Last of the Cold War Spies by Roland Perry Read Free Book Online Page B

the monkey. It was a bizarre start for the budding revolutionary, but despite these upper-class trappings, Straight tackled his new life at the LSE with zeal. He become a member of the Communist-controlled Socialist Club, joined in debates, attended radical rallies, and used his wealth to get noticed. He became a card-carrying member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, associating rarely with anyone at the university except like-minded Soviet-supporting Communists, such as Geoffrey Marmont, editor of the radical magazine The Student Vanguard , who late in 1934 committed suicide; American Frank Meyer (expelled and deported to the United States in 1934 for his radical activities); Oxford graduate Peter Floud, who became a leading communist intellectual;Krishna Menon (later the foreign minister of India); Leo Silberman, a German refugee, later murdered in an intelligence operation involving South Africa; Michael Young, who studied law; and many others.
    Frank Meyer ran a fund for refugees from Nazi Germany, and Straight donated twenty pounds, which was ten times that raised in seven weeks. It allowed him to ingratiate himself with Meyer, LSE’s most militant Communist. Straight got on the LSE hockey team by using his Ford convertible to chauffeur other players to games. These were undergraduate lessons in how he could buy access to what he desired, a practice he would call on as a matter of course to far greater effect for decades to come.

4

CAMBRIDGE CONSOLIDATION
    T he London School of Economics had given Straight experience at communism beyond Dartington. Cambridge, he hoped, would provide the opportunity to embrace it further, although he was not aware of how that would occur and what form it would take. He began, age 18, at Trinity College, in the autumn of 1934. Its style and atmosphere attracted him from day one.
    His digs were in a lodging house on Trumpington Road, and he still had a “gentleman’s gentleman”—bequeathed by Whitney—to prepare his daily wash basin and once-a-week bath and to lay out his clothes. Wellscrubbed and nicely attired in shirt, tie, and student’s gown, the young freshman set about organizing the best tutor for his purposes in economics. First there was Maurice Dobb, a leading member of the British Communist Party and a “spotter” for the Comintern. Straight moved from him on to a classical economist, Denis Robertson, but he was angling for tuition under Joan Robertson, reputed to be the most brilliant of John Maynard Keynes’s disciples. Straight was a big supporter of Keynes. His economics represented a break from the noninterventionist classicists, who thought government interference should be kept at a minimum and who were shocked by Keynes’s articles and lectures on the General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, which would later (1936)be published in book form. This theory embraced big spending and expansion of government, especially during recession, to escape a slump and to reduce unemployment.
    This theory sat well with socialist thinking despite Keynes’s not advocating full socialism, which meant government “control of the means of production and exchange.” Yet it was acceptable to Marxists, for the time being, given the West’s history. It meant an economy following Keynes would be conditioned to big government spending. This was a step toward total government control that could be implemented by a change from something like a New Deal administration in the United States or Labour in the United Kingdom to something more radical.
    Keynes’s main concepts emerged during the Great Depression when the Western world was looking for solutions to mass unemployment as economies declined and big corporations slugged it out with powerful unions. He was the foremost economic thinker of the era, and Straight wanted to be as close to him as possible. Straight showed his prowess by studying hard and coming top out of two hundred students in the first examination