Last of the Cold War Spies (43 page)

Nancy Harriman had not yet obtained access to the money from her grandmother’s estate in 1955, and
The New Republic
did not quite belong to her husband. Straight’s name was still on the masthead as editor, but he had written a “farewell” editorial. It marked the fortieth anniversary issue in 1954. While doing research for this editorial, he fell out with Felix Frankfurter over the issue of freedom of speech. Straight had been for unconditional freedoms, whereas the Supreme Court judge had supported some restrictions in the 1950s.

While in Europe for the summer of 1955 for his annual visit to Dartington, Straight took time off for a trip to Geneva for an East-West summit, which was meant to “identify sources of tension” between the Soviets and the West. Straight was there using
The New Republic
as his usual cover for his KGB work. His job was to report anything that would be useful to the Soviet side. He passed on analysis of the in-fighting in the U.S. camp just prior to the summit between John Foster Dulles, the secretary of state, and Nelson Rockefeller, Eisenhower’s special assistant for Cold War strategy. Straight attended meetings of the cabinet, the National Security Council, and the Council on Foreign Economic Policy.

The Geneva summit’s aim was to consider the problems that lay between the two superpowers. After that, the disagreements would be referred to the foreign ministers of participating nations for detailed discussions to see if any agreements could be worked out. Dulles was happy for this arrangement; Rockefeller saw problems. He had summed up the Russians and thought that Nikita Khrushchev, who had taken over as general secretary of the Communist Party after Stalin died in 1953, would bring a number of solid proposals for arms reductions to the summit table. The Soviet leader, always on the lookout for ways to outshine the United States in world opinion, would, Rockefeller believed, make his proposals public. Straight learned that Rockefeller feared the United States would be put on the defensive. If the United States was perceived to hesitate, much esteem might be lost. Straight observed that “he [Rockefeller] saw the meeting as theater and proposed to pre-empt the stage by a bold gesture that would capture the imagination of the world.”
⁹

It was Straight’s job to find what that gesture would be. But all he learned was that Rockefeller’s argument won over the Dulles plan. Rockefeller and his staff of six (including Nancy Hanks, whose biography Straight would later write) moved into a hotel in Lausanne, thirty miles from Geneva. Security was extra tight, but there was no safe in the rooms. The staff carried classified information in a metal satchel. Classified data that they wished to dispose of had to be flushed down the toilet.
¹⁰
This meant that Straight had to be content with tidbits rather than documents to pass on to the Russians.

After three days of preliminaries, Eisenhower told Soviet leaders that “the time had come to end the Cold War.” He handed them Rockefeller’s Open Skies Plan. Straight and his fellow Soviet spies had failed their leaders. Straight said that the Soviet side was stunned by the plan. Western diplomats and correspondents called it “fantastic” and “unprecedented”; Soviet journalists disappeared for several days.
¹¹

But it mattered little. Although Rockefeller had won a public relations coup for Eisenhower, the plan later fizzled. One of its main concepts was a detailed plan for on-site inspection after agreed arms reductions or cessation of an arms buildup. This was fine for the United States. It had long-range, high-altitude aircraft to check on developments; the Soviets did not. There would be no “Open Skies” agreement for a long time yet.

Vladimir Barkovsky was sent to Washington as the KGB’s chief-of-station at the beginning of the summer of 1956 in an effort to speed up its acquisition through espionage of U.S. developments in everything from military aircraft to biological weapons. Money was no object as the Soviet Union turned over 50 percent of its national income to defense, and espionage was allocated a sizable chunk of it. Barkovsky, who had served in the London embassy during the war, and in New York until the early 1950s, was one of the most experienced, hardworking, and demanding controls ever placed in the United States. His specialty had been nuclear weaponry, and he had done as much as possible in stealing U.S. atomic and hydrogen bomb secrets, which went some way to the Soviet Union’s creating their own major weapons of destruction. Now, as station-chief in the most important embassy outpost in the world, his responsibilities had increased.

