Last of the Cold War Spies

by Roland Perry

  His digs were in a lodging house on Trumpington Road, and he still had a “gentleman’s gentleman”—bequeathed by Whitney—to prepare his daily wash basin and once-a-week bath and to lay out his clothes. Wellscrubbed and nicely attired in shirt, tie, and student’s gown, the young freshman set about organizing the best tutor for his purposes in economics. First there was Maurice Dobb, a leading member of the British Communist Party and a “spotter” for the Comintern. Straight moved from him on to a classical economist, Denis Robertson, but he was angling for tuition under Joan Robertson, reputed to be the most brilliant of John Maynard Keynes’s disciples. Straight was a big supporter of Keynes. His economics represented a break from the noninterventionist classicists, who thought government interference should be kept at a minimum and who were shocked by Keynes’s articles and lectures on the General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, which would later (1936) be published in book form. This theory embraced big spending and expansion of government, especially during recession, to escape a slump and to reduce unemployment.

  This theory sat well with socialist thinking despite Keynes’s not advocating full socialism, which meant government “control of the means of production and exchange.” Yet it was acceptable to Marxists, for the time being, given the West’s history. It meant an economy following Keynes would be conditioned to big government spending. This was a step toward total government control that could be implemented by a change from something like a New Deal administration in the United States or Labour in the United Kingdom to something more radical.

  Keynes’s main concepts emerged during the Great Depression when the Western world was looking for solutions to mass unemployment as economies declined and big corporations slugged it out with powerful unions. He was the foremost economic thinker of the era, and Straight wanted to be as close to him as possible. Straight showed his prowess by studying hard and coming top out of two hundred students in the first examination in the Economic Tripos. He was one of only four to gain a first. It was proof on paper of what everyone who encountered him on an intellectual level thought. Here was an articulate youth with an exceptional brain and ambition to match. The door was open to Robertson and Keynes. Straight’s diligence ensured he was on the way to matching wits with the most formidable minds on the campus.

  His examination success marked him as an academic high-flyer, with money and social position. He was a perfect target for Soviet recruitment, for the odds were that Straight would reach the highest echelons of the profession he chose. What made him even more interesting was the fact that his background meant he could, if willing, be pushed to the top in either the British or U.S. establishment.1 Yet to be assessed were his temperament and commitment: in KGB terms the extent to which he would be willing to go and how far he could be directed.2 Arnold Deutsch, the Jewish Austrian Comintern agent, was already aware of him. Yet Straight was still a raw 18-year-old and could not be simply signed up like a football recruit. He had to be tested, indoctrinated, and inspired before being approached by a Comintern representative—a process that took years in peacetime. Once a new agent was in place, Stalin and the Moscow Center would not accept anything short of a lifetime’s commitment to their cause, unless he or she were found to be incompetent. A burnt out agent who was of no further use would be pensioned off at a rate commensurate with performance. Rebellion or defection would see the agent marked for assassination.

  Straight’s initial steps toward a consolidation of his communist links came when two gowned, second-year Trinity students—the bird-like and clever James Klugman and the dark, brooding, and intense John Cornford— came unannounced to his modest lodgings one chilly evening in November 1934. Klugman was from a wealthy Jewish family and had been educated at Gresham’s, an old and unconventional public school, as had his friend Donald Maclean, a member of the Cambridge ring of Soviet spies then being formed. Klugman had “spotted” and helped recruit John Cairncross, a brilliant scholarship winner from a poor Glasgow background, to the ring. Cornford was the son of Charles Darwin’s granddaughter and a Trinity classics don. He had been a Marxist at Stowe School before he won an open scholarship to Trinity at age 17 in 1932.

