Notes

Chapter 1: Facing the Future

1. Report of 75th Annual Trades Union Congress (Blackpool, 1945), 353–56; Daily Worker, 13 September 1945.

2. Daily Worker, 13 September 1945.

3. Walter Schevenels, Forty-Five Years: International Federation of Trade Unions, 1901–1945, 333.

4. Geert Van Goethem, The Amsterdam International: The World of the International Federation of Trade Unions (IFTU), 1913–45, 179–82. Sir Walter Citrine (1887–1983) was apprenticed as an electrician in his native Liverpool, where he became district secretary of the electricians’ union in 1914, rising to the position of national president in 1918. He joined the TUC in 1924 and was promoted to general secretary the following year. In the wake of the 1926 general strike, he and Ernest Bevin collaborated to centralize control of the TUC as it developed a partnership role with governments. In 1935, he became one of the first British trade union leaders to be knighted. Abandoning the IFTU in 1945, he was elected as the WFTU’s founding president, but he held office for less than a year before resigning from his trade union positions to head up Britain’s newly nationalized electrical power industry in 1946. He was staunchly anti-communist and was clear about his criticism of Soviet communism when he first approached the AFL to join the ICFTU in the 1930s.

5. Peter Weiler, British Labour and the Cold War, 64, citing the minutes of the February 1942 meeting of the Anglo-Soviet Trade Union Committee.

6. Speaking at the New York Central Trades and Labour Council on 5 April 1945, Meany refused to be party to the “rigging of international labour machinery to be used as . . . the chocolate coating of any ideology among people who would choke if they knew the consequences of what they were swallowing.” Joseph C. Goulden, Meany, 125. For detailed accounts of the trade union diplomacy leading to the formation of the WFTU, see Van Goethem, The Amsterdam International, chaps. 7, 9; Schevenels, Forty-Five Years, chaps. 7–8; Lewis Lorwin, The International Labour Movement, chap. 19; Philip Taft, Defending Freedom: American Labour and Foreign Affairs, chap. 3; Peter Weiler, British Labour and the Cold War, 55–69.

7. William Green (1873–1952) was a miner from Ohio who was elected AFL president on the death of Sam Gompers in 1924, largely through the influence of John L. Lewis, president of the United Mine Workers of America. Although Green edged out Matthew Woll for the presidential post, in matters of international affairs he deferred to Woll and later to Meany as well, when the latter became AFL secretary-treasurer. Indeed, on the whole, Green played little role in this area.

8. Report of 75th Annual Trades Union Congress, 366-68, 402.

9. Weiler, British Labour and the Cold War, 69; Lincoln Evans to David Dubinsky, 19 January 1949, IAD Brown files, box 29, file 6.

10. Van Goethem, The Amsterdam International, 258n159; Schevenels, Forty-Five Years, 344.

11. Schevenels, Forty-Five Years, 346–49; Walter Citrine, Two Careers, 219, 224.

12. The Labor League for Human Rights operated until the end of 1946, when it was wound up and its remaining funds ($1,674) transferred to the FTUC. The FTUC continued for some years afterward to use letterhead, which gave the impression that it was still a subsidiary part of the league when in fact the league was defunct. Minutes of LLHR Administrative Committee, meeting, 13 December 1946, Dubinsky records, box 78, file 3a.

13. Charles Zimmerman (1896–1983) emigrated from Russia aged thirteen and by the age of sixteen was an ILGWU member and president of his local shop. In 1923, he became a leader of the powerful Local 22 but was removed two years later as a result of his membership in the Communist Party. He was expelled from the party in 1929, at the same time as Lovestone, and, in 1933, ran again successfully for the presidency of Local 22, which subsequently provided a base for Lovestone’s career in the labour movement. In 1934, Zimmerman was elected an ILGWU vice president and played a prominent role in the AFL’s international solidarity activities. He was an important figure in the Jewish Labor Committee (JLC), whose president he became in 1969. On retirement in 1972, he was elected co-chairman of Social Democrats, USA.

