Last of the Cold War Spies
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We [he and his counsel] believe if it [the U.S. Communist Party] becomes a clear and present danger, then by that time communism will have triumphed in the rest of the world before it becomes a threat to this country. We think the critical front is in Berlin, Southeast Asia, India, and Rome.
The HUAC committee left the hearing confused at a higher level by Straight’s testimony. Once they were over their bamboozlement, the hearing’s transcript was pored over by them and other congressmen. Straight’s attempt to appear open and anticommunist backfired. He and the Whitney grants to communist fronts came under closer scrutiny.
In explaining contact with Burgess in Washington in 1950, Straight wrote in After Long Silence:
If Guy [Burgess] was in Washington in October [1950], he would have known of our plans to advance into North Korea. He would have sent the information to Moscow. . . . The Kremlin in turn would have handed it to Peking [Beijing]. . . . Guy could have caused the deaths of many American soldiers . . .
Straight’s critics saw his failure to denounce Burgess before or at the time of the Korean War as an inaction that made him complicit in causing the deaths of those American soldiers. Furthermore, if he was the Western spy who convinced Mao to attack U.S. forces, his complicity was even greater. But this possibility aside, his critics judged the failure to act over Burgess as his greatest travesty. It demonstrated that at this critical time Straight put his former allegiances to the Apostles and the KGB ahead of his country and countrymen. His loyalties were never in doubt.
His contact in 1954 with Sergei Striganov, the KGB agent at the Soviet embassy, went on for at least two years. It highlighted that he had to make such contacts, even if they were dangerous for him. As mentioned earlier, Cord Meyer wondered what tidbits of information from his connection with Straight may have been passed on to Striganov.
Straight had hope in the mid-1950s that there may still be a revival of mainstream support for far-left agendas in the United States. Yet as the Cold War temperature dropped, mainstream opinions hardened against countenancing in the United States anything remotely like even Communism in Italy or France. There wasn’t a moderate liberal candidate in sight who had any real chance of becoming president and thus setting the pace for political change.
In 1956, Straight followed the Soviet line over the crushing of the uprising in Hungary and blamed the attempted revolution on the CIA. In discussing “neutralism”—the proposal that England give up its nuclear weapons program—with Nixon in 1963, Straight’s case for it was parallel with Moscow’s position and propaganda.
He was always on the lookout for ways to act as an agent of influence and to shore up radical liberalism, lost from American mainstream politics by the mid-1960s with the failure, Straight felt, of disarmament and other protest groups. He directed Whitney Foundation funds into Amnesty International, which kept it afloat. Like the Australian radical communist writer Wilfred Burchett, Straight often responded when the whiff of revolution was in the air. In 1968, he rushed from Martha’s Vineyard to Washington when blacks rioted in response to the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Yet Straight was disappointed the rioters were more interested in looting than in revolution.
His final act of influence came from his own political use of federal government funds to support protest through drama and dance. Instead of the 1930s youthful, messianic drive to revolution in the streets, he was satisfied, in his late 50s, with dramatized revolution on the stage. In post-1968 language reminiscent of German-born U.S. Marxist/Freudian philosopher Herbert Marcuse, Straight supported artistic vehicles showing feelings of “bitterness, rage and alienation” toward the establishment.
The irony was in the fact that he managed this under the auspices of the Nixon administration.
From his early years, betrayal and deception became part of Straight’s life, from passing information to a foreign power to relations with all the family. Straight’s only deep loyalties were to the ring and the KGB. Even if he wanted to, he could not afford to be disloyal because he would be implicated in espionage operations. It was the KGB’s insurance policy. After all, if agents like Straight could betray and deceive family and country, they could betray anything or anyone at any time. This mutual blackmail worked beyond 1963 when he was compelled to make misleading “confessions” to the FBI about Blunt.
Some of Straight’s dearest friends and acquaintances over sixty years were spies and sometime fellow-travelers, including Young, Klugman, Cornford, Burgess, Blunt, Tess Rothschild, Victor Rothschild, Long, Astbury, Dolivet, Duran, Michael Greenberg, Michael Green, Striganov, and many others.