  The two visitors—the leaders of the Cambridge Communist movement—wanted Straight to become a member of the communist-controlled Cambridge University Socialist Society. The controllers were directed by the British Communist Party, headquartered in King Street, London, which in turn took its orders from Moscow. His name, he was told, had been mentioned to them by comrades at the LSE. Straight had no hesitation in joining; he regarded it as a major turning point in his life.3 He went to society meetings and discussed issues with Klugman and Cornford, who set about ironing out what they believed to be his naïveté concerning the class struggle. Straight was an eager, willing, and quick student. He was passed from “A” to “B” then “C” contacts—each successive person more important in the secret system—until March 18, 1935, four months after meeting them. Then he moved from being one of fifty avowed communists in the society to one of twelve students in the Trinity College “cell” or communist group. It was his introduction to the clandestine world; the cells kept quiet about their membership.

  Cells were split into three groups. The first included those interested in communist ideology. The second worked openly for the party and carried green membership cards. The third group of “moles” was more sinister. They prepared themselves for influential posts in British life and later infiltrated the professions and government. Not even close friends or family were aware of their communist affiliations.

  Straight enjoyed the intrigue. It gave him a special thrill to add a hidden layer to his busy, more public applications on campus. The experience drew him closer to unsmiling and dedicated Cornford, whom he admired. Cornford introduced him to Harry Pollitt, the working-class leader of the British Communist Party and a Soviet agent. The two men got on well. Straight began “giving as much money (in cash) as I could without feeling the pinch” to the party.4 The contributions had the dual effect of linking him more strongly with the British Communist Party’s hierarchy and of pleasing Cornford, whom Straight wished to impress.

  Several communists, including those at the Soviet Embassy in Kensington Gardens, the British party’s headquarters in King Street, and many on the Cambridge campus, were now aware of Straight’s potential. Reports filtered back to key recruiter Deutsch, who was orchestrating a trip to Russia for a group of young communists.5 He made sure Straight was to be included. The three-week trip was meant to give them a sanitized, controlled look at the “workers’ paradise.” The holiday was also a chance for Russian intelligence to assess each student’s suitability for future recruitment. A list was passed on to Trinity’s Charles Rycroft (later a distinguished psychiatrist) and John Madge, who organized the students to pay £15 each for the Intourist round-trip by steamer to Leningrad. Also on board the ship in August 1935 were Straight’s Dartington chum, Michael Young; Brian Simon (another member of the Trinity cell and a future member of the British Communist Party); Charles Fletcher-Cooke, also at Trinity (then a Union radical, later a Tory member of Parliament); Christopher Mayhew (a future Labor minister and lord) and his friend, Derek Nenk, both of Oxford University; art academic and French tutor at Cambridge Anthony Blunt (a member of the university’s growing ring); and his brother Wilfrid, an art teacher. The trip would build Straight’s relationship with the tall, lean Anthony Blunt with the cutaway mouth and aloof demeanor.

  The two had a link from 1935, the first year they met. They didn’t fraternize much after hours. Blunt was a predatory homosexual, and Straight had hopes of being a hunter in the opposite camp. Blunt was a KGB recruiter, and Straight was intrigued by the secret communist milieu at the university, thus making himself available. Straight tried to make out that their backgrounds and circumstances were similar, but he was clutching at straws to explain away the ease of their relationship.

  Straight told journalists and family members that
Blunt and his brothers were brought up strictly and in an atmosphere of missionary zeal. His father, an Anglican priest, was never close to his sons. He loved sports and was devoted to John Ruskin, the nineteenth-century English writer, critic, and artist who championed the gothic revival movement in architecture and the decorative arts. He had a big influence upon public taste in art in Victorian England. Ruskin inspired opposition to laissez-faire philosophy. By age 13, Blunt hated all sports and loathed Ruskin. By contrast, his mother coddled him. She was linked to aristocracy and in marrying a priest had moved down the social scale.6

  Straight tried hard to put a fanciful spin on Blunt’s communism, blaming it on his family relationships. He supposed that Blunt’s mother really loved his father because Blunt Sr. answered to God, a higher calling. Therefore, Straight postulated, Blunt Jr., in yearning for his mother’s attention, himself sought a better calling, communism. This intellectual fairyland avoided certain contradictory points. First, Blunt only accepted certain Marxist doctrine, particularly his Stalinist, ridiculous view of art (and even this died away after he left Cambridge). However, when it came to political power linked with international Marxism, he had limited views and left that to the articulation of others, such as Guy Burgess.

