Last of the Cold War Spies (21 page)

After his meeting with Guy Burgess on July 8, 1940, Straight informed his wife Bin of his secret work and his links to KGB agents Blunt and Burgess. Bin Straight said she was very disturbed by the news. She asked him to break off contact with Green by early the next year.
³¹
(Bin never had anything to do with his underground activities.) This disclosure was an added pressure. The Krivitsky affair drew Straight deeper into the KGB net.

Was it getting enough out of this very special agent? There was always a feeling, first allegedly expressed by Theodore Maly, that Green was not
up to the task of nurturing this exceptional recruit. The thought gained currency at the Moscow Center.

Arguably the best controller of personalities as such, Yuri Modin, who handled the varying characters of the Cambridge ring with the natural aplomb of a man twice his age (he was 24 when he first met Cairncross and Blunt in England in 1947), would have dealt with Straight in a more lateral, sophisticated way.

His psychology in manipulating the childlike Cairncross, the cynical Blunt, the outrageous Burgess, and the tough-minded Philby was outstanding. Yet Straight was another individual altogether. In our interviews, Modin indicated that he would have done a better job than Green. “Straight was not handled well,” he said. “It should have been done far, far better.”
³²

All controls in the Comintern and after were encouraged to study the psychology of their charges and to know every detail about them. But following Maly and Deutsch, who had chosen Straight, there was a lapse in attitude of later Russian controls. Anatoli Gorsky, Ivan Milovzorov, and others had been too brusque with Burgess, Blunt, and Cairncross, even to the point of bullying them. While Straight never complained about Green this way, there seemed to be an emphasis on drilling rather than encouraging him. Green was efficient and friendly enough yet more concerned with his own point-scoring in Russia than playing psychological games. He had his own career to worry about, not to mention a score of other spies supplying data. These were low-key types who were more ideological than ambitious. They received enough stimulation from a stolen document here and piece of equipment to be photographed there. It was all for the cause and against fascism. That was incentive enough.

Yet even given a control like Modin, it is doubtful that Straight’s political ambition would have been sated by any amount of praise, cajoling, encouragement, and ego-soothing. Straight had drives that had to be met. They went beyond being a small-time thief and research analyst for a foreign power. If he could, he would manage all his aspirations.

S
traight had to have a plausible reason for his sudden departure from State again, especially after using his connection to the president and the First Lady to get in the department both times. His thin explanation was Roosevelt’s decision to replace Joe Kennedy as ambassador to Great Britain with John G. Winant, a former Republican governor of New Hampshire. The appointment was announced in the press on February 10, 1941, and shared the headlines with Krivitsky’s death. Winant toured the State Department soon afterward, where he met Straight and talked about Great Britain for an hour.
¹

This hour, Straight claimed, inspired him so much that he wanted a job with the urbane, strong Winant. The haste with which he moved to have strings pulled for him had the same resonance as his original effort to enter government via the Roosevelts, along with his more recent bid to slip back into State. The first string to a possible new posting was Ben Cohen, who had joined Winant. Straight also phoned Felix Frankfurter (whom he had contacted in 1933 to help him get into the London School of Economics) at the Supreme Court and told him he wanted to be on Winant’s staff in London.
²

Winant was more successful than Jack Hickerson had been at State in blocking the precocious Straight, who again used his family (this time
brother Whitney at a Royal Air Force base in the United Kingdom, which Winant visited) and connections to leap over career professionals. Yet if Straight were going to be thwarted, it had to be by the commander-in chief, not a mere diplomat. Roosevelt, he claimed, had vetoed the request because he suspected Straight would resign from the embassy staff and join Whitney at the RAF.
³
The perspicacious president, it seems, was wise to Straight’s apparently capricious nature. His basic drive, however, he explained, was that he wanted a challenge.