Leonard Garment, in his book Crazy Rhythm, noted that Straight had been cursed for “being able to do everything well.” This flattering but fair observation would apply to Straight’s espionage more than any other activity.
If Straight had written his own epitaph, he most likely would have listed the New Republic years, his novel writing, and his role in bringing his radical form of government support to the arts as the efforts he would like to be remembered for. They were his covers for his espionage work and activities as an agent of influence over forty years, from 1937 to 1977.
For the man who began his career under Joseph Stalin and ended it under Richard Nixon, there is a temptation to think he could not have a true sense of loyalty to anything. But he held true to his masters and his convictions even working for the Republicans as he encouraged the arts of protest and dissent. Dartington Hall, some members of his family, his love of the arts, and adherence to radical liberal principals held his commitment from time to time.
Stalin and the Communist cause held him for life.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Many people in the United States, the United Kingdom, Russia, France, and Australia contributed to my research for this book, and I am grateful to them all. It seems unfair to single out anyone from the rest. However, several members of the extended Straight/Elmhirst family on both sides of the Atlantic, and friends of Michael Straight, such as the late Lord Young of Dartington, were particularly helpful in their contributions.
My agent, Andrew Lownie, was loyal and encouraging with this difficult project. His knowledge of his alma mater, Cambridge University, and its principal players from the espionage demimonde of the period from 1920 to 1970 was more than useful in his prodding me to carry on.
A special word of thanks is due to Moscow-based Yuri Ivanovitch Modin and the late Vladimir Barkovsky, both of whom were formerly Moscow controls running the Cambridge spies. I visited Moscow several times, and they were unfailing in their courtesy and assistance. They both indicated at the beginning of our conversations that they would provide information that wasn’t already known by Western intelligence. I was happy with this assurance; it put me ahead of the investigative game before I began to probe further. The late Cord Meyer was also of great assistance. Other contemporary and retired employees of several spy agencies—notably the Australian Secret Intelligence Service, the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, the CIA, the U.S. National Security Agency, the KGB (RIS), French intelligence, MI6, and MI5—were all essential sources in establishing solid information and facts, and certain theories.
Several journalists, particularly Verne Newton, Philip Knightley, John Slavin, and the late John Costello, were also helpful with their information and insights. Researcher Ellen MacDougall was of great assistance in raiding Washington, D.C., institutions and files.
Finally thanks also to the chief editor Robert L. Pigeon at Da Capo Press.
Roland Perry
July 2005
NOTES
CHAPTER 1: DESTINY DICTATOR
1. For further information on the background of the Whitney and Elmhirst families, see Swanberg, Whitney Father, Whitney Heiress.
2. For Dorothy and Willard diary entries, here and following, see Swanberg, Whitney Father, Whitney Heiress.
CHAPTER 2: BIRTH, DEATH, AND CIRCUMSTANCE
1. Swanberg, Whitney Father, Wh
itney Heiress, p. 401.
2. Young, The Elmhirsts of Dartington, pp. 57–58.
3. Ibid.
4. Swanberg, Whitney Father, Whitney Heiress, p. 331.
5. Young, The Elmhirsts of Dartington, pp. 57–58.
CHAPTER 3: MARX AND SPARKS
1. Interview with Lord Young, September 1996.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Straight, After Long Silence, pp. 46–47.
CHAPTER 4: CAMBRIDGE CONSOLIDATION
1. Interview with Yuri Ivanovitch Modin, October 1996.
2. “KGB” is used in this book to cover all the Soviet and Russian intelligence services from 1930 to 2002. They are essentially the same, no matter what the propaganda to the contrary. Amy Knight in her book Spies Without Cloaks makes this point and further argues that today’s post–Cold War Russian intelligence activity has expanded, not contracted.
3. Costello, Mask of Treachery, p. 247.
4. Michael Straight admitted to giving money to the British Communist Party. His contributions have been confirmed though information gathered from the KGB Archive in Moscow and further corroborated in an interview with the KGB’s former “publicity” head, Oleg Tsarev, October 1996.
