Last of the Cold War Spies
Page 39
Blunt felt the severe strain of what he saw as Straight’s betrayal and the fact that their disagreements had become public, so exposing and threatening to unravel many secrets of the KGB and its operatives. Blunt and the others had been restrained by fear of reprisals from the KGB all their lives. This sort of media exposure broke all the rules.
Soon after his press statement, on Saturday morning, March 26, 1983, Blunt died of a heart attack in his London flat. The night before, his brother Wilfrid had spoken to him and had found him “in good form.” Blunt’s death took the pressure off Straight. He was interviewed by Ludovic Kennedy on BBC TV and held to the view that Blunt had been controlled by Burgess. “The unanswered question,” Straight remarked, “was why a man of his intellectual stature could have been the willing captive of a gypsy vagabond like Burgess.”23
Straight’s body language during the interview exposed his stress. Yet he also appeared to deliver candid responses. Overall the program may have done Straight a favor. Instead of being at the center of controversy, as he had been in the clash with West, he at times appeared the thoughtful, almost detached expert who had plausible explanations for becoming entrapped at Cambridge.
When published in 1983, After Long Silence featured a revealing back cover photograph of Straight. He was 65 when the shot was taken. It was the look of a concerned man. He appeared uncertain of what the camera might portray as he stared at it. Gone was the semiprofile pose of self-assurance of a few years earlier when he was forced out of the Arts Endowment by President Carter. Nearly half a century of acting out, then concealing, a double life had etched itself into his former sharp, aquiline features. It left a drawn, ever-suspicious impression. The defensive stare, which interviewers at times found “ferocious,” moved upward from beneath an aggressive ridge of thick eyebrows and heavily lined forehead.
Straight used literary allusions to put his case, but they didn’t quite resonate with readers. He drew on British writer Joseph Conrad’s story, “Under Western Eyes,” published in 1911. Each extract was meant to evoke sympathy for Straight. Kyrilo Sidorovitch Razumov, the main character, betrays Victor Haldin, a mature and admired student, to the secret police. Haldin had assassinated the czarist minister of state. Straight’s attempts to show how he turned in Blunt invited judgment that Straight was not a betrayer but rather a courageous individual for doing so.
Straight quoted Conrad’s description of Razumov after he has betrayed Haldin, who is sent to his death: “An incredible dullness, a ditch-water stagnation was sensible to his perceptions, as though life had withdrawn itself from all things.”
This was meant to parallel Straight’s feelings when he informed the FBI about Blunt, although nothing in his private archive, letters, or diary conveyed any apparent concern for Blunt’s fate.
Then later in After Long Silence, Straight again used Razumov’s deception of Haldin. Razumov went out into the wintry, snowy night wondering what to do. If he helped Haldin, he would become an accomplice in a crime. If he went to the police he would betray Haldin and eventually himself. The reader was invited once more to be sympathetic to his “no-win” situation. Straight further quoted Conrad: “Who knows what true loneliness is—not the conventional word, but the naked terror.”
In the same passage in After Long Silence, Straight turned to an image of himself when he arrived in the United States in 1937, saying that he was on his own. He claimed to have no roots in the United States, no old friends, no accepted tradition to support him, and finally nothing rational to look forward to.
This portrait seems anomalous to his experience. He had roots at Old Westbury. He was young enough to create many new friendships, which he did with gusto. Straight’s name opened doors in accessing everyone from the president down. He had a choice of attractive women for a wife. His wealth enabled him to take the chosen one with him. Their home was never short of friends and visitors. Rather than a poor little rich boy locked in a state of terror, his actions and utterances gave an impression of a confident young man bursting with ambition.
Straight lamented that he could not reconcile the position he was in (presumably in 1937 when he arrived in the United States to act as a KGB agent). He claimed he faced a life of deception if he continued as a KGB man, and that this would make him ingrown, suspicious, and unloving. He wouldn’t, he said, ever be able to share his mind and his heart with another human being. It was the dilemma facing all the Cambridge ring, except perhaps for Victor Rothschild, who did share his secret life with his wife Tess.
This was Straight’s description of how he perceived his character and life developing, if he acted as an agent. Yet he did go on with a career as a KGB operative. Over the years of his actions as an agent, did he develop inwardly and become suspicious and unloving? Some family members and friends said he did.
Straight’s book raised more questions than it answered. This caused the exercise in writing it to backfire on him. Confused journalists and reviewers now had more information—or disinformation—to mull over than the sketchy reports from the Blunt affair of two years earlier. Some accepted him as naive and misguided. They accepted his claimed ignorance of how a communist underground operated.
Many reviewers and commentators sat in judgment of him and found him guilty. William Safire’s piece in The New York Times asked if he could fairly be called a traitor. “Not really,” Safire wrote, “because no purpose or passion guided his double life. Evidently that word [traitor] is not currently applied to White House aides who do political analysis for the Kremlin, or to citizens who fail to report what they know to be espionage until they know the spy is safely gone.” Safire compared him unfavorably to Admiral Canaris, the German officer who tried to assassinate Hitler.24
Allen Weinstein’s review in The New Republic was also unfavorable. Straight may have been expecting his old magazine to endorse him. Instead, Weinstein touched on the major questions the memoirs raised concerning Straight’s unconvincing portrayal of his control, Michael Green, and his remaining silent when Burgess was doing damage during the Korean War.
