3

For Multilateralism or “Independent Activities”?

Once the schism in the World Federation of Trade Unions had occurred, the way was open for the creation of a “free” trade union international. Yet the process of establishing the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) in opposition to the WFTU was fraught, not least over differences of emphasis as to what the word “free” meant in the world of trade unionism. At a basic level it involved unions being free from state or political party domination; but was it compatible with any organic link to a political party or partnership role with the state? Would collective bargaining be its raison d’être at the expense of political engagement? And would Christian trade unions qualify as “free,” if they were subject to heavy influence from the church hierarchy? Such matters were vigorously contested ahead of the establishment of the ICFTU and resolved by compromises broadly satisfactory to the AFL. Less easily resolved was the undeclared competition between the AFL and the British TUC for influence in the new organization. Tensions between the two dating back to 1945 and the foundation of the WFTU persisted and contributed to an AFL boycott of ICFTU meetings for several months when the new body was little more than two years old.

The ICFTU was launched with the Cold War at its height and amid a proliferation of areas of tension between “East” and “West.” Keen to engage fully in the anti-communist struggle, the AFL found the ICFTU slow to respond, whether for lack of resources or out of a belief that trade unionism’s legitimate area of activity was more circumscribed than envisaged by the AFL. In these circumstances, the FTUC was quickly drawn into what were termed “independent activities”—in effect an extension of the work it had engaged in when the AFL was free from outside ties from 1945 to 1950. Its scope for engaging in such activity was greatly facilitated by its access to secret CIA funding that originated in 1948–49 and was at a peak in the eighteen months following the launch of the ICFTU. Much of the AFL’s effort via the FTUC continued to focus on France, but Italy was increasingly important as a theatre of activity following the 1948 split in its formerly unified but communist-led trade union movement. Meanwhile, the situation in Finland called for urgent intervention between 1949 and 1951 to keep it from being fully absorbed into the Soviet sphere. The AFL’s entanglement with the CIA also led to its embroilment in areas beyond the normal sphere of trade unionism—notably in the realm of anti-communist propaganda and in intelligence gathering through activities focused on Eastern Europe. Strains induced by such involvement would soon emerge, highlighting for both CIA and AFL the limitations of their partnership.

The ICFTU’s Short-Lived Honeymoon

The long-anticipated split in the WFTU took place at a meeting of its executive board in Paris on 19 January 1949 when the TUC, CIO, and NVV walked out of the organization for good. The AFL’s fear now was that the TUC and CIO, acting in unison, might launch a new international without consulting it. Although Irving Brown had no specific instructions, the cyclostyled bulletin he issued from his Brussels office pressed the case for a new body and aired his personal views on the form it should take. He was the source of recurring press reports that the AFL would be in the forefront in forming a rival to the WFTU.1 The CIO’s European representative, Elmer Cope, until recently a WFTU assistant general secretary, observed that the AFL was making a serious error with the tone of its literature on Europe: “It rings too much of the confident American who has all the answers to the European workers’ problems.”2

The tenor of Brown’s pronouncements irritated the TUC, contributing to its decision to slow down any steps to establish a rival international. Prior to the walkout, its general secretary, Vincent Tewson, had deliberately turned down Brown’s request for private talks, and he now declined an invitation to the AFL’s executive council meeting in Bal Harbour, Florida. It didn’t go down well with the AFL, but the TUC saw the need for a decent interval following the walkout before holding formal talks with friendly organizations over the way forward. It would allow time to explain the decision to quit the WFTU, countering any suggestion that the British had been cynically conspiring to undermine the organization, and also allowing time for other centres to follow suit and sever their links.

There was ill-tempered sparring between Brown and Tewson at an OEEC-TUAC meeting in Bern later that month, where the main item was the appointment of the TUAC’s secretary. Walter Schevenels, the TUC’s nominee, was the front-runner though he was still a member of the WFTU secretariat. This fact confirmed the AFL in its view that he was running with the hares and hunting with the hounds, altogether too much of a survivor to find favour in its uncomplicated, monochrome view of the world. This TUAC appointment would also be more significant than appeared on the surface, for the successful candidate would later have a springboard in bidding for the bigger job as general secretary of a future international—exactly what Schevenels aspired to be. In anticipation of this, Jay Lovestone had commissioned a dossier on Schevenels by a disaffected former assistant in the IFTU that called into question his moral character and credentials as a trade unionist. The document was forwarded for Brown’s use at the TUAC meeting.3

At the sessions in Bern, Irving Brown fought tenaciously to block Schevenels’s appointment. He protested that the Americans had not been consulted over his candidacy and forced an adjournment for six hours in order to telephone home for instructions. TUC representatives Tewson and Arthur Deakin complained that Brown was interfering in what was essentially a European matter and accused him of threatening unity and dictating to the Europeans. Only when it proved impossible to get through to Washington did Brown agree to abstain and so allow the appointment to be made unopposed. But when he received cabled instructions from Dubinsky and Woll the next morning he insisted that the AFL vote be recorded as “against.”

As soon as TUAC business was complete, there was an informal session held in secret to consider strategy in the aftermath of the walkout from the WFTU. In line with TUC thinking, the meeting rejected any rushed move to create a new organization. Schevenels was given the task of drafting a report explaining the reason for the action of the British, Americans, and Dutch in the hope of winning over other centres who might question why they were being bounced into a split at this particular time and without wider consultation. It was agreed that a new international would need to include both the AFL and CIO, and to this end a liaison committee was established with seats for both American centres. However, Brown declined on principle to accept membership since it would mean sitting alongside the CIO.4

Irving Brown’s obstructiveness put him in bad odour with many of the Europeans and reinforced a growing indignation that this relatively junior American representative should presume to throw his weight around on behalf of the AFL. Tewson’s preference for someone other than Brown to speak for the AFL in the TUAC was barely concealed. In TUC circles there was muttering that they would “get rid of him” in due course. Rumours circulated that someone high in the State Department had called AFL president Bill Green and requested that he put a stop to Brown’s activities in Europe, which were causing harm.5 In fact, British foreign secretary Ernest Bevin had written personally to David Dubinsky, diplomatically expressing confidence that “you will do all in your power to remove any obstacles which might arise in promoting a development so important to free trade unionists and free men everywhere.”6 Fearful that he might have overstepped the mark, Brown requested a recall to the United States for clearer instructions, only to be told that this was not possible. The AFL international affairs committee did, however, register its strong disapproval of Walter Schevenels. Lovestone was also on hand to offer Brown reassurance, telling him that the TUC would be in for a rude awakening if it felt it could treat him like a mere clerk.7

Pending any agreement leading toward the formation of a new international, Brown busied himself with arrangements to ensure AFL influence whatever the region or sphere of activity. In March at a general conference of the international trade secretariats held in Britain under Oldenbroek’s chairmanship, Brown combined forces with the ITF general secretary in a move to establish a permanent organization of trade secretariats should the idea of a new international fail to materialize. The AFL had already helped launch a regional trade union organization for the Americas in 1948 in the shape of the Confederación interamericana de trabajadores, and now Brown also turned his attention to Asia, where an equivalent body was under consideration at a conference in Indore in May 1949 that he attended along with anti-communist trade union representatives from eight Asian countries. On this occasion, his judgment was that the proposed Inter-Asiatic Trade Union Federation was premature and that the establishment of an FTUC office in Calcutta would be more productive. The FTUC office in India opened by Richard Deverall in 1949 was an early beneficiary of secret funding from the OPC/CIA, with $10,000 earmarked for it.8

When Tewson and Deakin travelled to the United States for a March–April meeting of the Anglo-American Council on Productivity, the atmosphere was calmer and it was possible for AFL and TUC leaders to have general talks about a new trade union international. The AFL leadership still refused to admit the CIO to the talks, but the TUC insisted that without the participation of both American centres there would be no new organization. The AFL took the opportunity to press the TUC on certain preconditions: agreement that a new international would have to be open to all free trade unions, not restricted to those of social democratic orientation; and that larger affiliates must not dominate the organization, thereby making it a weapon for big power politics. Mollified by the TUC’s assurances, the AFL agreed to the TUC’s calling a preparatory conference for Geneva in June 1949 to lay the groundwork for the new International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU).9 The AFL and CIO subsequently reached an understanding over their respective membership strengths—a formula that would recognize the numerical dominance of the AFL in any future international. On the basis of such an understanding, the AFL was prepared to accept equal representation with the CIO in the governing body of the ICFTU and to coordinate their approaches to policy and choice of leader.

However, at the preparatory conference in Geneva it was evident that achieving agreement over a new international would still not be easy. In his keynote speech George Meany emphasized the importance of the ideological battle against communism, whereas Vincent Tewson and the CIO’s Jim Carey insisted that it was necessary to be more than just anti-communist. It was a foretaste of a debate that would run through the international trade union movement over the coming thirty years. Attitudes to communism would determine precisely who were considered friends and enemies—who was acceptable and who was not.

For all that this preliminary conference seemed to symbolize the coming together of the British and Americans, privately the AFL criticized the way the TUC exercised control in deciding which centres to invite to Geneva, while the British would later mutter their resentment at the AFL’s “bossing the show,” forever colloquing on the fringes with other delegations. But as Lillie Brown commented, as a result of her husband’s efforts there was hardly a delegation present in Geneva with whom the AFL had not had friendly contact, and naturally they looked to the AFL for leadership: “three years of hard work cannot be denied nor the fact that the AFL was politically on the right track since 1945.”10 A preparatory committee was set up to draft a constitution and to reconcile differences revealed in Geneva. It met as international tension in the Cold War reached a new peak: NATO had been formed four months earlier; the committee’s initial session coincided with the USSR’s first atom bomb test; and its final meeting was held just as Mao Tse-tung’s communist forces swept the Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek from the Chinese mainland.

Chaired by the Belgian Paul Finet, with Vincent Tewson as secretary, the preparatory committee included Jaap Oldenbroek, Evert Kupers of the Dutch NVV, and Giulio Pastore of the recently formed anti-communist Italian centre, Libera confederazione generale italiana del lavoro (LCGIL), while Irving Brown and CIO international affairs director Mike Ross represented the two American centres. The meetings themselves became protracted bargaining sessions in which the AFL and TUC spokesmen dominated proceedings. They were frequently at odds and loath to yield on issues they claimed to be trade union “principles,” but which were as much to do with securing a strategic advantage in the new international. Exchanges between Brown and Tewson had a personal edge—the two men rerunning under new headings old battles and, as it turned out, honing their weapons for confrontations yet to come.11

Debate turned on such questions as how to define “free trade unionism”: Did it include Christian as well as social democratic organizations? Argument was fierce over whether to incorporate into the constitution specific references to issues of the day such as “totalitarian aggression,” “free labour versus slave labour,” and the Atlantic Pact, as the AFL wanted, or to aim for a “positive” as distinct from “anti-communist” document as Tewson preferred. Should the Soviet bloc exiles of the ICFTUE be admitted as full members, thus strengthening the anti-communist thrust of the international, or would they be confined to the fringes? All were agreed that a regional structure for the international was a much-needed new departure, but there were sharp differences over whether it should be accompanied by extensive decentralization of power, as advocated by Brown, and whether a rapid move in this direction or the phased development preferred by the TUC was more appropriate.12 Even the location of the headquarters was bitterly contested, with Brown’s preference for Paris and Tewson’s proposal for London reflecting a tit-for-tat call and response. Both proposals were in conflict with the sentiment in the wider labour movement that the choice of general secretary and headquarters location should be decided in favour of the smaller affiliates.

