by Roland Perry
Samuel Dickstein, a New York Congressman (code named CROOK because he wanted fat payments for his intelligence services). He provided the Soviets with information on fascist groups and war budget materials.
Ironically, he played the key role in setting up the House Committee on Un-American Activities. It was meant to investigate fascist and Nazi groups. But when the Nazis were defeated, it turned its attention to communist subversion.27
Most of these agents had been publicly named, and the Venona program served to titillate by revealing the code names of the spies. Straight’s exposure in 1981, and his attempt to justify himself through After Long Silence, served to soften the blow of the new surge of interest in the late 1990s in his secret life as an agent of a foreign power.
26
A REUNION OF OLD COMRADES
The pressure was off Straight by 1985. He no longer had to report to MI5 when he visited the United Kingdom, and the embarrassment of his public unmasking, which had been exacerbated by the publication of his autobiography, was subsiding. He even met up with Tess Rothschild at the bar of the Dukes Hotel, around the corner from the Rothschild’s townhouse in St. James’s Place, overlooking Green Park.
Straight described this meeting to journalists, who were later inquisitive about their relationship after its romantic depiction in his book. He told them that she was grateful for his saving her life. This was in reference to his blocking her move to join the Cambridge communist movement. He vetoed her application. Straight maintained that she was most unhappy about his action at the time. But after 1981, when the Cambridge ring was in part exposed, she allegedly understood why he had stopped her from joining the party. This was true as far as it went. What Straight did not tell journalists was that by bypassing the party, Tess was ripe for recruiting by Blunt and him for underground KGB work.
A further “coming out” was possible for Straight two years later, in 1987, when he attended his class of 1937 reunion at Cambridge. This would have been unthinkable in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. But the years of interrogation by the FBI and MI5 were behind him. Peter Wright was living in far-away Tasmania, and the witch-hunts had wound down. The MI5 old guard who had fought the KGB was being replaced by a new breed with instructions to widen the net beyond communist spies to terrorists.
Despite some worrying—even terrifying—moments, Straight’s “management” of the long-running disinformation campaign, with connivance from the KGB and fellow Western agents, allowed him to emerge back where it all began. There would still be surveillance of a sort on all members of the Cambridge ring and suspects. But Straight was now free of any obligations to British Intelligence. The reunion was a time of quiet celebration in cloistered halls and bug-free hotel rooms. Spies like Straight and Tess Rothschild had got away with their espionage. They were soon to be the last of the Cold War spies who had begun their careers after being recruited at the university in the late 1930s.
Old comrades lunched and dined in the days before and after the reunion. Straight found himself frequenting clubs such as the Athenaeum in London. The actual night of the reunion, which took place in the dining hall at New Court, Cambridge, was a glittering affair. Straight’s old contemporaries, dressed in dinner jackets, were there sipping aperitifs. Straight mixed with them, especially Hugh Gordon, whom he had first resided with at Trinity College in 1935. Gordon was then working in scientific research for American foundations. Then there was Gerald Croasdell, whom Straight had also drawn into the Apostles in the fresh intake of communists in 1937. Croasdell gave up his work as a barrister to spend his career as secretary-general of International Actors Equity. They, like him, had not changed their fundamental beliefs, which came out in their conversations about world affairs, the fate of communism, and their hopes for a certain kind of future. (Their attitudes would not change with the collapse of the Soviet Union three years later.)
Peter Astbury was one notable absentee from the reunion. His name came up in hushed tones. He had been another of Straight’s recruits to the Apostles. Peter Wright had started hounding him after Straight had given Wright Astbury’s name as one who may have been recruited for the Soviets by Blunt and Burgess.
