Last of the Cold War Spies (44 page)
Read Last of the Cold War Spies Online
Authors: Roland Perry
There is no doubt Philby would have known of Straight after he was recruited by his close friend Burgess. Straight would have realized Philby’s position at the very least after he denied publicly in 1955 that he was the Third Man.
For a short while,
The New Republic
was the outlet for two Cambridge ring members, one of whom was living in the West on borrowed time.
The wedding of 1957 in the United States was between businessman-professor Newton Steers, 40, and the beautiful 19-year-old Nina Gore Auchincloss, in the tiny St. John’s Church, Washington, D.C., famous as a place of Sunday prayer for presidents. Among the groomsmen were three sometime brilliant aspirants for the White House. All had fine intellects, a capacity for public speaking, and the mandatory massive egos. One was Straight, who could aspire no more; another was writer Gore Vidal, the half-brother of the bride, who may have been a fine Oval Office occupant in the nineteenth century or the twenty-first; the third was Jack Kennedy, who would make it, along with his sensational wife, Jackie, the bride’s stepsister and matron of honor.
A black-and-white photograph featured in Vidal’s “memoir,”
Palimpsest
, captured the three hopefuls at the wedding. Vidal, self-assured and superior, stood at the front, looking every inch the front-runner in the race for highest office. Behind him, Straight was just in the picture but not the race. At the far right was Kennedy, the only one of ten faces not looking directly at the camera. In half-profile, he seemed to be looking at Straight, as if he were an interloper. But he was far from that. Straight had cultivated Steers, the former Atomic Energy Commissioner (1951–1953), as a friend and tennis partner and had admired the string of attractive women he brought to play on Virginia summer weekends. One of them was Nina.
The wedding was a setting in which Straight, with his endless charm, reveled. He engaged the guests with his sharp mind and broad knowledge of major issues. Those on the political right, on rarefied occasions such as this, would listen to the torrent of carefully placed and articulated words coming from the acceptable face of liberalism. To those of the left, he seemed to have a position of wisdom on every issue from McCarthy to missiles. Straight’s social fluidity allowed him to develop relationships with whomever he pleased. There were useful pickings at this wedding, from senators to CIA men, business tycoons to academics. After such events, he could write a voluminous report on what he picked up that would be useful for the KGB. He was also in his element with a feast of stunning young women, some experienced and elegant like Jackie, others virgins such as her stepsister about to step down the aisle. He fancied them both, and they were attracted to him too. Straight, in fact, was just the type that these upmarket women gravitated to. He was rich, good-looking, and urbane, and he knew his art. What more could a socially conscious girl want?
5
After the wedding service, Kennedy and Vidal drove across the Potomac river for the reception at the Auchincloss family home, Merrywood, on the Potomac palisades. They spoke of politics, then the event at hand. Kennedy, in his usual analytic style, reckoned that Nina should have married his brother Teddy.
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But she had chosen Steers. (Seventeen years later, when marrying a second time, she would again avoid the Kennedy clan and elect Straight.)
Soon after the wedding, Straight prepared to take off with Rose for England for the less pleasant task of sorting out the legal tangles into which his family had stumbled. Whitney was engaged in the costly withdrawal from the family trust now that all its “operational losses” had been sold. The problems had multiplied since their half-sister, Ruth, had—with her husband Maurice Ash—complained about the failure of the trust to generate more income for them.
Aware that a wedge had been driven between Whitney and matriarch Dorothy since the confrontation at Dartington in 1951, Straight had written to Whitney in an attempt to clear up misconceptions. Dorothy had remained distant and cool to Whitney, who had advanced his already successful business career by becoming a director of the prestigious Rolls Royce company. Yet Whitney held firm in his quest to rid himself of financial links to a family he no longer trusted.
Ruth and Maurice proved less tricky when Rose and Straight learned that Maurice was behind the fresh attempt to leave the trust. He wanted Ruth’s “share” of the Trust 11 capital to invest in a vineyard in France. Rose told him it was not suitable for the trust to indulge in because it was a foreign investment. He and Ruth were easily dissuaded. Rose was able to head off their implied threat to follow Whitney out of the trust.