In view of all this, it was some surprise that the AFL and TUC were able to agree on a candidate for ICFTU general secretary—J. H. Oldenbroek. As his close collaborator in the struggle against the WFTU, Brown was initially in his corner. Yet the preparatory committee sessions revealed signs of friction between the two men. Oldenbroek differed sharply with Brown on the approach to regional machinery, the admission of the Christian trade unions proposed by the AFL, and the relationship with the ICFTUE. For the first time, Brown began to express surprise at how “tradition bound” Oldenbroek was with his “lack of imagination on the new and vital problems” they faced, while Lovestone bridled at news of Oldenbroek’s “intemperate and impudent remarks.” At one stage in the committee proceedings Brown and Oldenbroek were literally shouting at each other in anger across the table.13 Disturbed by this new insight into Oldenbroek, Brown looked around for an alternative candidate but concluded that there was really no one of equal calibre. For its part, the TUC had seen in Oldenbroek’s recent behaviour someone unafraid of acting independently of the Americans. In a move that surprised many, the TUC agreed to move his nomination, with the AFL seconding.14 It was an intriguing question as to whose candidate Oldenbroek really was. Certainly the fraught relationship between the AFL leadership and Oldenbroek, which later became such a crippling factor in ICFTU politics, traced its origin back to the differences that emerged in the preparatory committee.

Compromises reached in the preparatory committee were only tentative, and several issues were to be fought over again at the ICFTU founding congress in London in November 1949. Defending its corner to the last, the AFL arrived with five pages of proposed amendments to the very draft constitution Brown had helped write. The bruising battles of the London congress were keenly remembered years later as veterans of that experience engaged in successive rounds of trench warfare over the evolving shape of ICFTU policy. Four years on, Walter Reuther recalled how the prospects for the London congress even starting had been in doubt over AFL demands that the Christian trade unions be admitted. And Jay Lovestone subsequently remembered with bitterness how, at Vincent Tewson’s insistence, his exclusion from the congress committee on resolutions had paved the way for Walter Reuther to foist on the ICFTU what Lovestone was keen to remind people was the original Leninist slogan of “Bread, Peace and Freedom.”15

Yet, on balance, Irving Brown was satisfied with the gains made in the struggle to shape the ICFTU constitution. The AFL could claim that it had shifted the emphasis from the social democratic focus of the IFTU’s European veterans: implicitly the emphasis was more on freedom than economic equality. He had helped sharpen the formal anti-communist thrust and had strengthened the possibilities for regional activism by addressing the concerns of what would later come to be known as the “Third World.” The TUC’s control, he reported, was slipping away, slowly but inevitably, since the British lacked drive and “any conception or imagination for the job to be done.” Nevertheless it was his personal view that unless the ICFTU proved to be a big improvement on what had gone before, the AFL should not for one minute consider giving up its independent activities.16

“Independent activity” had a special meaning for the AFL. It was rooted in a perception that only the Americans were capable of undertaking certain projects. It had much to do with the virulence of AFL opposition to communism; even among anti-communist trade unionists, their hostility to the secular religion spawned by the Russian revolution was pronounced. But it was also bound up with a sense that Americans now had a manifest duty to lead, especially in view of the ravaged state of organized labour in much of postwar Europe. It was Lovestone’s view that no other national labour movement had the requisite “drive” to qualify them for leadership. In the past, the British labour movement had claimed, and had been accorded, a leadership role among European trade unions, but the TUC was suspect in Lovestone’s eyes because of its unprincipled role in 1945 in killing off the IFTU and launching the WFTU. And, of course, neither the British nor any other national trade union centre in the free world commanded material resources that matched those of the Americans and that were now required to build an international free trade union movement. While other centres might consider that the essence of trade union internationalism—the business of being “one’s brother’s keeper”—was best expressed in multilateral assistance programs, for key figures in the AFL an effective approach required a significant element of autonomy for national centres.

Thus, AFL independent activities—several of them highly sensitive and only recently launched with OPC-CIA financing—were hardly likely to be dropped, however well the ICFTU performed. Apart from continuing with its interests in France and Germany, the FTUC was now heavily involved in Italian and Finnish trade union affairs. In Asia and the Far East, the FTUC had recently stationed representatives in Formosa, Indonesia, and India. An immediate issue was the need to help extricate trade union centres from their continuing membership in the WFTU—calling for the AFL to focus on Australia and Israel, among other places. Over the next two years, Brown and the AFL would also attempt to establish a toehold behind the Iron Curtain with activities focused on Poland and Czechoslovakia and a window on East Germany via the Ostburo operated by the AFL-backed Unabhängige Gewerkschaft-Organization (UGO) in Berlin. Meanwhile, through its financial control of the Confederación interamericana de trabajadores, forerunner of the ICFTU’s regional arm, Organización regional interamericana de trabajadores (ORIT), the AFL kept a close watch on Latin American labour movements. In this sphere AFL representative Serafino Romualdi reported directly to President Green—an operation in which Lovestone played no role.17

In its early months, there was a spirit of harmony among the ICFTU’s affiliates and idealistic talk of national centres agreeing to combine their international effort through multilateral programs. Under this suggestion, the more powerful centres—the TUC, AFL, and CIO—were to assign their international specialists to work as assistant general secretaries under Oldenbroek. The latter proposed such a role for Irving Brown while on a visit to the AFL. Brown would have been personally content to wear the title if it also left him free to operate as a representative of the AFL, and he suggested that his superiors negotiate appropriate terms that would avoid his being bureaucratically “handcuffed.” Meanwhile, he was happy to run errands on behalf of Oldenbroek in the shape of missions to Greece or Tunisia, where the national centre had recently disaffiliated from the WFTU. Lovestone fretted that some of this was a distraction, but Brown assured him: “The meetings to which I am going are not of great importance in themselves but provide me with excellent reasons or camouflage for other activities. . . . It is absolutely essential . . . that I maintain personal and direct contact with the individuals, groups and organizations involved.”18 On one mission to Greece to represent Oldenbroek at a GSEE congress, Brown was accompanied by Elmer Cope of the CIO, which had as yet no international program of its own and was content to channel its financial and manpower resources through the ICFTU. During the visit Cope became concerned over what he saw as Brown’s uniquely close relationship with Oldenbroek and wrote home anxiously: “If we [the CIO] are not careful we will have to fight like hell to get a look in.”19

Irving Brown used his influence with Oldenbroek to ensure as best he could that people approved by the AFL handled important aspects of ICFTU work. In his capacity as chairman of the ICFTU executive board’s subcommittee on publicity, he brought Arnold Beichman onto the staff of the press department to pep up what the Americans bemoaned as the organization’s unimaginative approach to publicity. Based in New York, Beichman would become a key Lovestone ally within the ICFTU and a purveyor of the Lovestoneite view of the world for decades to come through his columns in the Christian Science Monitor.20 At the United Nations, Lovestone had already ensured that the AFL would have decisive input into ICFTU activities by persuading Oldenbroek to take over wholesale the AFL’s New York office and staff already established to monitor the UN under the direction of German socialist refugee Toni Sender. For the sake of convenience (because they were located in New York), Matthew Woll and David Dubinsky were named as the ICFTU’s consultants to the United Nations Economic and Social Council. And when the UN established a Commission on Forced Labour, Lovestone asked Brown to lean on Oldenbroek to allow the AFL rather than the ICFTU to nominate to the trade union seat.21

Jaap Oldenbroek began his stewardship of the ICFTU amid a spirit of goodwill, promising that in opposition to the WFTU it would be a “fighting organization.”22 Yet with the general secretary’s early efforts focused on assembling a staff and creating a headquarters machinery, Lovestone and Brown worried at the lack of external activity. Three months on from the founding congress Lovestone was concerned about the ICFTU’s silence over tense cold-war confrontations that were shaping up in various parts of the world. It had yet to issue a public statement of any kind, and even a recent foreign ministers’ conference in London had gone unremarked.23

In truth, Oldenbroek did not regard these as priorities for the trade union movement. It reflected a difference in attitude that assumed greater significance just months later when the Korean War broke out. Lovestone wanted the general secretary to convene an emergency committee and publicly declare support for the position taken by the United States at the UN.24 Brown lobbied Oldenbroek but got no further on this issue than he had in arguing the case for the ICFTU to take a firm stand against the communist-sponsored Stockholm Peace Campaign. Oldenbroek was certainly anti-communist, but he understood that there were limits to what trade unions could and should do about such matters. Brown, in contrast, responded to the Korean emergency by offering to work with “anyone else in Europe who is ready to start up a steady and consistent campaign of psychological warfare.” His idea was to cover France with posters and leaflets to capitalize on what he optimistically described as “a new spirit in Western Europe, especially in France.” But in view of the ICFTU’s inaction he told George Meany: “Unless we can show more desire on the part of the ICFTU to play a role in these hot issues, the reason for [its] existence . . . becomes less and less.”25 Lovestone shared his misgivings, which soon narrowed down to a specific complaint arising from the ICFTU’s first tentative foray into Asia. It would lead to a permanent souring of relations between himself and Oldenbroek and would blight dealings between the AFL and the ICFTU secretariat for years to come.

The Souring of Relations with the ICFTU and the British TUC

In summer 1950, the ICFTU dispatched a delegation on a mission to fifteen Asian countries to solicit affiliations and make preparations for the establishment of an Asian Regional Organization as required by the constitution. The secretary to the delegation was Jay Krane, a twenty-seven-year-old American of bookish appearance, latterly with the CIO, who had transferred only weeks earlier to the ICFTU payroll. To balance the CIO-AFL ticket on the delegation, Lovestone pressed Oldenbroek to name as co-secretary Richard (Dick) Deverall, who had been representing the FTUC in India since July 1949. By stationing him in India, the AFL had signalled its determination to be fully involved in the formation of an Asian regional trade union body whenever it took place.26

Unfortunately, Deverall had a controversial past, and having been advised to be wary of him Oldenbroek demurred over including him in the mission. Up to 1947, he had served on the staff of the military government in Japan under General Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Commander Allied Powers (SCAP). However, he was dismissed that year as a disruptive influence. In the highly politicized labour education division, he was regarded as obsessively anti-communist, having reported several of his colleagues to G2, the military intelligence division, as fellow travellers. In hiring Dick Deverall, Lovestone’s original intention was to send him back to Japan as FTUC representative, but MacArthur barred him from entering the country, and he was then deployed in India instead.27

In the face of persistent lobbying by Lovestone, Oldenbroek finally agreed that Deverall could be part of the ICFTU mission while it was in India but would be required to cover his own expenses in other countries visited. In the event, General MacArthur again refused Deverall admittance when the mission reached Japan, blame for which was laid at the door of Val Burati, the acting chief of SCAP’s labour division and a former CIO organizer with the textile workers. The ICFTU visit to Japan was timed to coincide with the launch of Sōhyō (the General Council of Trade Unions of Japan), the culmination of a long, painstaking effort by the Japanese non-communist unions, overseen by Burati, to unite in a single organization. From his Calcutta office, Deverall had been sniping at this initiative, suggesting that “communists” were behind it and writing to this effect to Japanese union leaders. Well aware of Deverall’s campaigning and of the mischief he was capable of causing if permitted to travel to Tokyo at this critical juncture, it was Burati who had warned Oldenbroek against including him in the delegation to Japan.28

Outraged over the way Deverall had been treated, and especially Oldenbroek’s reluctance to allow him full participation in an exercise for which the AFL had been preparing for almost a year, Lovestone warned Oldenbroek: “This is inexplicable and unpardonable . . . Rest assured we will follow this matter up further.” He told Brown: “I do not intend to conduct with Oldenbroek any personal, friendly, unofficial correspondence in the future. I shall deal with him strictly on an official basis hereafter.” Only twelve months earlier Oldenbroek had been a close ally in the campaign against the WFTU, but now he was persona non grata. Ominously, Lovestone observed: “I think our friend, for whose tenure of office we are responsible more than anyone else, is making a very bad mistake in his behaviour.”29

In the months following the return of the Asia delegation, Oldenbroek tried to appease Lovestone with hints that Deverall could be offered assignments as a roving representative for the ICFTU in Asia, but no specific commitments were made.30 In this situation nothing could repair the damage to the personal relationship between Lovestone and the ICFTU general secretary. But more significant was the long-term damage to AFL-ICFTU relations that would flow from this.