David Dubinsky (1892–1982) worked as a baker in his native Poland, where he became an assistant secretary of the Jewish Bund at the age of fourteen. Arrested for strike activity, he escaped from a labour camp and made his way to the United States in 1911. He worked in the garment industry and, as a member of the ILGWU, rose from local president to vice president in 1922 and then to international president in 1932. He helped launch the CIO but subsequently opted for the ILGWU to remain in the AFL. As the garment workers’ president and a close ally of George Meany, he was one of the most powerful trade union figures both nationally and internationally until his retirement in 1966.

14. Ted Morgan, A Covert Life: Jay Lovestone, Communist, Anti-Communist, and Spymaster; Jay Lovestone, “Labour’s Stake in Democracy: American Labour Looks Ahead,” 1940, Dubinsky records, box 262, file 4c.

15. Dubinsky to Henry Allen Moe, 16 October 1940, Dubinsky records, box 262, file 4c.

16. Lovestone to Ernesto Cuneo, 24 June 1940, cited in Van Goethem, The Amsterdam International, 186; A. E. Jolis, “The OSS and the Labour Movement: How European Trade Unionists Operated Behind German Lines,” New Leader, 13 August 1946.

17. FBI Report, 31 December 1943, cited in Morgan, A Covert Life, 226. During the 1950s, J. H. (Jaap) Oldenbroek, of the ICFTU, would point out in private that Lovestone’s activities often damaged the free trade union movement but never seemed to result in outcomes disadvantageous to the communists. Author interview with William Kemsley, 18 April 1987. Michael (Mike) Ross, a former Communist Party member who became Lovestone’s boss in the AFL-CIO, used to wonder whether Lovestone had ever really left the Communist Party. Author interview with Rosy Ruane, 14 January 1995.

18. Morgan, A Covert Life, 141.

19. Matthew Woll (1880–1956) emigrated from Luxembourg as a child and began work as a photo engraver in 1895. He became his union’s president in 1906 and, as an AFL vice president from 1919, was a close colleague of the president, Samuel Gompers. Though his ambitions to succeed Gompers were thwarted, Woll remained a powerful influence behind President William Green and took a special interest in international affairs. As successor to Green from 1952, Meany had to work hard to wrest control of international affairs from Woll. Bob Reynolds, “Choosing the 2nd President of the AFL: Ephemeral Correspondence That Survived,” draft note prepared for the AFL-CIO Archives at the University of Maryland, sent by Reynolds to author, 25 July 2018.

20. Catherine Collomp, “The Jewish Labor Committee, American Labor, and the Rescue of European Socialists, 1934–41,” 127–28. Although ALCIA initially embraced AFL and CIO personnel, participation by CIO figures ceased after the conference came under attack by the American Communist Party, which accused it of being “counter-revolutionary” and “anti-Soviet.”

21. Varian Fry, “How to Help the Free and Democratic Labour Movements in Liberated Europe,” April 1945, Dubinsky records, box 173, file 3b.

22. Fry to Dubinsky, 20 August 1945, Dubinsky records, box 173, file 3b. Fry envisaged a publication jointly produced by the AFL and ALCIA, with AFL staff contributing domestic news from the American labour movement, while ALCIA staff would handle the “international” content. But organizationally, ALCIA was already in difficulties. Meany had resigned from its board of directors as a consequence of policy disagreements, the budget was overspent, staff were being laid off, and Fry’s suggested budget of $50,000 for the overseas publication (which would need to come from the AFL’s Free Trade Union Fund) looked like a desperate bid to keep ALCIA afloat. Fry to ALCIA executive board members, 12 September 1945, Dubinsky records, box 173, file 3a.

23. Information about Brown’s period in the FEA and intended move into the US Office of Military Government comes from the author’s interviews with Newman Jeffrey, Morris Weisz, and Alan Strachan, 28 August 1986. See also Paul Porter, “Conflict Within American Military Government Concerning the Revival of German Trade Unions,” 7–14, Paul R. Porter Papers, Group I, Harry S. Truman Presidential Library and Museum, Independence, MO.