  Still, Straight connected Blunt’s family relationship complexities to his own, especially the lack of a warm connection to his mother and a fatherless past. Straight, too, wanted everyone to believe he was drawn to a bigger ideal that would usurp the father-figure role. Then there was the broader claim of the influence, or lack of influence, of a national identity. Blunt, it was pointed out, spent important years (from ages 5 to 14) in France. This upbringing allegedly led to his having no allegiance to England. This idea may have had some credence if Blunt had been brought up in Germany or Russia, who had opposing ideals to England. But France in ideological terms (let alone geographical) was not that far from the island across the Channel.

  Perhaps Straight’s biggest stretch in discussions with Blunt’s biographer Miranda Carter was an attempt to fill in the dots between negative feelings for England and homosexuality, which in turn found an outlet in underground communism. One problem with this thinking was that homosexuality at the time was an even bigger crime in the Soviet Union than it was in England. Straight liked also Blunt’s citing of the dictum of homosexual English novelist E. M. Forster that if he had to choose between betraying his friends and his country, he hoped that he would have the guts to betray his country. Yet this argument went nowhere either, unless that friend was a communist agent. Betraying a fellow spy would see the betrayer on a KGB death list, a more telling test of courage.

  Once more, Straight tried to foster parallels with his own background and lack of patriotism, which was again implausible. The United States and the United Kingdom, his two homes, were bound by a democratic ideal that he could not fail to recognize. To suggest that he would drift stateless and find himself in a slipstream toward Russian communism was improbable, even absurd.

  Third, Straight suggested that Blunt was bored with religion at home, and with his father in church, not to mention the twice-daily compulsory chapel services at his school, Marlborough. The argument was that once he entered Cambridge, he was open to other religions, primarily art, and presumably then communism, which was an even more unbelievable point than that of the lack-of-a-father-figure. Yet Straight saw more similarities with Blunt to his own case by forever laboring the idea that he had given away religion early in life.

  A fourth alleged similarity was their experience and attitude to education. But Dartington had led Straight directly to communism, whereas Blunt had been at an elite school, for which he had contempt. Yet he never lost his support for what it represented—elitism—which he supported, believing that the masses had to be led. It was hardly a position that would have driven him to communism with its alleged ideals of equality. (Although in this respect, he found he had a quaint kinship with the true impact of communism, which developed its own elite and divided from the masses.) This attitude was also unlikely to have driven Blunt to spy and betray his country.

  The ten tourists bound for Russia were told to pack suitably shabby clothes—no smart cravats, ties, jackets, shirts, trousers, and shoes. It was a novel experience for most of them, who had been used to semiformal wear at least on campus and sometimes smart attire at night. The organizers did not wish the group to stand out for fear of reaction from the proletariat. Better to conform to the impoverished, from whom they would be shielded as much as possible.

  The group sailed from London Bridge at the beginning of August. Madge organized ship-board seminars to prepare and lift their expectations. These would distract them from the disturbing start for most concerning the ship’s filthy toilets and cramped two-berth cabins where eight of them slept. “Even for some of us who liked close male company,” Wilfrid Blunt remarked dryly, “this was a bit much.”7

  Wilfrid slept on deck, where he was further irritated by a Chinese deck-hand who wanted to show him dirty postcards. “What made it worse,” he remarked, “was that they were pictures of women.”

  During the seminars, the lugubrious Blunt sat to one side and listened in silence. He seemed to be weighing the reactions to Madge’s comments. One member raised the matter of the toilets. Madge dismissed it as irrelevant and only something that would be brought up by someone from a privileged bourgeois background. The ship’s crew, the gullible group were reminded, were performing to a higher ideal. They could hardly be expected to concern themselves with such a triviality.

