Roland Perry - Last of the Cold War Spies: The Life of Michael Straight

M ichael Whitney Straight was always going to be different from the rest of the Cambridge University ring of spies recruited by Russian intelligence in the 1930s. First, he was the only American among a group otherwise boasting British backgrounds. Second, he was the wealthiest. And third, he was the most ambitious. He wanted to succeed at something other than being a thief and errand boy for Joseph Stalin. Most of the others in the ring were dedicated wholly to a life of espionage work. To say the others were motivated by ideology is not enough. Once the Stalinist brand of Marxism was exposed as a fraud, many were disillusioned but still carried on.

Kim Philby suggested he only ever wanted to be a spy, which indicated a mind excited by the thrill of deception. His thrill turned sour when he defected to Russia, where his bosses shunned him. The rejection turned him suicidal and exacerbated his alcoholism.

Guy Burgesss KGB-admired capacity for imaginative lying and scheming was cut short by his own whimsical decision to defect with Donald Maclean in 1951. Burgess hated his life in Russia and died in miserable conditions in 1963.

Donald Maclean, like Kim Philby, took his Soviet agency seriously all his life. He carried on his work in Russia long after defecting. Although he was motivated by ideology, from all accounts he had a sad life in Russia despite never regretting his spying.

John Cairncross, the brilliant, impoverished Scotsman, became an expert on the French writer Molire. While more proud of his profound undercover work for the KGB, especially with the Battle of the Kursk, which helped change the course of World War II, Cairncross was happy to be acknowledged for his academic success. He was blown as a spy in 1951.

Victor Rothschild spread his tentacles everywhere on behalf of British, Israeli, and Soviet intelligence and put his prodigious intellectual capacities across several disciplines. At the beginning his support for the Soviet Union was rooted in self-preservation and the practical realities of prewar Europe. The Rothschild family had been a target for Hitler and the Nazis in every country they occupied. Postwar, his reasons were more murky. Like his forebears who had considerable influence in Europe in the nineteenth century, Rothschild thrived on secrecy, subterfuge, and behind the-scenes machinations. He was happy in the back rooms of power manipulating events to achieve success for his nefarious projects.

Anthony Blunts espionage work was marginalized after the defection of Burgess and Maclean, although he still on occasion met with his Soviet control, Yuri Modin. He had another, more visible career as the royal art curator and competent lecturer and writer of turgid art books. Like Rothschild, he thrived out of the limelight, in the hidden world of the palace and the esoteric world of art academia.