Astbury worked for years on CERN’s European nuclear accelerator project, and this alone would have put him under suspicion. According to MI5 sources, including Wright, Astbury maintained his innocence, and his case had not been “reactivated”—that is, he was not being hounded—in the 1980s. Astbury, like Alister Watson and others, were names submitted by Straight, Philby, Blunt, and the Rothschilds when MI5 interrogated them, leading Peter Wright and his MI5 witch-hunters up blind alleys for decades. It’s possible that Astbury had been recruited and trained by the KGB, but when the crunch came and he was under orders to spy, he could not go through with it. The KGB would have put enormous pressure on him. Later MI5 would do the same, which meant that Astbury, like many others, would have been driven to despair over time. (He was to die two months later in December 1987. Some suspected it was suicide.)
As Wright acknowledged in his book Spycatcher, and begrudgingly in interviews in Tasmania in the late 1980s, all the names given up by Straight and other key members of the ring were either known to MI5, dead or false leads, or such small fry that following them up deflected from the main aim of uncovering the major spies.
This all meant that the 1987 reunion was special. It signaled a significant victory for the KGB.1
Yet Straight was ever vigilant in the late 1980s as writers probed into activities of the Cambridge ring. There had been a lull since the initial rush of analysis and reports from 1981 to 1983. Straight worried about writer John Costello, author of Mask of Treachery. But he died in 1996 from complications brought on by AIDS when he was on a plane from London to his home in Miami. His comprehensive files disappeared, perhaps absorbed or destroyed by his strong contacts in Western intelligence.
Straight and Michael Young kept a lifelong interest in Dartington Hall. In the late 1980s it saw a large scaling down and selling of operations. The school, a nursery in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s for many future fellow-travelers and communists, closed. However, the newly formed Estate Council at the Hall was soon preparing a successor college to maintain the old philosophies in a more digestible, modern form. Communists had been replaced by ecologists. It manifested from 1990 as Schumacher College.
Straight may well have been pleased with developments. On May 26, 1996, the BBC’s Radio 3 broadcast a study of Dartington Hall. Journalist Patrick Wright reported:
Some of these deep ecologists seem more inclined to dive into . . . inner space. Listening to their more apocalyptic utterances, I find myself strangely reminded of the revolutionary Marxists who bided their time, in whatever fraternal retreats they could muster, waiting for the crisis to worsen so that their great millennial day would finally come.2
According to BBC Senior Producer Simon Coates, Wright’s analogy followed from what Dartington trustee John Lane had said about the “inevitability of the success of green politics and the intellectual approach underlying it.”
“He amplified his belief that current [British government and Western] economic policies would be unsustainable,” Coates said, “and that such options [including ‘Green’ policies] would no longer be marginalized.”3 In other words, Lane, reflecting the “new” agenda at Dartington, was saying that radical, Green policies would take over from the current economic wisdom in the West.
“Neither Patrick Wright nor I thought this approach consistent with Dartington’s history of improving experiment and active engagement with the outside world,” Coates added, “but rather one reminiscent of a different argument advanced in the past by other critics (particularly communists) of the current ‘system.’”4
Lane and trust secretary Ivor Stolliday characterized the old Dartington approach as “social engineering.” Lane said that by avoiding the previous ways, Dartington would in future influence the mainstream.
Straight’s marriage to Nina
deteriorated until they divorced in 1993. This was followed by another burst of creativity from 1994 to 1999 when he turned to painting. After this further unsustained effort in the arts, Straight in 1999 married his third wife, Katherine Gould, the daughter of a renowned teacher in Boston, Frank McCarthy. She worked as an art teacher, sculptor, and art critic and later became a child psychotherapist. Katherine, also on her third marriage, had two children with her first husband, Ricardo Levisetti, who was once head of the Fermi Laboratory. She works at a Chicago hospital for disturbed children, Rush Day School.
The Straights’ home base was Chicago, while keeping Chilmark for the summer months. Straight was still fit enough to play tennis regularly, but in September 2003, just after his 87th birthday, he went for a medical checkup thinking he had a hernia. In surgery, the doctors discovered Straight had pancreatic cancer. It was diagnosed as terminal. Straight opted not to have chemotherapy. His doctors told him he had just three months to live. On January 4, 2004, the last member of the twentieth century’s most important spy ring died.
