Last of the Cold War Spies (24 page)

Acutely aware of where Straight was coming from, Chamberlain commented that he was even more of a perfectionist than “Lenin or Robespierre. He is long on denunciations of industrialists, politicians and soldiers, and he is short on the type of charitable realism that expects ten per cent of bungling for every 90 per cent of effective effort.”

Chamberlain chided Straight for saying, “We are losing the war,” and “Between the glorious defense of Stalingrad and our own ignominious inaction stands the greatest contrast of our entire war.”

The reviewer commented: “But even as Mr. Straight was busy writing, the ‘ignominious’ and ‘inactive’ staff officers of General Eisenhower were planning a cross-water invasion, which clicked even more efficiently than the Nazi General von Falkenhorst’s seizure of Norway.”

Perhaps Chamberlain was aware of Straight’s own inactivity and exhortations to others to fight. In a burst of perspicacity, given the writer’s secret allegiances, the reviewer asked: “Does Mr. Straight doubt that Americans would fight with a fury comparable to that of the Russians if the Nazis were thundering at the gates of Akron, Ohio, or Manitowoc, Wis.?”

“Mr. Straight,” he noted, “has an intellectual’s fear and distrust of the incorrigible give-and-take of the American people.” He went on to dissect the proposition that the Russians had superior war organization capabilities. Chamberlain pointed out that Americans had given them the plans and designs for power stations and factories making tractors, tanks, and machine tools.

“He can’t see,” Chamberlain admonished, “that our industrial effectiveness and our fighting spirit stem from the same beliefs which also led to 1929 [the Wall Street Crash] and its aftermath [of severe depression]. He can’t see that faults and virtues are sometimes inseparable.”

The reviewer had stumbled onto Straight’s lack of experience of recent U.S. history. He had been in England from 1925 to 1937, particularly formative years in his country of origin. He had also never had much exposure to more pragmatic thought away from Marxist economic theory and philosophy, which left him without instincts for the masses, whom he felt born to lead. His wealth and privilege further removed him from the mainstream political themes, moods, fears, aspirations, and ideas that motivated Americans.

In an unfashionable yet insightful dig at the Soviet Union’s totalitarianism, the reviewer remarked: “We are intolerant of people who would impose form and goals from above. And so we run into terrible troubles. But if we weren’t that sort of people, we would never have invented the submarine and the airplane and the mass production line for the Russians to use. . . . ” “I’m beginning to dislike people who insist,” Chamberlain concluded, “that the only proper clothes for an American are sackcloth sprinkled with ashes.”

Straight claimed in his memoirs to have been devastated by this review because at the time he was in a highly sensitized state. He made no reference later to whether or not, on reflection, he saw any value in Chamberlain’s assessment of his first literary effort.

It began as an easy, safe war for Straight, who in mid-February 1943 arrived by troop train at Miami Beach. While he was in Florida, an American agent for the KGB—code named HARDY—was there preparing a succinct report on U.S. aircraft strength and movements for his Washington control, which was transmitted to Moscow on May 5, 1943.
²⁷
HARDY’s report “from personal observation and conversations with officers” noted the organization of “airplane runs on the southern route.” It also detailed the activity at all the bases, including the type of aircraft dispatched. It was typical of reports relayed to the Moscow Center at this time when the Soviet high command was tracking U.S. military maneuvers as the war in Europe intensified. HARDY was probably Straight;
agents were often known by two or three names, and it’s unlikely that two KGB agents would be sent to Miami.

He finished his training course in Miami and later Marietta College, Ohio, and ended up at Gunter Field, Montgomery, Alabama. He was taught to fly, but where his companions went on to see action (many of them died) in bomber command in Europe, Straight’s knowledge of French was enough to miss the dangers of combat. Instead, from March 1944 he used this knowledge of the language to teach French cadets how to fly.

