Last of the Cold War Spies (8 page)

Straight tried to impress Vakhtangov’s widow that his stepfather ran an experimental enterprise, with special socialist significance, which was a bit like a Greek city-state. Straight only made Madame Vakhtangov understand that Leonard was a farmer—a Kulak. She was disdainful. Farmers were class enemies of the workers. She inquired about Straight’s mother. “He tried again in French to portray Dorothy in her full artistic milieu at Dartington, but could only make her comprehend that she was a farmer’s wife,” Michael Young recalled. Madame Vakhtagnov frothed about the iniquity of a woman’s lot as a Kulak slave. It was the fate to which women were condemned in capitalist societies.
¹⁴

After visiting Moscow, the tiny party went on an arduous two-day train trip to Kharkov and Kiev, while the Blunts stayed behind. Wilfrid continued his art pilgrimage. Anthony met his KGB masters from headquarters at Dzerzhinsky Square for further inspiration and instruction.

Straight, Young, and the others were forced to suffer the airless discomfort of a primitive train. The depressing atmosphere caused them to dwell again on the scatological. The lavatory had a poster for those who could not read. It showed the difference between a peasant, whose aim and method was inadequate for reasonable hygiene, whereas an enlightened worker demonstrated how it should be done. Most of the tourist’s fellow passengers were apparently not enlightened, Young recalled.
¹⁵

It was a case of welcome to the real world of the workers’ paradise, yet most of these youthful communists were kept ignorant of more pertinent realities, such as the mass arrests going on across the country, the torture, and the general development of the then-worst police state in the world, fascist Germany included.

The Russians encountered on board the train seemed a little primitive and xenophobic as they drank vodka, smoked, and boiled tea. They gave no clues to the blinkered bunch of foreigners of the nation’s plight. No communication meant no hints about the Stalinist malaise that had gripped Russia and turned it into a state of fear. An instance of harsh scare tactics and the nation’s poverty came when the students were stunned at night to hear gunfire. The train shunted to a halt. The curious travelers hurried to the end of their carriage to see a small group of starving children cowering on the steps. They had stolen on board at a remote stop in the middle of the night. The guards were searching for them. The shots were meant to make them flee the train.

At Kiev such incidents became dim memories in between slumber as the tourists were taken by bus to a hotel, then a horse race meeting. “It was rather like the Melbourne Cup,” Young remembered imaginatively. “All the jockeys wore brightly colored caps and there was a big, raucous crowd.”

The tour was also taken to a camera factory in Kiev. “The plant was run by a big fat man who happened also to be the headmaster of a school,” Young said, putting a benevolent spin on Russian intelligence operations once more. “The school was set up and controlled by the KGB. It was composed of homeless children from the Russian Civil War who had been brought together by the KGB. In the morning they would do their school work, have lunch, and then go to the factory to make cameras.”

Without prompting, Young then began to speak of an incident at the factory involving Straight. “Michael Straight had a Leica camera, and the plant manager took a great interest in it,” Young said. “He asked Straight if he could take it away and examine it. Straight agreed. It was taken to bits, photographed, put back together and returned.”
¹⁶
It was a mild form of spontaneous industrial espionage that delighted the 19-year-old Straight.

The group returned to Leningrad and on September 12 joined the merchant vessel
Smolny
for the return trip to London. Also on board was Harry Pollitt, whom Mayhew recalled spent his time making notes and planning a new offensive against fascists. Pollitt’s appearance made sure that MI5 scrutinized the names of all who sailed with him. Nancy Cunard, the millionaire London hostess, happened to be on board. She provided light relief for the other travelers by flirting with a black Russian dancer and with Wilfrid Blunt, when both would have preferred each other.

Once back in Cambridge, Blunt reported to Deutsch on the trip and then wrote an art report about it for
The Spectator
. His experience had only confirmed his dedication to communism. This was more than hinted at in his writing, where under Straight’s precocious influence, he attempted to apply Marxist theory to aesthetics. Works of art, Straight suggested, could be judged by their historical impact instead of their intrinsic worth.

Blunt continued with this kind of analysis, which damaged his reputation as an art historian and critic. Marxism, rather than a fair aesthetic sense, dominated his judgment. This reached a point of absurdity when he later attacked Picasso, one of the most important artists of the twentieth century, for his painting,
Guernica
, which had been inspired by the horrors of the Spanish Civil War. Blunt, in a deluded critique, dismissed it as “disillusioning . . . it is not an act of public mourning but the expression of a private brain storm, which gives no evidence that Picasso has realized the political significance of Guernica.”
¹⁷

Blunt’s assessment of the potential recruits on the Russian trip was more acute. His job—and to a lesser degree Burgess’s—now was to seduce to a deeper cause those who showed the right temperament and dedication on the tour.

Top of the list was Michael Straight.

D
orothy became worried as Straight entered his second year at Cambridge and took up residence in suite K5 at Trinity College with another communist, Hugh Gordon. His letters and utterances to her waxed between fanaticism and a callousness she had not before detected in her son.

He mentioned to her and others the death of the poet, A. E. Housman, who had lived in the suite above his. Straight and his friends had ignored him as he shuffled down the stairs and into the diminishing autumn sunshine for his daily constitutional walk. They laughed him off when he tapped his cane on the ceiling to noisy K5, where the students reveled below playing loud music on Straight’s gramophone. One day the cane stopped tapping.

Straight demonstrated the indifference and arrogance that touched Michael Young at Dartington when he wrote that they did not pause to mourn Housman. The poets of his generation were the ones who moved them. Cambridge was not now a place for old men.
¹

No creative or intellectual writers motivated Straight, although he was inspired, in a limited way, by the ideas behind Keynes’s book,
The General
Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money
. This book was not published until 1936, but all economics students such as Straight were familiar with
everything in it long before this. Keynes had been preaching his views in lectures and papers since he first appeared at King’s College in 1909.

The Spanish Civil War, rather than thoughtful documentation, moved Straight’s generation. If he and his contemporaries read anything it was supporting magazines such as
The News Chronicle
,
New Statesman
, and
Palme Dutt’s Monthly
.

Straight began misleading his mother and the family, dolling out just enough careful information that would lead her to believe he was a socialist (not a dirty word in 1935) or a liberal working in communist cells, but not out of any conviction. He admitted he was recruiting others to the cause but alleged, disingenuously, that he didn’t know what was driving him to do it.

Remarks to his mother and family members demonstrated that he was seeking Dorothy’s approval by suggesting that his activities in the communist cells were not carried from a sense of conviction. He even wondered if he was damaging the lives of new people he was drawing into the movement. He claimed, plaintively, he didn’t know why he was doing it.
²

However, by late 1935, he had strong feelings of affection for Cornford, Klugman, and Dobb; they gave him an inexplicable sense of comradeship. But just in case his parents became concerned, he let them know that he had been all evening with Klugman, his brother Whitney’s friend Guy Burgess, and an art historian named Anthony Blunt. This sugar-coated his closeness to the two leading Soviet spies and recruiters at the university. The family knew Whitney was a true-blue conservative, and Dorothy and Leonard would have assumed that Burgess was probably conservative and most likely harmless. Blunt’s profession would have seemed also to be nonthreatening and on the surface, apolitical.
³

By this stage Burgess was cultivating right-wing groups and was using Whitney for introductions to influential conservative figures. The views of Whitney, the playboy sports enthusiast, weren’t in accord with the rest of the family. He had no time for radical politics. A fellow rich racing-car fanatic, Victor Rothschild, had first introduced Burgess to Whitney in 1934.

Still Dorothy was worried. Implanted in her mind was the 1919 message about Straight from her dead husband Willard via the Maryland medium: he will have a very deep mind and he will have to be taught to meet problems of all kinds. Furthermore, Tagore had spent May and June
of 1935 at Dartington and had refreshed her strong spiritual feelings. It was time to dispatch someone like him to her son to assess the situation. She sent her close friend Gerald Heard, a philosopher with spiritual interests.

He wrote to Straight and said he was coming to Cambridge in November. He was invited to lunch. Straight knew his mother’s concerns and was a step ahead of her. He invited Cornford to the lunch, having forewarned him of Dorothy’s worries. There was small talk for an hour before dictatorship was discussed.
⁴
Heard tried to draw Cornford out on his Marxist views, but he was evasive. The philosopher asked him if he really believed that any individual was wise enough or good enough to hold unchallenged authority, even for an hour.

Cornford gave an irrelevant light answer to this allusion to Stalin by saying that the communist movement had put the fear of God into the bourgeoisie. Heard reported back to Dorothy, and her fears were lessened. Straight decided he would invite Burgess and Blunt to Dartington as soon as his second-year exams were over so they could allay any further concerns. He knew Burgess, with his capacity for charm and intellectual brilliance, had already become the Rothschild family’s financial adviser. (Dorothy was not in need of financial advising, for she was in the process in the winter of 1935–1936 of giving up her American citizenship and creating a tax-free family trust, which incorporated all her American properties, including Westbury and
The New Republic
.) Blunt, too, could impress, not so much with his charm but more with his manners and erudition on art.

Meanwhile on campus, Straight coasted with his studies and threw himself into communist politics, working with Dobb planning demonstrations and parades and even some mornings selling
The Daily Worker
. He jumped on political platforms wherever he could and railed against fascism, one day in demanding sanctions against Italy in response to Mussolini’s invasion of Abyssinia, the next in questioning actions of the Nazis in Germany, the following week in opposing Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists.

A contemporary of Straight’s characterized him at this time in the book
Anthony Blunt, His Lives
by Miranda Carter:

Straight’s all-encompassing exuberance for matters communist even spilled into his creativity. He wrote and performed jazz songs that celebrated social issues.

Straight immersed himself further in Marxist theory at the newly formed Political Economy Club. He ran up against ridicule from Keynes, who called Marxism “complicated hocus-pocus, the only value of which was muddle-headedness. I read Marx like a detective story, trying to find some clue to an idea in it and not succeeding.”

Straight brushed this surprising criticism aside. Keynes was well aware of the mood at Cambridge and that scores of dedicated undergraduates saw Marx as infallible. Perhaps it was an intellectual tease to stimulate minds that had been dulled by blind idolatry. By nature Keynes was an iconoclast whether in dealing with established laissez-faire economists or in his blistering sketches of President Woodrow Wilson, France’s President Georges Clemenceau, and Prime Minister Lloyd George at the Versailles Peace Conference after WWI. They exacted excessive reparations from Germany, which Keynes correctly predicted could not be repaid.

Keynes’s remarks about Marx did not affect his sympathy for communism in the 1930s. Despite being homosexual, he had married the talented and charming Russian ballerina Lydia Lopokova in 1925, which had given him strong links to certain Soviet citizens, as King’s College archival letters, by and to him, testify. These included a brother in Leningrad with whom he corresponded at length and gave his expert analysis on Western economies and leaders—succinct intelligence, which a thousand agents would not have been able to steal or concoct.

When he wasn’t at meetings and lectures being stimulated by Keynes, Straight was preparing for debates in the University Union Society where he and Cornford took up the communist cudgel against its conservative
members. They ran together for the union committee and were elected. Straight proved a strong debater. It boosted his self-confidence. He saw himself as a future political leader. He discovered (he wrote several decades later) in the autumn of 1935 that he had the power to lead his generation and to take his place with the leaders of England in debates. He was “someone.”

Straight knew his family history well and always thought that it was his birthright to lead. His great-grandfather, Henry B. Payne, sought the presidency until he was seventy-seven. His grandfather, William Whitney, was once touted as a candidate for the White House but instead was a force in Democratic Party politics. His father Willard, like Payne and Whitney, had the confidence of the presidents of his time. Straight felt political power and influence was in his blood.

His fever to go further and actually be a famous leader, perhaps prime minister, maybe president, was matched by the barely contained excitement of less public developments. Top of the list was his all-encompassing communist activity with the cells and the private chats with Blunt and Burgess. They had been directed by the Kremlin, and their “controls” Deutsch and Maly, to influence recruits with subtle talk about “old societies being replaced by new” and the historical need for revolution. There was no direct conversation about being recruited for Stalin’s purposes. Straight was potentially a willing accessory to the Kremlin’s operations, but the timing had to be right for full recruitment.

Blunt and Burgess spoke of the “The International”—the global communist movement, Stalin’s tightly controlled subversive operation outside the Soviet Union. The utterances of Blunt and Burgess were sweetly digestible for gullible, and not so gullible, youths.

Straight was attracted to the idea of national boundaries being broken down because it lessened, he thought, the conflict between nations. He made out that he and his fellow communists/students fell for this utopian concept that would lead to some unspecified, ill-defined international government. The other factor was the leader of the Comintern, Bulgarian communist Georgi Dimitrov. Cambridge students were always searching for heroes, and this man seemed to be nearly perfect. He had defended against Nazi accusations during the German Reichstag (Parliament) fire trial of 1933. His position made the International movement even more alluring, although Straight was never under any illusion that the Comintern was anything other than an operation controlled by the Kremlin.

Straight took time off in December 1935 to indulge some passions reserved for those who could afford it: flying and racing cars. He joined Whitney, a superb if daring pilot, in a De Havilland Dragon for a flight to South Africa and its first Grand Prix. Whitney won in his Maserati, and Straight came in third in his sports car, built by Reid Railton around a Hudson engine.

Then it was back to Cambridge. Straight had a girlfriend at Dartington named Herta Thiele, a German dancer about his own age who had replaced the more mature Margaret Barr in his affections. But neither of them gripped his romantic interest like Teresa (Tess) Mayor, with whom he became acquainted in his second year. Tess was a stunning young firebrand, who in her first year—1935–1936—gained a reputation as a fanatical communist. Her Cambridge and literary pedigree was long. Her philosopher and educator father Robin had been a fellow of King’s College and a member of the Apostles. Her mother was a playwright. The author F. M. Mayor was an aunt, as was writer Beatrice Webb.

Dark-haired Tess had a wide mouth, which gave her “a slight look of decadence, especially when she had been drinking.”
⁶
Straight likened her to stunning Irish rebel Maude Gonne, the lover of poet and Irish nationalist politician William Butler Yeats. Straight thought Tess had Maude’s gaunt nobility and some of her cold fire.

The Comintern became interested in her too. She slipped, like Straight, willingly into the web of Cambridge communists. Soon she was close friends with recruiters Blunt and Burgess. Rothschild was more than infatuated with her, as was Brian Simon, who was also struck by her looks and intellect.

Straight made a bid to seduce her, kicking his fellow lodger out of K5, playing Mozart, and pretending to read Yeats’s poems as she arrived for afternoon tea. Perhaps his technique lacked something. He didn’t succeed in his quest.
⁷
The KGB would later prove more dexterous in dealing with her.