, painted Straight as an heroic spy-catcher. The piece referred to Straight “as the source of information that helped break the Soviet spy network—fictionalized in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.” He was deceptive in the article when he claimed that he “flatly” turned down attempts to recruit him. In 1963 “he gave evidence that later forced a confession from the man who had tried to recruit him, Sir Anthony Blunt.”21

  Despite this, his image-making was not working. Scores of papers and media outlets in the United Kingdom and the United States were describing him as a spy. He knew that it would be impossible to refute in court. Instead of suing them, he decided to write his own book, After Long Silence. He sought his own FBI file under the Freedom of Information Act. This was given to him piecemeal. He also relied on his memory of submissions to the FBI and MI5 from 1963 to 1975. The FBI file had gaps in it in the form of blacked-out passages, which ended in September 1963. After that date there were missing pages. Straight later indicated to U.S. agents, such as the CIA’s Newton Miler and the FBI’s Sam Papich (the liaison officer with the CIA), that he had misgivings about those omitted passages. He guessed that they dealt with briefings about him and other KGB agents, such as Dolivet and Duran, by Golitsyn and others.

  Straight’s book, rather than being an autobiography or his memoirs, would attempt to counteract the FBI files. He interwove the tightly edited versions of his family letters (mostly to Dorothy) to provide an image of the innocent, loving family man, much as he had done in the cover-up 1980 publication For Noah for his relatives’ consumption. He threw in literary diversions as further sweeteners. The end product was as far from his secret life as he could get, given what was already public. After Long Silence was devoid of much chronology, with intermittent chapters trying to explain away the FBI dossier. It was perhaps a too clever cover-up. The book opened up far more questions than it answered.

  Straight would have been encouraged by the KGB to write it as part of the continuing disinformation campaign directed by Yuri Modin concerning all the members of the Cambridge ring. He began this with Kim Philby in 1968. Modin edited Philby’s book, My Silent War. Rothschild wrote two semi-autobiographical books,
which stayed away from his own story and concentrated on essays to do with his work as a scientist and member of the Edward Heath government’s think tank. He mentioned his relationships with Burgess and Blunt in passing, and dismissively. In 1981, Blunt too was drafting his story (which was never completed), as was John Cairncross (who tried to get it published in the United States and United Kingdom for the decade up until his death in 1995. The book, The Enigma Spy, was published in 1997).

  Straight’s book continued his deception. He even sent a courtesy manuscript copy to Blunt. This demonstrated—until this point—their relationship had not diminished after Straight was supposed to have double-crossed him by the exposure in 1963. Blunt marked up the copy where he claimed Straight was not accurate and gave it to journalist John Costello and others.

  Had the two lifetime comrades fallen out at this critical moment? Blunt had kept in touch with English authors Nigel West and Robert Cecil. Straight’s main defense when they contacted him was that the promotion of After Long Silence was out of his control.

  Straight was concerned now that he might be double-crossed by Blunt. He wrote to him saying he was coming to London. They agreed to meet.

  Straight was also in touch with Michael Young, who was now Lord Young of Dartington, having been appointed a life peer by Prime Minister James Callaghan a few years earlier. Young was horrified by Straight’s book. He felt it was a dangerous self-indictment. He told me in a 1996 interview that Straight had been a lifelong Soviet agent. When I asked him what he meant, he suggested I read After Long Silence. The answer and explanation were imbedded in it, he said.

  Young urged him not to return to Great Britain, suggesting he might be imprisoned, but Young was unaware that Straight had been through lengthy interrogations since 1964.22 Straight, aware from his MI5 contacts that there would be no attempt to interrogate him further, flew to London to face the crisis. He and Blunt were forced to cancel the rendezvous for fear of being followed by the news-hungry media. Blunt then made a statement to the press. He placed Leo Long and Straight in the same category as espionage agents, the implication being that Straight had spied on well into the Cold War. This was a clear betrayal of their secret positions and sworn oaths of allegiance both as Apostles and Soviet agents.