Last of the Cold War Spies: The Life of Michael Straight

by Roland Perry

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.

Genres: Espionage, Biography, Nonfiction, Historical

408 pages, Hardcover

First published July 12, 2005

About the author

Professor Roland Perry (born 11 October 1946) is a Melbourne-based author best known for his books on history, especially Australia in the two world wars. His Monash: The Outsider Who Won The War, won the Fellowship of Australian Writers' 'Melbourne University Publishing Award' in 2004. The judges described it as 'a model of the biographer's art. In the Queen's Birthday Honours of June 2011, Perry was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia 'for services to literature as an author.In October 2011, Monash University awarded Perry a Fellowship for 'high achievement as a writer, author, film producer and journalist.His sports books include biographies of Sir Donald Bradman, Steve Waugh, Keith Miller and Shane Warne. Perry has written on espionage, specialising in the British Cambridge Ring of Russian agents. He has also published three works of fiction and produced more than 20 documentary films. Perry has been a member of the National Archives of Australia Advisory Council since 2006.

In late 2012 Perry accepted an adjunct appointment at Monash University as a Professor, with the title ‘Writer-in-Residence’ in the University’s Arts Faculty.

Reviews

[Erik Graff · Rating 3 out of 5]

While this is a well-written biography of Michael Whitney Straight, (9/1/16–1/4/04) its central thesis that he was a K.G.B. spy until the collapse of the USSR is unconvincing. The evidence seems perfectly clear through WWII and clear enough through the Henry Wallace campaign, but by the fifties it no longer seems certain that Straight was an intentional K.G.B. asset. He did certainly remain openly left-wing, at least until obtaining a political appointment from the Nixon administration, but there is nothing particularly remarkable about that given his upbringing, education and the character of his mother.

Reading Perry's book casually, I noted how surmise gradually overcame evidence as regards the espionage thesis. The main claim in the end was based on what the author reports as having been told by a handful of individuals, Russian and Western, who had known Straight. All-in-all, placing the book in the broader context of the Cambridge spy ring, the story told is much like many of the (necessarily) speculative books about the JFK assassination.

My major critique of this book is its lack of any sympathy for its subject. There is no attempt to get into or represent Michael Straight's mind as it seems assumed from the beginning that he, a prolific writer, was ever and always a liar. What would have interested me more was some intelligent effort to represent how it was that so many well-educated Westerners, Americans in particular, became captivated by Soviet "communism" in the thirties and forties. Additionally, I'd be interested in learning more as regards the responses of persons like Straight to post-war Soviet foreign policy, the Kruschev revelations about Stalin's regime, the incursions into Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968. It is incredible to me that someone like Straight, knowing of these things, could serve such masters.

[Liz V. · Rating 2 out of 5]

A feeling of deja vu permeated my reading of the first chapters, such that I kept flipping to the footnotes to see whether I had read the secondary sources. Finally I decided I had read Last of the Cold War Spies already.

Perry describes Straight's career as a Soviet spy in declarative sentences that make for a gossipy tale, festooned with footnotes. Not that I doubt what Perry conveys generally, but I would have preferred clearly documented facts with interpretation left to the reader. Nonetheless, Perry makes an inarguable case that, should there be justice, Straight is in Dante's ninth circle.

[Kylie · Rating 2 out of 5]

Dragged on. Couldn’t finish it.

[Benjamin Flores · Rating 5 out of 5]

Accurate depiction of the history of the cold war, it was amazing to read.

[John McLaughlin]

Abandoned unfinished. Could be compared to *Legacy of Ashes,* I suppose.

[Ruth · Rating 4 out of 5]

interesting