His mother must have been concerned that he was behaving similarly to his father, Willard. He didn’t appear to have enough staying power for any one job. At the very least, his desire to leave government would have been a surprise. Weeks earlier Dorothy wrote from New York to Miss Hull-Brown, her secretary at Dartington, expressing her pride in Michael’s progress. She noted that Michael had presided over a public event at which key politicians and the attorney general spoke. Dorothy was enchanted by a story of doing the rounds in Washington that said if you wanted something done, you saw President Roosevelt about it because he had “more influence with Michael Straight than anyone else!”
⁴

Straight made sure to keep impressing his mother, and it enabled him to gain her approval for the move to
The New Republic
. The magazine’s editor, Bruce Bliven, had no choice but to accept Straight’s unabashed use of nepotism. Straight’s view was that Bliven was not quite bright enough for his position. He was, Straight maintained, a working journalist rather than an editor of an intellectual journal.
⁵

According to Straight, Leonard Elmhirst had told Bliven that
The New
Republic
’s approach to the war was callous and timid. The magazine, which had survived for nearly thirty years, suddenly needed something more sensitive and courageous in its makeup. Bliven was in for a shock. The self-styled “loose cannon” Straight had already started work on a 30,000-word article, something new for the magazine. The topic? The U.S. defense program.
⁶
Bliven had no choice but to publish it as a special supplement, which took three weeks to produce.

There was a great deal of overlap while Straight finished his time at State, according to him, about April 24. (The FBI had his resignation from State as February 28, indicating he gave seven weeks’ notice.)

After nearly thirty years of frugal budgets and advances, the magazine spent more—from week one of the brash young Straight’s arrival—which was a sign of things to come. But he still had to justify increased expenditures at the battling, low-circulation magazine. Straight had found a little office for $50 a month in an old brownstone near Connecticut Avenue, coincidentally the place where his mother had been born. He hired writers Helen Fuller, Bill Salant, and Alfred Sherrard, along with two young economists from the Federal Reserve Board who had assisted him on the supplement.

The thirty-two-page report, “Democratic Defense,” was published February 17, 1941. No doubt subscriptions to the magazine went up at the Kremlin and in Berlin. U.S. defense capability was an area of great interest to future enemies of the United States, particularly as it was expected sooner or later to enter the war. Now they could read about it in the Straight family organ.

The published report, for example, gave estimates of essential raw material production of steel and aluminum, which would easily have been extrapolated into defense industry production of, say, fighter aircraft. In one item titled, “Why We Are Falling Behind,” the author noted: “Magnesium is a vital armament production. It is even lighter than aluminum and is equally strong. . . . I. G. Farbenindustrie raised German production in 1940 to 50,000 tons. Our production in 1940 was under 5,000.”
⁷

Another article, “Capacity and Defense,” detailed everything from steel production to the military’s copper requirements. And so it went.

Straight and his team were able to get in doors throughout the Washington defense industry on the basis that they were writing about the need to put the nation on a production footing in preparation for a war against fascism. It was a call not so much to arms but rather to massive central government control of essential industries. Fascism had presented an enemy that no liberal or anyone with the facts about its methods and intent could fail to hate. The only way to combat it, according to Straight and his crew, was with a full-blown socialist approach.

The report attacked Roosevelt’s Office of Production Management and the businessmen he had called in to run it with such comments as “We have placed our defenses in the hands of men to whom the defense of democracy means the preservation of profits.”
⁸

The unions loved it. Straight’s friend Felix Frankfurter rang and complained about the harsh judgment of businessmen. But Mrs. Roosevelt was interested enough to invite him to the White House for lunch. According to Straight, she was thrilled and had highlighted parts of the article for the president.
⁹
Roosevelt had never been quite as enthusiastic
about Straight as his wife. She was not sure whether he bothered to read the highlighted pieces of the magazine. (On another occasion, when she insisted he read a Straight piece, he complained, “Do I have to?”
¹⁰
)

Straight’s hefty lunge at big business was bold enough, but the supplement also stretched itself into a social treatise and touched on civil liberties. In this section was a full-blooded attack on the FBI. It noted the bureau’s “compilation of a card index . . . listing thousands of individuals and groups, labor unions and labor leaders, writers, publishers, speakers and articulate liberals. . . .”
¹¹

There was a subtle attempt to protect Straight’s own position:

Then, borrowing from Lenin, the writer of this section concluded with the phrase “What Must Be Done” (often used in print by Straight) and called for the firing of J. Edgar Hoover. He suggested that the FBI should be “deprived of authority to investigate the non-criminal activities of American citizens.”

