Michael Straight
Michael Whitney Straight, the youngest child of Willard Straight, an investment banker, and Dorothy Payne Whitney Straight, an heiress, was born in New York City on 1st September, 1916. His father died of septic pneumonia in 1919. Later his mother married Leonard Knight Elmhirst, a British educationist who founded Dartington Hall school in Devon.
Straight was educated at the London School of Economics and Trinity College. While at Cambridge University he became friends with John Cornford, Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean and Anthony Blunt. Straight joined the British Communist Party after the death of Cornford in the Spanish Civil War. Blunt introduced Straight to spy chief, James Klugmann, who ordered him to return to America, although he was in line to become president of the Cambridge Union.
After returning to the United States in 1937, Straight worked as a speechwriter for President Franklin D. Roosevelt and was on the payroll of the Department of the Interior. Klugmann put him in touch with KGB agent, Iskhak Akhmerov, who introduced himself as Michael Green. He provided material to Akhmerov but this was of little use to the Soviet Union. Akhmerov reported that Straight “does not yet provide authentic materials, but only his notes,” which are out-of-date. In 1940, Straight went to work in the Eastern Division of the U.S. State Department.
After the United States entered the Second World War Straight joined the United States Army Air Forces as a B-17 Flying Fortress pilot. In 1946 Straight took over as publisher of his family-owned The New Republic magazine (his parents had established the magazine with Walter Lippmann and Herbert Croly in 1914). Straight appointed the leading left-wing politician, Henry A. Wallace as editor of the magazine on a salary of $15,000 a year. Wallace wrote that: "As editor of The New Republic I shall do everything I can to rouse the American people, the British people, the French people, the Russian people and in fact the liberally-minded people of the whole world, to the need of stopping this dangerous armament race."
Wallace formed the Progressive Citizens of America (PCA). A group of conservatives, including Henry Luce, Clare Booth Luce, Adolf Berle, Lawrence Spivak and Hans von Kaltenborn, sent a cable to Ernest Bevin, the British foreign secretary, that the PCA were only "a small minority of Communists, fellow-travelers and what we call here totalitarian liberals." Winston Churchill agreed and described Wallace and his followers as "crypto-Communists".
In January 1948, The New Republic reached a circulation of a record 100,000. Michael Straight was unhappy with Wallace's involvement of the Progressive Citizens of America and his collaboration with the American Communist Party. Straight was a supporter of the Marshall Plan and the anti-communism policies of President Harry S. Truman and therefore decided to sack Wallace as editor. Straight became editor until resigning in 1956. He was replaced by Gilbert A. Harrison.
Straight now concentrated on a literary career. His first book, Trial By Television, was an attack on McCarthyism. He also wrote several historical novels about the American West. This included A Very Small Remnant, about the Sand Creek massacre of 1864, and Carrington, about the Fetterman Massacre, where Captain William J. Fetterman and an army column of 80 men were killed by a group of Sioux warriors in December 1866.
In 1963 Straight was offered the post of the chairmanship of the Advisory Council on the Arts by President John F. Kennedy. Aware that he would be vetted - and his background investigated - he approached Arthur Schlesinger, one of Kennedy's advisers, and told him that Anthony Blunt had recruited him as a spy while an undergraduate at Trinity College. Schlesinger suggested that he told his story to the FBI.
Straight's information was passed on to MI5 and Arthur Martin, the intelligence agency's principal molehunter, went to America to interview him. Straight confirmed the story, and agreed to testify in a British court if necessary. Christopher Andrew, the author of The Defence of the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5 (2009) has argued that Straight's information was "the decisive breakthrough in MI5's investigation of Anthony Blunt".
Peter Wright, who took part in the meetings about Anthony Blunt case, argues in his book, Spycatcher (1987) that Roger Hollis, the Director General of MI5, decided to give Blunt immunity from prosecution because of his hostility towards the Labour Party and the damage it would do to the Conservative Party: "Hollis and many of his senior staff were acutely aware of the damage any public revelation of Blunt's activities might do themselves, to MI5, and to the incumbent Conservative Government. Harold Macmillan had finally resigned after a succession of security scandals, culminating in the Profumo affair. Hollis made little secret of his hostility to the Labour Party, then riding high in public opinion, and realized only too well that a scandal on the scale that would be provoked by Blunt's prosecution would surely bring the tottering Government down."
Blunt was interviewed by Arthur Martin at the Courtauld Institute on 23rd April 1964. Martin later wrote that when he mentioned Straight's name he "noticed that by this time Blunt's right cheek was twitching a good deal". Martin offered Blunt "an absolute assurance that no action would be taken against him if he now told the truth". Martin recalled: "He went out of the room, got himself a drink, came back and stood at the tall window looking out on Portman Square. I gave him several minutes of silence and then appealed to him to get it off his chest. He came back to his chair and confessed." He admitted being a Soviet agent and named twelve other associates as spies including Straight, John Cairncross, Leo Long, Peter Ashby and Brian Symon.
