The Last of the Cold War Spies: The Life of Michael Straight--The Only American in Britain's Cambridge Spy Ring

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.