Last of the Cold War Spies (56 page)

I asked, Why had he kept such a close relationship with Straight?

“He is a very interesting man,” Peake replied, which was the same un-expansive response he gave when asked how he found Straight personally. The CIA man was not forthcoming about the nature of the discussions with him. However, he agreed that Straight was keen to learn if any new, potentially damaging material about him ever emerged. And if anyone had his pulse on all things to do with the intelligence community, it was the well-informed and -read Peake.

He confirmed that Straight was particularly interested in Venona—the U.S. National Security Agency program to decipher cables sent to Moscow by Russian control agents via their diplomatic missions. This was understandable. He was featured in them.

The U.S. army had been collecting Soviet encrypted cables since 1939. In 1943, the army learned that Stalin, then an ally, was attempting to negotiate a separate peace treaty with Hitler’s Germany. The U.S. army decided to decrypt—decipher—the cables. The military was shocked to learn that only about half the 750,000 cables concerned diplomacy and its foreign ministry or trade. The rest was espionage. Soviet agents had penetrated the U.S. State Department, Treasury Department, Justice Department, Senate committee staffs, the military, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the Manhattan Project, all wartime agencies, and the White House itself.

It was a huge shock to the few Americans who were allowed to know. The Soviets had made the biggest penetration of any government in the modern era. The medium-term aim—regardless of the wartime alliance—was to weaken and overthrow the democratically elected federal government from within. It would be replaced by a communist regime under Moscow’s control. Venona also found that the Soviets were similarly well ensconced in the United Kingdom, Canada, France, and Australia, with the same intentions.

The Venona decrypts—only about 5 percent of all the cables sent— were declassified in 1995. Straight, code named NIGEL, was confirmed as one of Stalin’s agents. Some of the others officially unveiled were:

• Lachlan Currie, a senior White House aide to FDR, who alerted the KGB to FBI investigations of its top agents;
  
• Martha Dodd, the libidinous daughter of the American ambassador to Berlin, William Dodd, in the 1930s. She had an affair with the first secretary of the Russian embassy and passed on confidential diplomatic information to the KGB;
  
• Alger Hiss, chief of the State Department’s Office of Special Political Affairs. He accompanied FDR to Yalta and helped Stalin run rings around the ailing president. Hiss also chaired the founding conference of the United Nations;
  
• Harry Dexter White, assistant secretary of the treasury and U.S. director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF). He was also senior adviser to the American delegation of the founding conference of the UN. He made sure Soviet agents were employed in his department;
  
• Harold Glasser, vice-chairman of the U.S. War Production Board and assistant director of the treasury’s Office of International Finance;
  
• Gregory Silvermaster, a treasury economist. He controlled a sizable spy ring, which, among other things, provided the KGB with huge amounts of information from the War Production Board concerning arms, aircraft, and ships;
  
• Victor Perlo, chief of the aviation section of the War Production Board. He supplied Soviet intelligence with aircraft production details;
  
• William Weisband, the NSA linguist who disclosed the Venona project to the Soviets;
  
• Duncan Lee, a senior aide to the Office of Strategic Services (the CIA forerunner, 1942–1946) chief William J. Donovan, who became one of Soviet intelligence’s sources inside American intelligence during and just after World War II;
  
• Judith Coplon, a Justice Department analyst. She alerted Soviet intelligence to the FBI’s counterintelligence operations—that is, exactly what the FBI was doing to counter subversion by Nazis and communists;
  
• Laurence Duggan, Secretary of State Cordell Hull’s personal adviser. Duggan provided Soviet intelligence with confidential diplomatic cables;
  
• Boris Morros, a Hollywood producer-director. He became an FBI informer;
  
• Samuel Dickstein, a New York Congressman (code named CROOK because he wanted fat payments for his intelligence services). He provided the Soviets with information on fascist groups and war budget materials.
  

Most of these agents had been publicly named, and the Venona program served to titillate by revealing the code names of the spies. Straight’s exposure in 1981, and his attempt to justify himself through
After Long
Silence
, served to soften the blow of the new surge of interest in the late 1990s in his secret life as an agent of a foreign power.

T
he pressure was off Straight by 1985. He no longer had to report to MI5 when he visited the United Kingdom, and the embarrassment of his public unmasking, which had been exacerbated by the publication of his autobiography, was subsiding. He even met up with Tess Rothschild at the bar of the Dukes Hotel, around the corner from the Rothschild’s townhouse in St. James’s Place, overlooking Green Park.

Straight described this meeting to journalists, who were later inquisitive about their relationship after its romantic depiction in his book. He told them that she was grateful for his saving her life. This was in reference to his blocking her move to join the Cambridge communist movement. He vetoed her application. Straight maintained that she was most unhappy about his action at the time. But after 1981, when the Cambridge ring was in part exposed, she allegedly understood why he had stopped her from joining the party. This was true as far as it went. What Straight did not tell journalists was that by bypassing the party, Tess was ripe for recruiting by Blunt and him for underground KGB work.

A further “coming out” was possible for Straight two years later, in 1987, when he attended his class of 1937 reunion at Cambridge. This would have been unthinkable in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. But the years of interrogation by the FBI and MI5 were behind him. Peter Wright
was living in far-away Tasmania, and the witch-hunts had wound down. The MI5 old guard who had fought the KGB was being replaced by a new breed with instructions to widen the net beyond communist spies to terrorists.