Weinstein questioned Straight’s reliability “as a witness . . . on the dramatic events” of the memoir. He cited the example of Straight while at State in 1940. Straight claimed he distributed to other government agencies a “strictly confidential” report by the ambassador to England, Joseph Kennedy. The report predicted military defeat for the British. According to Straight, the report appeared on the front page of leading newspapers late in the 1940 presidential campaign. He maintained it led Roosevelt to consider Kennedy’s endorsement “worthless.” It forced Kennedy, Straight said, to leave his ambassadorial post “in disgrace.”
In fact, Kennedy returned to Washington from London late in the campaign, Weinstein pointed out, “to endorse FDR for the third term.” The ambassador delivered radio addresses publicized by the Democrats to reinforce FDR’s support among isolationist conservatives.
Only after the election did Kennedy give an interview to Boston Globe reporter Louis Lyons. This expressed his belief that “democracy is all but finished in England.” The interview damaged his standing sufficiently to force a 1 December, 1940, resignation. The facts are described in Michael R. Beschloss’s Kennedy and Roosevelt: The Uneasy Alliance (Norton).
This example in Straight’s book at once demonstrated to Weinstein the unreliability of his recall and his distaste for the Kennedys. Straight took Weinstein’s piece as a declaration of literary warfare with his old magazine. He used the next opportunity of political disagreement (over publisher Martin Peretz’s defense of Israel’s invasion of the Lebanon) to cancel his subscription.
The Encounter review by Sidney Hook said:
To this day he seems unaware that his prolonged and stubborn silence about his involvement in the Soviet espionage apparatus, long after he had claimed to have shed any trace of faith or loyalty to the Communist cause, in effect made him complicit in the hundreds of deaths (in Korea and elsewhere) that were contrived
by his erstwhile comrades.25
The impact of this period put strains on Straight’s second marriage. Yet in 1983, Straight seemed to have maneuvered his way through the minefield he had in part created himself. Some in the circles he mixed with shunned him. But he was ostracized only to the point of a few people refusing to socialize with him, a small price to pay, and typical of attitudes to his politics he had become used to since the 1940s.
Straight seemed inured to attacks. He once felt certain he was part of a world movement that would overrun petty bourgeois rightists opposed to him and his fellow travelers. It was a toughening experience as he weathered the realities of post-WWII Cold War America and the McCarthy period. This, coupled with his social standing, wealth, and protection afforded by top lawyers, allowed him to sail through the decades insulated from witch-hunts, black bans, the political vicissitudes of various administrations, and those years of probes by Western intelligence.
Straight also had the knack of engaging any opposition with his charm and class. He had the measure of the intelligence operatives and journalists who could uncover evidence dangerous to him. As long as he was up with current revelations, such as new information coming in to the NSA, the CIA, and the FBI, he would stay in a position of power over his adversaries.
A chance to stay on top of events came in April 1983, a few weeks after Blunt’s death. Straight was invited to the Conference on World Affairs at Boulder, Colorado, by the organizer Howard Higman, a sociology professor. There were discussions on a wide range of intelligence, political, economic, and cultural issues. The participants and audience included spies, students, academics, fiction writers, and journalists. Straight delivered an essay, “Death of a Butterfly,” at a plenary session, which kept his views on a theoretical level and away from his personal history. Newton Miler, the CIA man who had interrogated Anatoli Golitsyn with James Angleton, was in attendance. So was Sam Papich, former FBI liaison officer between the FBI and the CIA. Both implied that Straight had not disclosed the complete story behind his relations with Blunt and Soviet intelligence. “He tried to intimidate by name-dropping,” Miler recalled. “‘So-and-so believes me, who are you, you little peasant, to say otherwise’—that sort of inference.”
Twenty years earlier, Miler had been puzzled by Straight’s “confession” to the FBI, maintaining that there was nothing damaging in the file and that he would have been given a clearance to work at the Arts Endowment under Kennedy. Straight was adamant that Golitsyn said he was a continuing Cold War spy and agent provocateur. Miler denied it.
Higman asked Straight to return the next year, 1984, now that he had achieved minor celebrity status with his book After Long Silence. Straight realized that he could stay abreast of intelligence attitudes and perhaps make some useful contacts. He turned up and spoke for an hour to students. He was antagonized by what he said was Miler’s negative attitude. However, he was given a better reception by Papich and the CIA’s Hayden Peake.
Miler attacked him for saying he did not understand what Stalinism really meant. Straight responded by saying that he was the age of the students in the audience when he was seduced by it. He maintained that he was studying all day and had no way of knowing what was happening in Russia. More to the point, at that stage, Straight did not want to know what was really happening in Russia. And he certainly was not deep in study at any time apart from during the weeks before exams. Instead he was intriguing with the communist movement and putting himself in a position to be recruited by the KGB.