Perversely, Lovestone also attached blame to Jay Krane for the blackballing of Deverall, dubbing him “the self-appointed dictator of the delegation.” Virtually unknown within the labour movement, and one of the youngest and least experienced members of the ICFTU staff, Krane was suddenly elevated to the status of villain. The delegates to Asia returned, proposing that the ICFTU establish a regional headquarters and labour college in Singapore—a British colony. Deverall’s reports to Lovestone had highlighted Krane’s role in shaping this proposal. “It is suicidal idiocy,” Lovestone wrote, “to have the Asian Labour College in Singapore as Professor Krane wants it—it can’t be in any section of the British Empire.” In his view the proposal amounted to a fatal blunder; the British colonial connection would provide free propaganda to Asian communists. “If Krane is to have anything to do with the Asian Labour College the AFL will not contribute a cent . . . You know how much work we have put into cleaning out the Communist rats and WFTU in Japan. I don’t propose to bring the rodents back in any shape or form.” Krane was now a marked man. Yet over the next decade he would become Oldenbroek’s most trusted staffer, and the consequence of this was to deepen Lovestone’s suspicion of the entire ICFTU headquarters in Brussels.31

Lovestone’s persistent backing for Deverall highlighted a curious lack of judgment. He sided with him in the face of a welter of trade union opinion and experience that considered Deverall to be psychologically unstable and a potential liability. Irving Brown was privately dismissive of Deverall for his poor judgment and “low grade,” “phoney impressionistic” reports from the field. Over time, George Meany would likewise come to mistrust information emanating from Deverall, though for many years he still allowed Lovestone to protect his friend.32

The essential point about the Lovestone-Deverall relationship was that the latter’s loyalty was unquestioned: as a witch-hunting anti-communist, he never once failed Lovestone. As for the collapse of Lovestone’s personal relations with Oldenbroek, a central factor was Lovestone’s realization that the ICFTU general secretary would not be dictated to. The Dutchman was a shrewd operator, ever inclined to bob and weave rather than stand up directly to Lovestone’s bullying. Yet ultimately he was his own man, not biddable and, fatally for him in his relations with the Americans, inclined to look for compromise solutions in situations where Lovestone could see only black and white.33

The Deverall affair left Lovestone in little doubt of the need to conduct FTUC activities independently of the ICFTU. His personal view became the AFL view over the course of the next few months in a chain of developments that also saw a concurrent deterioration in the already febrile relations between the AFL and the British TUC. In 1950, the latter unveiled plans for assistance worth over $100,000 to unions in India, Pakistan, and other British territories awaiting decolonization. The moral drawn by Lovestone was inescapable: if independent activities by the British were acceptable in Commonwealth countries, the same ought to apply where the AFL believed its special interests were at stake.

The TUC’s plans were reported in an FTUC circular letter drafted by Lovestone and issued under Woll’s name. In passing it commented in unflattering terms on the state of trade unionism in Britain, observing that despite its organizational strength the TUC had a “rather weak national leadership.”34 This line was consistent with the caustic criticisms of other national centres and their leaders that regularly flowed from Lovestone and Brown. Vincent Tewson now sought to put an end to the backbiting in a private letter to Meany. Aware that relations between Meany and Woll were not the best, and regarding Meany as the one more amenable to reason, he complained about the tone of the circulars emanating from Woll and suggested that it would be more helpful if such material were issued officially by the AFL, and through Meany’s office rather than by the “ad hoc” FTUC.35 But whatever the current state of his relations with Woll, Meany was not prepared to act against his FTUC colleague, and in a personal letter to Tewson’s home address suggested that “we just forget it for the time being.”36 However, by the time the two men next met privately in November, TUC-AFL relations had taken a sharp turn for the worse, and when Tewson attempted to revive the issue of Lovestone’s role in the FTUC he was immediately cut short. As Brown reported back to Lovestone: “Of course, George let him have it on that question, and the matter was settled.” Tewson’s relations with Meany were about to enter a disastrous downward spiral.37

The new issue that was acting adversely on relations between the British and the Americans was Tewson’s decision to seek the presidency of the ICFTU in 1951. It flew in the face of the understanding that the powerful affiliates would not seek to dominate the ICFTU. At the 1951 congress in Milan where Tewson’s election was secured, Irving Brown spoke out against his candidacy. From the AFL perspective, the ICFTU risked being run by Oldenbroek and Tewson working in tandem, just as the duo of Citrine and Schevenels had controlled the pre-war IFTU. Lovestone suggested that the two men had morphed into one composite character and took to referring to them disparagingly as “Sir Vincent Oldenbroek.”38 The ICFTU had plans afoot for a $750,000 Regional Activities Fund (RAF) to finance organizing work in the developing world, and the AFL feared that day-to-day control of the fund would devolve to a coterie of European-based union leaders around Tewson and Oldenbroek. With Irving Brown’s reports linking the RAF to what he sensed was “a growing and inspired campaign in the British-controlled press” against the AFL’s independent activities, the AFL wavered over whether to support the project.39

American disquiet over developments in the ICFTU and a rise in anti-British feeling were evident at the AFL’s convention in September 1951. Attending as a distinguished guest, having just stepped down as ICFTU president and soon to become the first president of the European Coal and Steel Community, Belgian union leader Paul Finet was disturbed by the tone of the convention, in particular what he termed the “Catholic-Irish antipathy” toward the TUC and the British that he detected among people like George Meany. It concerned him that AFL leaders with little first-hand experience of Europe were being fed a distorted picture from Irving Brown and the “professional anti-communists of the FTUC.” Finet was also unimpressed by some of the other overseas trade union guests present and concluded that the AFL was hoping they would serve as an echo chamber for its own policy line. He considered the AFL’s independent operations misguided and likely to injure the ICFTU, and on returning to Europe warned his European trade union colleagues against becoming too dependent on American assistance.40

Animosity between George Meany, on the one hand, and Tewson and Oldenbroek, on the other, over policy issues that were dear to the American’s heart marked the ICFTU executive board meeting in December 1951, chaired for the first time by the newly elected President Tewson. Meany was deeply at odds with the ICFTU over the acceptability of applications for affiliation from centres in Australia and Italy. Questioning Tewson’s call when the votes were cast, Meany demanded a recount. When he further requested a roll call vote, the TUC’s Arthur Deakin asked pointedly whether his purpose was to make a note of who should be cut off from AFL funding.41

More politically sensitive still was the issue of whether the ICFTU should condone affiliates having contacts with Yugoslavia’s communist labour movement, recently expelled from the WFTU. Many within the ICFTU accepted the pragmatic case for maintaining a line of contact with the Yugoslav unions so as not to drive them back into the Soviet fold, and some affiliates would have welcomed their admission to the ICFTU. Oldenbroek argued that he was in no position to instruct affiliates on the nature of their relationship with the Yugoslavs. Other speakers tried to distinguish between Soviet and non-Soviet communism—in Meany’s eyes an exercise in sophistry. In the event, a motion by Meany condemning the anti-democratic nature of the Yugoslav regime and demanding the creation of free trade unions in the country fell for the want of a seconder. Meany’s failure to secure a vote on this motion would by no means be the end of the matter. His intervention was but the opening shot in a debate over the benefits and risks involved in establishing a dialogue with communist-led labour organizations that would run for the next thirty years. For the AFL, it was a red line that could not be crossed. As with the issue of WFTU membership in 1945, the AFL considered it a matter of fundamental principle to have nothing to do with communists.

It was not just the outcome of these debates but the way the meeting had been conducted that rankled with Meany. He questioned Tewson’s consistency and impartiality as chairman and maintained that Oldenbroek had been less than honest in reporting the background to the applications for affiliation by the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) and the Unione italiana del lavoro (UIL), both of which Meany opposed. Sitting at Meany’s elbow throughout the meeting, Irving Brown observed “a growing chasm between Oldenbroek, the British, the CIO on one side and ourselves.” He recorded that, as chairman, Vincent Tewson had engaged in “bureaucratic manoeuvring” and “factional trickery,” while Oldenbroek was said to have played “the British game.” Lovestone put it more bluntly: Oldenbroek was “a semi-skilled liar.” Meany’s angry reaction was to announce that the AFL would now definitely not contribute to the RAF. Brown correctly anticipated a year of “tough sledding” ahead.42

So unhappy with the ICFTU was Meany that he now considered diverting the sum the AFL was expected to contribute to the RAF to additional independent activities by the FTUC. That was fine by Brown; he was convinced that the AFL was likely to do a better job than the ICFTU. Indeed, in taking off the gloves to the ICFTU, Meany was inclined to go further in demonstrating his dissatisfaction. Lovestone was instructed to prepare a report for the AFL executive council highlighting the “dishonourable” and “high-handed” treatment meted out by Tewson and Oldenbroek. It would signal that the AFL intended “a full and frontal fight,” while applauding Meany’s “energetic efforts.”43 The reaction of some executive councillors was to favour a complete break with the ICFTU, though most drew back from “going into isolation now.” Lovestone was called on to draft a list of specific AFL complaints—a “bill of particulars”—for circulation among ICFTU affiliates. In the meantime the AFL announced that it would not attend ICFTU meetings. A boycott was now on: it was rather more than Lovestone and Brown had bargained for.