24. “Irving Brown, AALC Founder Remembered,” AALC Reporter Supplement, n.d. [1988], IAD Brown files, box 9, file 11: Irving Brown, Condolences.

25. Author telephone interview with Kaare Sandegren, 16 September 2002. Haakon Lie’s doubts about claims that Brown had been in Norway during the war were expressed in a conversation he had with Kaare Sandegren, who, in the 1970s, was the secretary of international affairs for the Landsorganisasjonen i Norge (the Norwegian trade union centre). Lie’s doubts are of particular significance as he was an early leader of the Norwegian anti-Nazi resistance, from 1940 onward. Forced to flee the country in 1941, he then took charge of propaganda for the exiled Norwegian labour movement, based in London. However, Kaare Sandegren also relates that, in talks of his own with Irving Brown in 1975, the latter gave him to believe that he did indeed spend time in occupied Norway during the war. Separately, Brown also hinted to his deputy and eventual successor as AFL-CIO representative in Europe, Jim Baker, that he had been in France during the war—in Normandy and Paris—where he had had contact with the CGT. He was careful to tell Baker that, while he had worked with the OSS, he had never worked for them. Jim Baker to author, 12 June and 21 June 2002.

26. Ben Rathbun, The Point Man: Irving Brown and the Deadly Post-1945 Struggle for Europe and Africa, 91–95, 169–70. Rathbun claims that Brown was able to reach Oslo via Sweden and met Norwegian partisans, including Willy Brandt, that he conducted a session on rail sabotage in Norway, travelled on to Copenhagen for a meeting with officials of the International Transport Workers’ Federation, and was then flown back to Paris in an OSS plane for meetings with “the anti-CGT members of Force Ouvrière.”

27. Brown answered one interviewer’s innocent question about his relatives by saying that yes, he did have a family “which includes a wife and grown-up children.” It was partly true but hardly very helpful. In fact, he was then divorced and had married for a second time, with one child from his first marriage. Brown to Norbert Anderson, 8 September 1978, IAD Brown files, box 33, file 7.

Chapter 2: Building Labour’s Anti-Communist Opposition in Europe

1. Brown to Abraham Bluestein, 2 November 1945, Thorne files, box 16, file: International Labour Relations Committee.

2. Ted Morgan, A Covert Life: Jay Lovestone, Communist, Anti-Communist, and Spymaster, 147–48. Whether, given a change in the international climate and the relations between the big powers, they might choose to abandon their studied moderation and mount a revolutionary challenge could only be a matter for conjecture. In fact an article under the name of Jacques Duclos, number two in the Parti communiste français (PCF), and published in Cahiers du communisme in April 1945 had attacked the idea that the class struggle was no longer relevant in the postwar years. In America such a view had already led the Communist Party to dissolve itself on the assumption that its adherents should now join all-party coalitions. The significance of this PCF pronouncement went largely unnoticed at the time, but the article to which Duclos had attached his name was in fact simply a translation of one that had already appeared in the Bulletin of the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party. In reality the French communists were on notice from Moscow that political and industrial moderation was only a temporary tactic.

3. In return, the AFL backed Caffery in the face of concerted moves to have him replaced as ambassador. Meany and Dubinsky spoke on his behalf at a meeting with President Truman in March 1947 and wrote to Secretary of State Marshall. Brown to Lovestone, 17 February and 23 April 1947, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 7; Brown to Lovestone, 26 December 1947, IAD Brown files, box 29, file 3.