5. According to Yuri Modin, Arnold Deutsch suggested the people who should be taken on the trip. Interviews with Modin, October 1996.
6. Interview with John Costello, October 1993. Whatever Straight’s claims about connected histories between the two men, both believed in the cause and its roots, which they were about to explore in a more concrete way inside the Soviet Union.
7. Comment by Wilfrid Blunt to author John Costello, interview March 1982.
8. Brian Simon interview with Barry Penrose, and Simon Freeman, Conspiracy of Silence, p. 162.
9. Interview with Michael Young, September 1996.
10. Conspiracy of Silence, p. 162.
11. Mayhew, Time to Explain, p. 24.
12. Wilfrid Blunt in interview with MI5 officer, 1981. Story relayed to author.
13. Bukharin was executed March 14, 1938, after being a defendant in the last public Moscow purge trial. He had been falsely accused of counterrevolutionary activities and espionage.
14. Interview with Lord Young, September 1996.
15. Ibid.
16. Interview with Michael Young, September 1996, and subsequent verification in facsimile exchanges, October 1996.
17. Spectator, August 6, 1937.
CHAPTER 5: IN THE RING
1. Straight, After Long Silence, p. 65.
2. Interviews with family members, August 1996; and interview with John Costello, October 1993.
3. Ibid.
4. Straight, After Long Silence, p. 67.
5. Carter, Anthony Blunt, His Lives, p. 187.
6. The source for this observation was another Cambridge contemporary of Tess’s who was less besotted by her than Michael Straight, Brian Simon, and Victor Rothschild. Interview, 1999.
7. Straight, After Long Silence, p. 81.
8. Interview with John Costello, October 1993.
9. Information supplied by an English espionage “expert” and confirmed by a member of the Rothschild family.
10. Perry, The Fifth Man, pp. 46–47 and source notes.
11. Although Blunt told Rothschild that the painting would be bequeathed to him and his family, this promise proved to be another piece of deception. Blunt left the Poussin to a British Museum.
CHAPTER 6: GRADUATE IN THE ART OF DECEPTION
1. Vassiliev and Weinstein, The Haunted Wood, p. 73, and the KGB Archive, Moscow, file 58380.
2. Costello, Mask of Treachery, pp. 267–268.
3. Straight, After Long Silence, pp. 101–102.
4. Interviews with Yuri Modin, October 1996. Modin and the author discussed the issue of Michael Straight’s sleeper role as a potential U.S. presidential candidate.
5. Costello, Mask of Treachery, pp. 267–268, and Straight, After Long Silence, pp. 101–103.
6. Rothschild, Meditations of a Broomstick, p. 64.
7. John Costello, interviews with Michael Straight, and Costello, Mask of Treachery, p. 269.
8. Ibid.
9. Interviews with Yuri Modin, October 1996.
10. The author has seen several letters between Franklin Roosevelt and Leonard Elmhirst, and between Dorothy Elmhirst and Eleanor Roosevelt. Many examples of this close connection in the 1930s and 1940s are on file in the Dartington Hall Trust Archive at High Cross House in Devon, England, and in the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library in Hyde Park, New York.
11. One such photo portrait, taken by Ramsey and Muspratt of Cambridge and dated 1936, appears in Straight’s After Long Silence. Posed and serious, it is the type of image he wished to project during his staged breakdown in the months of February–May 1937.
12. Straight, After Long Silence, p. 106.
13. Costello, Mask of Treachery, p. 269.
14. Straight, After Long Silence, p. 109.
15. Ibid.
16. Costello, Mask of Treachery, p. 270.
17. Young, The Elmhirsts of Dartington, p. 236.
18. KGB Archive, Moscow, file 58390; see also Vassiliev and Weinstein, The Haunted Wood, Chapter 4.
19. KGB Archive, Moscow, file 58390. Italics added.
20. Interviews with family members, September 1996.
21. Interview with John Costello, October, 1993.
22. Ibid.; and also interviews with former MI5 operatives, 2003.
23. Ibid.
24. This conversation was related to author John Costello by Michael Straight. See also Costello, Mask of Treachery, p. 273.