Despite some worrying—even terrifying—moments, Straight’s “management” of the long-running disinformation campaign, with connivance from the KGB and fellow Western agents, allowed him to emerge back where it all began. There would still be surveillance of a sort on all members of the Cambridge ring and suspects. But Straight was now free of any obligations to British Intelligence. The reunion was a time of quiet celebration in cloistered halls and bug-free hotel rooms. Spies like Straight and Tess Rothschild had got away with their espionage. They were soon to be the last of the Cold War spies who had begun their careers after being recruited at the university in the late 1930s.

Old comrades lunched and dined in the days before and after the reunion. Straight found himself frequenting clubs such as the Athenaeum in London. The actual night of the reunion, which took place in the dining hall at New Court, Cambridge, was a glittering affair. Straight’s old contemporaries, dressed in dinner jackets, were there sipping aperitifs. Straight mixed with them, especially Hugh Gordon, whom he had first resided with at Trinity College in 1935. Gordon was then working in scientific research for American foundations. Then there was Gerald Croasdell, whom Straight had also drawn into the Apostles in the fresh intake of communists in 1937. Croasdell gave up his work as a barrister to spend his career as secretary-general of International Actors Equity. They, like him, had not changed their fundamental beliefs, which came out in their conversations about world affairs, the fate of communism, and their hopes for a certain kind of future. (Their attitudes would not change with the collapse of the Soviet Union three years later.)

Peter Astbury was one notable absentee from the reunion. His name came up in hushed tones. He had been another of Straight’s recruits to the Apostles. Peter Wright had started hounding him after Straight had given Wright Astbury’s name as one who
may
have been recruited for the Soviets by Blunt and Burgess.

Astbury worked for years on CERN’s European nuclear accelerator project, and this alone would have put him under suspicion. According to MI5 sources, including Wright, Astbury maintained his innocence, and his case had not been “reactivated”—that is, he was not being hounded—in the 1980s. Astbury, like Alister Watson and others, were names submitted by Straight, Philby, Blunt, and the Rothschilds when MI5 interrogated them, leading Peter Wright and his MI5 witch-hunters up blind alleys for decades. It’s possible that Astbury had been recruited and trained by the KGB, but when the crunch came and he was under orders to spy, he could not go through with it. The KGB would have put enormous pressure on him. Later MI5 would do the same, which meant that Astbury, like many others, would have been driven to despair over time. (He was to die two months later in December 1987. Some suspected it was suicide.)

As Wright acknowledged in his book
Spycatcher
, and begrudgingly in interviews in Tasmania in the late 1980s, all the names given up by Straight and other key members of the ring were either known to MI5, dead or false leads, or such small fry that following them up deflected from the main aim of uncovering the major spies.

This all meant that the 1987 reunion was special. It signaled a significant victory for the KGB.
¹

Yet Straight was ever vigilant in the late 1980s as writers probed into activities of the Cambridge ring. There had been a lull since the initial rush of analysis and reports from 1981 to 1983. Straight worried about writer John Costello, author of
Mask of Treachery
. But he died in 1996 from complications brought on by AIDS when he was on a plane from London to his home in Miami. His comprehensive files disappeared, perhaps absorbed or destroyed by his strong contacts in Western intelligence.

Straight and Michael Young kept a lifelong interest in Dartington Hall. In the late 1980s it saw a large scaling down and selling of operations. The school, a nursery in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s for many future fellow-travelers and communists, closed. However, the newly formed Estate Council at the Hall was soon preparing a successor college to maintain the old philosophies in a more digestible, modern form.
Communists had been replaced by ecologists. It manifested from 1990 as Schumacher College.

Straight may well have been pleased with developments. On May 26, 1996, the BBC’s Radio 3 broadcast a study of Dartington Hall. Journalist Patrick Wright reported:

According to BBC Senior Producer Simon Coates, Wright’s analogy followed from what Dartington trustee John Lane had said about the “inevitability of the success of green politics and the intellectual approach underlying it.”

“He amplified his belief that current [British government and Western] economic policies would be unsustainable,” Coates said, “and that such options [including ‘Green’ policies] would no longer be marginalized.”
³
In other words, Lane, reflecting the “new” agenda at Dartington, was saying that radical, Green policies would take over from the current economic wisdom in the West.

“Neither Patrick Wright nor I thought this approach consistent with Dartington’s history of improving experiment and active engagement with the outside world,” Coates added, “but rather one reminiscent of a different argument advanced in the past by other critics (particularly communists) of the current ‘system.’”
⁴

Lane and trust secretary Ivor Stolliday characterized the old Dartington approach as “social engineering.” Lane said that by avoiding the previous ways, Dartington would in future influence the mainstream.

Straight’s marriage to Nina deteriorated until they divorced in 1993. This was followed by another burst of creativity from 1994 to 1999 when he turned to painting. After this further unsustained effort in the arts, Straight in 1999 married his third wife, Katherine Gould, the daughter of
a renowned teacher in Boston, Frank McCarthy. She worked as an art teacher, sculptor, and art critic and later became a child psychotherapist. Katherine, also on her third marriage, had two children with her first husband, Ricardo Levisetti, who was once head of the Fermi Laboratory. She works at a Chicago hospital for disturbed children, Rush Day School.

The Straights’ home base was Chicago, while keeping Chilmark for the summer months. Straight was still fit enough to play tennis regularly, but in September 2003, just after his 87th birthday, he went for a medical checkup thinking he had a hernia. In surgery, the doctors discovered Straight had pancreatic cancer. It was diagnosed as terminal. Straight opted not to have chemotherapy. His doctors told him he had just three months to live. On January 4, 2004, the last member of the twentieth century’s most important spy ring died.