4. Lovestone’s doubts about the reliability of State Department personnel extended to the very top. When General George Marshall succeeded James Byrnes as secretary of state, Lovestone believed that the tendency to appease communism would increase. Likewise, he mistrusted Dean Acheson, assistant secretary of state, who was close to Alger Hiss, and never forgot that in 1945 the Daily Worker had praised Acheson as one of the most forward-looking men in the department. “Pro-Soviet Personnel in State Department,” Thorne files, box 2, file: Communism; Ted Morgan, “The Grey Eminence” (typescript, n.d.), 420; Lovestone to Brown, 9 January 1947, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 8; Lovestone to Woll, 27 January 1947, IAD Lovestone files, box 64, file 26. Acheson replied to the AFL request that Murphy be attached to the office of the secretary of state by saying that Murphy had many other responsibilities and couldn’t be spared for this work. He suggested another name, but the person proposed lacked the particular talents that the AFL required. Minutes of International Affairs Committee meeting, 7 April 1949, Thorne files, box 17, file: International Labour Relations Committee.

5. “Four Day Period Observations: France, 18 November 1945,” section of letter from Irving Brown to Abraham Bluestein, 18 December, 1945, Thorne files, box 16, file: International Labour Relations Committee; Zimmerman cable to Dubinsky, 19 November 1945, Dubinsky records, box 34, file 3; Bert (Jolis) to Lovestone, 13 November 1945, Lovestone papers (Hoover), box 391, file: OSS, 1945. Even in the days immediately prior to Brown’s arrival in Paris, it was evident that Lovestone was in discussion with Jolis and Raymond Murphy of EUR-X Department about the use of funds to assist French socialists.

Léon Jouhaux (1879–1954) began his working life in a match factory and became minute secretary of his local union branch at the age of sixteen. After losing his job following a strike, he served as CGT local union representative from 1906. Elected in 1909 as CGT general secretary, a post he held until 1947, he played a central role in international affairs before 1914—campaigning against the looming prospect of war, attending the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919, and helping launch the ILO. He was one of the founders of the IFTU and was active in the League of Nations as a member of its Economic Advisory Council. During World War II, he was imprisoned by the Vichy regime and then deported to Germany, where he spent two years in Buchenwald. He returned to the general secretaryship of the CGT after the war until 1947, when he reluctantly led the breakaway to form Force ouvrière, becoming its first president, 1948–54. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1951.

6. Brown to Bluestein, 27 November 1945, Lovestone papers (Hoover), box 355, file: Irving Brown, 1939–45; Brown to Bluestein, 29 November 1945, Thorne files, box 16, file: International Labour Relations Committee. Robert Bothereau (1901–85) was a metalworker who joined the CGT in 1919 and worked in its confederal office under Jouhaux from 1932. During the war, he was part of the CGT underground. He became a leading figure in the group formed around Résistance ouvrière out of which grew the breakaway centre, Force ouvrière, which he founded jointly with Jouhaux and led as general secretary, 1948–63. His relations with Brown were mostly cordial, though the latter regarded him as a stolid, uninspiring figure and was pleased when he retired.

7. Brown to Bluestein, 2 December 1945, Lovestone papers (Hoover), box 355, file: Irving Brown, 1939–45; Brown to Woll, 5 December and 10 December 1945, Thorne files, box 16, file: International Labour Relations Committee; Brown to Woll, 14 December 1945, Zimmerman papers, box 11, file 5.

8. Brown to Woll, 28 December 1945 and 1 January 1946, Thorne files, box 16, file: International Labour Relations Committee; Brown to Woll, 21 January 1946, and Brown to Bluestein, 27 February 1946, Zimmerman papers, box 21, file 1; Brown to Lovestone, 25 February 1948, IAD Brown files, box 29, file 4.

9. Zimmerman to Brown, 11 January 1946, Dubinsky records, box 11, file 16.

10. George S. Wheeler, Who Split Germany? Wall Street and the West German Trade Union Leaders, pt. 11, 25–39; Paul Porter, “Conflict Within American Military Government Concerning the Revival of German Trade Unions,” 7–14, Paul R. Porter Papers, Group I, Harry S. Truman Presidential Library and Museum, Independence, MO.

11. McSherry subsequently claimed that undercover communists in the Manpower Division had used and deceived him. However, in 1954, when Senator Joseph McCarthy got wind of these events and sought details to support possible charges that General Eisenhower and General Clay had harboured communists in US Office of Military Government, he failed to come up with the evidence and did not pursue the case. Porter, “Conflict Within American Military Government Concerning the Revival of German Trade Unions.”

