Last of the Cold War Spies

by Roland Perry

  Keele: You did not include—did you?—the American-Russian Institute Grants. In 1937 you gave $500; in 1938, $1000; in 1939, $500; in 1944, $500; in 1945, $500; in 1947, $500.

  Straight: Yes, sir.7

  Straight and Rose now looked concerned. A photographer knelt on one knee in front of them, set off flash bulbs in their faces, and captured their nervousness. Keele and the other members of the committee added further pressure. Straight was forced to defend some of the propaganda for the Soviet Union.

  Straight: I think that we sincerely felt [in the war years] that this was an effort to spread further information concerning an ally of the United States.

  Keele: What about the grants to Commonwealth College in 1937 and 1938? You have not listed them either, have you?

  Straight: That was three years before I came onto this foundation. I frankly don’t know about it.

  Keele: I am not asking you now about the grants. I am asking you why they were not listed here in your answer as grants made to organizations which had appeared on the Attorney General’s list or on the House UnAmerican . . .

  Straight: I assume we have no record at all of its being cited. I take your word that it has been.

  Keele: Well, Commonwealth College was cited as Communist by the Attorney General in the letter to the Loyalty Review Board released 27 April 1949. It is on page 40 of the Guide to Subversive Organizations and Publications . . .

  Straight’s technique in the interrogation was to distance himself from the decisions to give grants, where possible. He conceded errors but always had an answer that sounded plausible and rational. He would drop into his responses that he and his board were “anticommunist.”

  When Keele began to probe about grants going to “fields where the greatest possibility of danger [from communist groups] occurs,” Straight’s response emphasized the coincidence concerning money going to them.

  Straight: As you can see from our grants, we are particularly interested in these fields of labor organizations and education, and there is no question at all that in those fields the Communist Party was a very active underground force during the life of this foundation. I think it would have been remarkable—it would probably have been more a matter of luck than intuition—had we had a perfect record during that period from your point of view.

  He reiterated his old argument that congress and government should not interfere in organizations infiltrated by subversives. It was better, he maintained, that they be purged from within. Keele pounced on this. He had read the transcript of Straight’s March 1950 testimony before a HUAC hearing.

  Keele: You are quoted here as saying, “We don’t believe that the Communist Party today is a clear and present danger.”

  Straight: It certainly is a danger, but I question—I am not sure it is one in the sense that Justice Holmes used the phrase in denying that a Communist Party member at the time could be prosecuted with such a . . .

  Keele: I take it from what you have said that speaking now within the framework of Justice Holmes’ remarks, you would say the Communist Party is a clear and present danger today; is that right?

  Straight: I certainly would; yes.

  Keele: I wanted to give you that opportunity because I thought you meant it in an entirely different light than you stated here.

  Straight: Thank you. I certainly would.

  Straight disliked being cornered into this admission on the “clear and present danger” point.8 Nevertheless, he felt that he and Rose had come through unscathed, despite the mistakes and nervousness exhibited at the hearing. The press reports on their submissions were not damaging. Straight assumed that the worst was over, but three weeks later, in December, he received a shock at breakfast while reading the Washington Post. A former Communist Party functionary, Maurice Malkin, had mentioned Straight in testimony before Keele’s Select Committee.

  Keele: I think you told us at one time about Michael Straight, at the Whitney Foundation. Am I correct about that?

  Malkin had then claimed that Straight was used in Communist Party in-fighting to defend Stalinists against Trotskyites over the Moscow show trials in 1937–1938. Malkin didn’t think Straight was the type to be a card-carrying member.

  Straight complained and made the appropriate threats. Malkin checked his papers and wrote to Keele saying he had confused Straight with a Michael Strong, who was a close and trusted party follower from 1931 to 1939.9

  Fourteen months after facing the Select Committee, congress again investigated foundations. Straight and Rose were summoned on February 5, 1954, to the New York offices of an attorney named Rene Wormser, who was counsel to a house subcommittee. He and his partner wanted to know about the Whitney Foundation’s past mistakes. Why had it given grants to subversive groups? Who had made the decisions? Which board members voted for them or against them?

  Rose and Straight stuck to the answers given to the Select Committee. They admitted to making “mistakes,” but Straight argued that giving money to the Institute for Pacific Affairs was not an error. Straight asked Wormser how he would define “mistakes” and was told about a large foundation financing a study on cybernetics, which contained criticisms of capitalism. Straight responded that every year he had an application for funding from the League for Industrial Democracy that openly criticized capitalism, and yet it had a Treasury Department ruling for tax-exemption. He asked if that meant he could not support the league.

  Wormser didn’t respond, but instead put the investigators’ argument concerning the probes into the activities of private foundations:

  The money you are spending under today’s very high tax rates belongs to the people of the United States in the sense that they would otherwise collect it in taxes. I question very much whether the people have not the right to ask whether their money should be spent on behalf of ideas that the majority strongly approve of.

  This sort of soft, circular argument, coupled with the “very genial” atmosphere generated by the two congressmen, gave Straight confidence that he had weathered the worst that investigators could throw at him.10

  Despite his background and the various interrogations that he faced from hearings, Straight never felt threatened by McCarthyism. The senator, his staff, and supporters made haphazard, indiscriminate attacks. Even if they had stumbled on something, Straight was building a great deal of experience with his lawyers in handling onslaughts, probes, and slurs. His wealth protected him. But others suffered, such as his sister Beatrice, an accomplished actress, who was prevented for a long time from working in Hollywood. Also according to Straight, Gustavo Duran, who married his wife’s sister, was persecuted by McCarthy.11

  Clearly, no one in government, including the FBI or congress, had anything substantial on Straight, and certainly no one had an inkling of his secret affiliations. Straight reported for The New Republic in April 1954 on a house subcommittee into allegations and counterallegations between the army and Senator Joseph McCarthy. McCarthy’s charges against the army were to discover who was responsible for obtaining the promotion of a Captain Irving Peress, an army dentist, to the rank of major. McCarthy was attempting to show that army officials were protecting communists, but he couldn’t demonstrate any credible collusion. (Later, it was found that minor bureaucrats had requested throughout the army that there be appointment of officers who had been brought in as captains, but who should have been majors from the beginning.)

  The army’s counterclaim was that McCarthy (chairman of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations); the committee’s counsel, Roy Cohn; and its executive director, Francis Carr, “had sought by improper means to obtain preferential treatment for one Private G. David Schine.” There were forty-six counterclaims by the army “to force discontinuance of further attempts by that committee to expose communist affiliation in the Army.”

  To many observers, McCarthy, a senator from Wisconsin, had set himself up as almost a second president, using his fervent anticommunism as a vehicle for pronouncing on domes
tic and foreign policy. He and his staff of fourteen had taken it upon themselves to enforce the nation’s security, for which, Straight was relieved to relate, they were underequipped.

  Straight conceded in his book, Trial by Television (which covered the Army/McCarthy hearing), that McCarthy was able to expose security procedures that were weak or ill-defined. But McCarthy’s primary concern was publicity. He wished to take public credit for the measures the executive branch had taken or was preparing to take.12

  With this knowledge, Straight felt buoyed enough to tackle McCarthy more vigorously in print. He had summed up the scattered and underresourced nature of McCarthy’s political forays and accusations. Straight felt comfortable about reporting on him, especially as the army hearing marked the beginning of the decline of McCarthy’s power and influence. Even the Republican president, Dwight Eisenhower, would have applauded the analysis in The New Republic.

  Senator McCarthy’s attacks (1949–1954) became the standard by which all false political accusations were judged from that time on. By 1954, the word “McCarthyism” became an official term in the English language.

  When McCarthy began his anticommunist crusade, Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower feared it could sway the election for the Democrats. But McCarthy’s support actually aided the Republicans. Their share of the vote increased in traditionally democratic, ethnic, Catholic (and therefore anticommunist), working-class areas, particularly in the Northeast. Long before Ronald Reagan wooed this powerful sector in his successful 1980 bid for the presidency, McCarthy had shown the way.

  The senator was correct in his belief about the broad sweep of communist infiltration in U.S. government, but in his fervent drive for publicity and popularity, he attacked some innocent yet powerful victims within government. Over time this caused a natural revolt in influential places in Washington and the liberal media against McCarthy and his bullying tactics.

  His biggest target was China scholar Owen Lattimore, director of the School of International Relations at John Hopkins University. Franklin Roosevelt chose him to advise on Chinese Nationalist leader Chiang Kaishek. Lattimore spent the war years as head of Pacific relations in the U.S. Office of War Information. He advised that the United States should stop subsidizing Chiang Kai-shek. American conservatives therefore viewed Lattimore as supporting Chiang’s nemesis, Mao Tse-tung, and his communists.

  McCarthy told the U.S. Senate that Lattimore was Moscow’s “top espionage agent” in the United States and the boss of Alger Hiss. This was an over-the-top, unsubstantiated claim that caused McCarthy’s credibility to slip. Lattimore hit back publicly and was soon seen as a hero among genuine American liberals desperate for someone to stand up to McCarthy. Lattimore said that the Chinese communists (who came to power in 1949) were more nationalist than pro-Soviet and that they would eventually break with Stalin and his successors, which they did by the late 1950s. Lattimore thought that the communist victory in China would be a “magnificent” opportunity for American foreign policy. This proved a truism that slowly gained wide acceptance. It led to another Republican president, Richard Nixon, taking the opportunity to better relations with China, two decades later.

  Lattimore’s pro-Chinese communist positions saw him in close proximity to real Soviet and Chinese agents, whether at the State Department or at the Institute of Pacific Relations. Yet attempts to label him as a spy in his own right or by association did not work.

  Another formidable target for McCarthy was General George C. Marshall, a hero of World War II and a mentor to Eisenhower. In a long speech on June 14, 1951, McCarthy alleged that Marshall had helped sell out China to Mao and had thus aided the drive to communist world domination. McCarthy charged that Marshall had stood by Roosevelt’s side (with Alger Hiss) during the February 1945 Yalta Conference of the Allied leaders—Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin. They met in the Crimea to plan the final defeat and occupation of Nazi Germany and to decide the political makeup of “liberated” countries, particularly Germany and Poland. Agreements were also reached on China and Japan. All the agreements, McCarthy charged, were treacherous and served “the world policy of the Kremlin.” Even conservative Republicans judged this assault on Marshall as unfair. It drew negative publicity for McCarthy. Undaunted, he charged on, claiming that Marshall’s charity toward Mao and the communists, and his contempt for Chiang, were part of a “conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man.”

  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.

  20

  MORE MOSCOW CONNECTIONS

  While 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 int
ercepting 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