Laird told the Allentown Morning Call in 1986 that he became close friends with future Soviet ambassador to the United Nations, Oleg Troyanovsky, who was son of Aleksandr A. Troyanovsky, the first Soviet ambassador to the United States from 1934 to 1938, while at Swarthmore.
Oleg was a fellow student and member of the football team, of which Laird was assistant coach, and later became a foreign policy assistant and interpreter for Joseph Stalin and adviser to Nikita Khrushchev.
Laird was supposedly considered to be a politically well-developed person by the MGB in 1944 and being used as an agent.
The story of Laird's secret life surfaced for the first time in the Venona files.
Laird's reported code name in both Soviet intelligence and the Venona files is "Yun".