12. Wheeler clung to his job for almost two more years but left of his own accord in November 1947 when it became evident that all hope for an American-Soviet agreement over Germany had disappeared. Maintaining that the “right wing social democrats” who were being allowed to take over leadership of the trade unions were simply people who “preferred Nazis to communists,” he went to live in Czechoslovakia and remained there for thirty years. To suggestions that this revealed his pro-Soviet sympathies, he pointed out that the Czechoslovakia he moved to was still a socialist country under Benes. Wheeler, Who Split Germany?; Wheeler to author, 17 June 1986.

13. Brown to Woll, 22 February 1946, Zimmerman papers, box 21, file 1; Irving Brown, “Report on Germany,” American Federationist, May 1946, 32. Hillman’s biographer gives an altogether different impression of this visit, describing how, in the three weeks the WFTU delegation were in Germany they spent much time with trade unionists on the factory floor and in works councils. He argues that Hillman himself was assiduous and meticulous in exploring the situation, voracious in gathering data from trade unionists, and a dogged interrogator of military officials. Steven Fraser, Labour Will Rule: Sidney Hillman and the Rise of American Labour, 555.

14. Brown to Woll, 17 February and 22 February 1946, Zimmerman papers, box 21, file 1.

15. Brown to Woll, 20 May 1946, and Leon Dennen to Zimmerman, 27 April 1946, Zimmerman papers, box 21, file 1.

16. Brown to Meany, 17 June 1947, IAD Brown files, box 29, file 2.

17. Brown to Woll, 20 August 1946, Zimmerman papers, box 21, file 1. Doubtless the secretary of state, a conservative southern Democrat with an anti-union track record, was more impressed with Brown’s anti-communism than his pro-union advocacy.

18. Brown to Bluestein, 27 February 1946, Zimmerman papers, box 21, file 1; Brown to Zimmerman, 14 March 1946, Dubinsky records, box 11, file 16.

19. Zimmerman to Dubinsky, 12 April 1946, Dubinsky records, box 7, file 3.

20. Brown later recalled that the strike was the occasion of Benoît Frachon’s first public attack on him. Brown to Lovestone, 5 April 1952, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 15.

21. Brown to Woll, 10 August 1946, Zimmerman papers, box 21, file 1.

22. Brown to Woll, 20 May 1946, Zimmerman papers, box 21, file 1; G. M. Lamming, “Report on LO Conference,” 14 September 1946, LAB 13/596: WFTU: General File.

23. Brown to Woll, 22 March 1946, Zimmerman papers, box 21, file 1.

24. Brown to Woll, 24 May 1946, Zimmerman papers, box 21, file 1.

25. Abramovitch to Dubinsky, 9 June 1946, Dubinsky records, box 173, file 3a. The considerable disparity between the projected cost of Brown’s scheme and that proposed by Abramovitch suggests that there was as yet no common idea of what the FTUC would be able to afford.

26. Brown to Woll, December 1946, Zimmerman papers, box 21, file 1.

27. Jay Lovestone, “The Frantic Mr. Franchon,” Free Trade Union News, December 1946.

28. Apart from a number of right-wing members of the TUC General Council such as steel union leader Lincoln Evans, he had in mind in particular Herbert Tracy, the TUC’s press officer, and Edgar Harries of the international department, whose unofficial briefings had kept him informed of internal TUC politics.

29. Volney D. Hurd, “AFL Drops Paris Bureau Plan,” Christian Science Monitor, 3 January 1947.

30. Daniel Yergin, The Shattered Peace: The Origins of the Cold War and the National Security State, 275.

31. Lovestone to Brown, 24 June 1947, and Brown to Lovestone, July 1947, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 7.

32. Brown to Lovestone, 23 April 1947, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 7.

33. Lovestone to Brown, 8 March 1948, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 9.

34. Lovestone to Brown, 13 January and 31 January 1947, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 8; Brown to Lovestone, 17 February 1947, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 7.

