Straight, Michael Whitney (1916-2004)

An American government official, magazine publisher and writer.

Michael Straight was born in New York on September 1, 1916, the youngest child of Willard Straight, a senior investment banker with J.P. Morgan, and Dorothy Payne Whitney Straight, the daughter of former Secretary of the Navy William C. Whitney and an heiress, philanthropist and social reformer. Willard Straight died in late 1918, while serving at the Paris Peace Conference in the aftermath of World War I. In 1925, Dorothy Straight married Leonard Knight Elmhirst, British agricultural economist and educationist, and in 1926 she brought Michael to England to be subsequently educated at Dartington School in Devon – an experimental community based on Progressive theories which she had founded with her second husband. Brought up on the progressive teachings of Dartington, Straight traveled in India, took part in a Pittsburgh steel strike and danced in a ballet company sponsored by his mother – before spending a year at the London School of Economics. In 1934, he went to Trinity College, Cambridge, to study economics.

At Trinity Straight was attracted to socialism and radical politics. He became close friends with left-wing students and soon joined a cell of the British Communist Party (CPGB) cell at Trinity and as well a Cambridge University branch of the Society for Cultural Relations with the Soviet Union, at the time commonly known as the SCR. In August-September 1935, Michael Straight made a trip to the Soviet Union organized by the Cambridge SCR branch (as part of a group of six Cambridge students.) He also joined a secretive circle known as the Apostles, which included students who would become known decades later as members of the so-called “Cambridge Five” espionage group working for the Soviet Union.

In 1937, in distress after the death of his close friend, poet John Cornford, in the Spanish Civil War, Straight submitted to recruitment by a member of the Apostles, Anthony Blunt – for what was described to him as work for the Comintern. Soon, he was assigned the cover name “Nigel.” The game plan was for Straight to return to the United States and get himself employed. From the very beginning, Moscow operatives had no illusions about their new recruit. “He has very little experience and sometimes behaves like a child in terms of romanticism,” said an early August 1937 report on meetings with Straight. “He thinks that he is working for the Comintern, and he must be left with this delusion for a while.” ¹

Straight returned to the United States later in August of 1937 and was soon contacted by a Soviet “illegal,” Iskhak Akhmerov, who introduced himself as Michael Green. Straight would never learn the true identity of his new acquaintance or discover his affiliation with the Soviet intelligence. From the very beginning, Akhmerov sensed “some ideological hesitation” in his new source. In one of his reports to Moscow, he wrote that “‘Nigel’ was not such a solid and dedicated party member” as Moscow had described him in its profile. ²

Finally, on January 24, 1938, Akhmerov was able to report to Moscow that “‘Nigel’ managed to get himself hired at the Department of State – as an assistant to a counselor in its department of international economic affairs.” Straight always maintained that the only documents he had ever supplied to Michael Green were those written by himself. The notes on his NKVD file taken in the mid-1990s by a former KGB officer and journalist, Alexander Vassiliev, to some extent confirm this statement. In instructions to Akhmerov on March 26, 1938, Moscow Center requested that its “illegal” agent intensify his work with “Nigel” – and deplored that the latter “does not yet provide authentic materials, but only his notes,” which are out-of-date. ³

By late May of 1938, Straight still had not lived up to the Soviets’ hopes. “I am stating with regret that thus far, there have been no successes in the development of ‘Nigel’’s work,” Akhmerov reported on May 24, 1938. “I meet with him weekly. I talk with him for hours about work and politics, thus far, with no result.” Only in June did Akhmerov finally receive from Straight his long-promised report on armaments, and the next month Straight delivered a lengthy report on British military and raw material reserves compiled by the U.S. consul in London. Finally, Akhmerov had something to send to Moscow. In the fall of 1938, Straight brought Akhmerov a copy of a State Department report on German penetration in South America. It turned out to be the same report that had been obtained earlier from Laurence Duggan, another source at the Department of State. At the Center, they viewed Straight as “a prospective big agent” – and advised Akhmerov not “to burn him,” that is, not to put him at risk by using him “for obtaining some non-urgent material or relating its approximate content.” Moreover, Moscow considered using Straight for pilfering documents a potential risk to the relationship between the Soviet Union and the United States. Nevertheless, in early 1939 Straight brought Akhmerov another report, which had been shared with him by an acquaintance from the European department of the Department of State: a report on the origins and consequences of the August 1938 Munich agreement between Nazi Germany, Great Britain and France that led to the partitioning of Czechoslovakia. ⁴

With the signing of the Non-Aggression Pact between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union (commonly known as The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact) on August 23, 1939, Straight’s attitude changed. On September 7, he told “Michael Green” about his “disappointment with the Soviet Union and sharply criticized the Soviet policy, as well as the policy of the Amer. Comparty” (CPUSA). According to Akhmerov’s report, Straight said candidly that “his attitude to us has become ambivalent,” meaning that his “connection” might be soon terminated. Still, Akhmerov’s “educational work” produced some temporary results: On October 25, he reported to Moscow that he thought he had “managed to straighten out ‘Nigel,’” who finally agreed with his “analyses of the international situation.” In late 1939, Akhmerov departed for the Soviet Union. According to Vassiliev’s notes on “Nigel’s” file, throughout the entire period from 1937 to 1939 “Michael Straight was still thinking that he was working for the Comintern.” ⁵

According to Vassiliev’s notes, Straight was next approached by an operative of the Washington “legal” residency with the cover name “Igor,” who was to keep an eye on Straight. Behind this cover name was an experienced NKVD intelligence officer, Constantine Mikhailovich Kukin, who was working at that time under the cover of a second secretary at the Soviet Embassy in Washington, D.C. ⁶ Kukin probably approached Straight in his official capacity of a diplomat. According to Vassiliev’s notes, by that time “cooperation with Straight was de facto terminated: he ceased bringing any materials.” By late 1940, according to Vassiliev’s reading of Nigel’s file, “there was not a single NKVD intelligence officer left in Washington, and ‘Nigel’ was left without any oversight, since there was no one in New York either who could take him under control.” ⁷

By May, 1941, Straight resigned from the Department of State to become the editor of The New Republic magazine, which had been founded by his parents and was still being financed by his mother. ⁸ In the months before the United States entered World War II, he shifted the magazine’s editorial policy to encourage American involvement in the anti-Nazi struggle.

Meanwhile, Moscow continued to consider Straight one of its promising assets. According to Vassiliev’s notes, in mid-July 1941 Straight was approached “by an agent of the New York ‘legal residency,’” whom he told that he had resigned from the Department of State and worked at The New Republic. When Akhmerov began his second tenure in the United States in early 1942, resuming contact with Straight was high on his agenda. Straight’s obvious lack of commitment (as well as concerns on this score in Moscow) notwithstanding, according to a reference compiled at Moscow Center in late February 1942, “it was decided to continue work with Michael Straight, since he had interesting connections and was close to the Roosevelt family.” Vassiliev’s notes make it clear, however, that despite his high hopes, Akhmerov “proved unable to resume business cooperation with ‘Nigel,’ although their personal relations remained friendly.” ⁹

Click here to have a glimpse of an English translation of a fascinating Moscow NKGB document from April 1942, which discusses Moscow’s plans regarding “Nigel” Scroll to top of the documents’ p. 2

Any friendly relations aside, in June, 1942 the Moscow NKGB foreign intelligence Center filed a report received from its chief resident in the USA, “Maxim,” whose real name was Vasilii Zarubin: ““‘Maxim’ thinks that N. has been ideologically corrupted: this is borne out by his anti-Soviet statements. For instance, he contends that in the war with Germany, the USSR is defending narrow national interests and that the worldwide Communist movement is not at all important to the USSR. In his view, the Sov. Union can be given a certain degree of assistance only because the war being fought by the USSR benefits England and the USA.” ¹⁰ But the friendly “personal relations” were obviously short-lived, for in the later part of 1942 Straight joined the US Army Air Corps and went through training to become a heavy-bomber pilot. He did not see any action, however, and spent the entire war in the American Midwest.

With the war’s end, Straight returned to New York and became publisher of The New Republic magazine. He hired former U.S. Vice President Henry Wallace to be the magazine’s editor. Wallace’s name on the magazine mast doubled the circulation but he soon resigned to run for the presidency. Straight took over the editorship himself, having endorsed Harry Truman for president in the election of 1948. During the late 1940s, the Soviets continued to occasionally watch Straight, probably more as a source of perceived threat than as any prospect. According to Vassiliev’s notes, on May 14, 1946, the Soviet foreign intelligence London station reported to the Moscow Center: “N. [Nigel] came to L.[London] to visit his ailing mother. Met with “Johnson” (A. Blunt) and “Hicks”(Burgess). He declared that he had abandoned his polit. convictions because of disagreements with the CPUSA’s line.” ¹¹ According to Vassiliev notes, as of 1948, Nigel was still occasionally followed by three agents of the Soviets in New York. ¹²

In 1954, Straight wrote a book called Trial by Television, which was critical both of the recent McCarthyite witch-hunts and of Communism. In 1956, he left The New Republic and began writing novels.

In 1963, facing a background check after an offer from the Kennedy Administration to become chairman of the Advisory Council on the Arts, Straight voluntarily confessed to Kennedy assistant Arthur Schlesinger that he had a Communist past and had worked for some time for the KGB. Schlesinger referred him to the FBI. Straight was next debriefed by MI5 and turned in his British recruiter, Anthony Blunt. Since nothing was publicly revealed at the time, Straight was later able to become deputy chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, a position he held from 1969 to 1977. In 1993, he described his youthful Communist activities in his memoir, After Long Silence. Straight maintained until his death, on January 4, 2004, that he “was not a spy in the accepted usage of the word.” ¹³ This assertion is circumstantially corroborated in a brief profile of Straight in the semi-official history of Russian foreign intelligence, which limits his “work for the KGB” to briefly “passing some information” during “a few meetings with a Moscow representative before the war.” [[14. Ocherki istorii rossiiskoi vneshnei razvedki, tom 4, 1941-1945, Moskva: Mezhdunarodnye otnoshenija, 2003, s. 200. (The Essays on the History of Russian Foreign Intelligence, Vol. 4, 1941-1945, Moscow: International Relations, 2003, p. 200).]]