27
SPLIT IMAGE OF A SPY
One of the most telling comments in Michael Straight’s career was the acknowledgment by his publisher and survivors of the exceptional potential in his writing. Straight would have thought about the what-might have-beens in his life. Had he not been recruited by the KGB, would he have been a successful politician, even U.S. president? If he had gone to an American university and not Dartington, London School of Economics, and Cambridge in the 1930s, would he have taken his place as a respected writer or playwright?
These ambitions welled in him in his stated aim to “gate-crash eternity.” They could not be reconciled with a subterranean life as a Russian espionage agent that he chose in 1937 as his main career. His truer career instincts surfaced postwar when in late 1945 he tried and then backed away from endorsement from the Democratic Party. When the reviews for his first two fiction works were favorable, he pondered what it would be like to go on as a creative writer in the early 1960s. But he did not. He had other more lasting and demanding agendas.
After knowledge of his student communist days was leaked to the Democratic Party machine, he had barely recovered from the shock when he was working as an important backer, strategist, and speechwriter in Henry Wallace’s bid for the presidency. If Wallace had succeeded, he may have offered Straight a place on the ticket or a position in the cabinet that could have prepared him as a future candidate. His final facing-up to the impossibility of ever having a political career came in the early 1950s when he appeared before congressional committees that were hunting subversives. The hostility toward his views and suspicions about his motivations would have driven home to him that he was not electable to public office in the United States. After that, his disdain for most candidates running for the Oval Office, especially Jack Kennedy, was caused in part by the frustration of not being able to reach for the position himself. He had met them all and considered he was better equipped as a thinker, speaker, idealist, and even administrator. Yet he would never have a chance to prove it.
When his insipid third novel—the only contemporary fiction—failed in the mid-1960s, he didn’t need to work hard at it or follow through. But his play on Caravaggio, in contrast, was a more thorough performance. It was another clever cover for a KGB assignment. After that, he dried up. There would be no more smoke screens of that exhausting proportion. And anyway, the CIA and British intelligence would be on to him, if they were not already.
In the beginning at Cambridge, the allure of the cause was understandable, given the time and the company he kept. For all the denigration of “grubby” Guy Burgess, his contemporaries were dazzled by his intellect and dedication. Blunt with his cultured manner and knowledge of the arts represented something superior. Their combined loyalty to the cause was seductive in itself. They romanticized the higher political creed of international Marxism with its emphasis on the right economic interpretation of history. No thoughts were expressed that could lead to penetrating analysis of the Stalinist state, propped up by terror. Within the secluded cloisters of Cambridge, gullible idealists like Straight were fed sugarcoated propaganda that played to their privileged backgrounds and juvenile guilt over them. There were other characters on the scene that reinforced Straight’s move, including Victor Rothschild, John Cornford, Tess Mayor, and James Klugman. He could not feel superior in breeding or intellect to these impressive peers and several more like them.
Another important factor was his wealth. He never needed to work. He was therefore open to a movement offering other than monetary remuneration. Straight’s covers were as a bureaucrat, political official, administrator, writer, publisher, and journalist. His own money facilitated them. Wealth placed him from birth in an insulated establishment structure. He learned to use his connections, as exemplified by the way he manipulated Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, and later Jackie Kennedy, when they were in the White House. His inherited fortune also allowed him to buy the best legal advice to protect him against prosecutors in search of subversives and media probes into his life. But because he didn’t sustain a career, there were voids in his life. The KGB manipulated those empty periods by flattery and cajolery. Russian controls played to his ego and made him feel important and wanted.
As Straight was being drawn into the network, he acted himself as a recruiter of others into the Apostles Club. In the 1930s, it was an important breeding ground at Cambridge for the KGB.
