Last of the Cold War Spies (25 page)

All this caused concern and grumbling but not alarm in the noncommunist sections of the administration, until the OSS break-in discovered
Amerasia
was publishing some of its top secret reports almost verbatim. The squad found the suite of offices strewn with classified documents. There was a darkroom for developing microfilmed material, which was smuggled from government offices, photographed, and then returned. The OSS turned the case over to the FBI, which obtained a warrant, raided
Amerasia
, and seized about a thousand classified documents, including papers from the State Department, naval intelligence, OSS, and British intelligence. The FBI arrested six suspects—including the aforementioned Mark Gayn, for whom Straight had obtained accreditation papers; the magazine’s editor Philip Jaffe; and Andrew Roth, a naval intelligence officer. The group was charged with conspiracy to violate the Espionage Act.

The fast-talking Corcoran entered the fray and manipulated a brilliant cover-up for the administration.
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A well-orchestrated response was directed at the FBI, which the liberal and even the popular media accused of curtailing freedom of the press. Consequently a grand jury refused to indict three of the defendants. The government dropped espionage charges against the others, who faced lesser charges of “conspiracy to
embezzle, steal and purloin” government property. Despite this brushing under the carpet, the affair highlighted the depth of infiltration in the Roosevelt administration.

Straight observed all these political developments from a useful distance while being given intensive training on B-17s. He expected to be transferred to England early in 1945, although the European conflict was clearly in its last throes. With the
Amerasia
case making headlines, his thoughts were always attuned to communism, politics, and the shape of a world he would inherit once hostilities ceased. He saw the war as propitious for a revolution in property holdings, but he bemoaned the fact that there had been a worldwide counterrevolution. The United States was returning all the empires of European states (such as England, France, Spain, Portugal, and Belgium) to their former owners. Straight saw it as a poor base for a lasting peace. He gave the example of France taking back its colonies such as Vietnam in Asia. His revolutionary soul was offended by this.
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On April 12, 1945, President Franklin D. Roosevelt died at age 63, a little way into his record fourth term as president. He had used the federal government’s powers to pull the nation out of the Great Depression in what became known as the New Deal. He had been the great white hope for the development of left-wing America, but his passing would shut the door on the chance for liberalism, and anything politically to the left of it, to flourish courtesy of the White House. Roosevelt had played a leading role in creating an alliance with Great Britain and the Soviet Union. He met with Allied leaders Churchill and Stalin in Tehran, Iran, in 1943. Despite his ailing condition, Roosevelt made it to Yalta in the Crimea in early February 1945 for another meeting with Churchill and Stalin. At that meeting, the big three decided how Germany and the rest of Europe should be carved up after Germany was defeated. It was felt by some British and American observers at the time that Roosevelt had been too much influenced in negotiations by pro-Soviet groups in the State Department. Stalin, it was said, had been conceded too much in the desire
to get him to support the Allied war in the Pacific against Japan. More precisely, Stalin was better informed than the other two leaders. He had key spies (including Alger Hiss) in the entourages of both Roosevelt and Churchill.

Roosevelt was succeeded by Harry S. Truman, 60, a failed haberdasher but good political manager and decision-maker. Truman was no ideologue, and if anything, anti-intellectual. Liberals left him cold, and he was not open to left-wing influence. (The Cold War would see him take a strong stance against the Soviet Union under Stalin, whom he didn’t trust.)

In April 1945 Hitler committed suicide in his bunker, and Germany capitulated. The United States’ total focus was now on the war against Japan in the Pacific. Straight’s once-somnolent outpost was alive with change. The B-17 he had trained on was usurped by the more sophisticated B-29—“Superfortress Bomber”—the biggest plane built by the United States. It was the single most complicated and expensive weapon produced during the war. Nearly 4,000 B-29s were built for combat in the Pacific Theater. The plane had been assembled in a rush by a vast manufacturing program employing about 300,000 workers from Seattle, Washington, to Marietta, Georgia, and from Wichita, Kansas, to Woodridge, New Jersey. The B-29 was more evidence for Straight that the system in the United States could produce something special under pressure, despite capitalist imperfections. The point would be driven home to him when he was transferred to San Antonio, Texas, to train in the product itself.