25. Ibid.
26. Interviews with family members, September 2002.
27. Costello, Mask of Treachery, p. 275.
28. FBI interviews with Michael Straight.
29. Ibid.
30. KGB Archive, Moscow, file 58390; see also Vassiliev and Weinstein, The Haunted Wood, Chapter 4.
31. Ibid.
32. Ibid.
33. Ibid.
CHAPTER 7: GREEN SPY
1. Straight, After Long Silence, p. 120.
2. KGB Archive, Moscow, file 58380; see also Vassiliev and Weinstein, The Haunted Wood.
3. The October 1937 date is critically important. Michael Straight claimed in After Long Silence that contact was made in April 1938. Later he corrected himself after accessing his own FBI file, where he had stated that he made contact sometime between October 1937 and March 1938, and probably in December 1937. This is significant. The earlier date demonstrates that Michael Green, his KGB control, was directing him from the beginning of his stay—before Straight began working at the State Department. Straight’s FBI statements make it clear that the direct link to Green, when Straight became an agent, began in October 1937. Furthermore, all document sources and his own testimony indicate that he was in New York then, not Washington. He admits to meeting Green in New York first. It was later, when Straight was operating from within the State Department, that his control met him in Washington. See FBI file on Michael Straight, p. 5, 6–11, interviews, June 1963.
4. FBI interviews with Michael Straight, report of July 31, 1975.
5. Costello, Mask of Treachery, pp. 379–380.
6. From the NSA analysis of Venona traffic, Robert Louis Benson, The 1944–1945 New York and Washington-Moscow KGB Messages (Venona Historical Monograph No. 3), published 1995.
7. Straight, After Long Silence, p. 128.
8. FBI interviews with Michael Straight, 1963 and 1975.
9. Benson, The 1944–1945 New York and Washington-Moscow KGB Messages.
10. Straight, After Long Silence, p. 123.
11. Interviews with Yuri Modin, and interviews with Vladimir Barkovsky, October 1996.
12. FBI interviews with Michael Straight, June 25, 1963, and July 31, 1975 (WFO 100-3644).
13. KGB Archive, Moscow, file 58390; see also Vassiliev and Weinstein, The Haunted Wood.
14. Ibid.
15. Interviews with Yuri Modin, October 1996.
16. KGB Archive, Moscow, file 58390; see also Vassiliev and Weinstein, The Haunted Wood.
17. Ibid.
18. Michael Straight letter to the New York Review of Books, December 1997. The author had several interviews with Alger Hiss from 1979 to 1986. Hiss spoke about Michael Straight at the State Department, calling him “bright and ambitious.”
19. Straight, After Long Silence, pp. 130–133.
20. FBI interviews with Michael Straight, June 25, 1963, and July 31, 1975 (WFO 100-3644).
21. KGB Archive, Moscow, file 58390; see also Vassiliev and Weinstein, The Haunted Wood.
22. FBI interviews with Michael Straight, June 25, 1963, and July 31, 1975 (WFO 100-3644).
23. The FBI files on Michael Straight reveal that he identified Franklin from FBI photos.
24. FBI interviews with Michael Straight, who identified Adler from photos as Solomon Aaron Lichinsky, who he then recalled had been linked to the revelations made by Elizabeth Bentley’s Soviet espionage in the State Department.
25. FBI interviews with Michael Straight, June 25, 1963, and July 31, 1975 (WFO 100-3644).
26. Straight, After Long Silence, p. 135.
CHAPTER 8: THE INFORMANTS
1. Interview with retired French intelligence officer from the General Directorate for External Security, June 1996.
2. Louis Waldham’s papers in the Manuscripts and Archives Division of the New York Public Library.
3. Newton, The Cambridge Spies.
4. Brooke-Shepherd, The Storm Petrels, pp. 152–153.