STRAIGHT, MICHAEL• 529In 1937 Straight was instructed by his Soviet controller to return
to the United States and obtain a job in the European Division of the
State Department, and he remained there as an unpaid volunteer until
he joined the U.S. Army Air Corps Reserve in January 1943. During
this period, as he admitted in his 1983 autobiographyAfter Long Si-
lence, he removed copies of confidential papers from the State De-
partment and supplied them to his contact, whom he named as
‘‘Michael Green’’ but who was actually Iskhak Akhmerov, the
NKVDillegalrezident. Straight trained as a B-17 pilot but never saw
combat and was stationed in the Midwest throughout the war.
In 1946 Straight made a visit to London and learned that Blunt and
Guy Burgesswere still active Soviet spies. He made no protest and
said nothing to anyone until in 1963 he confessed to William Sulli-
van of theFederal Bureau of Investigation(FBI) in anticipation of
an FBI background check on him following his nomination for a fed-
eral arts post in the Kennedy administration. Sullivan subsequently
informedArthur Martin, MI5’s principal mole hunter and the
newly appointed head of the D1 counterespionage branch, of
Straight’s confession in April 1964 as Martin passed through Wash-
ington, D.C., after interviewingJohn Cairncross in Cleveland,
Ohio. Under interrogation Cairncross, then working as an academic,
had admitted spying for the Soviets between 1934 and 1952 and had
named Klugmann as his recruiter at Cambridge. During a lunch
hosted by Sullivan, Straight confirmed that he too had been recruited
by Klugmann, and he named Blunt, with whom he had conducted a
brief homosexual affair, as a talent-spotter for the CPGB and a fellow
spy. Armed with this information, Martin persuaded MI5 to approach
the attorney-general, Sir John Hobson, to offer Blunt immunity from
prosecution. Although Straight volunteered to confront Blunt, his ev-
idence was considered insufficient to obtain a conviction, but Mar-
tin’s disclosure that Straight had talked encouraged him to accept the
deal.
Straight’s account of his espionage, contained in his autobiogra-
phy, was obviously self-serving and minimized the extent of his
involvement, but he was dismayed when his KGB file was released
in Moscow in 1999. Nevertheless, he gave a candid account of his
sister Biddy’s stormy marriage to Louis Dolivet, a veteranComin-
ternagent whose real name was Ludwig Brecher.