Miler also thought that his claim about being preoccupied with study was at odds with his other statements about his working on his communist connections at Cambridge when Blunt recruited him. Despite his starry-eyed deification of Stalin, he had visited the Soviet Union in 1935 and was aware of the conditions, even if only on the surface, in one of the world’s most brutal police states.26
Higman invited Straight back for another two years. He made some lasting friendships, one of which was with Hayden Peake, whom he continued to meet twice a year in Washington. This connection was one of many that kept Straight abreast of issues in intelligence. If anything surfaced that affected him, he would know about it before the media did.
I lunched with the semiretired Peake (a professor at the Center for Counterintelligence and Security Studies, along with Nigel West and others) in October 1996. A soft-spoken and studious man, he brought with him copies of two previous books of mine on intelligence: The Exile, a biography of KGB agent of influence Wilfred Burchett, and The Fifth Man, about Victor and Tess Rothschild and Yuri Modin. He asked me to sign both books. They were notated with colored strips on scores of pages. Peake told me he had 5,000 books on espionage. He had just returned from a series of meetings in Russia with KGB operatives, including Modin. We discussed the book, Spies Without Cloaks, the KGB’s Successors, by Amy Knight, the professorial lecturer in Russian history at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, Washington. Her conclusion was that the KGB was renamed when the Soviet Union collapsed but that it was not reformed. Knight maintained that the “new” Russian security services had acquired more power than the old KGB. It was the only organ of government whose power had been increased rather than diminished. I agreed with Knight. Peake was emphatic that the new security forces had been trimmed.
I asked, Why had he kept such a close relationship with Straight?
“He is a very interesting man,” Peake replied, which was the same un-expansive response he gave when asked how he found Straight personally. The CIA man was not forthcoming about the nature of the discussions with him. However, he agreed that Straight was keen to learn if any new, potentially damaging material about him ever emerged. And if anyone had his pulse on all things to do with the intelligence community, it was the well-informed and -read Peake.
He confirmed that Straight was particularly interested in Venona—the U.S. National Security Agency program to decipher cables sent to Moscow by Russian control agents via their diplomatic missions. This was understandable. He was featured in them.
The U.S. army had been collecting Soviet encrypted cables since 1939. In 1943, the army learned that Stalin, then an ally, was attempting to negotiate a separate peace treaty with Hitler’s Germany. The U.S. army decided to decrypt—decipher—the cables. The military was shocked to learn that only about half the 750,000 cables concerned diplomacy and its foreign ministry or trade. The rest was espionage. Soviet agents had penetrated the U.S. State Department, Treasury Department, Justice Department, Senate committee staffs, the military, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the Manhattan Project, all wartime agencies, and the White House itself.
It was a huge shock to the few Americans who were allowed to know. The Soviets had made the biggest penetration of any government in the modern era. The medium-term aim—regardless of the wartime alliance—was to weaken and overthrow the democratically elected federal government from within. It would be replaced by a communist regime under Moscow’s control. Venona also found that the Soviets were similarly well ensconced in the United Kingdom, Canada, France, and Australia, with the same intentions.
The Venona decrypts—only about 5 percent of all the cables sent— were declassified in 1995. Straight, code named NIGEL, was confirmed as one of Stalin’s agents. Some of the others officially unveiled were:
Lachlan Currie, a senior White House aide to FDR, who alerted the KGB to FBI investigations of its top agents;
Martha Dodd, the libidinous daughter of the American ambassador to Berlin, William Dodd, in the 1930s. She had an affair with the first secretary of the Russian embassy and passed on confidential diplomatic information to the KGB;
Alger Hiss, chief of the State Department’s Office of Special Political Affairs. He accompanied FDR to Yalta and helped Stalin run rings around the ailing president. Hiss also chaired the founding conference of the United Nations;
Harry Dexter White, assistant secretary of the treasury and U.S. director of the International
Monetary Fund (IMF). He was also senior adviser to the American delegation of the founding conference of the UN. He made sure Soviet agents were employed in his department;
Harold Glasser, vice-chairman of the U.S. War Production Board and assistant director of the treasury’s Office of International Finance;
Gregory Silvermaster, a treasury economist. He controlled a sizable spy ring, which, among other things, provided the KGB with huge amounts of information from the War Production Board concerning arms, aircraft, and ships;
Victor Perlo, chief of the aviation section of the War Production Board. He supplied Soviet intelligence with aircraft production details;
William Weisband, the NSA linguist who disclosed the Venona project to the Soviets;
Duncan Lee, a senior aide to the Office of Strategic Services (the CIA forerunner, 1942–1946) chief William J. Donovan, who became one of Soviet intelligence’s sources inside American intelligence during and just after World War II;
Judith Coplon, a Justice Department analyst. She alerted Soviet intelligence to the FBI’s counterintelligence operations—that is, exactly what the FBI was doing to counter subversion by Nazis and communists;
Laurence Duggan, Secretary of State Cordell Hull’s personal adviser. Duggan provided Soviet intelligence with confidential diplomatic cables;
Boris Morros, a Hollywood producer-director. He became an FBI informer;