Last of the Cold War Spies (55 page)

When published in 1983,
After Long Silence
featured a revealing back cover photograph of Straight. He was 65 when the shot was taken. It was the look of a concerned man. He appeared uncertain of what the camera might portray as he stared at it. Gone was the semiprofile pose of self-assurance of a few years earlier when he was forced out of the Arts Endowment by President Carter. Nearly half a century of acting out, then concealing, a double life had etched itself into his former sharp, aquiline features. It left a drawn, ever-suspicious impression. The defensive stare, which interviewers at times found “ferocious,” moved upward from beneath an aggressive ridge of thick eyebrows and heavily lined forehead.

Straight used literary allusions to put his case, but they didn’t quite resonate with readers. He drew on British writer Joseph Conrad’s story, “Under Western Eyes,” published in 1911. Each extract was meant to evoke sympathy for Straight. Kyrilo Sidorovitch Razumov, the main character, betrays Victor Haldin, a mature and admired student, to the secret police. Haldin had assassinated the czarist minister of state. Straight’s attempts to show how he turned in Blunt invited judgment that Straight was not a betrayer but rather a courageous individual for doing so.

Straight quoted Conrad’s description of Razumov after he has betrayed Haldin, who is sent to his death: “An incredible dullness, a ditch-water stagnation was sensible to his perceptions, as though life had withdrawn itself from all things.”

This was meant to parallel Straight’s feelings when he informed the FBI about Blunt, although nothing in his private archive, letters, or diary conveyed any apparent concern for Blunt’s fate.

Then later in
After Long Silence
, Straight again used Razumov’s deception of Haldin. Razumov went out into the wintry, snowy night wondering what to do. If he helped Haldin, he would become an accomplice in a crime. If he went to the police he would betray Haldin and eventually himself. The reader was invited once more to be sympathetic to his “no-win” situation. Straight further quoted Conrad: “Who knows what true loneliness is—not the conventional word, but the naked terror.”

In the same passage in
After Long Silence
, Straight turned to an image of himself when he arrived in the United States in 1937, saying that he was on his own. He claimed to have no roots in the United States, no old friends, no accepted tradition to support him, and finally nothing rational to look forward to.

This portrait seems anomalous to his experience. He had roots at Old Westbury. He was young enough to create many new friendships, which he did with gusto. Straight’s name opened doors in accessing everyone from the president down. He had a choice of attractive women for a wife. His wealth enabled him to take the chosen one with him. Their home was never short of friends and visitors. Rather than a poor little rich boy locked in a state of terror, his actions and utterances gave an impression of a confident young man bursting with ambition.

Straight lamented that he could not reconcile the position he was in (presumably in 1937 when he arrived in the United States to act as a
KGB agent). He claimed he faced a life of deception if he continued as a KGB man, and that this would make him ingrown, suspicious, and unloving. He wouldn’t, he said, ever be able to share his mind and his heart with another human being. It was the dilemma facing all the Cambridge ring, except perhaps for Victor Rothschild, who did share his secret life with his wife Tess.

This was Straight’s description of how he perceived his character and life developing, if he acted as an agent. Yet he did go on with a career as a KGB operative. Over the years of his actions as an agent, did he develop inwardly and become suspicious and unloving? Some family members and friends said he did.

Straight’s book raised more questions than it answered. This caused the exercise in writing it to backfire on him. Confused journalists and reviewers now had more information—or disinformation—to mull over than the sketchy reports from the Blunt affair of two years earlier. Some accepted him as naive and misguided. They accepted his claimed ignorance of how a communist underground operated.

Many reviewers and commentators sat in judgment of him and found him guilty. William Safire’s piece in
The New York Times
asked if he could fairly be called a traitor. “Not really,” Safire wrote, “because no purpose or passion guided his double life. Evidently that word [traitor] is not currently applied to White House aides who do political analysis for the Kremlin, or to citizens who fail to report what they know to be espionage until they know the spy is safely gone.” Safire compared him unfavorably to Admiral Canaris, the German officer who tried to assassinate Hitler.
²⁴

Allen Weinstein’s review in
The New Republic
was also unfavorable. Straight may have been expecting his old magazine to endorse him. Instead, Weinstein touched on the major questions the memoirs raised concerning Straight’s unconvincing portrayal of his control, Michael Green, and his remaining silent when Burgess was doing damage during the Korean War.

Weinstein questioned Straight’s reliability “as a witness . . . on the dramatic events” of the memoir. He cited the example of Straight while at State in 1940. Straight claimed he distributed to other government agencies a “strictly confidential” report by the ambassador to England, Joseph Kennedy. The report predicted military defeat for the British. According to Straight, the report appeared on the front page of leading newspapers
late in the 1940 presidential campaign. He maintained it led Roosevelt to consider Kennedy’s endorsement “worthless.” It forced Kennedy, Straight said, to leave his ambassadorial post “in disgrace.”

In fact, Kennedy returned to Washington from London late in the campaign, Weinstein pointed out, “to endorse FDR for the third term.” The ambassador delivered radio addresses publicized by the Democrats to reinforce FDR’s support among isolationist conservatives.

