Michael Straight, New Republic publisher, editor, and writer from 1948 to 1956, was a KGB spy associated with the notorious UK Cambridge Five that passed thousands of classified documents and secrets to the KGB from the 1930s through at least the early 1950s.

He worked as a speech writer for Frankin D. Roosevelt and in that administration’s Department of State beginning in 1937. In 1940 he was employed at the Department of State covering the Near East. In 1942 he joined the Air Force and was a pilot of B-17s. After the war he left government service to help run his family’s journalism business: the New Republic. In 1963 he admitted to being a communist spy and outed Anthony Blunt, the recruiter for the Cambridge Five for which he was given immunity from prosecution and a job as Deputy Chairman of the Coordinating Committee for Cuban Affairs in the Kennedy Administration.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War it was revealed that Straight was a much more significant KGB asset than he led the US government to believe.

Source: Historica.fandom.com. History.com. Graphic: Michael Straight at Cambridge, 1936, Public Domain.