In July 1945 it seemed as if he were to see active duty after all when he and his crew were ordered to Colorado Springs to prepare for a mission to fly Four-Star General James Doolittle to the U.S. base on Guam in the mid-Pacific. The colonel who had sent for them discovered they had little experience flying over water. That led to a grilling of Straight and his crew by the Standardization Board about their knowledge of the B-17, which was to be Doolittle’s carrier. Their exacting examination found him wanting. The combined lack of experience within the crew also influenced the board interrogators. It was a case of from “Doolittle to do nothing.” They were dismissed and sent back to their base by rail.

Straight had mixed emotions about the end of hostilities in the Pacific brought about by two atomic bombs dropped by B-29s on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Yet he expressed no concern at all about these new weapons of mass destruction. He saw them as important for the Allied victory and the 500,000 American lives that were spared because of Truman’s momentous decision to use atomic weapons. In his autobiography he bemoaned the lost opportunities to see combat in not joining the marines, in having the capacity to speak French, and in not going as a copilot to fly B-17s. Straight regretted three wasted years that had interrupted his career as a writer and a member of the progressive movement in the United States. Yet, as he mentally worked through those lost years, he was thankful for the passion he had developed for flying.

He was beginning to consider his future. Sitting on a bunk in his quarters in San Antonio in between flying B-29s in eight-hour shifts, he reflected more and more on the lost chances to serve in combat. A stronger service record would have given him the momentum for a political career, first as a congressman, and later even a shot at the presidency, which was a family expectation for one of its sons going back to his great-grandfather Henry B. Payne. Yet when Straight returned to civilian life, he would not be so concerned with a lack of combat. Politics was still very much on his agenda.

At the Potsdam Conference in Berlin on July 24, 1945, President Truman turned to Stalin and said through an interpreter, “Our scientists have developed a new weapon. We tested it fully. It has a terrific destructive force.”

The president searched Stalin’s face for a flicker, some hint of concern from the Soviet Union’s leader. His expression remained implacable, even benign.

“I’m glad to hear of it,” Stalin responded. “I hope you can make good use of it against the Japanese.”

It was Truman who received the surprise. Stalin’s reaction meant only one thing. He already knew. In fact, the biggest espionage operation in history had been running for nearly eighteen months in an attempt by the Soviet Union to catch up to the U.S.-controlled development of the atomic bomb, known as the Manhattan Project.

Days later the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were all but obliterated. The atomic age of destruction was not merely a complex diagram on a blackboard; it was reality. Despite the stolen and home-produced knowledge the Russians already had, the shock was palpable in the Kremlin. There was a not-unwarranted fear that the United States could now turn its attention to Moscow and finish the job left incomplete by Hitler. Some hawks in the Pentagon were advocating a move on the citadel of communism while the United States and its allies in Western Europe were on a roll.

Stalin responded by increasing the huge espionage effort to gain the capacity to produce his own bomb. Yet the United States, it was learned, was moving on to even bigger and more powerful weapons, a hundred, perhaps a thousand times the force of the one dropped on Hiroshima. The KGB was ordered to hold back that progress as much as possible. A “peace movement” was mobilized to retard U.S. development of new weapons. The aim was to put pressure on the vulnerable key scientists involved in the Manhattan Project, who were concerned about one country—the United States—having a monopoly over the use of atomic weapons. The aim was to contact them through “friends” to obtain vital documentation on the technology. In effect, the KGB wanted to make de facto espionage agents out of them, and to also gain their support in the Soviet-inspired peace movement.

The three top targets were physicists: J. Robert Oppenheimer, an American at the University of California, a communist sympathizer with a strong conscience about his part in the bomb’s creation; Hungarian-born Leo Szilard, who petitioned Roosevelt to develop weapons using atomic energy, and when the bomb was made, tried to stop it being used against Japan; and Italian-born Enrico Fermi, who had won the Nobel prize in 1938 for his work on radioactivity.

These three and several other scientists, such as the amenable Danish physicist Niels Bohr, were assigned code names by the KGB without their knowledge, such as STAR, EDITOR, and PERSEUS, which covered one or sometimes all of them at one time. The KGB’s best agent recruiters were told to focus their skills on gaining the confidence of the scientists and their wives. Elizabeth Zarubin, the wife of the Washington KGB resident, was used to cultivate Oppenheimer’s wife, Katherine, a communist supporter. The attractive, sociable Elizabeth established her own illegal
network of Jewish refugees from Poland and recruited one of Szilard’s secretaries, who provided technical data.
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