Last of the Cold War spies : the life of Michael Straight, the only American in Britain's Cambridge spy ring /

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,0 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 2005 Booklist

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. (Aug.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.