Hoover responded angrily by writing to the magazine and opening a file on Straight, Dorothy as the true “owner” of
The New Republic
, and some of its editors. Hoover had the magazine investigated, and this led to an FBI report to the criminal division of the Justice Department. It had to judge if prosecution were warranted against Editorial Publications Limited,
The New Republic
’s holding company, which was set up in Canada under the control of the family trust created in 1936 by Dorothy. Hoover wanted the magazine charged for failing to register “in compliance with the provisions of the Foreign Publications Act.” The Justice Department investigated and decided that “prosecution was not warranted.”
¹²
Yet this incident showed the extent of Hoover’s thirst for revenge.

Undeterred, the magazine replied to Hoover’s letter with an article in the April 28 edition.
The New Republic
defended its original attack, citing Hoover’s remarks to a House hearing. It mentioned the FBI’s fingerprinting of employees at industrial plants “to ascertain whether these individuals have been engaged either in criminal or subversive activities.”
¹³

A month later, in the May 26 edition, the magazine kept up the pressure on Hoover in an article, “The FBI and Its Money.” This questioned the big boost in the bureau’s budget and warned Hoover against the misuse of funds.

“We hope,” the article began, “that J. Edgar Hoover uses his sixteen millions to detect any potential crime and not for any other purposes.” It again went on to attack his card-indexing, wire-tapping, and “crack down” on minorities “holding unpopular beliefs.”

It was just the sort of defiance from his enemies among “pinkos and liberals” which brought out the worst in Hoover.
The New Republic
building and Straight’s Washington office were now under surveillance.

However, whether unaware or otherwise of the attention that he had drawn to himself, Straight was enjoying the change.
The New Republic
seemed to have given him a new lease on life. He wasn’t a journalist at heart, but he was satisfied if he could become the voice of the young New Dealers working for a progressive defense policy. At least this was part of his cover.

He wrote several articles in 1941 and thought that they were the best commentary on the defense program. In his inimitable style he pulled together the far-left New Dealers who had lost favor with Roosevelt and focused them on a socialist approach to defense.

Straight reveled in pointing out a “conspiracy” that General Electric (GE) had with (German group) I. G. Farben “to obstruct the production of an element needed in the manufacture of armaments.” GE dropped its advertising with the magazine. He attacked the War Department for opposing the creation of new defense plants. He penned another broadside at the Office of Production Management, listing its failures, industry by industry.
¹⁴

Straight was getting the sort of public reaction at rallies and from irate recipients of criticism in reports, including one from Robert Patterson, the mild-mannered Secretary of the Army, that boosted his ego. It was the kind of nurturing he needed and had not had since his days in the
Cambridge Union four years ago. His self-confidence was bubbling once more. Straight was starved of power aphrodisiacs, however minuscule in comparison to those in major corporations, or media outlets such as
The
New York Times
, or in the White House. There, in the real fulcrum of world decision-making at a critical time, the president had majority opinion, that of countless minorities like the one Straight represented, and the vast international arena outside the United States to deal with in actuality. Yet it was the power of the presidency that really attracted him. There and only there he could appease the two demons of his secret affiliations and his public aspirations.

His political stirring at
The New Republic
was a beginning. He was already familiar with the workings of the president and the government. Straight worked assiduously on his contacts, usually within the hard-left and liberal spectrum. He considered they were enough—along with the sweep of world events—to allow him one day, in the not too distant future, to make a run for political office.