Straight later served as the deputy chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts from 1969 to 1977. In 1983, Michael Straight detailed his communist activities in a memoir entitled After Long Silence. He admitted that while working for the Department of the Interior he passed on reports to a Soviet handler he called "Michael Green". He later insisted he had not provided anything that "contained any restricted material". However, according to TD: "But six years later the KGB released his file which showed that, using the codename 'Nigel', he had sent telegrams, ambassadors' reports and political position papers from the State Department."
According to Richard Norton-Taylor: "Straight's marriages to Belinda Crompton and Nina Auchincloss Steers, a writer and stepsister of Aristotle Onassis, ended in divorce. His third wife, Katharine Gould, a child psychiatrist, survives him, as do five children from his first marriage."
Michael Whitney Straight died of pancreatic cancer at his home in Chicago, Illinois, on 4th January 2004.
Primary Sources
(1) Peter Wright, Spycatcher (1987)
Hollis and many of his senior staff were acutely aware of the damage any public revelation of Blunt's activities might do themselves, to MI5, and to the incumbent Conservative Government. Harold Macmillan had finally resigned after a succession of security scandals, culminating in the Profumo affair. Hollis made little secret of his hostility to the Labour Party, then riding high in public opinion, and realized only too well that a scandal on the scale that would be provoked by Blunt's prosecution would surely bring the tottering Government down.
(2) Richard Norton-Taylor, The Guardian (9th January 2004)
Michael Straight, who has died aged 87, was the scion of a patrician American family, a former editor of the New Republic magazine and perhaps the most reluctant member of the Cambridge spy ring, centred around the secretive circle known as the Apostles, which included Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean and Anthony Blunt.
As a student in the mid-1930s, Straight was enlisted by Blunt, who later became surveyor of the Queen's pictures, to work for the communists, and therefore for the Soviet Union. His university friends included Tess Mayor, who later married Lord Rothschild - who was also to be accused of being a member of the notorious spy ring - and who helped to expose Philby, Burgess and the prominent communist James Klugmann.
Blunt had approached Straight at a time when the American was emotionally vulnerable, as well as politically impressionable, after his close friend, the poet John Cornford, had been killed in the Spanish civil war. Many years later, Straight's own admissions led to the unmasking of Blunt.
In 1963, Straight was offered a post as adviser on arts endowment with the Kennedy administration in Washington. Aware that he would be vetted - and his background investigated - he approached Arthur Schlesinger, one of Kennedy's advisers, who suggested he reveal all to the FBI. He was subsequently interviewed by MI5.
After being given immunity from prosecution, Blunt confessed everything. He was finally named in public - and stripped of his knighthood - in 1979 by Margaret Thatcher, who told the Commons that the information that had led to his confession was not "usable as evidence on which to base a prosecution".
This was challenged by the former MI5 officer Peter Wright, who said that Straight had stated that Blunt had recruited him as a spy for Russia, not simply as a member of the Communist party. However, Straight is likely to have insisted that he must, on no account, be named as a witness in any trial of Blunt. That would certainly have suited the British establishment, which was determined to try and keep Blunt's treachery under wraps.
(3) The Daily Telegraph (17th January 2004)
Michael Straight, who has died aged 87, was the former Soviet spy responsible for telling MI5 that Anthony Blunt - whose lover he had briefly been at Cambridge in the 1930s - was a mole.
When this was publicly revealed soon after the unmasking of Blunt in 1979, Straight, a member of America's super-rich establishment, seemed both flattered and embarrassed by the publicity. In his autobiography, After Long Silence (1993), he claimed to have leaked no official information except for a paper he had written himself.
But six years later the KGB released his file which showed that, using the codename 'Nigel', he had sent telegrams, ambassadors' reports and political position papers from the State Department...
When Straight attended a meeting of the Cambridge Apostles at the RAC Club in London after the war, he became embroiled in a row over Czechoslovakia with the historian Eric Hobsbawn, which prompted Burgess to ask if he was now "unfriendly". "If I were, why should I be here?" Straight replied evasively.
By then he had taken over the running of the influential Left-wing journal New Republic, which was subsidised by his mother, and appointed Henry Wallace as editor. Wallace doubled the circulation, then resigned to run for the presidency, declaring that the Marshall Plan would lead to a third world war; but his star faded and, after Straight took over the editorship himself, the magazine endorsed Harry Truman in the 1948 election.
While the United States became increasingly frenzied in its search for Reds under American beds, Straight considered exposing his former associates. According to Straight, he made three attempts to confess, even walking into the British embassy in Washington before his nerve failed; his wife leaked the names of Blunt and Burgess to her psychoanalyst, who felt prevented by a code of conduct from passing them on to the intelligence service. The most convincing of his excuses was that he was afraid of the effect on his young family.