This example in Straight’s book at once demonstrated to Weinstein the unreliability of his recall and his distaste for the Kennedys. Straight took Weinstein’s piece as a declaration of literary warfare with his old magazine. He used the next opportunity of political disagreement (over publisher Martin Peretz’s defense of Israel’s invasion of the Lebanon) to cancel his subscription.

The
Encounter
review by Sidney Hook said:

The impact of this period put strains on Straight’s second marriage. Yet in 1983, Straight seemed to have maneuvered his way through the minefield he had in part created himself. Some in the circles he mixed with shunned him. But he was ostracized only to the point of a few people refusing to socialize with him, a small price to pay, and typical of attitudes to his politics he had become used to since the 1940s.

Straight seemed inured to attacks. He once felt certain he was part of a world movement that would overrun petty bourgeois rightists opposed to him and his fellow travelers. It was a toughening experience as he weathered the realities of post-WWII Cold War America and the McCarthy period. This, coupled with his social standing, wealth, and protection afforded by top lawyers, allowed him to sail through the decades insulated from witch-hunts, black bans, the political vicissitudes of various administrations, and those years of probes by Western intelligence.

Straight also had the knack of engaging any opposition with his charm and class. He had the measure of the intelligence operatives and journalists who could uncover evidence dangerous to him. As long as he was up with current revelations, such as new information coming in to the NSA, the CIA, and the FBI, he would stay in a position of power over his adversaries.

A chance to stay on top of events came in April 1983, a few weeks after Blunt’s death. Straight was invited to the Conference on World Affairs at Boulder, Colorado, by the organizer Howard Higman, a sociology professor. There were discussions on a wide range of intelligence, political, economic, and cultural issues. The participants and audience included spies, students, academics, fiction writers, and journalists. Straight delivered an essay, “Death of a Butterfly,” at a plenary session, which kept his views on a theoretical level and away from his personal history. Newton Miler, the CIA man who had interrogated Anatoli Golitsyn with James Angleton, was in attendance. So was Sam Papich, former FBI liaison officer between the FBI and the CIA. Both implied that Straight had not disclosed the complete story behind his relations with Blunt and Soviet intelligence. “He tried to intimidate by name-dropping,” Miler recalled. “‘So-and-so believes me, who are you, you little peasant, to say otherwise’—that sort of inference.”

Twenty years earlier, Miler had been puzzled by Straight’s “confession” to the FBI, maintaining that there was nothing damaging in the file and that he would have been given a clearance to work at the Arts Endowment under Kennedy. Straight was adamant that Golitsyn said he was a continuing Cold War spy and agent provocateur. Miler denied it.

Higman asked Straight to return the next year, 1984, now that he had achieved minor celebrity status with his book
After Long Silence
. Straight realized that he could stay abreast of intelligence attitudes and perhaps make some useful contacts. He turned up and spoke for an hour to students. He was antagonized by what he said was Miler’s negative attitude. However, he was given a better reception by Papich and the CIA’s Hayden Peake.

Miler attacked him for saying he did not understand what Stalinism
really meant. Straight responded by saying that he was the age of the students in the audience when he was seduced by it. He maintained that he was studying all day and had no way of knowing what was happening in Russia. More to the point, at that stage, Straight
did not want to know
what was really happening in Russia.
And he certainly was not deep in study at any time apart from during the weeks before exams. Instead he was intriguing with the communist movement and putting himself in a position to be recruited by the KGB.

Miler also thought that his claim about being preoccupied with study was at odds with his other statements about his working on his communist connections at Cambridge when Blunt recruited him. Despite his starry-eyed deification of Stalin, he had visited the Soviet Union in 1935 and was aware of the conditions, even if only on the surface, in one of the world’s most brutal police states.
²⁶

Higman invited Straight back for another two years. He made some lasting friendships, one of which was with Hayden Peake, whom he continued to meet twice a year in Washington. This connection was one of many that kept Straight abreast of issues in intelligence. If anything surfaced that affected him, he would know about it before the media did.

I lunched with the semiretired Peake (a professor at the Center for Counterintelligence and Security Studies, along with Nigel West and others) in October 1996. A soft-spoken and studious man, he brought with him copies of two previous books of mine on intelligence:
The Exile
, a biography of KGB agent of influence Wilfred Burchett, and
The Fifth Man
, about Victor and Tess Rothschild and Yuri Modin. He asked me to sign both books. They were notated with colored strips on scores of pages. Peake told me he had 5,000 books on espionage. He had just returned from a series of meetings in Russia with KGB operatives, including Modin. We discussed the book,
Spies Without Cloaks, the KGB’s Successors
, by Amy Knight, the professorial lecturer in Russian history at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, Washington. Her conclusion was that the KGB was renamed when the Soviet Union collapsed but that it was not reformed. Knight maintained that the “new” Russian security services had acquired more power than the old KGB. It was the only organ of government whose power had been increased rather
than diminished. I agreed with Knight. Peake was emphatic that the new security forces had been trimmed.