A few months later, U.S. vice-president Henry Wallace, with whom Straight was soon destined to become bound politically, embarked on a “fact-finding” tour of China. He was accompanied by communist Owen Lattimore, who was on the executive committee running
Pacific Affairs
, the official magazine of the Institute of Pacific Relations (IPR), which had developed a long way from its 1926 charter “to promote cooperation among the peoples and governments of the Pacific.” IPR had been hijacked in the best tradition of creeping communism by Lattimore. It had developed into an organ for the promotion of Chinese communism. Lattimore was leading a faction of so-called China Hands (including Greenberg) in Washington, D.C., opposed to the then-main political power on the Chinese mainland, the Nationalists, under the command of General Chiang Kai-shek. The Nationalists were after an ambitious $1 billion loan, and the request had split the U.S. State Department into two factions. Veterans of the Far Eastern Division, led by Stanley Hornbeck, supported the loan. Communists and other sympathizers, euphemistically known as “pro-Chinese liberals,” were against it. The latter argued that Chiang Kai-shek might use the money in the civil war against Mao Tse-tung and the communists rather than the invading Japanese.

Wallace, always susceptible to extreme left-wing propaganda, wrote in his diary about the Chinese communists being “agrarian reformers.”
²⁸
He visited Mao at his headquarters in Yenan Province and naively volunteered to negotiate a settlement between rival Chinese leaders. Mao was quick off the mark and began mouthing platitudes about democracy and how much he admired it. He even cheekily alluded to the need for “foreign
capital and free enterprise in China,” which in fact he studiously avoided for the rest of his life. But to paraphrase Lenin, which he often did in his
Little Red Book
, why let the truth get in the way of deceiving gullible, greedy capitalists? The ploy worked marvels in the ill-informed popular U.S. press. Even the
Saturday Evening Post
fell for the deception.

“For the foreign reader it is somewhat confusing that this Chinese agrarian reform movement is called ‘Communism,’” the paper’s Edgar Snow noted.
²⁹
“Communism in China is a watered-down thing today.” A chorus of procommunist writers jumped on the popular bandwagon just as Mao began preparing for the last leg of the “long march” that he predicted would take his communists to power. U.S. propaganda, headed by the vice-president, was helping to smooth the path.

Meanwhile, life seemed quite bearable for Straight, based in sleepy Alabama, especially when he could have breaks with Bin and David, who flew to him. The meetings were frequent enough for Bin to become pregnant late in the year, and she gave birth to a second son, Mike, in August 1944. It was a busy period for her as she embarked on a degree in psychiatry in New York.

Straight managed time off in New York and Westbury to see his family. Did he also meet his KGB control on these trips? Straight claimed to the FBI that he finished meeting Green late in 1942. But the KGB still regarded him as an important operative. They did not have a “decommissioning” policy beyond assassination.
³⁰

By November 1944, when the wars in Europe and the Pacific were turning in favor of the Allies, Straight wanted a change from the uninspiring routine of instructing three classes of more than four hundred French cadets over fifteen months.

A call to Tom Corcoran took him out of the rear cockpit in forty-eight hours and on his way to Lincoln, Nebraska, to be assigned to B-17— “Flying Fortress”—bombers. Just when he was being prepared for combat, Straight learned that his close friend from Cambridge, John Simonds, had been killed flying a glider into battle at Arnhem, Holland.

Corcoran had attended to Straight’s minor problem while in the middle of one of the biggest cover-ups by an American administration to that point. It began soon after the night of March 11, 1945, when a five-man CIA forerunner OSS burglar team broke into the offices of the magazine
Amerasia
at 225 Fifth Avenue, New York, which was an “unofficial” organ of IPR.
Amerasia
had been subtly positioned to intellectually guide a “popular front against fascism” as directed by the seventh Comintern congress in 1935. It was a quaint way of not alarming the United States while influencing the State Department, already riddled with KGB agents, and in turn the media and public opinion. According to growing IPR/
Amerasia
propaganda, Chinese communists were not real communists but—in the language taken up by Henry Wallace and a vocal faction of the U.S. government—liberals wanting “agrarian reform, civil rights and the establishment of democratic institutions.” This was in contrast to Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists, who were being portrayed as corrupt and intractable.