There was a clear danger of the war of words spinning out of control. Lovestone had no shortage of ammunition for his charge sheet; he had spent the previous two years logging complaints about almost every facet of the ICFTU. Indeed, through their negative reports on the ICFTU and the vilification of its officials, he and Brown bore much responsibility for the disenchantment among AFL leaders that led to the boycott. The ICFTU, it was frequently suggested, was staffed by—even dominated by—incompetents who lacked drive. The AFL self-image of being more dynamic than other centres, and especially the European affiliates, was a recurrent theme. Lovestone would contrast the “speed and energy” displayed by the FTUC with the failure of others to work with “the same tempo, the same zeal, the same dynamic faith.” In particular Brown would berate the tendency of the cautious TUC to avoid anything other than “the policy of wait-and-see or, more precisely, do nothing.” Linked to this was the further political criticism that European trade union leaders who proclaimed their socialism often tended to be “prisoners of past clichés,” displaying a “pseudo radicalism,” which in practice led to “appeasement.” Of course, it wasn’t organizational vigour in a general sense that the FTUC wanted so much as total, unrelenting commitment to fighting communism.44 Such hostile reportage had a cumulative effect that inevitably led AFL executive councillors with limited first-hand experience of the international field to wonder what the AFL was doing belonging to such a body. Less committed to the boycott than his fellow FTUC leaders, David Dubinsky wanted Lovestone to limit the charge sheet to just a few items of disagreement, but Meany and Woll were pushing in the opposite direction.45

The irony was that both Irving Brown and Jay Lovestone were against the boycott tactic. They were firm believers in the need to be part of the ICFTU, even if such engagement involved an ongoing war of attrition with its leading officials—“keeping up the strife,” in Lovestone’s cynical expression. Brown always felt that top AFL leaders should be devoting more time and effort to ICFTU business, not merely at biennial congresses but through systematic participation in committee work and with an American presence in the secretariat. Even if the organization was of limited effectiveness, membership had clear advantages. In Europe, Brown did whatever he had to do—mostly for the labour movement; sometimes for the CIA, quite often combining assignments—and if it was helpful to operate under the ICFTU label, so much the better. However, the notion of the ICFTU providing respectable “cover” for independent activities was not something that the generality of AFL leaders were likely to understand or sympathize with. In that sense, Brown and Lovestone were victims of their own confrontational style of operating. They found themselves riding a tiger, and it wasn’t clear where it would take them. Boycotting the ICFTU prevented Brown from attending a conference on labour and the North Atlantic Alliance, which was central to AFL concerns. He complained that the tactic was leading them nowhere. Lovestone agreed: without the AFL’s presence the event risked becoming “a Bevanite concoction.” But Meany insisted on maintaining the boycott.46

Irving Brown was disconsolate over these developments. In dealing with Europeans he was on the front line, forced to bear the odium of an AFL policy he personally opposed. And when he discovered that in his dealings with European union leaders the AFL’s ILO representative, Phil Delaney, was distancing himself from AFL policy, Brown gave vent to his resentment, telling Lovestone, “While I am ready to carry out this [boycott] decision, although I think it is wrong, I think the same loyalty should be demonstrated by other reps of the AFL,” and “I don’t treasure the idea of being the only SOB representing the AFL in Europe.”47

It was an indication of Brown’s unsettled state of mind that when the post of labour advisor to the US military aid program in Turkey was established, he wrote to Bill Green and expressed an interest in being appointed. How serious was his interest is unclear; in all probability he was simply signalling to his superiors his sense of disillusion over the latest phase of AFL international policy.48

Lovestone’s “bill of particulars” amounted to a motley collection—fourteen suggestions ranging from matters of high politics, including a call for more vigorous support for national independence movements in the Near and Middle East, to petty administrative measures such as the need to reduce the length of written reports to the executive board. It was hardly a charge sheet to justify the breakup of the ICFTU, yet the AFL was clearly determined to force the issue by absenting itself from an important meeting of the general council in July 1952.49 Behind the specifics listed by Lovestone was a genuine, gnawing resentment within the AFL that Tewson and Oldenbroek were looking to run the ICFTU as if it were the pre-war International Federation of Trade Unions in which the AFL was merely welcomed for its dues payments.50

Six months into the boycott, and with no sign of the AFL backing down, it was clear that the standoff could only be resolved by Tewson and Oldenbroek agreeing to travel to Washington and eating humble pie in a meeting with the AFL international affairs committee. It was a tense occasion; what Tewson and Oldenbroek had to say cut little ice. A resentful Meany rehearsed old complaints of how, in the months prior to the ICFTU’s formation in 1949, the TUC was determined to remain in overall control; that pattern was now being repeated. However, the highly respected leader of the railroad clerks, George Harrison, rescued the session by getting the visitors to recognize that the AFL needed to feel like “partners not appendages” and that the British “consciously or unconsciously” had dominated the show. It still wasn’t enough for the AFL to call off its boycott straight away, but a press release was issued stating that the air had been cleared and agreement reached on holding the next ICFTU executive board meeting in New York, where the AFL would seek a discussion of its bill of particulars.51

Figure 2.  Vincent Tewson, general secretary of the TUC, 1946–60, delivering his opening address at the ICFTU’s Stockholm congress in July 1953, toward the end of his two-year term as ICFTU president. Seated to his rear is Jaap Oldenbroek, general secretary of the ICFTU, 1949–60. The AFL’s strained relations with the ICFTU were prompted in part by what it saw as the tendency of these two men to “boss the show.” Courtesy of the Walter P. Reuther Library, Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University.

Interestingly, given their recent concern over the AFL’s wavering commitment to the ICFTU, Lovestone and Brown were all for hanging tough at the board meeting in New York—a prospect that Lovestone relished as the looming “battle of Murray Hill.”52 The main task for him was to pre-empt any ICFTU criticism of independent AFL activities by going on the offensive. Lovestone savoured the prospect of Oldenbroek “hitting the roof” when he learned of the AFL’s recent decision to appoint a field representative in Turkey. Winding Meany up on an issue calculated to arouse his ire, Brown reminded him that what divided the Europeans from the Americans was the Europeans’ attachment to socialism and their criticism of the Americans for being anti-socialist. And yet these same self-proclaimed European socialists were weak union leaders, wholly lacking in dynamism. He portrayed the ICFTU headquarters staff as exuding an anti-American bias, suggesting to Meany the need for careful scrutiny of their effectiveness. Warming to a familiar theme, he wrote Lovestone: “Some day when I am no longer stationed in Europe, I shall have the freedom to say precisely what I think of the European Labour movement which will be extremely uncomplimentary.”53

In the event, the New York board meeting avoided the sharp confrontation that Lovestone and Brown anticipated and seemed to want. A banquet and a Broadway show for the visitors lightened the atmosphere. An emollient Meany suggested that the bill of particulars amounted to no more than constructive criticism, enabling its specific points to be fed into the ICFTU committee system for eventual resolution in anodyne formulations that allowed all sides to save face. For the time being passions were spent.54 It helped greatly that Tewson’s two-year term as ICFTU president was drawing to a close and he was about to be succeeded by someone far more acceptable to the AFL. Whether Oldenbroek would learn the lesson of the boycott and knuckle under to the AFL remained to be seen. What the recent standoff hadn’t done and couldn’t do was eliminate the differences that existed over the appropriate way to address the issue of communism and its challenge to the labour movement. At root, this was what lay behind the AFL’s gesture of protest in the 1952 boycott.

Independent Activities: Funding from Intelligence Sources

The activities that the AFL was determined to conduct independently of the ICFTU had at their heart the battle against communism rather more than for trade unionism, although AFL leaders would insist that the two were inextricably linked. Those for which Irving Brown was primarily responsible took place in France, Germany, Finland, and Italy. Farther afield, Lovestone also handled the financing of operations in India, Japan, Indonesia, and Formosa, where FTUC control was necessarily more devolved. Former Lovestoneite Willard Etter directed an operation in Formosa with intelligence funding through which “trade unionists” of the Free China Labor League (FCLL) with military training sought to infiltrate the Chinese mainland as part of Chiang Kai-shek’s counteroffensive against Mao’s communist regime.55 Another long-standing disciple of Lovestone, Harry Goldberg, represented the FTUC in Indonesia, where an intelligence-funded program aimed to undermine the main labour centre SOBSI, an important WFTU affiliate. And Dick Deverall, who had bided his time as FTUC representative in India while barred by the US military government from entering Japan, returned there when Japan became fully self-governing, and directed the FTUC’s second largest program with expenditures totalling $66,900 between 1952 and 1956.56

Once the ICFTU was established at the end of 1949, it was important to attract into membership national centres that were still resisting disaffiliation from the WFTU. Histadrut in Israel and the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) were centres the AFL considered capable of being won over with financial help. In Israel the AFL campaign focused on Histadrut’s anti-communist Mapai wing. In spring 1950, Lovestone noted: “The Kosher business situation has taken on a rather urgent character. If we were able to give them a decent push within the next couple of months, things will be much better.” A first payment to Mapai of $3,000 was duly made in May 1950, and by the end of the year $13,500 had been passed to it, by which time the Histadrut executive committee had resolved to leave the WFTU. Further payments totalling $6,000 were contributed the following year to consolidate the anti-WFTU position adopted.57

In Australia, faced with an ACTU leadership determined to retain membership in the WFTU, the FTUC set out to help the centre’s anti-communist wing via the office of Herbert Weiner, the US labour attaché. Weiner transferred $10,000 in 1950 and a further $5,000 the following year to the anti-communist faction in ACTU and the pro-American Australian Workers’ Union (AWU), whose general secretary, Tom Dougherty, was invited to the AFL’s 1950 convention.58 Over the next twelve months, ACTU withdrew from the WFTU and both Australian centres competed for affiliation to the ICFTU at the executive board meeting in December 1951, where Meany’s ire was aroused over Oldenbroek’s preference for the larger ACTU over the AWU. More strategically important in the global struggle with communism were the situations in Finland, France, and Italy—all part of Irving Brown’s beat—where finance from intelligence sources was of critical importance. How were these transactions effected?

Secret funding of FTUC programs by the OPC-CIA began in 1949. From then until 1958, when FTUC operations were discontinued, it received $464,167 directly from the OPC-CIA, with individual donations earmarked for specific projects. In addition, Irving Brown also had a separate budget of indeterminate size that was made available directly to him rather than through the FTUC and was not recorded in the committee’s accounts. Overseen by Paul Birdsall, who operated under the cover of military attaché in the US embassy in Paris, Brown’s paymaster was John Philipsborn, the embassy’s assistant labour attaché. It was referred to as Brown’s “French account,” though it was not restricted to activities in France.59

Under this arrangement, with transactions typically agreed on by word of mouth, little was committed to writing. In their correspondence with one another, Brown and Lovestone were careful to use coded language. Lovestone dealt directly with intelligence officials in Washington, having periodic meetings with OPC director Frank Wisner—“my luncheon friend” as he referred to him—or later with “Squinty,” his sobriquet for the CIA’s deputy director, Allen Dulles. Birdsall was “the birdman.” Much of the interaction was ad hoc; problems were apt to arise over delayed payments for which simple bureaucratic foot dragging or political infighting within the faction-riven intelligence community appeared to be responsible. The two partners were mutually mistrustful. the OPC-CIA was never entirely happy with Lovestone’s accounting for sums received and resorted to opening FTUC mail to discover more about the projects it was financing.60 Lovestone resented its “book-keeping psychology” and “laundry methods” and complied with requests for details in minimal fashion. Such tensions undermined the partnership and at times brought it close to breaking point. Lovestone developed a deep antipathy toward the CIA, and especially its many staff members drawn from privileged Ivy League backgrounds. To some they were the “Park Avenue Cowboys,” but Lovestone simply dismissed them as “Fizz Kids” or “Fizzers,” inhabitants of “Fizzland.” They had little understanding of the labour movement, and he doubted their capacity to maintain confidentiality about FTUC operations—but he badly needed their money.

