Last of the Cold War Spies (28 page)

“It will be useful for you to have me at the palace,” Blunt told him.
¹⁴
The Russian asked why. Blunt explained that he would be close to the king, whom he claimed was a “very good friend.” He exaggerated the importance of his role. The Russian was not clear how this would help him. If he agreed to let Blunt move, he would have to justify it to the Moscow Center. Blunt explained how much the royal courtiers learned about government, the cabinet, and the leaders of British society. Milovzorov couldn’t understand how this would be better than being at the hub of intelligence at MI5, whose charter was the defense of the realm. Blunt went on to mention that he would be on continuous assignment for the king—which was true—to find as much as possible of the communications between his brother and Hitler. The connections and communications were “very extensive,” he informed Milovzorov.

Blunt gambled on his mission being of great interest to the Moscow Center. But it would be loathe to lose such a great spy from inside British intelligence. Blunt had acted as a conduit for several of the finest subagents—men and women in positions of power and influence with access to the realm’s secrets that Moscow coveted. These subagents, such as Victor Rothschild, would not risk meeting controls themselves but were happy to pass data to a trusted middleman. Blunt was the best.

Milovzorov asked if he would be prepared to carry on in the middleman role, considering so many others depended on him. Blunt feared this request. He felt then, in his weary state, that this demand would place him more or less where he had been for the past four years.

“In certain circumstances,” Blunt replied carefully, “I would be available.”

Milovzorov, with a report now to file to the center, wanted to know exactly what circumstances. Blunt explained that he would be “terribly busy” in his new position. The Russian extracted an assurance that he would be available in “emergencies” without specifying what that meant.

Milovzorov got up to leave, taking with him the rolled up copy of
The
Times
that Blunt had left on the table. Inside the paper was the microfilm containing photos of all the key letters at Kronberg.

The two parted. Blunt was relieved to think that he had engineered a reprieve from the secret world he had been prisoner to for more than a decade. Yet he wondered if it were really the end. He would be haunted by the thought of being contacted again and of more demands. In his heart Blunt knew he would never really be free of his masters. It could be a life sentence, if the KGB wished. They had incriminating details on Blunt’s private and clandestine life.

He took solace from the luck of the king’s assignment. If he were ever cornered and caught by British intelligence, that microfilm, which would be on its way to Moscow by the next diplomatic bag, was his last-resort insurance policy against unmasking and prosecution. No one, he felt sure, would take action against him and risk bringing down the House of Windsor. In effect, the microfilm was also an insurance policy for Straight and every major agent with whom Blunt was ever linked. Not one of them could ever be charged, for it would expose Blunt, which in turn would expose the reigning monarch because of his brother’s links to Hitler and the Nazis. The thought that this was inconceivable allowed the overstressed spy to sleep better at night.

When Blunt was reactivated by his new Russian control Yuri Modin in 1947, MI5 became suspicious of the royal courtier. He was followed. MI5 alerted the palace late in 1947, but predictably, nothing was done about Blunt’s traitorous activity. His insurance policy was working well. He simply knew too much and had to be protected by the royal family. The queen also appointed him as Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures when she succeeded to the throne in 1952.

S
traight spent his last weeks in the military celebrating “peace at last,” carousing in San Antonio, making pleasure forays into Mexico, and lounging about in border towns such as Del Rio, where he celebrated his 29th birthday. Early in October 1945 those fun-filled but frustrating last days were over, and he was discharged. Straight drove 1800 miles northeast to Old Westbury.

He was unsure of where his career was headed. His priority, as it had been since Stalin placed him in the United States in 1937, was politics. He had no desire to return to
The New Republic
, although it was always there as a job of last resort. While thrashing around exploring options in the first week out of the military, he joined the board of a new war veterans organization, the American Veterans Committee (AVC). It had been founded by a sergeant named Gil Harrison, who was still in the South Pacific. The AVC had some communist members from the beginning. It soon would be seen as ripe for infiltration as the new body’s membership grew rapidly.
¹

Straight presented himself, in his well-practiced, convincing way, as he was—a liberal. He realized after the war he would have to be far more cautious than before about resuming contacts with any of his former communist affiliations. The political climate had changed. The four decade Cold War had begun. The Soviet Union, a war ally, was now the enemy that Nazi Germany had been.

