After Long Silince

...JAMES TOBIN, Sterling Professor of Economics, Yale University, Nobel Laureate in Economics...

...No wonder even the British press called him a "spy" and a "traitor...

...Straight passed on selected political analyses to Green until he left the Department, partly out of nervousness about, and distaste for, the Green connection...

...It is good to see left-wing political economy come alive...

...William Safire, in his second New York Times "Essay" on the matter, reports that by his own account Michael Straight "was a member of a secret communist cell...

...Paradoxically, although less evidencq>and documentation are available in espionage cases than is the norm in non-espionage cases, the vocabulary and imagery of espio-lit are significantly more vivid than those found in many other modes of discourse...

...He feigned a break and a breakdown, and when he departed for America, Blunt tore a drawing into two ragged pieces, handed one to Straight, and said that the other would one day be handed back by his contact in New York...

...Using high family connections, Straight got himself a job not on the Street in New York but at State in Washington and indeed, after some months, he was contacted by a man who identified himself as Michael Green...

...prepared five 'political analyses' and handed them to a Soviet secret agent...

...There must be "more to this story...

...The Straight memoir also contains interesting sidelights on the plight of the non-jet set rich, life at The New Republic during the prewar and postwar years, and Straight's travels with that intriguing political figure, Henry Wallace...

...It is well worth study and consideration...

...But more what...

...I'm inclined to believe him, although his book, which cavalierly characterizes the espio-sta-tus of others without offering backup evidence, adds yet another ingredient to the soup in which he finds himself...

...ANCHOR PRESS/DOUBLEDAY BOOKS it was that Burgess—Philby—MacLean— Blunt did, was less menacing than the stereotypes might suggest...

...Instead, he went to his friend Arthur Schles-inger Jr., who sent him to the FBI, which passed him on to MI-5, to each of whom he told all...

...First, there is much talk about but little definition of "spies" and "cells" and "traitors" and "moles" and "the underground...

...The high probability is, of course, that Burgess was, indeed, a "recruiter" at Cambridge...

...I would be facing Anthony Blunt in an English courtroom...

...Surely his report that his appeal not to go to Wall Street was considered by Stalin himself is grounds for suspicion that Straight has yet to come to terms with the finite nature of Cambridge's contribution to the international conspiracy...

...My actions were shaped by my own free will," Straight says...

...Treatments based on reigning orthodox theories appear to be worse than the disease...

...KENNETH J. ARROW, Joan Kenney Professor of Economics, Stanford University, Nobel Laureate in Economics...

...A novel explanation for the turndown in productivity based on worker reactions and corporate control...

...Straight asks rhetorically, "Had Guy selected me as the first of the undergraduates to be brought into the network...

...Well, it might be maintained, perhaps Straight himself was "innocent," but he had guilty knowledge...

...This is partly because of the espio-culture, which involves double and triple agents, deception, codes, obsessive secrecy, and the institutionalized destruction (via shredding and other devices) of key evidence, but also—and this is the third characteristic—it is patiently explained that critical information is classified or cannot be made available for reasons of national security...

...According to Straight, there were three types of members: those in touch with the real Communist Party...

...In 1951, Straight accidentally ran into Burgess in Washington and says that when he discovered that Burgess was still working for the British foreign service he threatened that if Burgess didn't resign forthwith, "I swear I'll turn you in...

...Especially since Michael Green, Straight's control, if that's what he was, forgot to bring or misplaced the identifying half of the ragged drawing...

...And although he wrote his mother that he was "filled with a violent uncontrollable love" for his comrades, he also writes that "I didn't love communism itself and that he regarded the superstructure of communist ideology as little more than a "psychological pretense...

...Safire "wonders" whether there is "more to this story...

...When he explains that he didn't come forward earlier because he would "find himself in court facing Anthony Blunt," one is hard put to fathom the evidence he thinks he might have been called up to provide...

...to 'go underground' as a Soviet spy in the United States...

...Contrast, for example, the language and claims of espio-lit with the sciences, where no proposition is defended without an abundance of documentation and evidence, and where life-and-death findings are stated as conditional formulas...

...Also one suspects that whatever The alternative Reagan asked for-"by the three most interesting economists of the lef tl—John Kenneth Galhmith "By and large, the economics profession has not developed any powerfully convincing diagnosis of the stagflation which has afflicted the United States and world economies the past decade...

...The sorts of evidence that we routinely demand in every other realm of discourse, with the possible exceptions of the Mafia, theology, and certain discussions about supply-side economics, are neither provided nor expected...

...They carried no party green cards, took no party assignments...

...and the "political analyses" he passed on were his own unclassified essays based on unclassified materials—the sort of stuff that later found its way into The New Republic when he changed his literary venue...

...The Diarist then goes on to report disapprovingly: "Since then, of course, Straight has admitted that in fact he had known of such a secret agent [Guy Burgess] and yet kept it to himself...

...In fact, on reflection one feels that one has less understanding of his role as "fourth man" than one did before one took up the book...

...More espio, more fantasy, or more of the author's naivete...

...So both economists and other concerned citizens should take seriously the refreshing and original explanations of our problems offered by Bowles, Gordon, and Weisskopf, and their detailed proposals for solution...

