Book Review | Last of the Cold War Spies: The Life of Michael Straight, The Only American in Britain’s Cambridge Spy Ring

CIA's Center for the Study of Intelligence

Studies in Intelligence, 2006

Last of the Cold War Spies: The Life of Michael Straight, The Only American in Britain’s Cambridge Spy Ring

Roland Perry. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2005. 395 pages, endnotes, photos, index.

Reviewed by Hayden B. Peake, curator of the CIA's Historical Intelligence Collection

In his 1983 memoir, After Long Silence, the late Michael Straight tells of becoming a communist and a Soviet agent while he was a student at Trinity College, Cambridge, in the late 1930s. Anthony Blunt, one of the so-called Cambridge Five, told him to return to America and spy from Wall Street; he chose the State Department instead. According to Straight, his spying enthusiasm died early in the war when he stopped all contact with his NKGB handler. At that time, he could not bring himself to turn in his Cambridge colleagues (Blunt, Burgess, and Maclean); he managed that only in 1963—hence the “long silence.”

Author Roland Perry challenges Straight’s version of events. Straight, he asserts, was a Soviet agent while working as an unpaid intern at the State Department, and as editor of The New Republic. Wherever he went, he “was on a KGB assignment” (x). There are genuine reasons to doubt the Perry account, however. First, he presents only speculation about Straight’s continuing espionage. Does he really expect anyone to believe, without providing any documentation, that at one point Straight reported to Mao (238)? Second, Perry gets too many documented facts wrong. For example, he credits Donald Maclean as the first to give British atomic research plans to the Soviets, and he calls Victor Rothschild the fifth man of the Cambridge ring—in both cases, the honor belongs to John Cairncross. In another astonishing example, Perry wrote that Straight “made some lasting friendships, one of which was with Hayden Peake, whom he continued to meet twice a year in Washington.” My one meeting with Straight, which occurred on an airplane, was the subject of an article in Studies in Intelligence.[19] Finally, although Perry correctly recounts Straight’s public life as a writer, arts patron, and editor, he provides little new and no hard evidence that Straight was a continuing “agent of influence, and agent provocateur for the KGB . . .” or that “Stalin and the Communist cause held him for life” (352, 355). Whatever Straight’s reality, Perry’s has been distorted by poor research and analysis, which has led to assertions not proved.

[19] Hayden B. Peake. “The Apostle in Seat 4F,” Studies in Intelligence, Winter (1984).