Barkovsky set out to cast a wide espionage net in the United States with hundreds of agents in Washington and dotted around the country in “strategic” cities and remote locations such as the Midwest—those close to major U.S. military centers. He admitted in our interviews that he recruited people everywhere, even attempting to reactivate agents long considered burnt-out cases. It was now more than a decade since the United States and Soviet Union had been allies, and the Cold War had become worse with no thaw in sight. Now the GRU—the Soviet military’s espionage arm—and the KGB wanted to know about every single U.S. development that indicated a threat or a turning point in policy, strategy, or tactics. Main highways, designed for quick military maneuvers, were being constructed throughout the United States. The KGB wanted to know everything about them, from the contractors commissioned to build them to the routes they would take. A military command and control bunker was planned for construction in Colorado. Barkovsky, who jokingly underplayed his role during WWII at the London embassy by describing his role as a “photographer,” now was in charge of a massive picture-gathering operation of his own. Within months, the new KGB chief-of-station had created the largest foreign espionage operation in peacetime. Barkovsky sent hundreds of agents into remote areas of the United States to create maps and take photographs.

One of his more experienced agents called up for one such assignment was Straight.

S
traight turned forty in 1956, and the year proved to be one of change, at least in his professional life.

He claimed to have assessed his options. He was modestly famous as an orator. Organizations such as the Americans for Democratic Action sought him as its chairman. But his connections to the Cambridge ring— particularly Burgess and Blunt—had ruined any chances of his ever entertaining a political career. Straight could not now go on with his easy life at
The New Republic
, which his brother Whitney had seen to by forcing him to stop financing the magazine from Trust 11 money. That left Straight no option but to sell it off and therefore end his own association with it as owner, editor and even eventually a sometime journalist.

This was an accurate summary as far as it went without being the full story. Whitney argued that Straight’s handling of the magazine had to be stopped. Gil Harrison had finally paid for
The New Republic
, and Straight turned over full responsibility for the magazine to him. It was not difficult. Ever since the Henry Wallace campaign debacle, Straight faced the reality of the magazine’s leaving his family’s control, but he had stayed on through necessity. Now it was time to move on. But to what? He didn’t need money. That would always roll in from the trust. But it was nice to be occupied. And his only long-term true “employer,” the KGB, always
had intriguing projects for him. It wanted him and made him feel useful. He was also locked in and obligated to carry out espionage.

For the latest directive from Barkovsky, Straight needed a better cover than being a political journalist. If he snooped around the West in his allotted states—Wyoming and Nebraska—taking pictures and notes of every military establishment for research, troops, and training, he would invite suspicion. He could have claimed he was doing “local color” stories. But this would have looked strange after one or two articles from a man known for mixing in hot political circles around the power portals of Washington, D.C.

Straight needed something more layered and creative as a cover. He hit on the idea of being a novelist. But what sort of novel would he write? First he surveyed the area.

During the summer, he and the family vacationed at a ranch at Saddle-string, Wyoming. Straight became familiar with the region, first on horseback and by car, and then in the air in his Navion, which he flew over the Big Horn Mountains. He took a keen interest in the area’s history. He noted in his diary that the so-called Fetterman Massacre took place on the road to Sheridan in northern Wyoming, not far from the Montana border. Then it came to him: he would write a Western.

Over time he had to justify this writing move, and his choice of genre, from his past inclinations. He decided to become an author.

But not just any author. Straight was bound to tackle deeper subjects and needed a certain amount of solid background before he wrote. This meant, even with fiction, accessing locations and archives that the layperson might find difficult to get into. As long as authors or writers had the right story to explain why they needed to visit a certain location or to access an archive, they usually succeeded in obtaining the material they wanted. Straight, as a journalist, had useful experience in gaining information. Now as a would-be novelist, he would have similar access. It was a clever, even ingenious new screen as an excuse for wandering around his two target states. As ever, he felt compelled to deceive the family and justify his move into Western fiction writing. He told his parents that he was making a break from his past. Straight said he needed a new challenge and that it was coming in the form of a novel, which was beginning to take shape in his mind.

But he was unconvincing. He had never dreamed of being a novelist as a teenager or youth. He had claimed that books and writers did not move
his generation (except for the British economist John Maynard Keynes). There was no unpublished manuscript of his tucked away in a desk drawer at Dartington or a vault at Cambridge. In fact, creative writing had never challenged him. His horizons had been limited to considering a biography of English economist David Ricardo (1772–1823). Yet suddenly at 40, he had contrived to be a fiction author when until this point he had been consumed by hard-nosed, very political nonfiction journalism.

The first reassertion of this alleged long-dormant urge came in the form of a Western novel—not quite Wyatt Earp or Billy the Kid, but nevertheless a Western. It was a most unlikely genre for Straight to tackle. The story would be set in a ruined fort near Sheridan, the site of the Fetterman Massacre. The theme would be human responsibility. Straight had a further fascinating explanation for setting his first fiction effort in the remote West. The location came first, then the story; the characters and the themes were settled on the geography. The story emerged from true history with the characters who had actually lived out the action around the fort. Once the key people were discovered, Straight set them down on the landscape around which he wished to do his espionage work for Barkovsky.

