Last of the Cold War Spies (42 page)

There was nowhere to go but down after reaching such a summit of hyperbole. By the time of the televised hearings on the counterclaims of McCarthy and the army in 1954, the cumulative effect was a swaying of public opinion against the Wisconsin senator. He was giving anticommunism a bad name. The hard left in the United States was able to dismiss any concern about American communism as a McCarthyite smear. It was the moment for Straight to attack with impunity.

By going after McCarthy, Straight, perhaps for the first time in his career, found himself in league with majority opinion, at least among the media opinion-makers. He relished the opportunity to demonize (literally) McCarthy with high-mileage writing. “A roll of flesh beneath his black eyebrows came down over his upper eyelids,” he wrote in
Trial by
Television
, “making slits of his eyes, and giving to his face an almost Satanic look.”
¹³

With such a gift of a target, Straight didn’t need to position himself as an anticommunist. He simply had to keep McCarthy in his sights while discussing constitutional crises or the weaknesses of Eisenhower.

Straight made much of McCarthy needing the great evil of communism on which to ride to political prominence. But equally, Straight used the great evil of McCarthyism to fulfill part of his agenda.

W
hile Straight castigated McCarthy for looking for reds under every bed, he was having no trouble finding his own and maintaining his espionage work. In May 1954, just after the army hearings, he met Sergei Romanovich Striganov, whose job was political counselor at the Soviet embassy in Washington, D.C. The relationship began, according to Straight, when Adam Watson, a Soviet specialist at the British embassy, arranged a meeting between them. The link and the middleman caused concern at the FBI and in MI5, who may have been concerned about Watson.

Straight told in his memoirs (and to the FBI) how Watson took him across the lawn at the home of the British cultural attaché to the bar where Striganov, a KGB operative, was waiting for a drink.
¹
Straight claimed to be meeting him as part of his work as editor of
The New Republic
, which he and Gil Harrison were struggling to keep alive by borrowing money where they could. (Anita McCormick Blaine had died in February 1954, but funding from the inherited estate would not be forthcoming for at least a year.) Straight felt he was obligated to communicate with the KGB to help prevent a major conflict. As with all such explanations, this sounded implausible against his protestations that he was anxious to avoid all contact with KGB agents such as Burgess. His assertion
that his communications with the KGB could in any way ease pressure in the Cold War has no substance.
²

Straight and Striganov agreed to meet for lunch once a month, which was about the regularity of his former meetings with Michael Green. Yet this was in the open. Straight alleged he wasn’t passing his lunch companion any documents, just opinion. Straight said they followed a strict protocol. Striganov would take Straight to lunch at the Hotel Mayflower Grill; Straight in turn would take him to the University Club. Both places were within a block of the Soviet embassy. Their protocol broke down when Striganov would ring and ask if he could have lunch on that day or the next. Straight spoke of a pattern emerging in their conversations. Striganov’s bosses in Moscow would send him a telegram with a query that needed a quick reply. Straight characterized the queries as innocent, nothing more potent than a question about a domestic development in U.S. politics.
³
He wanted his answers to make sense to Striganov’s bosses in Moscow. He claimed also to be conscious of the possibility of the CIA monitoring and intercepting all Striganov’s cables, which was a cheeky assertion given that this was the reason he was later interrogated.

The response from Straight, he said, would have to seem sound to the CIA too. Straight’s explanation to the FBI was that he interpreted current political events to his KGB friend, such as the meaning of a hard-line, anti-Soviet speech by Vice-President Richard Nixon. But was Striganov that feeble an agent that he had to be spoon-fed interpretations by Straight when he could have made such simple analyses himself by reading the American papers?

In
After Long Silence
, Straight demonstrated impressive recall—nearly thirty years after the event—by repeating the verbal intercourse on paper as if in a novel. The Russian kept reporting back Straight’s information. It must have pleased his superiors. They met for the next two years.