  Straight shared neither Wilfrid’s disdain for the ship’s conditions nor his reticence. He was excited. He treated the trip as a true pilgrimage. He was overawed by the sight of a large female deckhand, which he took as symbolic of female emancipation and equality in a more advanced society. It was free of class barriers, both social and sexual. Straight took photos of her with his expensive Leica camera, of which she was wary. He was aglow with the thrill of a voyage to utopia, the new society of the Soviet Union.

  Blunt and Fletcher-Cooke left the ship for one day to visit a German medieval town on the Baltic coast. Straight snapped them being lowered over the side in a boat.

  When they arrived at Leningrad, a member of the party cried: “Freedom at last,” then stumbled on a sign ordering them not to walk on the grass verge. Brian Simon enjoyed himself. “They [the Russians] seemed to be pushing ahead all the time,” he noted through rose-tinted spectacles. “There was no unemployment. A planned economy seemed to be working.”8

  Charles Fletcher-Cooke was more circumspect. He had been given a grant to study libel law under communism and plenty of contacts. But on arrival he found they had disappeared. He learned later of Stalin’s purges.

  From the first day in Leningrad they were given the usual tours of monuments to the October Revolution in 1917 and were kept well away from locals. Christopher Mayhew tried to engage them but was shunned. He wondered if it were his bad Russian, but none of the tourists understood that there was real fear in the country. Engagements with foreigners were forbidden. Any breach of this would run the risk of a heavy reprisal.

  “They provided a bus [in Leningrad] for us,” Lord Young recalled, “and treated us royally.” Unlike Rycroft, Mayhew, and Wilfrid Blunt, he found the whole trip “great fun” and kept an enthusiastic diary.9

  Blunt avoided the dreary factory tours. He took his brother with him to the Hermitage, which took days to view. They both later wrote about it. The Blunts met Lady Muriel Paget, who was working on behalf of the British born “marooned” for one reason or another in Russia. Her flat, Wilfrid noted, had an air of conspiracy, with figures half-glimpsed coming and going.10

  The tour party took the night train to Moscow and stayed at the Moscow Nova at the corner of Red Square. There seemed to be much going on in the Russian capital. The seventh, and last, International Congress of the Comintern was passing resolutions on forming “popular fronts.” These Soviet-controlled organizations
aimed at forming links with socialist parties in all Western European countries. The legitimate cover was an effort to defeat fascism. The second, more clandestine objective was to infiltrate non-Communist groups in order to gain control of public opinion throughout Europe.

  The group was shown the Metro. Blunt wrote excitedly: “The Metro . . . is perfect in comfort and efficiency, but it has a Parisian chic and one almost expects a top hat to emerge from its doors.”

  It resembled the neo-Baroque music halls of Europe, but it was limited in size—a fraction of the Paris Metro or the London Underground—and was more of a showpiece for visitors with a limited function for the average Muscovite. The gullible visitors were happily sucked into its apparent opulence. Blunt went further in his appreciation by suggesting that buildings in Moscow and Leningrad were superior to the best in London’s Regent Street and London University.

  The tourists were very open to accepting the propaganda being thrown at them on their carefully managed tour, especially about increases in production of all industries. If any of the tour noticed anything that indicated backwardness in the economy, or poverty and squalor, they were reminded that the Soviet Union was in the middle of a five-year plan. All would be sorted out in the medium-term.

  There was not a whisper of the forced “collectivization”—the brutal takeover of farms throughout Russia and the Ukraine—that led to the deaths of between 15 and 20 million peasants. Not a word was mentioned of the burgeoning state concentration camps—the gulags that in August 1935 controlled five percent of the population for forced labor (and by 1939 would control ten percent).

  Despite their gullibility, none failed to notice the restrictions on foreigners. Mayhew was keen to take photos of the Kremlin surrounded by its high walls. “We weren’t allowed to take shots,” he recalled, “we could do nothing. I got Anthony Blunt to hold my legs while I leant out of the hotel window so that I could take a picture.”11