Straight was working part-time at
The New Republic
on the outside chance that liberal Adlai Stevenson should be elected U.S. president in the 1956 elections. In that eventuality, Straight planned to go back full time to make sure the magazine supported him. In the meantime he was researching his novel in the national archive. His claimed aim was to produce something that lasted as opposed to editorials he had written weekly for a decade.

The book would recapitulate his experience on
The New Republic
. This meant that a lot of pent-up energy would flow into the novel, which he called
Carrington
. It was one of the more inventive espionage covers yet attempted.

While this first novel was brewing, his deeper attitudes to the communist movement were being tested just after the Hungarian Uprising in
Budapest in October 1956. An attempted overthrow of the ruling communist party was put down by an invasion of Russian tanks ordered by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. It demonstrated the brutal nature of the Kremlin regime in the true Stalinist tradition. Straight’s attitude was exposed the night after the election won by the incumbent, President Eisenhower, when he spent time with Cord Meyer and an acquaintance, Leo Cherne, who had just delivered supplies to Cardinal Mindzenty. Josef Mindzenty was the Catholic clergyman who personified uncompromising opposition to fascism and communism in Hungary. He had been arrested by the communist government in 1948 for refusing to let Catholic schools be secularized. He was convicted of treason in 1949. Sentenced to life imprisonment, he was set free during the uprising. When the communist government regained control after the tanks rolled in, he sought asylum at the U.S. embassy in Budapest. Meyer said that Straight believed the U.S. government was covertly supporting Mindzenty and that this support seemed to have led to the uprising.
¹

The Soviet line, as espoused by such agents of influence as Australian communist journalist Wilfred Burchett, was that Mindzenty was a CIA stooge and a traitor who should be surrendered by the Americans to the authorities. Straight had spent time with Meyer and his wife Mary on the last night of the uprising. Meyer had been listening to the last, desperate broadcasts from underground radio stations in Budapest. He was responsible for the CIA’s relationship with Radio Free Europe (RFE), hence his interest in the final broadcasts. A KGB disinformation program was created that charged RFE with inciting and provoking the uprising. The KGB used the Romanian Communist Party newspaper on November 3 to make the accusation, followed by Vasily Kuznetsov, the chief Soviet delegate at the UN, during a security council debate. It became official communist history in the Hungarian regime’s publication,
The Counter-Revolutionary Forces in the October Events in Hungary
.

Meyer did a careful review of the taped broadcasts that had been made in the weeks before the revolution. “We could not find evidence that in this period RFE had violated the standard instructions against inciting to violence or promising external assistance,” Meyer wrote in his autobiography,
Facing Reality
.
²
“Far from having planned or directed the Uprising, both RFE and officials in Washington were taken very much by surprise when the fighting broke out.”

Since the collapse of communism in Hungary, the evidence is that the CIA had nothing to do with the uprising. Yet Straight’s accusation came just three days after the first piece of propaganda came out of a Romanian paper. At the time Meyer had been cultivated as a friend by Straight, and he had no idea of his KGB links. (Meyer wondered later how much confidential information passed on in conversation between friends was reported to Moscow, especially in the light of Straight’s regular lunches with Sergei Striganov.)
³

A contributor to
The New Republic
in 1957 was H. A. R. (“Kim”) Philby from Beirut. He had been eased out of British intelligence after Maclean and Burgess defected. He was suspected of being the so-called Third Man in the Cambridge ring, but Philby had enough supporters in the establishment to prevent his being charged. MI6 thought he might be useful as their man in the Middle East. It arranged for him to work as a journalist for
The Observer
and
The Economist
. With these credentials and his acute understanding of the Middle East problems, it was not surprising he would write for the left-leaning magazine.

Straight was asked about the connection by British intelligence when interrogated by it in 1964, but he maintained he knew nothing of Philby’s link to the magazine, saying he had left it when the Englishman began writing. But this was not accurate. Straight had relinquished his role of editor, yet he was still associated with it. His name was on the masthead as Editor-at-Large and his by-line appeared early in February 1957 on a light article about mules titled, “Are the Joint Chiefs Erring Again?”
⁴
Straight had written the light piece after ten days in Wyoming and Colorado as part of his research into
Carrington
.