For the AFL leadership the sudden availability of this generous outside funding also posed problems in maintaining control of operations and expenditures. Limited bureaucratic regulation and informality of approach meant a recurrent risk of things “getting out of hand,” especially given that Brown had his own source of financing in Paris. Right at the outset his cryptic request for Lovestone to deliver urgently “10 volumes” in cash in the name of “Marron” (i.e., Brown) to a Forrest Hills address for immediate transmission caused concern in the FTUC.61 After consulting Woll, Lovestone cabled back: “You asked about the 10 volumes of O. Henry. I couldn’t handle the circulation or distribution or reallocation of books without Committee authorization. All I am allowed is to handle little pamphlets.” He added later:

Strictly between us . . . the Committee, particularly DD, have expressed anxieties regarding various volumes of literature you have gotten from other book shops and which you have been despatching. . . . The Committee would like to have full knowledge in a basic sense how each volume is distributed and the reaction to its contents.

Lovestone made it clear that he was referring to Brown’s “French account”: “DD and Matt have in mind particularly the volumes you have picked up at a bargain rate from the settlement of Frank’s [i.e., Wisner’s] estate.”62

Often it was a case of needing to contain Brown’s headstrong instincts and penchant for wheeler-dealing. Meany was taking closer control of international affairs, and in spring 1950 Brown was transferred to the AFL’s payroll, where the secretary-treasurer would have a closer supervisory role. Initially Brown bridled under the new regime, which he considered too cautious, telling Lovestone on one occasion:

I do not feel free any more to accept commitments . . . without the backing and knowledge of the AFL leaders. . . . There are many activities which involve not only operations in Western Europe but behind the Iron Curtain . . . [concerning] our complete operations and relations with our friends in Washington [i.e., the CIA]. I am now being pressed on a number of questions . . . but feel I cannot commit myself as a representative of the AFL without complete understanding and agreement among ourselves. This cannot be handled by correspondence.63

Yet, in practice, Brown managed to retain considerable freedom. In later years, following much first-hand experience of his European representative, Meany would make light of this, joking that “nobody controls Irving Brown.”

Concurrently Brown faced pressure from his CIA handler, Birdsall, over the FTUC’s failure to release funds already authorized, asking Lovestone:

What’s going on the financial front? I just cannot understand why we are sitting on the ten volumes. I have received an additional ten from Washington but cannot utilize them in their present condition. The donor [Birdsall] was extremely concerned and somewhat annoyed . . . when I told him. . . . He rose up in all the dignity of his military rank to suggest that I immediately . . . let him know what was happening.64

The inability of the CIA to exercise control over Lovestone and Brown was, in fact, the reason the initial financial arrangement with the FTUC began to be revised in 1951 and was eventually phased out by 1958.

Finland, 1949–51

Precariously situated and sharing a long border with the USSR, Finland was permanently at risk of being absorbed into the Soviet sphere of influence, its social democratic government only tolerated so long as it avoided giving offence to Moscow. Within the Finnish national trade union centre—Suomen Ammattiliittojen Keskusjärjestö (SAK), which retained its WFTU affiliation—communists, powerfully backed by the Soviets, comprised 40 percent of the membership and were engaged in an ongoing struggle with social democrats for control. It was this contest that the FTUC set out to influence.

Brown first visited the country in October 1949 in the aftermath of communist-led strikes that had failed in their effort to destabilize the government and force acceptance of rule by a united workers’ party. Basing himself in the American legation in Helsinki, he attended a crucial congress of the woodworkers union where the socialists captured control. It was a major blow to the WFTU, whose Building Trades Department was heavily dependent on its Finnish affiliate and also had its headquarters in Helsinki. The building department’s continued presence in the city was now problematical. Led by Väinö Leskinen, the social democrats requested $500,000 from Brown to enable more effective non-communist organization within the unions. The aim was to engage up to a hundred organizers and so match the large number of communist organizers flooding in. “Perhaps the amount is too high,” admitted Brown, “but I think we ought to recommend to our [OPC] friends some kind of aid programme for what I consider to be one of the finest groups of men in the European labour movement. . . . Leskinen is tops . . . tough, intelligent and the organizational brain of the movement.” For good measure, he reported that within the unions there were 200,000 men who were ready to bear arms and “take to the woods” in partisan warfare against any Soviet military threat.65

In the spring of 1950, while on a visit to the United States, SAK secretary Olavi Lindblom presented a revised request for $200,000 in aid. This time the stated object was to help pay for training of non-communist leaders at the national and local level and also the cost of publishing a journal and pamphlet material. The OPC agreed to help, and a month later the SAK executive committee resolved to stop paying their fees to the WFTU as a first step toward disaffiliation.66 Financial contributions destined for use by the Finns now began to show up in FTUC accounts: $5,500 in September, $10,000 in November, and a similar sum the following month. The June 1951 SAK congress would need to ratify the decision to disaffiliate from the WFTU, and with this in prospect a fierce battle raged over the selection of delegates.

Bidding to match the large sums poured in on the communist side, Lovestone opened a special bank account in Rome in the name of “Mr. Joseph Brown,” and by the spring of 1951 the CIA had passed “37,500 pages” to the FTUC for use of “the northern lumber men.” Brown was instructed to meet up with Leskinen outside Finland and “go over the whole matter of banking arrangements.” Meanwhile, a further “15 books” were earmarked for the Rome account for use ahead of the crucial SAK congress.67 However, having been urged by Lovestone to hurry with the transfer of the $15,000, Brown discovered in Rome that the money had not in fact been deposited, and duly complained to the FTUC secretary. It provoked one of their periodic exchanges in which Lovestone hinted at suspicion of the way Brown was using the funds. He told Brown that he would be happy to accommodate him “provided any benefits thereof will affect and accrue only to the interests of the northern lumber merchants.” Indignantly, Brown demanded: “To whose benefit do you think they would be going. . . . What do you expect of me on our northern transaction?”68

Reassured that the Finns would indeed be the beneficiaries, Lovestone promised to arrange the transfer ahead of the SAK congress: “We have given the lumber merchants the green light that they can spend up to fifteen volumes in preparation for their salesmen and stockholders’ gathering.” There was a possibility that he could obtain more, but he cautioned Brown: “I have no confidence in the promises of the Fizzers.”69 Two months later a further $12,500 was credited to the FTUC account for Finnish activities, and Lovestone told Brown: “I am definitely going into the northern woods. They have been apprised of available resources and have contracted and paid for merchandise on that basis.” As distinguished guests at the SAK congress, Irving Brown and Leonid Solovjev, secretary of the Soviet AUCCTU, exchanged polemics in their fraternal addresses. The Russian later stormed out when delegates voted 3:1 to withdraw from the WFTU and to adopt a cautious policy of neutrality between it and the ICFTU.70 The FTUC campaign had been effective.

Overall some $27,500 passed through the FTUC books in 1951 destined for Finland. By the end of that year a total of $52,500 had been made available to the Finnish social democrats. The FTUC had broadly achieved its objective in helping consolidate the non-communist ascendancy in SAK and reducing Western trade union support for the WFTU. There would be further American funding of the Finnish labour movement, but never again exclusively through the FTUC. The CIA had revised its approach; henceforth the CIO would also be involved in intelligence-backed initiatives. It was a matter of much concern for the AFL leadership.

France: In Harness with Ferri-Pisani

In France, Brown’s primary focus was always the strengthening of Force ouvrière, and by early 1949, 300 FO activists were benefiting from the monthly food parcel program first begun in Germany and Greece. He reported how even Force ouvrière general secretary Jouhaux now seemed to accept that he no longer “controlled” the organization; over dinner with Jouhaux the Frenchman joked weakly: “the word is going around that Force Ouvrière is in the hands of Irving Brown.” They had both laughed at this.

The training of organizers featured prominently in Brown’s project. Coal miners were a key target, and in the immediate aftermath of the collapsed strike of December 1948 Brown organized a training school for forty activists, the first of many such initiatives. Mining was a relative success story, but elsewhere Force ouvrière generally failed to attract into its ranks former CGT members who were now drifting away disillusioned at the failure of successive insurrectionary strikes. The beneficiaries were more often than not new independent unions that now claimed 150,000 members. Hoping to build bridges between FO and the independent unions in metalworking, Brown arranged training schools and food parcels for a select fifty of the latter’s leaders. However, Force ouvrière was, and would remain, essentially an organization of white-collar workers and civil service functionaries, with a feeble presence in private sector industries. On the railways, the centre was actually losing members to the CGT, and by 1950–51 Brown was engaged in a desperate attempt to reverse the trend by extending the training program, planning in 1951 to put as many as 750 local organizers through courses. Yet even more was needed. He saw the communist party transforming itself into a fighting cadre of partisans bent on destroying the economy. Faced with this, he believed it was insufficient to rely on traditional means of organization building. Schooled in Leninism, he was convinced of the need for a disciplined counterforce capable of preventing the communists’ quasi-military apparatus from commanding the streets. This would be his new emphasis, but it would only be possible as a result of the new OPC-CIA funding: Force ouvrière itself, he conceded, would not be able to afford this in “a million years.”71

He focused his main effort on FO’s dockers’ union, whose leader was forty-nine-year-old Pierre Ferri-Pisani, for many years a prominent figure among socialists and trade unionists in Marseille.72 Ferri-Pisani’s deployment of Corsican toughs of the Guerini crime family to protect his members from CGT violence on the Marseille waterfront in the early months of the Marshall Plan is endlessly reprised in accounts of the period—a famous or infamous episode depending on the narrator—though most accounts are devoid of dates and details. For historian Alexander Werth it was part of the “mythology and martyrology” of French labour history.73 It is also vaguely cited as Irving Brown’s signal contribution, although his main financial support for Ferri-Pisani in fact came later, when a willingness to meet physical force with physical force became an essential component of FO’s organizing strategy among waterfront workers more generally. Brown’s project was to establish disciplined cadre organization mirroring the communists’ own formations and capable of resisting their attempts at moral and physical intimidation.74

With Ferri-Pisani’s support, Brown set about extending the strategy devised initially for the Marseille docks to other ports. Against the background of the WFTU’s announced plans to disrupt the shipments of American armaments under the Atlantic Pact, in 1949 Ferri-Pisani was instrumental in persuading an ITF docks conference of the need to maintain a close watch on the WFTU’s Maritime Trades Department, which was based on the CGT unions. He called for tight organizational discipline and coordination on an international scale. A six-man Central Vigilance Committee of dockers’ and seamen’s leaders, including Ferri-Pisani, was established in January 1949. It conducted little real business, but it provided an impressive-sounding international platform for Ferri-Pisani to perform on. There were also plans for regional vigilance committees along the Baltic and Atlantic coasts and in the Mediterranean. No concrete organization ever resulted for the Baltic or Atlantic ports, but the Mediterranean vigilance committee was where Ferri-Pisani would later preside over his own personal fiefdom. The ITF launched a financial appeal and raised £650 over a two-year period. But this paltry sum was hardly needed; nor in truth was the ITF machine itself except as a form of respectable trade union cover.