7
Straight spent the next eighteen months researching
Carrington
in and around Wyoming and Nebraska in extraordinary detail, all the time gathering the sort of material that would please Barkovsky.
The cover story was set mainly at Fort Phil Kearney. He traversed the country, sometimes on foot, notating and photographing the area with the diligence of a map surveyor. Straight described his approach in a 1970
television interview with John Milton, the then-professor of English at the University of South Dakota, an expert on the American West:
I kept going back [to the fort], at all seasons, so that I could see and feel just how it had been when Carrington and his garrison were there. So I stayed there when it was very hot, in thunderstorms, and by moonlight. I made a great many notes, and I took many colored slides, and studied them later on, as I described each scene.
8
Straight later related how he visited Kearney, Nebraska:
[It] was the settlement where the Battalion wintered before it set off for Laramie. And, from Kearney, I tried to retrace its journey, mile by mile. It meant leaving the road at times, and driving along dirt trails. Later on, it meant riding up to Cloud Peak . . . and rolling down ravines where the troops had fun, under Indian fire. I spent one day scrambling around the sage bush and gullies near the Crazy Woman’s Crossing of the Powder River . . .
9
The timing of this 1970 interview with Milton is relevant. By then, Straight had already been interrogated for six years by British and American intelligence services. The CIA was particularly fascinated by his 1956–1962 roaming in the West. They were far from convinced by his novel researching explanation. The 1970 interview was opportune. He could use it to air his impressive literary mien and lay out the elaborate background to his very literary Western.
Milton seemed puzzled by this excessive research. If “mile by mile” is taken literally, Straight covered up to 350 miles from Kearney, in the middle of the southern region of Nebraska, to Laramie, inside Wyoming’s southeast border. Each step of the way, he took notes and photographs, in what may have been the best backgrounded Western ever written. The professor was further perplexed by why an Eastern liberal would bother to write a novel about the Wild West. Straight skipped over that, saying that the ruins of the frontier fort near where he had vacationed in 1956 took hold of him. Milton was further furrow-browed about his approach.
Carrington
was a novel, but Straight approached it more like an historian. The historical novel was a hybrid, Straight explained. The writer started
off as an historian “and then pushes on, by himself, while the historian stands watching him and shaking his head.”
Milton began to pursue Straight on his approach to factual material. He responded by explaining how he covered everything from an ancient manuscript written by Colonel Carrington’s first wife to the Old War Records Branch of the National Archives in Washington. He studied photographs at his former workplace, the Department of the Interior, where he had once pilfered files for his KGB control. In the end, he amassed “more material about the fort than anyone else had put together.”
10
Once he had the detail, he took off his historian’s hat. Straight said:
For me, the important truths lay beyond verification, in the realms of human motivation. . . . Aristotle said that the historians tend to the particular, and poets to the universal. I was after the universal, seeking to reach it through some grasp of the minds and feelings of the men who played the leading roles in the story. For I sensed . . . the story was contemporary and relevant. I did not want to reconstruct the past. I wanted to interpret the present.
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This further confused Milton. By all means, research, but instead of behaving like an historian, why not perform like a novelist from the beginning?
Straight went on with his sophisticated explanation. It would be a useful public outpouring that he hoped would explain satisfactorily his heavy leg work day and night. But this daring attempt to scramble his tracks backfired. The CIA didn’t buy it. Yet unless they could prove that he passed on the data to the KGB, they couldn’t charge him with anything. And as Straight was very careful about what, when, and where he conveyed things to the KGB, it was unlikely that anything would be uncovered.
While Straight was wandering remote areas of the West with his trusty Leica, occasionally ducking bullets from hunters, Michael Young was publishing his book,
The Rise of the Meritocracy
, a satirical, sociological appraisal of a futuristic British society run by an IQ-justified hierarchy. Young’s tongue-in-cheek account made use of his pent-up communist sympathies, nurtured in the 1930s at Dartington and the London School of Economics. Those sympathies had been released through his membership in the Communist Party and endeavors to develop progressive institutions in consumerism and education. The final, almost science-fiction, section predicted a 2034 revolution against the new elite by the “poor, bloody-minded and unintellectual.”
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Young wrote:
