Last of the Cold War Spies (23 page)

The book was also a restless summer escape. Straight was struggling with a regurgitation of his Marxist training in the hope of giving it some meaning beyond his espionage work. He had been in contact intermittently with Green now for a five-year period (from 1937 to 1942), yet Straight was dissatisfied and still not reconciled to those two internal drives. On the one hand, he was under pressure not to let his Cambridge friends down. They had a pact, an Apostles’ creed that he felt compelled to adhere to. They believed they were on the correct path for proper Marxist historical development, and he was expected to assist them, or at the least not betray them. On the other hand, he wanted to fulfill his personal career ambitions. His burst into journalism had given him more than a taste for politics again. He thrived on the public rallies and the response from the crowd to rousing rhetoric. At Cambridge he had measured himself against the best minds in the union and felt he had stood taller than any of them in debate, argument, and management. In five years near the fulcrum of world power, Straight felt superior in ideas, intellect, ambition, drive, and vision to most of those he had met in the corridors of government. On top of this, he had learned how to use his money to get doors open and things done for himself.

Yet the timing was not quite right to make a move into congress. He had to put thoughts of a political career on hold while there was a war. He felt inclined to join the armed forces and achieve something that would add to his platform for politics. It could also be a chance to break from Green. When they had first met, just a few months after Straight had completed Cambridge, he was an arrogant yet raw 21-year-old, much in awe of the secret world he had been led into by Burgess and Blunt. Green had been part of his continuing indoctrination and influence. But five years later, at age 26, Straight had bought, cajoled, and pushed his way through a far broader education in Washington. Green had reduced in size as Straight grew experienced and made contact with the best and brightest in U.S. government. If Straight wanted to achieve for the cause, he wished to do it on his terms.

During the lazy summer months of 1942, Straight doubled up with the book by sending off related articles to
The New Republic
. When isolated within the journal, these excerpts seemed academic and misplaced, especially when the magazine was involved in a more real ideological war with the FBI. The attacks by it on Hoover continued and irritated him; Hoover was not used to such persistent criticism, even from the liberal press.

Green snapped Straight out of his campus reverie at Old Westbury with a phone call in August. He asked for a meeting, which had to be secret. FBI surveillance was tight, particularly in New York, where the main Soviet activity was going on. Straight took the Long Island Railroad from Westbury to Jamaica Station, where he was picked up by Green.
²⁰

They decided against a restaurant meeting, although once they had evaded any possible watchers, it would have been safe, especially in an area where Straight and Green were unknown. Instead they drove around the suburbs of Queens for more than an hour. Straight could not recall the specifics of the discussions, but he passed him information—a “memorandum.” Straight claimed it was a summary of the arguments in his book. Green urged him to meet with KGB agent Earl Browder (code name RULEVOJ), the leader of the Communist Party of the USA, which in itself was a significant step. It meant drawing Straight into the broader secret world from which the Moscow Center had so far shielded him.
²¹

While Straight was on call as a spy, he again could be also most useful to the KGB as a publisher hiring or gaining accreditation for journalists and as a financier. Green asked him to get accreditation papers from unsuspecting Ruth Shipley for U.S. entry of a female Swedish KGB agent, whose work cover was journalism, and another communist, Mark Julius Gayn, also a reporter. He had worked for the
Chicago Sun
and the
Washington
Post
as its Shanghai correspondent. Gayn was a Chinese expert affiliated with the International Pacific Relations group, a communist front, which was receiving financial support from Straight through the Whitney Foundation.
²²
Though obedient to Green’s demands, Straight was irked by them, especially as he was near the end of a book, which needed his full concentration.

He finished it in November 1942 about the time of the birth of his first son, David, and then he joined the US Army Air Corps Reserve, starting as a private.

In December 1942, Straight attended an Institute of Pacific Relations conference held at the Canadian resort of Mount Tremblant in Quebec. There he met two fellow communists from Cambridge who valued his financial support for the group. One was Canadian-born Egerton Herbert Norman, a rising diplomat in Canada’s External Affairs Ministry attached to the staff of General Douglas MacArthur. The other was the “very egotistical, very self-indulgent” Michael Greenberg, a former Trinity-cell member from Manchester who, like Straight, had been recruited to the KGB.
²³
Greenberg was helping to shape U.S. policy toward China and had diligently worked his way up the ranks in the Far East Division of the State Department.
²⁴
After Cambridge, England, he went on to Cambridge, Massachusetts, in October 1939 on a Choate Scholarship to continue his studies of the development of British trade with China. It was a useful mask to hide his espionage agenda.

Apart from their indoctrination at Trinity, he and Straight had a connection with China. Straight was conscious of his father’s fascination with the world’s most populous nation and was keen to help it on the road to communism, which was Greenberg’s role as a clandestine operator.

In late December 1942 Straight had another meeting with his control at a dimly lit restaurant, Longchamps, in New York. Green brought along his wife Helen Lowry, who was Earl Browder’s niece. She went under the cover name ELIZA. Straight told the FBI that she was in early middle age and of “nice appearance.” Her speech indicated she was American by birth. Helen, like her husband, was an “illegal.” According to Straight, they “comported themselves like a happily married couple.”
²⁵

The meeting demonstrated how valuable they thought Straight’s work and services could be. Otherwise Green would not have introduced him to his wife, another important player in the Washington network. (She had been involved in running the rings associated with Elizabeth Bentley, the courier and later defector from the Soviet espionage setup, and Whittaker Chambers.) This would have been a waste of time and an unnecessary risk if Straight had not been regarded as a big asset, even if he were yet to reach his potential.

Straight handed over the accreditation papers for the KGB agents, the woman from Sweden and Mark Gayn. Helen Lowry urged Straight to see
her uncle, which he again promised to do at the launch of his book in a few months time. Browder was then trying to set up a “back channel” link between the White House and the Kremlin. He wanted a contact close to Roosevelt who could carry messages to him from the Kremlin and get responses to them. Straight, a White House frequenter and friend of the Roosevelts, would have seemed a likely candidate for this role, but he would not like being used as a courier. It would also have exposed him to the Roosevelts as a communist, rather than the high-minded liberal that he purported to be. Someone else was chosen.
²⁶

Green asked Straight to recommend other people who were friendly and who could be of use to the KGB. He mentioned Greenberg, but Green showed no reaction. Straight realized that the KGB had already recruited him.

Straight assumed that Green was looking for a replacement for him in Washington, as he was soon due to join the Air Corps. This did not mean that they expected Straight to drift away from them while he was on reservist duty in other parts of the country. Green would have wanted a flow of data and/or assistance from all his agents for the hungry Moscow Center at a critical time as U.S. intervention in the European conflict increased. However, Straight intimated (to the FBI, when interrogated two decades later) that he took their restaurant conversation to mean he was free of Green’s grip.

In a bizarre twist, Straight told the FBI that Green asked him to help find a place to live in Philadelphia “and in obtaining some small business that he could run.” It was further evidence of the trust the KGB still had in their former star recruit and that he could not easily jettison his underground communist affiliations, even if he wished to. He met Browder as planned at the launch of
Let This Be the Last War
, in January 1943.

The book was met with mixed reviews. Friends were kind. Felix Frankfurter wrote Straight a “friendly” letter about it. John Maynard Keynes praised the effort in a letter to Dorothy. “But,” he said, “I wish that Michael could regard politics more than he does as the art of the possible,” which was a gentle way of marking down the tome’s impracticality. The doyen of world economists was kinder to Straight than he had been
to Marx, for he appeared to have succeeded in finding clues to ideas in Straight’s treatise.

The most provocative review came from John Chamberlain in
The
New York Times
of January 5, 1943. In his memoirs, Straight said Chamberlain found “my overwrought style repulsive.” But the reviewer actually said he was “attracted and repulsed in equal measure” with the book itself. He was concerned more with the content and ideology than the style, which was used as a pretext for the reviewer’s disagreement and irritation.

Chamberlain agreed with the proposition for a federalized Europe and a postwar UN keeping the peace and increasing standards of living everywhere. But he objected to the tone of the book, which “kept getting in the way of the sense. Mr. Straight . . . is so humorless in his style that I kept thinking of all the earnest reformers who have tried to drive fallible men beyond their powers of adaptation.”