...In 1982, it was at last publicly revealed that Blunt was the famous "fourth man" and that Straight had fingered him...

...by Victor Navasky John P. Roche, in National Review, found that "however he may detest the word, and mutter fulminations at those who employ it, Michael Straight did as an undergraduate at Trinity College, Cambridge, sign up as an NKVD agent or spy...

...Since ideologues so frequently find the other side's alleged espionage congenial for scoring moral and political points, it behooves the rest of us to subject espio-lit to close scrutiny...

...those he calls "moles," by which he seems to mean that although they were members they didn't go to meetings because that might interfere with their careers as barristers or civil servants ("Their reticence was seen as discretion, not deception"), and those like himself who were members of a student movement, sat around "discussing subjects like organizing a protest against the Black-shirts in Cambridge, raising relief funds for Abyssinia, combatting pacifist tendencies within the local faction of the League of Nations Union...

...who accepted an assignment to return to the United States to insinuate himself into a position of influence...

...That was presumably [my italics] one of the reasons he kept coming back to Cambridge...

...It adds zero to the little we know about what Burgess and MacLean were supposed to have stolen in the first place, before they defected to Moscow (from where they denied that they had committed espionage...

...The rest is speculation, as far as evidence of espionage is concerned, at least in terms of hard evidence Straight is willing to share with the reader...

...Had he instructed Anthony Blunt to become a friend of mine in order to draw me in...

...In this context, his conversation with Blunt about going to Wall Street is on its face so preposterous that Safire has to be right...

...Second, whether it concerns Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, said to be "atom spies," or Alger Hiss, said to be "a traitor to his country," or the Libyan hit squad, said to be out to assassinate President Reagan, or Agca the Turk, said to be a pawn in the Andropov-KGB-Bulgarian plot to assassinate the Pope, espio-lit (especially of the nonfiction variety) may be recognized by the absence of the smoking gun...

...The Washington Diarist, in Straight's old magazine, The New Republic, quotes his 1954 farewell where he wrote "if I knew of any secret couriers [of communism] in sensitive positions, I wouldn't suppose that keeping it to myself was an act of affirmation in the liberal faith...

...Straight tells us that alBOOKS though he had made some false starts toward disclosure over the years, he hadn't come forward because of a mixture of indecision, revulsion at playing the informer, discouragement from those toward whom he made whistle-blowing overtures (one told him there was "a line around the block" of people with information about Burgess) and fear ("My story would result in a trial in England...

...And other than the fact that Blunt was in touch with Britain's wartime allies, the Russians, during the war and broke with them thereafter, one learns little about what perfidy he might have committed...

...But because of Straight's own ambivalence, the main result of his book is to strengthen the myths of the Cold War without adding new evidence that might help us understand to what degree, if any, they deserve to endure...

...Let us look again at what Straight has told us about himself and his fellow "communist spies...

...He called himself not a communist but a "student activist," an "anti-fascist...

...It never occurred to me that it could impose discipline on me...

...Charles E. Claffey, in a Boston Globe story reprinted and circulated by Straight's publisher, quotes him as saying "he agreed...

...The case, as recounted in the press, seems clear...

...Straight's status at State was that of "unpaid volunteer...

...In his memoir, After Long Silence, Michael Straight informs us that in 1935 he did join the Cambridge University Socialist Society, which was "dominated by a Marxist core...

...Eliot Fremont-Smith, writing in The Village Voice, says he has been "a traitor and a spy" and that "he knew of Soviet moles in high places, he knew their names and how it had been done...

...When Blunt gives Straight his "assignment," he is to infer (and we are presumably to infer) that Burgess is the "friend" who gave the order, i.e., it was his suggestion...

...At least by the standards of what we might call espio-lit...

...and who, knowing that an old communist classmate was spying on the United States during the Korean war, kept that information to himself...

...The odd but sometimes affecting Straight memoir makes a nice place to begin precisely because the author himself exhibits such ambivalence about so many of the areas he chooses to include, and also because he has written to The New York Times, among other places, protesting that press reports of his spy status are greatly exaggerated...

...Not long thereafter, Burgess defected...

...In 1963, when Straight was asked if he would care to serve as chairman of the Kennedy Administration's newly created National Endowment for the Arts, he turned the post down because, knowing that an FBI check was a prerequisite, he feared there would be "too much explaining to do...

...But that, incredible as it may seem, is it...

...On the surface, these labels, descriptions, and observations seem fair enough...

...He tells us, after all, about Guy Burgess: "He had become part of a Soviet espionage network, and he had agreed to draw other students into it...

...In the aftermath of what he considers a misleading press, Straight has complained that he is not and never was a spy...

...I felt no sense of loyalty to the party as such...

...But this memoir offers no serious evidence for the proposition...

...It was at heart, the point of entry into the student communist movement...

...On this issue After Long Silence is evidentially silent...

...True espio-lit has at least three characteristics...

...No doubt about it, he was a communist, but wait a minute...

...The movement, "which took its direction from the head office of the British Communist Party in King Victor Navasky is the author of "Naming Names" and the editor of The Nation...