Once the Central Vigilance Committee was formed, OPC-CIA money began to flow in. Brown opened a bank account in Zurich in Ferri-Pisani’s name, and by the end of 1949 deposits amounted to $9,150. Though formally accountable to the ITF, the secret financing from intelligence sources meant that in all major respects the Central Vigilance Committee was an independent operation run by Brown and Ferri-Pisani. Other committee members were not privy to the financial arrangements. It functioned on the basis of strictest secrecy, with sketchy or non-existent minutes of its infrequent meetings and virtually no upward reporting to the ITF, whose leadership diplomatically chose not to ask about its detailed work.

What was expected to be the big trial of strength for European dockworkers came in March–April 1950 with the first Atlantic Pact arms shipments to France. From January there were a growing number of “incidents” at French ports—rioting, demonstrations, and sabotage—aimed at stopping the loading of arms destined for French use in the deeply unpopular war in Indochina. But there was no widespread or prolonged strike action, and generally arms shipments were loaded and unloaded without serious disruption, not least in Cherbourg, which was the main entrepôt for Atlantic Pact consignments.75 The pattern reflected a growing reluctance of CGT members to follow strike calls for purely political objectives. However, in Marseille, the CGT’s anti-NATO campaign ran in parallel with a wages dispute and as such engendered more popular support. Even so, the strikes called over a five-week period received only token backing by dockers belonging to Force ouvrière, with picket line violence the inevitable consequence. One version of the episode depicts it as a seminal conflict between CGT dockers and “the mob”; another sees it as the moment when “the communist reign of terror” ended and Marseille became “safe for free trade unionism.”

Either way, the action in Marseille eventually failed: the CGT had overplayed its hand. And although the Force ouvrière dockers union had proved itself to be a disciplined anti-communist strikebreaking force, it also failed at a basic level to establish itself as a representative body capable of securing the workplace interests of its members.76 Jay Lovestone dubbed it “one of our brightest episodes in the history of our effort to help European labour.” From the opposite side, a witness account by a CGT loyalist described it as one of the finest actions in working-class history, although he conceded it achieved “nothing much.”77 That was indeed an understatement. The real winners in Marseille were the dock employers who ceased to recognize any union and tore up existing agreements, leaving Marseille a non-union port for well over a decade.

It was not until six months later, in September 1950, that the Mediterranean Committee (formally the Regional Vigilance Committee for the Mediterranean) came into being at a conference in Naples. Reflecting the fact that he had pretty much a free hand, Ferri-Pisani was installed as “Chief”—an unusual title for a leader of a union body that also sometimes referred to itself as the “Association for the Study of Maritime Questions.” There was not now any obvious reference to the ITF; indeed, ITF embarrassment at being identified with such an operation began to show at the Naples conference.78

For the next few years, the committee maintained twin offices in Paris and Rome and issued propaganda through an effective monthly journal, Air-Terre-Mer.79 None of this would have been possible without American financing. Following the launch in Naples there were only ever two further delegate meetings of the Mediterranean Committee—in Marseille in January 1951 and six months later in Salonika, attended by union representatives of waterfront unions from France, Greece, Trieste, Malta, Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco. Throughout, the committee’s activities were cloaked in secrecy. As Ferri-Pisani later explained to the Force ouvrière congress in 1952, the organization had “entered a new stage of difficult underground action,” since “the secret agents of the Cominform” could not be beaten “without promising protection to the one side and reprisals to the other.”80 Ferri-Pisani was the committee’s solitary spokesman, and at the AFL’s 1951 convention, where he was given a hero’s welcome, Irving Brown praised him in suitable terms as “a virtual one-man brains trust in the battle against Soviet imperialism.”81

Brown was now firmly of the view that within the trade union movement there needed to be an elite force capable of operating in a disciplined, clandestine fashion. He wrote to Lovestone:

There are certain non-trade union tasks which must be assumed by the most reliable and most determined elements in the European labour movements. I am in constant conversation with such people, and we are moving towards . . . the building up of a small but determined group who can be of great service in any future political and military tasks awaiting us.

The union members concerned were ready to “go all the way,” but they needed to have closer links to the military, and this was something to discuss with NATO’s supreme commander, General Eisenhower, since it was as much a military as a labour matter: “There cannot merely be an orthodox approach to the problem of Western European defence,” he wrote. “Liaison between any military operation and those groups engaged in quasi-military activities is essential.”82

What did it all amount to? Clearly Brown had come to see Ferri-Pisani’s operation as a potential component of the “stay behind” military force being assembled by NATO in the event of a Soviet invasion—a component of what was later revealed as “Operation GLADIO.”83 Yet for all that the Mediterranean Committee is vaguely remembered as a “major initiative” in labour’s Cold War, it is almost impossible to detail any precise achievements.

The CGT campaign to stop the landing and loading of armaments in European ports had passed its critical stage before the committee’s foundation. That the threat from the communists subsequently faded may have been assisted by the work of the committee—the intelligence gathering by trusted anti-communists on ships and wharves, for example—but the more significant fact is surely that the CGT was itself a weakened force after 1949, having called out its supporters too often in actions doomed to fail. The propaganda put out by the committee through Air-Terre-Mer was valuable in presenting the Atlantic Pact as an essentially peaceful initiative, its weaponry intended for the defence of democracy.84 But it was also a vehicle for anti-communist propaganda more generally, with concerns that went far beyond the specific trade union interests of waterfront workers. At its two 1951 conferences in Marseille and Salonika (for which latter there were no minutes), the resolutions adopted contained more than a hint of Lovestone’s authorial hand. They variously described the war in Indochina as part of a Kremlin plot to conquer the world; deplored conditions of life in the USSR; demanded that the Atlantic Pact be widened to include Greece and Turkey, while a resolution on Far Eastern problems stated that it was unthinkable to negotiate with Mao Tse-tung without the participation of Chiang Kai-shek.

The Mediterranean Committee did provide Irving Brown with a forward base for surveying options in the Mediterranean basin as he attempted to extend his operations away from Western Europe, south toward North Africa, and east toward the Balkans, Turkey, and Egypt. The recent diplomatic rapprochement between Greece and Yugoslavia had contributed to the defeat of the Greek communist partisans, opening up prospects, so Brown thought, for an ideological offensive throughout the region. He wrote: “Unless the difficulties continue to mount for Stalin in Eastern Europe . . . we are heading for war. . . . Every situation must be exploited, every instance must be intensified.”

Under ICFTU auspices, and ahead of the conference in Salonika, Brown had returned to Greece in the spring of 1951, considering the visit an opportunity to play “a very serious role in making things difficult for Stalin in his own backyard.” While there he was able to make plans for the Salonika conference and arrange extensive coverage by Voice of America. However, he was also particularly excited by prospects for penetrating beyond the nearby Greek–Bulgarian border and reported back on how the incidence of desertions by Bulgarian soldiers opened up possible lines of intelligence gathering behind the Iron Curtain. He had funds at his disposal, and after giving the GSEE “a small shot in the arm,” he then travelled on for a first exploratory visit to Turkey, attending the congress of the Istanbul Federation of Labour and also making arrangements for three Turkish trade union leaders to visit the AFL later in the year.85

What Harold Lewis describes as Ferri-Pisani’s “consciously cultivated . . . almost romantic air of ‘secrecy’ and sense of physical danger” undoubtedly had a resonance that helped Irving Brown “sell” the Mediterranean project to his Fizz Kid contacts.86 And as dollars flowed in, reputations and careers rode on the “success” of this clandestine project, whose precise results were never thoroughly documented. No detailed account of Mediterranean Committee financing exists: the main channel for funding the operation was Brown’s own “French budget,” which he received direct from the OPC-CIA. Fragmentary evidence, however, suggests a substantial outlay until around 1954, when US intelligence began to lose interest.

FTUC financial statements show that Ferri-Pisani’s Zurich bank account was credited with $33,860 in August 1953 and a further $10,000 in November. In March of that year, with Brown in Washington to meet the newly promoted director of the CIA, Allen Dulles, Brown’s then CIA assistant in Paris, Leon Dale, handled finances and recorded disbursements. These included a payment of $6,000 to a representative of Ferri-Pisani who simultaneously placed a request for a further $3,000 to $4,000. That same month $5,000 was also paid to Force ouvrière general secretary Robert Bothereau. At the same time $4,000 per month was going to Paolo Giornelli, who ran the Italian section of the Mediterranean Committee.87 These were significant payments to union leaders whose own organizations were impecunious and might only employ two or three full-time officials. When the CIA became more parsimonious and Giornelli’s monthly subvention was reduced to $2,500 later in 1953, he complained of being in “serious trouble . . . like Ferri.” The following year, when Brown himself wrote of the Mediterranean Committee being in danger of “going under,” Ferri-Pisani himself was already fading from the scene and no longer appeared at ITF meetings. In mid-1955, his situation was described as “rock bottom.”88 Without the artificial crutch of external finance, the operation could not be sustained. But for as long as funding had been assured, it had continued in being, and with Brown able to “bury” some expenditures in his accounting, there was always scope to accumulate a slush fund for other pet projects.

Activities Outside the Field of Labour

For several years David Dubinsky had been subsidizing the French socialist party paper Le Populaire, with its circulation of 35,000, but the AFL’s sometimes strained relationship with the publication over its editorial line led the Americans to look around for other suitable publications to support.89 The CIA also had a general interest in supporting approved propaganda outlets, and the FTUC became the channel through which financial assistance was made available to various publications in France. One candidate for assistance was the Jewish publication Notre parole, which was widely read in Paris and promoted a social-democratic line. But the publication’s plans for expansion through a merger with Unzer Stimme, known for its Zionist outlook, went against the grain for Dubinsky, and the word went out to Brown to disregard their request for a $60,000 grant.90

A more powerful ally in the Cold War was the Paris-based journal Franc-Tireur, with a circulation of 300,000—bigger than that of the French Communist Party’s paper, L’Humanité. Caught up in its own internal struggle against the communists, Franc-Tireur was assisted financially by the FTUC from 1949 to 1951, a period during which it removed a number of communists and sympathizers from its editorial staff. Under its editor, the wartime resistance leader, Georges Altman, who was close to Brown, Franc-Tireur sponsored a new political grouping, the short-lived Rassemblement democratique revolutionaire, which initially included among its supporters Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and the AFL favourite, David Rousset.91 Brown also arranged for Franc-Tireur to sponsor the initial conference in Paris that led to the establishment of the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) by anti-communist intellectuals.

In 1951, Franc-Tireur was hoping to secure a further $200,000 grant from the FTUC, but Lovestone was increasingly uncomfortable with its off-message political line, taking exception to its sometimes unfavourable treatment of the North Atlantic Alliance. He exploded with anger when in 1950 the paper came close to advocating the seating of communist China at the United Nations, threatening to dissociate the AFL from “any organization which calls the Quisling Mao Tse Tung regime . . . a people’s China.” Lovestone was all for ending the subsidy and was bitterly critical of the CIA’s Bert Jolis, who undermined AFL criticisms by urging continued agency funding. Brown was forced to mediate, urging Altman to placate Lovestone by indicating his willingness to reorganize the paper. Lovestone was thereby persuaded to persevere with financial aid until after the French general election in summer 1951, but he was adamant about ending it thereafter. “Tell our [CIA] friends,” he ordered, “we want to wash our hands clean of this outfit.”92

As the FTUC link with Franc-Tireur withered, Leon Dale responded favourably to a proposal by two Paris journalists, Marzet and Clouzet, to launch an anti-communist publication in association with a “Centre of Study and Propaganda.” Their publication was to be targeted at employers and would advocate a reform of industrial relations practices combined with measures to improve productivity—ideas much in vogue in Marshall Plan circles. Dale conceded that the funding sought—$80,000 for one year—was high, but argued that the paper would fill a definite need and the centre would provide “useful cover.”93

Much more ambitious than subsidies to individual publications was Irving Brown’s involvement in setting up the CIA-financed Congress for Cultural Freedom, with its objective of challenging globally the attraction that Soviet communism held for so many in the intellectual community. On the surface this association of leading intellectuals and the AFL’s field representative was a strange affair, even allowing for their shared anti-communism. But the simple fact was that the project needed someone experienced at launching and running an organization, able to handle the humdrum practicalities of equipping an office, arranging meetings and follow-up activities, and, crucially, with the capacity to move money about discreetly. This was Irving Brown’s forte, whereas such talents were not readily found among the poets, artists, writers, and musicians who populated the congress.

During the Cultural Congress in Berlin in 1950, at which the CCF was launched and Brown worked closely with Sidney Hook, James Burnham, and Arthur Koestler, the OPC-CIA credited the FTUC with $14,000 for “cultural activities.” Brown oiled the wheels of the embryonic organization, paying expenses of fellow members of the steering committee to meet at the ICFTU’s Brussels headquarters in October and again at a founding meeting of the CCF executive committee the following month. He was a key member of the group that drafted the CCF’s articles of association and appointed a secretariat. He was also responsible for renting and equipping the Paris head office in the Boulevard Haussmann, pending which the CCF operated out of his own rooms in the Hotel Baltimore. During the CCF’s formative period, with Brown centrally involved, there was briefly a suggestion that it should take responsibility for intelligence programs in the labour field, work that subsequently became the responsibility of Tom Braden’s International Organizations Division of the CIA.94

Over the next twelve months Brown continued to pay the bills, running at $15,000 a month in 1951. He was the CCF’s paymaster—its bagman—and a driving force in the organization. During this period he was one of the few people involved in the cultural project who knew where the money came from. As François Bondy, the congress’s director of publications noted: Brown was “more helpful than all the Koestlers and [Ignazio] Silones put together.”95 Overall, Brown appreciated the benefit of working with the CCF, not least because it provided an extra source of CIA funding, a wider range of contacts, and further room for manoeuvre in a game where he and Lovestone played their cards close to their chest. Allen Dulles assigned the CIA’s Laurence de Neufville to monitor what Brown was up to in the CCF, but the latter reported that it “was almost impossible because he was running it like it was his own operation, and he never said much about what he was doing.” Only when the Farfield Foundation was created in 1952 as a wholly owned CIA conduit and took over responsibility for CCF finance did Brown slip into the background. He remained on the CCF executive committee until 1956, when he resigned, believing that the CCF was softening its anti-communist line.96

Acting on behalf of the CIA, and working through the émigré International Centre of Free Trade Unionists in Exile (ICFTUE) based in Paris and launched with ILGWU financial help, Brown had many lines of contact to Eastern Europe. The centre’s treasurer, former Romanian miner Eftimie Gherman, boasted having a network of trustworthy people in every big plant, mine, and government office from Warsaw to Sofia.97 It thus had great potential for intelligence gathering in the Soviet bloc. Brown’s most valuable contact in the early 1950s was the Czech, Jaroslov Profous, a lawyer in his mid-forties who had gone into exile and was vice president of the Czech National Confederation of Political Prisoners and Resisters in Exile. He and an Austrian colleague, Rudolf Stark, were encouraged to open a refuge in Salzburg for Czechs fleeing the country—what Brown referred to as his “Salzburg housing operation.” Commencing in October 1950, with a start-up budget of $7,000 from the CIA to establish the refuge and $600 per month in operating expenses, the project ran smoothly for a year. However, by late 1951, in the context of increasingly strained relations between FTUC and CIA, the “Fizzlanders” were keen to take direct control of the operation. It was another project beyond the FTUC’s central field of interest, and Lovestone treated the links with Profous—whose reliability he had begun to doubt—as a bargaining chip through which to bid for a more satisfactory relationship with the agency and an expansion of funding for core activities. He instructed Brown: “They need your merchandise. Let them pay for it and also for an insurance policy.”98

The souring of Lovestone’s relations with Profous was a factor behind a contemporaneous clash between Brown and the CIA over his dabbling with a dissident group in Poland. Through the ICFTUE’s Polish national section, Brown had made contact with Josef Maciolek, international director of the clandestine group Freedom and Independence (Wolnosc i Niezawislosc, or WiN). Nurtured by both the British secret service and the CIA, WiN was a magnet for anti-Soviet dissidents, but it also proved to be a honey trap for foreign agents. In September 1952, on the promise of intelligence from Maciolek, Brown gave him an advance of $3,000 from his own funds, planning to obtain retrospective CIA authorization and confirmation of funding when next in the United States. However, Maciolek had also earlier contracted directly with the CIA for WiN to serve as a part of a “stay behind” army, for which he had been paid $1.16 million. When the CIA realized that Maciolek was also dealing with Brown it demanded an end to the relationship. Indeed, the entire WiN connection with the agency collapsed, and the whole matter came to light when, soon after, its leadership handed over to the Polish communist authorities their file of incriminating evidence. The details were published by the WFTU and were neither rebutted nor in any way commented on by the AFL.99

During the previous two years, the CIA had gradually taken over responsibility for funding the ICFTUE through the National Committee for a Free Europe (NCFE).100 The agency’s interest in the exile centre had less to do with its character as a “trade union” body than its potential for intelligence gathering and its utility as disseminator of anti-communist propaganda through the NCFE’s broadcast arm, Radio Free Europe. Initially financial assistance took the form of a $650 fee paid monthly for scripts supplied by different national exile groups for broadcast by Radio Free Europe. The money was passed to the ICFTUE by Alois Adamczyk, a former Polish trade union official and currently unofficial leader of a section of the ICFTUE domiciled in New York. This group liaised closely with Lovestone through former Lovestoneite Henry Kirsch, who headed the NCFE’s “American Contacts Division.” However, in 1950 tension developed between the New York exiles and the ICFTUE in Paris over the former’s claim to be best placed to organize covert activities in Eastern Europe.101

The NCFE settled this dispute in favour of the Paris group, doing so in a way intended to reduce Lovestone’s influence. It dispensed with the services of Kirsch, who had acted as Lovestone’s eyes and ears within the NCFE, and appointed as its official representative to the ICFTUE in Paris Leon Dennen, a forty-three-year-old former garment workers’ staffer and representative in Europe of the Jewish Labor Committee. Although he was close to David Dubinsky and expressed his loyalty to the AFL, Dennen had no formal relationship with the FTUC and insisted on the need to work independently of it.102

Dennen had a secret budget of $71,000, from which he now made monthly payments of $5,000 to the ICFTUE. Lovestone was up in arms about these changes, unwilling to accept an arrangement that excluded him from full knowledge of all ICFTUE financial transactions. He noted that while others in Washington saw Dennen’s reports to the NCFE, he was not on the circulation list. “I know a rotten deal when my nose tells me it stinks,” Lovestone told him.103 He appealed Kirsch’s dismissal to C. D. Jackson, chairman of the NCFE, who was on secondment from his position as managing director of Time-Life International, but Jackson insisted that he would not have any AFL “stooges” in the NCFE: “We will not allow Lovestone to dictate or control our committee.” Jackson’s line was upheld by his successor, the former assistant secretary of state, Adolf Berle, who stated bluntly that Kirsch was unacceptable because he was a “Lovestoneite.” Jay Lovestone’s loss of favour was the direct product of a sharp deterioration in relations between the FTUC and the CIA. The agency’s deputy director, Allen Dulles, strongly supported the new arrangement and let it be known that he, too, would have occasional chores for Dennen.104

Describing the NCFE as a “committee of crooks and charlatans,” Lovestone urged the FTUC to sever all links with it, with the result that Matt Woll resigned from its board of directors. Lovestone won the backing of Meany and Woll for his line, but Dubinsky, who remained attached to Dennen, was not persuaded and preferred to maintain an AFL presence on the board and fight its corner from within. Links were eventually severed some months later, but it was only a partial victory for Lovestone. Dennen remained the channel through which the NCFE dealt with the ICFTUE, and he now developed plans for an expansion of its activities with new offices opened in Berlin and Stockholm.105 NCFE president, Admiral H. B. Miller, proposed a tit-for-tat reaction to the FTUC’s withdrawal by “cutting off our [FTUC] friends in Europe,” but Allen Dulles waved away the suggestion. He understood that in this bruising encounter the CIA had broadly achieved its objective and told Miller: “We have enough trouble as it is with Lovestone; let us not look for more.”106

Italy: Splits Financed by “Irregular” Funds

The financial dependency of the Italian maritime unions on the Americans, so evident at the conference of the Mediterranean Committee in Naples in September 1950, was a direct product of the splits in the Italian labour movement that developed over Marshall aid. These occurred in the aftermath of the Christian Democrats’ overwhelming success in the general election of April 1948, a victory achieved with no small support from the Americans, and especially the CIA. Irving Brown’s expression of support for the continuation of AFL independent activities abroad at the time of the formation of the ICFTU had much to do with American attempts to manage the politics of this trade union fragmentation in Italy.

The country was not a regular part of Brown’s beat until 1949. He had paid occasional visits to Italy and had spoken of the need to be more active there, but that would require more resources than he initially possessed. In any case, the Italian-American Labor Council, headed by the ILGWU’s Luigi Antonini, was the AFL’s established point of contact with the Italian labour movement. The United States also had an extremely active labour attaché in Rome in the person of Colonel Tom Lane, whose high profile was further enhanced by combining his role as attaché with that of labour advisor to the Marshall Plan mission. As former legal counsel to the bricklayers’ union, he appeared to some to carry the imprimatur of the AFL, and he didn’t hesitate to capitalize on this. In reality he pursued a line independent of the AFL, and over time this became a cause of great concern to Lovestone and the FTUC.

Irving Brown turned up in Rome four days after the landmark 1948 general election. Accompanied by Tom Lane, he met the leaders of three non-communist groupings within the then unified Confederazione generale italiana del lavoro (CGIL)—Giulio Pastore (Christian Democrat), Giovanni Canini (Social Democrat), and Enrico Parri (Republican)—and urged them to split away from the communist-led organization. From the outset the social democrats and republicans were reluctant to do so, the former in particular encouraged by the British to remain within the unified body and work to take control. To Brown they were “the weakest part of the picture”: “Saragat [Social Democrat leader] doesn’t know a damn thing about workers and trade unions.” With far fewer trade union members than the Christian Democrats, both groups feared becoming a minority in an organization dominated by the Catholic Church—“sextons and bell ringers for Pastore,” as one social democrat put it.107

Three months later, an insurrectionary general strike called by the CGIL in response to an assassination attempt on Communist Party secretary Palmiro Togliatti provided Pastore with the excuse for withdrawing his Christian Democrat members from the CGIL. But despite the personal urging of Dubinsky, Antonini, Lovestone, and Brown during a highly publicized visit to Rome, and their offers of financial help, no other non-communist group joined them. Pastore launched a new “free trade union confederation,” the Libera confederazione generale italiana del lavoro (LCGIL), in October 1948, having submitted to Lane a request for no less than $1.5 million in assistance over the coming nine months—including wage costs for 1,430 staff! US Ambassador Dunn cabled the State Department, urging that all means of obtaining the funds be explored: “We believe we could handle financial transfers here discreetly.”108 That same month, Tom Lane attended a meeting of the AFL international affairs committee where it was agreed to support Pastore’s attempts to establish the new organization on non-confessional lines and so increase its attraction to the Social Democrats and Republicans. As the LCGIL embarked on an organizing drive, and with Lane predicting that it would have a membership of a million and a half within six months, he and his embassy staff were prominent at many of the recruiting rallies. Lane was soon spending large sums of money on the LCGIL from Marshall Plan counterpart funds quite independently of the American labour movement.109

During a Marshall Plan–sponsored trip to the United States in 1949, Canini and Parri, the leaders of the CGIL Social Democrat and Republican factions, were subject to intense American pressure to join up with the LCGIL. They were given red-carpet treatment, including a meeting with President Truman, and they finally gave a commitment to withdraw from the CGIL by the end of June and to merge with the LCGIL before the end of November. It was hoped that such a consolidation of forces would enable the Italian unions to attend the founding congress of the ICFTU as a unified anti-communist centre. Funding in the amount of $200,000 was promised by the FTUC—half for the Christian Democrats, the other half shared between the Social Democrats and Republicans. But once Canini and Parri returned to Italy they encountered deep-rooted reservations about the proposed unification among their rank and file. Social Democrats in particular believed in the need for wider unity of the non-communist left, which would include members of the CGIL belonging to Pietro Nenni’s larger Socialist Party before creating a new trade union centre. The compromise response of Canini and Parri was to form the Federazione italiana del lavoro (FIL), which some saw as a staging post on the road to merger with the LCGIL while others regarded it as a permanent body, independent of both the Communist and Catholic wings of the movement.

Renewed American pressure was brought to bear on Canini and Parri to honour their commitment to immediate unification. Brown was sent to Rome on three occasions in July, August, and September 1949 to work on these two men and their political associates. He reputedly told the Social Democrat, Enzo Dalla Chiesa, that he could have suitcases of money if he would only leave the CGIL.110 However, so much money had been offered as an inducement to merger, most of it by labour attaché Tom Lane, that it was being devalued. Lovestone was appalled at the costings supplied to him by Pastore—$6,500 for 150,000 copies of a manifesto and $3,000 for 500,000 membership cards: “They must think we are a bunch of innocents,” he told Brown. “I think our Italian friends have been overfed . . . If they keep on with their high caloric diet they will get acute indigestion.”111 Dubinsky wrote to Averell Harriman, head of the Marshall Plan in Europe, threatening to wash his hands of the operation in Italy if this use of counterpart funds didn’t stop. He also called for the AFL to issue a statement dissociating itself from any irregular financing of the Italian unions. But Meany successfully opposed this particular suggestion, arguing that it would cast doubt on the legitimacy of the entire Italian program.112 The FTUC’s principal source of funds was, after all, hardly regular.

The course now decided on by the FTUC was to restrict carefully the distribution of its assistance so as to benefit only those parties that committed themselves to a merger with the LCGIL. Brown was instructed to open a bank account in Rome in the name of the FTUC from which withdrawals would be permitted, but only on the telegrammed instructions of either Woll or Dubinsky. Brown resented his loss of freedom under these new banking arrangements, but Lovestone put his foot down and told him: “You have got to get one thing clear, Irving, the Committee here will leave no stone unturned to make it clear and irrefutable that it is the AFL and not, as the Communist slanderers say, the other [CIA] sources which are giving material support for trade union realignment in Italy.”113

At a meeting in the Grand Hotel in Rome on 8 September, Brown turned up the pressure on the Italians and set 3 October as the deadline for merger, failing which he threatened to cut off funds. But this tactic served only to antagonize the union leadership: Parri described it as blackmail and referred to Brown and Lane as “clowns,” while Canini considered it stupid and predicted that it would result in only a few joining the LCGIL.114 L’Umanità, the Social Democrat organ, lambasted American ignorance of the situation and Brown in particular as the “naïve labour ambassador from the other side of the Atlantic.” In New York the expatriate Social Democrat, Vanni Montana, aware that Brown did not even speak Italian and that people were thereby forced to turn to Tom Lane for an interpretation of AFL policy, induced American Socialist Party leader Norman Thomas to complain to the secretary of state about the crudeness of American policy toward the Italian trade unions. The publicity generated by this caused a sensation in Italy.115

The deadline for merger passed, and negotiations were still taking place during the founding congress of the ICFTU in London in December 1949. When, in February 1950, FIL leaders finally committed themselves to merge, it provoked a walkout of its own left-wing Social Democrats, who formed a new Unione italiana del lavoro (UIL). UIL would later seek independent affiliation to the ICFTU at the highly charged executive board meeting under Vincent Tewson’s chairmanship in December 1951. In the event, a mere rump of Social Democrats and Republicans led by Canini and Parri finally merged with the LCGIL to form the new Confederazione italiana dei sindacati lavoratori (CISL) on May Day 1950. Making the best of a messy outcome, Irving Brown described it as a victory for democratic workers against the “relentless and fabulously financed Communist fifth column.” As he knew only too well, the “democratic workers” had also been “fabulously financed.” For their part in this venture, Canini and Parri were both viewed as traitors and, as such, expelled from their respective political parties.

It was against this background of hardball American tactics and generous financial inducements intended to influence the direction of Italian trade unionism that Brown and Ferri-Pisani prepared for the international conference of maritime workers in Naples in September 1950. Two months earlier Brown had released $2,000 to Canini for him to begin to make the arrangements.116 Historian Ronald Filippelli notes that the Italian anti-communists were now an international charity case. CISL was largely a creature of AFL pressure, and from the outset American funding bred a dependency that was hard to break. As Brown later reported, CISL had too many full-time paid officials among whom a spirit of comfortable fonctionarism had developed, with few of them displaying any willingness to self-sacrifice. Only weeks after the merger between the LCGIL and the FIL rump, Lovestone noted cryptically:

The wedding which recently took place improves the picture from a certain point of view but . . . the requests of the ailing pottery workers flabbergasted us. I am comparing the requested hospital bills with others and find that the Italian demands are fantastic. . . . We believe that the present request should be handled over a period of two years instead of one year.

And the role of the embassy in distributing finance had become a major problem:

We are particularly concerned about our very-well intentioned friend Tom [Lane] who presumes that all he has to do is make a commitment and come willy-nilly, the AFL-FTUC will have to accept it. . . . Neither DD, nor Woll, nor George Meany want . . . individuals holding such official positions to make commitments on behalf of the AFL without consulting them.117

Meanwhile, UIL, led by the left Social Democrats Dalla Chiesa and Italo Viglianesi, favoured cooperation between all the various strands of the fragmented labour movement, including the communist-led CGIL. For this and for voicing criticism of the North Atlantic Treaty, UIL was inevitably cut off from AFL financial assistance. With no other source of funding available, UIL then turned to the CIO for help. A new dimension was about to be added to American trade union activity in Italy. Highly critical of the AFL and State Department strategy in that country, and attempting to tap into finance from US government sources for trade union work abroad, the CIO would soon begin to develop plans for a European program of its own, competing with the FTUC in the Italian theatre and elsewhere. The CIO’s presence in Europe was set to become a major issue of contention between the two American centres.

Established with strong American support to foster pluralism in international trade unionism, the ICFTU underwent a severe test in its first two years, and was found wanting by the AFL. It was seen as slow to react to critical developments in the Cold War and to be dominated by a small group of Europeans, foremost among them leaders of the British TUC, with a conservative approach to trade unionism and little stomach for a real fight against communism. As early as 1952, such factors led the AFL to conduct a boycott of ICFTU meetings for most of the year, while some of its leading figures even questioned the value of membership tout court.

The latter view owed much to the strident criticisms and personalized attacks on ICFTU personnel in reports from Irving Brown and Jay Lovestone. Within months of its foundation, the ICFTU’s first general secretary, Jaap Oldenbroek, had gone from close AFL ally in the fight to extricate Western trade union centres from the WFTU to arch-villain with whom Lovestone would have no truck. His and Brown’s fiercely combative approach in dealing with sister organizations plainly limited the scope for fraternal give and take and generated wariness of the FTUC in Europe. Yet while whipping up this negative AFL view of the ICFTU, Lovestone and Brown never had any doubt about the need to maintain the international affiliation. Indeed, they considered that the AFL had an obligation to provide world leadership, meaning a special role for Americans in international labour affairs but with scope for “independent activities” where necessary.

Such an approach was greatly facilitated by the extra financing that the FTUC’s links with the OPC-CIA made available. It was central to FTUC programs involving the non-communist trade unions in Finland and the Mediterranean Committee. The source of funding dictated the need for secrecy, to which Lovestone and Brown adapted easily: they were essentially Leninists whose politics may have changed but who still retained a penchant for conspiratorial work. To this mix they also brought the passion and single-mindedness of zealots prepared to battle against heavy odds in pursuit of the abiding anti-communism that characterized their whole approach.

Of particular note in Irving Brown’s work in Finland, and even more so with the Mediterranean Committee, was his championing of the concept of an elite, anti-communist trade union force schooled in Leninism and trained to do battle with communists in a physical sense for control of the streets and the workplace. He plainly saw this as an adjunct to the American military presence in Europe, indeed a component of the “stay behind force” as envisaged in “Operation GLADIO,” prepared to go underground in the event of a communist takeover.

With its secret channel of finance, the FTUC spread its effort in Europe more widely. Subsidizing newspapers that were considered to have an acceptable political line in France, sponsoring the International Centre of Free Trade Unionists in Exile whose main function was the dissemination of propaganda and gathering of intelligence in Eastern Europe, and even assisting the launch of the Congress for Cultural Freedom and sustaining it organizationally over its first two years, were all initiatives far removed from the field of trade unionism proper. Indeed, an interesting feature of the extensive Brown-Lovestone correspondence is the patent lack of interest they displayed in routine trade union affairs, save where there was an anti-communist angle to exploit. Yet others in the AFL leadership had misgivings about the range of FTUC activities; Brown was urged to limit the time he devoted to the CCF, and Lovestone himself balked at the request of the US ambassador to India for help in preparing for the launch of a CCF section in the subcontinent. There was piquancy in his reminder that, after all, the FTUC was still a trade union body.

The potential for trade union intentions to be compromised by this funding arrangement was most evident in Italy, where the favoured centre, CISL, had access not only to assistance from the AFL but also to extensive financial resources liberally doled out from the US embassy in Rome by Tom Lane and made available on the fiction that this was money from the American trade unions. This practice of “buying” the support of trade union favourites was to arouse concern in the CIO—hitherto largely content to channel its international effort via the ICFTU—and prompt its leaders to seek a more prominent role in Europe. The CIO’s presence on the continent from 1951 as a competitor of the AFL would now lead to a heightening of conflict between the two American affiliates of the ICFTU in the first half of the decade.