With this in mind he drove with a veteran companion and fellow AVC member, Charles Bolte, to Dublin, New Hampshire, where there was a conference to discuss the problems the atomic bomb had caused. It had been called by Grenville Clarke, a senior New York lawyer. It was replete with substantial figures, such as Owen Roberts, a Supreme Court justice; a prominent banker, Frank Altschul; Thomas K. Finletter, a lawyer and later secretary of the air force; and atomic physicist Henry Smyth.

Straight became involved with the hot issue of the moment—atomic weapons. His unique position as a B-29 pilot could have seen him flying the atomic bombs destined to be dropped on Japan, but for his inexperience and minor doubts about his competency as a pilot. Straight expressed no moral dilemmas over the bomb. Yet days after he left the armed services, he was in the thick of a conference of experts with definite positions and interests in the issue of the bomb.

Straight met the 55-year-old Leo Szilard at the conference. The rotund physicist, his face pixieish behind horn-rimmed spectacles, used the gathering as a forum for warning about the danger of multiplying atomic weapons. While heartfelt on his part, this approach was what the KGB wanted in its strategy to retard U.S. bomb developments while the Soviet Union played catch-up. Not only was Szilard, unwittingly or otherwise, passing the Russians an abundance of vital technical data via a KGB agent, who had been recruited by Elizabeth Zarubin; he and the other key scientists were now at the forefront of KGB-inspired and aided propaganda.

The meeting led to the formation of the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists. Straight became its secretary, working with Beth Olds, Szilard’s “girl Friday” in his successive schemes for resolving the atomic crisis.
²
Straight would also have been cooperating with Zarubin’s KGB plant in the office.

Szilard managed to secure his friend Albert Einstein as the committee’s chairman, which gave it weight as a fund-raiser—its main role on behalf of concerned scientists wanting to spread their views and influence government.

At the New Hampshire conference, the forty-seven conferees agreed initially on one point: only a world authority could prevent a nuclear arms race. There was also some agreement on the rather woolly idea of a
“World Federal Organization,” which would take the place of the just born (October 24, 1945) United Nations.

A declaration was drafted, and thirty of the conferees, including Straight and AVC founding member Cord Meyer, a combat marine war hero injured while fighting on Guam in the Pacific, put their signatures to it.
The New York Times
carried the declaration on its front page. For a moment in history the concept of a world government with a representative legislature had credibility. Soon, its impractical nature surfaced.

As enthusiastic as they were, Straight and Meyer didn’t believe it could work. The Soviet government, for one, would not give up sovereignty over its armed forces to an organization it couldn’t control. An idea that rose without trace sank quickly, yet it focused Straight’s mind on political issues.

The Straight family was based in New York City to accommodate Bin’s psychiatry course. They had rented out Weynoke for the war and would not return until at least the end of Bin’s studies. Straight disliked the tensions he found in New York. It deepened his worry about a career. He hurried to Washington to see Tom Corcoran, but he was no help this time and had no suggestions about employment in the Truman administration. Straight’s in-out record from late 1937 to early 1941 at the State Department (twice), the White House, and the Department of the Interior was not one which would engender confidence in an administration chief. Straight then thought of the United Nations, which he had weeks earlier denounced as impotent in the Dublin conference declaration. He went and saw his old friend from the Department of State, KGB agent Alger Hiss, who reiterated that the fledgling UN had no power and talked Straight out of joining it.
³

That left him with few options. One was a long-held fantasy about going into politics. This dream had been thwarted in the United Kingdom, but Straight dreamed now about how he might run in the United States. The ultimate reverie was him as president, given the expectation that the United States would continue the New Deal–engendered move to more left-wing acceptance or domination of politics.

His age, 29, was not against him. Many young ex-servicemen of that vintage (including Jack Kennedy and Richard Nixon two years later in 1947) would enter politics soon after the war. But Straight had wanted a better track record and a little distance to hide his noncombat military duties, which he regarded as a drawback. One aspect, however, of his military experience was a help. He had been forced to mix with “ordinary” Americans, not intellectuals or the rich and privileged. He would never be accused of having the “common touch,” but his service had been useful if he wished to address the average citizen’s concerns.

He could boast about his experience in government and journalism, as long as the press did not uncover the paucity and unsteadiness of those years from 1937 to 1942. The Cambridge academic record looked good, but not nearly as impressive as it would have appeared in the United Kingdom. A U.S. degree would have carried more weight with most electorates. Then again, they would be skeptical of an academic background anyway. Voters in pragmatic, postwar, mainstream America could well ask how it would help them with taxes, services, and grievances in congress.

