Last of the Cold War Spies (54 page)

Straight was more than miffed. “I’ve never seen Mike so angry,” William Elmhirst noted. “He was fuming about being fired—or not reappointed—by Carter. He would lose all his power and status. It hurt.”
¹⁵

Straight reacted while still acting chairman. He told
Los Angeles Times
journalist Barbara Isenberg that “President Carter was politicizing our culture by appointing Joe Duffey to the Humanities Endowment, Livingston Biddle to Arts, and George Seybolt and Lee Kimche to the Museum Services Institute.”
¹⁶

He repeated it all to Grace Glueck of
The New York Times
. It seemed odd to many observers, who recalled that Straight had said when appointed in 1969 that he was attracted to the job because it was “a way of combining the two things I care about—politics and art.” His actions in supporting “revolutions” while in the job had done more than anyone to politicize the endowment.

Joe Duffey rang Straight and accused him of being a “God-damned elitist.” “You and your snob friends may not know it,” Duffey told him, “but your day is over.”
¹⁷

It was, almost. Straight was summoned to meet White House staffer Peter Kyros. He was asked for an assurance that he would not criticize the administration again while acting chairman. He agreed. Kyros then told him why the White House had acted the way it did to Hanks. She had gone behind the backs of White House staff in seeing Carter. She had also started the campaign against Biddle, and then denied it to Kyros’s face.
¹⁸

Biddle was sworn in on November 30, 1977. Straight, 61, was out of a job for the first time in eight years. With few prospects in sight for a future career, he set up a publishing group, Devon Press. It produced his books in 1979, except for his paean to communism,
Let This Be the Last
War
. He must have judged it as embarrassingly political in its vision of Stalin and the Soviet Union. With time on his hands, he was able to make a second trip to Australia, which was arranged by Jean Battersby of the government cultural body the Australia Council. She had met Straight when he was at the Arts Endowment.

In late 1979, Andrew Boyle published
The Climate of Treason
about the Cambridge ring. It hinted at the identities of the fourth and fifth members. Journalists began speculating, particularly on the fourth man. It became an open secret in late 1979 that it was Anthony Blunt. Until now only intelligence officers from the FBI, CIA, MI5, MI6, and, of course, the KGB knew that Blunt was a spy. Then on November 15, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher confirmed it in parliament. Blunt “had been recruited as a talent spotter for Russian intelligence before the war, when he was a don at Cambridge, and had passed information to the Russians while he was a member of the Secret Service between 1940 and 1945.”

(Modin would have been pleased that the prime minister of England had accepted the propaganda about 1945 being the end of the ring’s activity. Modin had been posted by the KGB to England to be its control for ten years starting in 1947.)

The Thatcher statement caused shock waves around the Cambridge ring. Straight realized that his 17-year secret “confession” could come up in relation to Blunt. In order to present an innocent self-portrait to his family, he collated personal diary entries, letters to his mother, and a few to his first wife Bin. He edited them to avoid any remarks that could give clues to his secret life. He placed them in a bound book,
For Noah, His
Uncles, His Aunts, and All His Relations
(Noah was a grandson). He distributed copies in 1980 to the family. Whitney had just died, so Straight felt free to show the letters that painted him unfavorably in the family trust dispute. There was no one then to challenge his version of events. Much of the correspondence was about his children; it created an image of the loving father and dedicated husband.

There was a lull until March 1981. Straight was asked by the Washington correspondent of the
London Daily Mail
, Angus Macpherson, to comment on an article appearing in his paper. It was an edited extract from a book by Chapman Pincher,
Their Trade Is Treachery
:

The long, private game of confession and cover-up was now public. Straight began giving interviews, attempting to explain himself. He emphasized his alleged confession and the image of being the one who blew the whistle on the Cambridge ring. He objected to the flippancy of a Washington radio interviewer who said in an introduction: “And now we go to Maryland to talk to the spy who came in from the cold.”
²⁰

The word “spy” concerned him. Yet in anyone’s language he acted as an espionage agent, or in common parlance, a spy. Seven months later, in October 1981, Straight told Simon Freeman of the London
Sunday Times
he had informed MI5 that Leo Long had been recruited by the KGB. The ensuing article identified Straight as the American “who had himself spied for the Russians.” Then the
Times
described him the same way. Straight reacted by writing to the paper saying that to characterize him as a spy was “simply not true.”

“I did give my own appraisals of the political situation,” he wrote, “to a gentleman who called himself Michael Green.” The difference now was that his audience was much wider than a handful of charmed interrogators at the FBI and MI5.