It all helped secure him in the Soviet web. The knowledge that Stalin himself connived in his placement in the United States propelled him into a dangerous yet thrilling clandestine world when barely out of his teens. Rebecca West in her book, The Meaning of Treason, wrote of the peculiar attraction of the espionage demimonde and the sentiment and adrenaline rush which kept Straight inspired from age 21.
Straight did not quite fit Rebecca West’s description of the mid–twentieth-century espionage agent: “The life of the political conspirator offers the man of restricted capacity but imaginative energy excitements and satisfactions which he can never derive from overt activities.”
She was writing just postwar based on analysis of Nazi spies and the few insignificant Soviet agents then exposed. She would have revised her thinking had she been aware of the “talents” like Philby, Blunt, Maclean, Cairncross, Burgess, Rothschild, Mayor, Straight, and others. They all had abilities that would have facilitated other brilliant careers. Straight’s skills would have allowed him thrills and satisfactions in “overt activities” such as politics. But where he differed from the others was in character. Despite their talents, they were able to sublimate them to a degree where these other aspirations did not interfere with their main occupations as Russian agents. By contrast, Straight thought for some time he could combine a very much more public career with his covert life.
A shocking point of realization that he was captured forever, and that it might restrict his public ambitions, came early in 1941 when Walter Krivitsky was murdered in a Washington hotel room. Straight, whom Burgess directed into the web of complicity in the assassination, was reminded that no agent should ever stray or turn against the cause once recruited. Not that Straight ever deviated. Once presented with an assignment, he did his spying and agenting his way.
Straight spent four decades as a KGB agent and an agent of influence. His most enterprising work was done in the Midwest from 1956 to 1962. Perhaps his most daring espionage effort was his spying on Cheyenne Mountain and its surrounds while pretending to do research for his second novel.
Many people provided evidence of his KGB operations and witnessed his long service. They began with his lifelong friend Michael Young, who in an interview with me went out of his way to emphasize Straight’s long KGB service. Others included Blunt, Anatoli Golitsyn, Cord Meyer, Whitney Straight, and some FBI and CIA members.
On top of that, Straight’s actions as an agent of influence and agent provocateur for the KGB, as well as his financial
donations, were further proof that he was always supportive of the Kremlin’s ideology, aims, and views. He backed the U.K. Daily Worker with his substantial pocket-money contributions for several years. He poured funds into communist fronts and supported KGB agent Dolivet to the tune of $250,000 in his publication of a propaganda sheet. Straight’s first book, Let This Be the Last War, published when he was 26, demonstrated his continuing accord with Soviet propaganda. Though submerged, refined, and made more digestible to a wider audience, that hard intellectual base, constructed at his educational institutions in Great Britain, never left him.
Straight was directed to work for “peace” over nuclear weapons with people the KGB had targeted for retarding U.S. weapons development, while the KGB worked overtime to gain the technology for the Russian’s own bombs. He was a campaign strategist and main financier for the first part of Vice-President Henry Wallace’s bid for the 1948 presidency. Wallace was the only serious U.S. presidential candidate in history who stood for appeasement with Russia and would have been the nearest thing to a Soviet puppet in the White House.
Straight’s work at the AVC, particularly from 1945 to 1948, according to Cord Meyer, always had a procommunist agenda directed from the Kremlin. Meyer wondered what information Straight fed back to the Kremlin from his insinuation into the most powerful circles in the United States. He was a master at networking where it counted, even cultivating the wife of a U.S. president (Kennedy) all the time he was in power.
Straight also financially supported the Institute for Pacific Affairs that played its part in helping bring communism to China, a development that made him proud. Buoyed by this sudden surge of hope for communists everywhere in the late 1940s, Straight in early 1950 felt compelled to put the case for maintaining a Communist Party in the United States while attempting to maintain the image of an anticommunist. He put his convoluted arguments with dazzling effect to the HUAC, but nearly tripped up on his own feverish rhetoric: