Last of the Cold War Spies: The Life of Michael Straight--The Only American in Britain's Cambridge Spy Ring - Hardcover

Perry, Roland

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0306814285 ISBN 13: 9780306814280

Publisher: Da Capo Press, 2005

Synopsis

The most damaging spy network of the Cold War—the infamous Cambridge Spy Ring—was comprised of several powerful and influential British citizens—and one American, Michael Straight. Born to a wealthy New England family, Straight attended Cambridge University in the 1930s, and there he fell in with the notorious circle of young men working for Soviet intelligence —Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Anthony Blunt, and Kim Philby, who was to become the most famous spy of the century.For the next several decades, Michael Straight led a secret life: While working at the State Department, he passed intelligence reports to a Russian agent; while running his family's magazine, The New Republic , he funded several communist fronts; and while serving U.S. presidents, including John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon, he continued to meet with agents around the world.Despite Michael Straight's 1963 “confession” to the FBI that his covert activity ceased in 1941, investigative journalist and author Roland Perry has unearthed a different story. Incorporating material from exclusive interviews with Michael Straight, members of his family, and former KGB agents (Perry has been careful to corroborate all KGB-supplied information), as well as archival research from the CIA, FBI, and Soviet intelligence, Perry presents a full and complete portrait of Michael Straight, the last of the Cold War spies.

About this title

About the Author

Roland Perry is an author and award-winning journalist living in Australia. Among his sixteen books is The Fifth Man , a biography of Victor Rothschild, British espionage agent; and Hidden Power , an investigation into the election and presidency of Ronald Reagan.

Reviews

When Michael Straight was a boy, a medium told his mother that the life of the future KGB spy would be intellectual, literary and educational. Indeed, Straight adopted a number of professions in those areas to provide cover for his espionage activities. He posed as a novelist writing a book set in Colorado to inconspicuously map and photograph the future site of NORAD, for example, and, as a would-be playwright, he assessed the strength of radical labor movements in Malta. Perry's bare-knuckle prose illuminates Straight's trajectory from the privileged New Republic heir who flirted with communism as a Cambridge student to the KGB spy who worked under JFK and Nixon and who played cat and mouse with U.S. and British intelligence agencies for decades. Perry's deeply researched book reveals how Straight, eventually named director of the National Endowment for the Arts under Nixon, never flagged in his dedication to the communist cause, crippling his political and literary aspirations. This astonishing chronicle of deceit, survival and ingenuity reveals the depth of penetration into the highest levels of American government by Straight and his fellow Soviet apparatchiks and operatives during some of the Cold War's darkest moments.
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Perry, an investigative journalist who has written extensively on Soviet espionage, has chosen an intriguing subject in Michael Straight. Straight, who died in January 2004, was the scion of a wealthy New York family. As he admitted in his 1983 memoir, he became a Communist as a student at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he claimed he was peripherally involved with the spy ring that included Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, Donald MacClean, and Anthony Blunt. In the 1930s, Straight admitted that, while working at the State Department, he passed reports to a Soviet handler, and he claimed he stopped cooperation in 1941. Straight eventually became editor of the New Republic, the magazine founded by his parents. However, Perry asserts that Straight's involvement in espionage was far from peripheral. Unfortunately, he seizes on tidbits of information and inflates them into conclusive evidence. Still, as a portrait of a rather interesting man who traveled a winding ideological road, this is an engaging tale. Jay Freeman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Da Capo Press
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0306814285
• ISBN 13: 9780306814280
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 408