Wasps by Michael Knox Beran

Author:Michael Knox Beran
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pegasus Books
Published: 2021-08-03T00:00:00+00:00

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IN THE SPRING OF 1937 Michael Straight and his stepfather, Leonard Elmhirst, had tea with Franklin and Eleanor in the White House, and the four of them discussed the possibility of Michael’s going to work in Washington, perhaps on the staff of the Federal Reserve Board or as a private secretary to the president himself. Elmhirst observed that Michael was both a student and friend of Maynard Keynes, whose stock was high in New Deal Washington, and the president seemed to think that the National Resources Planning Board was the “best place” for a young economist.

Afterward Straight returned to England to complete his course at Cambridge, and in June he drove down to London. He stopped in Oxford Street, where Anthony Blunt got in the car. They drove off to what Straight described as a roadhouse on the Great West Road near the aerodrome that is now Heathrow Airport. There Blunt introduced him to a man he called George, but who was in fact Arnold Deutsch. He ordered a beer and instructed Straight in such precautions as telephoning from public booths to avoid detection; he also explained to him the manner in which he would be contacted once he returned to America.

In October Straight was staying in his mother’s apartment in Manhattan when the telephone rang.

“Mr. Straight?” said a thickly accented voice. “I bring you greetings… from your friends in Cambridge University…”

Straight was told to go to a nearby restaurant, where he presently found a small, puffy-lipped man with a warm smile.

“My name is Michael,” the stranger said, “the same as yours… Michael Green.”

Iskhak Akhmerov was an agent of the N.K.V.D. and was keen on Straight’s finding work in Washington. The difficulty was that the young man’s employment counselor, President Roosevelt, had in spite of his musings about the National Resources Planning Board been unable to find a place for him. Another expedient was hit upon. Straight drove to Arthurdale, West Virginia, where, as if by chance, he ran into Mrs. Roosevelt, who was making one of her periodic tours of the model village. Her Packard limousine became stuck in the mud, and Straight joined a group of miners in extricating it. Afterward she asked him to join her. “I would be a Communist,” she said as they drove to meet a train she hoped to catch, “if I thought that Russia was comparable to America.” He told of her of his interest in working in the State Department, and she, in turn, wrote a letter to Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles, an old friend of hers who had been a year behind her brother Hall at Groton and who had been page boy at her wedding to Franklin. He was now her husband’s most trusted diplomat.

Straight was soon working as a temporary unpaid assistant in the Office of the Economic Advisor in the State Department and feeding government documents to Akhmerov. At the same time he insinuated himself in the social life of Washington. He dined

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