A magazine article in 1981 about his wife Nina’s novel,
Ariabella: The
First
, painted Straight as an heroic spy-catcher. The piece referred to Straight “as the source of information that helped break the Soviet spy network—fictionalized in
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.
” He was deceptive in the article when he claimed that he “flatly” turned down attempts to recruit him. In 1963 “he gave evidence that later forced a confession from the man who had tried to recruit him, Sir Anthony Blunt.”
²¹

Despite this, his image-making was not working. Scores of papers and media outlets in the United Kingdom and the United States were describing him as a spy. He knew that it would be impossible to refute in court. Instead of suing them, he decided to write his own book,
After
Long Silence
. He sought his own FBI file under the Freedom of Information Act. This was given to him piecemeal. He also relied on his memory of submissions to the FBI and MI5 from 1963 to 1975. The FBI file had gaps in it in the form of blacked-out passages, which ended in September 1963. After that date there were missing pages. Straight later indicated to U.S. agents, such as the CIA’s Newton Miler and the FBI’s Sam Papich (the liaison officer with the CIA), that he had misgivings about those omitted passages. He guessed that they dealt with briefings about him and other KGB agents, such as Dolivet and Duran, by Golitsyn and others.

Straight’s book, rather than being an autobiography or his memoirs, would attempt to counteract the FBI files. He interwove the tightly edited versions of his family letters (mostly to Dorothy) to provide an image of the innocent, loving family man, much as he had done in the cover-up 1980 publication
For Noah
for his relatives’ consumption
.
He threw in literary diversions as further sweeteners. The end product was as far from his secret life as he could get, given what was already public.
After Long
Silence
was devoid of much chronology, with intermittent chapters trying
to explain away the FBI dossier. It was perhaps a too clever cover-up. The book opened up far more questions than it answered.

Straight would have been encouraged by the KGB to write it as part of the continuing disinformation campaign directed by Yuri Modin concerning all the members of the Cambridge ring. He began this with Kim Philby in 1968. Modin edited Philby’s book,
My Silent War
. Rothschild wrote two semi-autobiographical books, which stayed away from his own story and concentrated on essays to do with his work as a scientist and member of the Edward Heath government’s think tank. He mentioned his relationships with Burgess and Blunt in passing, and dismissively. In 1981, Blunt too was drafting his story (which was never completed), as was John Cairncross (who tried to get it published in the United States and United Kingdom for the decade up until his death in 1995. The book,
The Enigma Spy,
was published in 1997).

Straight’s book continued his deception. He even sent a courtesy manuscript copy to Blunt. This demonstrated—until this point—their relationship had not diminished after Straight was supposed to have double-crossed him by the exposure in 1963. Blunt marked up the copy where he claimed Straight was not accurate and gave it to journalist John Costello and others.

Had the two lifetime comrades fallen out at this critical moment? Blunt had kept in touch with English authors Nigel West and Robert Cecil. Straight’s main defense when they contacted him was that the promotion of
After Long Silence
was out of his control.

Straight was concerned now that he might be double-crossed by Blunt. He wrote to him saying he was coming to London. They agreed to meet.

Straight was also in touch with Michael Young, who was now Lord Young of Dartington, having been appointed a life peer by Prime Minister James Callaghan a few years earlier. Young was horrified by Straight’s book. He felt it was a dangerous self-indictment. He told me in a 1996 interview that Straight had been a lifelong Soviet agent. When I asked him what he meant, he suggested I read
After Long Silence
. The answer and explanation were imbedded in it, he said.

Young urged him not to return to Great Britain, suggesting he might be imprisoned, but Young was unaware that Straight had been through lengthy interrogations since 1964.
²²
Straight, aware from his MI5 contacts that there would be no attempt to interrogate him further, flew to London to face the crisis. He and Blunt were forced to cancel the
rendezvous for fear of being followed by the news-hungry media. Blunt then made a statement to the press. He placed Leo Long and Straight in the same category as espionage agents, the implication being that Straight had spied on well into the Cold War. This was a clear betrayal of their secret positions and sworn oaths of allegiance both as Apostles and Soviet agents.

Blunt felt the severe strain of what he saw as Straight’s betrayal and the fact that their disagreements had become public, so exposing and threatening to unravel many secrets of the KGB and its operatives. Blunt and the others had been restrained by fear of reprisals from the KGB all their lives. This sort of media exposure broke all the rules.

Soon after his press statement, on Saturday morning, March 26, 1983, Blunt died of a heart attack in his London flat. The night before, his brother Wilfrid had spoken to him and had found him “in good form.” Blunt’s death took the pressure off Straight. He was interviewed by Ludovic Kennedy on BBC TV and held to the view that Blunt had been controlled by Burgess. “The unanswered question,” Straight remarked, “was why a man of his intellectual stature could have been the willing captive of a gypsy vagabond like Burgess.”
²³

Straight’s body language during the interview exposed his stress. Yet he also appeared to deliver candid responses. Overall the program may have done Straight a favor. Instead of being at the center of controversy, as he had been in the clash with West, he at times appeared the thoughtful, almost detached expert who had plausible explanations for becoming entrapped at Cambridge.