Straight monitored senate attacks on the Institute of Pacific Relations, which he continued to defend as a worthwhile group of the liberal left. Yet it was a classic communist front. An international secretariat made up of prominent Asian scholars, politicians, and businessmen acted for branches that contained communists and their sympathizers. There was a
section in Moscow. “One of the representatives of the British branch was Gunther Stein,” author John Costello wrote, “the Shanghai journalist with NVKD [KGB] connections and links to Mao Tse-tung’s American eulogist, Agnes Smedley.”
⁴

The U.S. Senate investigating committee summed it up when it said: “The IPR itself was like a specialized political flypaper in its attractive power for communists. . . . A remarkably large number of communists and pro-communists showed up in the publications, conferences, offices, institutions of the IPR, or in letters and homes of the IPR family. . . . The ‘effective leadership’ of the institute had diverted that organization’s prestige to promote the interests of the Soviet Union in the United States.”
⁵

The IPR was run by an executive committee that included Owen Lattimore, Edward C. Carter, and Frederick Vanderbilt Field. All were alleged to have communist affiliations. Congressional testimony linked Lattimore, a John Hopkins University academic, to the same communist cell as Field. Lattimore denied these accusations (see
Chapter 19
). However, Luis Budenz testified that he was present when the U.S. Communist Party chairman in 1937 instructed Lattimore to influence American journalists into playing down Chinese communists as harmless agrarian reformers.
⁶

Straight, aware from the attacks that there was no substantial evidence of Lattimore’s KGB links, defended him, and so defended his own position and the Whitney Foundation’s investment in IPR.
The New Republic
became a vehicle for the defense, running articles critical of committees investigating Lattimore.

One of McCarthy’s many targets was Straight’s close friend, Gustavo Duran, the husband of Bin’s sister, Bronte. He had been attacked since 1951, and matters were brought to a head when he faced the U.S. Civil Service Commission’s “Loyalty Board” hearings. They began in May 1954 and went on intermittently until January 1955. The main point of contention in Duran’s mercurial career centered on a vital three weeks in 1938, when he ran the Spanish Republicans’ Servicio de Investigacion Militar (SIM) in Madrid. It was created in 1937 as a counterespionage service but soon became an all-powerful political police force, able to make arrests without trial or investigation. SIM was immune to the authority of the minister of
war. It had more than 6,000 agents and was in control of prisons and concentration camps. Duran appointed militant communists to all the important posts.

The Loyalty Board accused him of a link to Soviet intelligence and also that he had been removed from his post in charge of SIM for making “numerous unauthorized appointments of Communists.” Duran denied the charge for four years, but now one further detail about his duties emerged. He had reported to the Spanish government’s National Intelligence Service. It had informed him on which experts’ advice to follow in making SIM appointments. Duran attempted to downplay this by saying they were “temporary.” But when pressed on who these “experts” were, Duran became evasive. He later gave a clue that they were probably linked to Soviet intelligence when he was asked to comment on his knowledge of twenty-five named persons. They included Alexander Orlov, a key Soviet intelligence officer directing the purge of communists who were not following the Stalinist line in Spain.

Duran answered: “I was introduced to a member of the Russian Embassy whose name was Orlov by the then head of SIM, Mr. Sayagues. I never knew what Orlov’s first name was. I spoke with Orlov once or twice. I remember that he told me how necessary it was to organize an effective counter-espionage system in the Republican Army.”
⁷
Orlov, then, was one of the “experts” instructing him on appointments in SIM.

After his fifth and final hearing in January 1955, Duran was cleared of all charges and allowed to continue his career at the UN. Once more the grapeshot approach to investigation had missed Duran’s most important KGB intelligence link—his brother-in-law, Straight.

Striganov asked Straight in October 1955 to receive at his home a delegation of Soviet writers, led by Boris Kampov-Polevoy, who was secretary of the Union of Soviet Writers, which was also under KGB control. Far from steering clear of Russian contacts, Straight now seemed to be encouraging them.

An FBI agent reviewing his FBI file (accumulated from 1963 to 1975), probably in the early 1970s, raised the possibility that Straight was dissimulating. The agent also accused him of being naive for even questioning whether Striganov, Fried (a possible agent he met in Moscow in
1969), and others were connected with the KGB. Straight countered by clinging to his argument that if he could reach (KGB) intelligence experts with sound reasoning, that was enough for him.
⁸
Straight made the wellworn, spurious claim that he was not passing on espionage but rather informing the Moscow Center in the interests of world peace.

In general there was FBI and CIA concern about any contacts with Russians in the United States by American citizens. The FBI vaults were full of files on everyone from journalists to atomic scientists who had or might still have links. At this time American intelligence services were aware that the Soviets were—as ever—very keen to learn how the U.S. nuclear weapons program was progressing. Any information to do with policy, new programs, and developments was of vital interest. By 1955 the Russians were on a par with the United States in the nuclear arms race as both countries developed horrific thermonuclear weapons.