Read Last of the Cold War Spies for Free Online Page B

mother.
    Just like his father, he would put his hand up if he were ever asked to serve for a cause in which he believed. Again, this temperament, when coupled with his emotional statelessness, implied that Straight would be vulnerable to any later overtures to become a KGB agent.
    The self-portrait of Straight as an emotionally defenseless neo-orphanwaif did not sit with those who knew him intimately. Young found him a dominant personality obsessed with extreme left-wing ideology and driven to fulfilling political ambitions through it. “He was extremely good-looking,” Young recalled, “an Adonis with intellectual gifts to match.”
    Straight was very competitive. He hated losing even on the tennis court, which was one of the few areas Young managed to conquer him. 2
    Even as a young teenager, Straight could summon an excess of charm and apply it at will. His self-styled emotional retardation seemed even more implausible when he encountered the curvaceous dancer, Margaret Barr, an Australian communist of 24 who came to teach dance at Dartington in 1930.
    Straight thought that she was dark, dramatic, bold, and strong. He likened her to a statue by Gaston Lachaise.
    Margaret took class twice a week, and Straight, just 14, set out to impress her with his knowledge of communist ideals and by his working hard at exercise routines started by her mentor, Martha Graham. These exertions won Margaret’s attention. He proved to be a fair dancer, and she cast him in leading roles she had created. Margaret’s epic was a clichéd heroic-workers-versus-the-fat-capitalist-boss saga—typical of that produced in Moscow and Leningrad by order of the state—performed to the Second Symphony of Jean Sibelius. Straight led a large chorus of workers out of poverty and oppression and into a painless new order. The show received a mixed reaction. Left-wing critics invited down from London for the opening night liked it. Admiral Sir Barry Domville, who had two children at Dartington, thought it was evidence that the school was a potential hotbed of Soviet propaganda and influence, and said so. Pom Elmhirst, as left wing as anybody at the Hall, threatened him with a libel suit.
    Straight continued for more than a year in his pursuit of Margaret until she relented, and they began a furtive love affair in her cottage. Straight insisted on outlining this in detail to a salivating Michael Young. 3 Margaret and Straight stole away to Dorothy’s weekend cottage in Cornwall and read Lady Chatterly’s Lover aloud. Straight was Mellors, the working class gardener, who had the affair with Connie (Margaret’s role), the upper-class wife.

    By 1932, the school—under the leadership of W. B. (Bill) Curry—had shed its unstructured attitude to the basics of education. Now any student could move on to higher formal qualification. English had to be taken every year. The fundamentals in arithmetic, languages, history, geography, and science were taught. The principle of enticing VIPs to visit Dartington continued. By now leaders in all walks of life were being invited or were coming on their own volition to examine the experiment. The contrast in visitors was notable. Rabindranath Tagore, always willing to lend his wisdom to his good friend Leonard, was there for some time in 1930. Tagore pleased Dorothy by declaring that the estate grounds had spiritual roots. He claimed that they went back to Christ’s time and that the natural springs and water beds had healing properties.
    At the other end of the belief spectrum, the Comintern—the international arm of Russia’s espionage operations, which ran communists and parties in other countries—was interested in the key British educational institutions for propaganda and recruitment. They had infiltrated Oxford and Cambridge, from where the nation’s leaders in every field had come and would come. The Comintern, which had been set up and directed by Leon Trotsky, had a patient long-term view about