Straight canvassed a few close family members, friends, and contacts. The consensus was that he should take the chance if he really wanted it. His original sponsors to the United States, the KGB and Stalin, also would have been pleased to see him in congress. This would give them a chance to keep him in active service. Straight’s drive, charm, and capacity for the quick study of an issue and manipulative skills would have seen him attempt to sit on the most powerful congressional committees in everything from budget appropriations to foreign affairs. He had the intellect to roam across the political spectrum, which would have suited the KGB. It had been fed a steady diet of data in the United Kingdom by spies such as Cairncross at Treasury and Burgess and Maclean in the foreign office. In the United States, it had done even better with two hundred agents, many in government departments. Another experienced and well-equipped espionage agent would not go astray, provided the KGB could persuade him to stay involved postwar and to deliver what they wanted.

Running for office as a Democrat would be the start of Straight’s dream to be something important and fulfill his fierce drive to achieve in politics—held since his days in the Cambridge Union. The move, too, would mark a distinct break from the other members of the Cambridge ring, who had mostly settled in the other direction—of gray bureaucrats for the cause. Philby had his day of minor fame and public recognition as an intrepid war correspondent for
The Times
. Blunt had once been a
minor art critic, and Burgess was once at the respectable BBC, despite his outrageous manner, which was a quaint cover in itself.

Yet they had subjugated any personal ambitions for the glory of Stalin and beyond him an even more glorious communist future for the world. Philby was in a back room in Whitehall running Soviet counterintelligence, the most private job of all. Blunt had left MI5, which officially had never existed, and was now (1945 to 1947) on that ultra-secret espionage mission for the king of England. Burgess was in the foreign office trying to make it less dull and bureaucratic, but all the while writing “brilliant” reports for the KGB. By contrast, Straight was about to choose the most audacious career path yet for one of the ring, although there were precedents of high-flying Western politicians working for the KGB. He need not look further than his comrade, Pierre Cot, who had been minister of air and minister of commerce in the short-lived cabinets of the interwar Third French Republic. Cot had presented himself as a radical outside the Communist Party while advocating a strong military alliance with the Soviet Union.

Straight chose to run for office in the Seventeenth Congressional District, in which he was living in New York. The incumbent was a Republican, Joseph Clark Baldwin III, known to his Italian constituents, according to Straight, as “Joe Baldwin de Turd.” The challenger thought he had the sitting member’s measure.

Straight met Bert Stand and Clarence Laughlin, the bosses of the Democratic Party machine, at its headquarters, Tammany Hall, where money talked. They knew Straight would have an open checkbook and could finance a hefty campaign. They were aware of his generous $10,000 support for Maury Maverick in San Antonio in 1938 and the liberal handouts of the Whitney Foundation. Stand and Laughlin didn’t mind his Ivy League appearance and patrician demeanor. Straight’s looks could be beneficial in photo opportunities. His more extreme liberal views could be useful here and there, especially with the Jewish vote. His antifascist views had been presented presciently at times in
The New Republic
and could be used now. Straight’s other stands on issues could be modified to make them acceptable to the diverse New York voting public. They noted his enthusiastic willingness to stump and door knock. He told them of his skills as a speaker, which were important. He had some experience in election campaigns in the United Kingdom and New York. All in all, the bosses were impressed and welcomed him with open arms.

Straight thought about mentioning his undergraduate communist days in England in a self-deprecating, offhand way, but he didn’t want to sow any seeds of doubt in the minds of the bosses with the chubby-faced smiles of welcome. A communist student past, if presented as a vague juvenile aberration, would have been acceptable up until the beginning of 1945. But by the end of the year it would have caused frowns. The Cold War was at its frosty beginning. The glacial shifts of world geopolitics had changed allegiances. Former enemies were now friends, and vice versa. “Reds” were now the target in the popular press. The Pentagon, not wanting its postwar budgets diminished more than necessary, was making the communist threat more menacing than fascism had ever appeared. The FBI and J. Edgar Hoover, although not yet acknowledging foreign infiltration of Russian espionage agents and killer squads, were concentrating on “the enemy within”—the domestic spread of communism. It had become entangled in the director’s mind with true liberal values that had little or nothing to do with Marxist doctrines.