35. Brown to Lovestone, 4–17 December 1946, and Lovestone to Brown, 6 January 1947, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 8.

36. Brown to Lovestone, 20 March, 1 April 1947, and Lovestone to Brown, 28 March 1947, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 8; Brown to Lovestone, 17 May 1947, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 7.

37. Lovestone to Brown, 13 January 1947, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 8; Brown to Lovestone, 17 February and 7 April 1947, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 7; Irving Brown, “The Crisis in Greece: What Are the Tasks of American Labour?” Free Trade Union News, May 1947.

38. Lovestone to Brown, 28 March and 23 May 1947, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, files 7 and 8.

39. Brown to Lovestone, 7 April 1947, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 7.

40. Bevin to Marshall, 6 May 1947, FO 800/468. Hubert Gee, Bevin’s special advisor on international labour matters at the Foreign Office, was convinced that Brown was wrong-headed in believing that the now-discarded GSEE executive committee was “communist.” He wrote that it indicated “an inability to see the situation in its proper perspective, which is really frightening when one considers the influence which Mr. Brown is in a position to exercise.” H. G. (Hubert) Gee to Mr. Veysey, 10 May 1947, LAB 13/656.

41. Brown to Lovestone, 17 May 1947, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 7; Brown to Watt, 18 June 1947, and Irving Brown, “Confidential Report on Greece, France and England,” 7 July 1947, Thorne files, box 17, file: International Labour Relations Committee.

42. “Report by Irving Brown on the Greek Labour Convention,” 10 April 1948, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 9; Lovestone to Brown, 17 May 1947, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 7.

43. Peter Weiler, British Labour and the Cold War, 346; Lovestone to Brown, 13 July 1949, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 10; minutes of International Labour Relations Committee meeting, 13 July 1949, and of FTUC meeting, 13 October 1949, Thorne files, box 17, file: International Labour Relations Committee.

44. Weiler, British Labour and the Cold War, 164. Reflecting on the difficulties experienced by the British in the international labour field in these years, Denis Healey, then the British Labour Party’s international secretary, recalled that Lovestone and Brown strove to mobilize the European labour movement against local communist parties and the USSR, often with little regard to the facts of the local situation. Yet, strongly supported with money and diplomatic assistance by the Truman administration, they were often able to exert more influence in Europe than the British Labour Party or the TUC. This was certainly the case in Greece in 1947. Denis Healey, The Time of My Life, 95.

45. Diary, 15 November 1946, Germer papers, box 25. There is no hint or suggestion anywhere in AFL or FTUC records that sums remotely of this order were actually available to the AFL. Minutes of FTUC meeting, 2 July 1947, IAD Lovestone files, box 35, file 29; Lovestone to Brown, 28 July 1947, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 7.

46. Brown to Lovestone, 2 September 1947, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 7.

47. Brown to Lovestone, 8 January 1948, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 9; Lovestone, “Report on Germany,” [August?] 1948, Dubinsky records, box 262, file 4b. Under the leadership of Ernst Scharnowski, UGO would soon establish an Ostburo through which trade unionists, supported by the CIA, engaged in intelligence-gathering activities in the Eastern zone. Brown to Lovestone, 9 December 1950, Lovestone papers (Hoover), box 283, file: Irving Brown, 1951.

48. Brown to Lovestone, 7 April and 23 April 1947, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 7.

49. Twenty-five years later, Lovestone revelled in the memory of Schumacher’s visit: his admiration for him was unbounded. Lovestone to Fritz Heine, 5 January 1971, IAD Country files, 1969–80, box 3, file 21.

50. Louis Edinger, Kurt Schumacher: A Study in Personality and Political Behaviour, 172–73. Brown underscored his belief in Schumacher some months later in arranging for the AFL’s American Federationist to publish an article by the SPD leader, translated from the German by his wife, Lillie. The article was controversial in AFL terms in that it reaffirmed support for the Marshall Plan but insisted that German workers wanted to see “socialist results” and were “not willing to fight for capitalism.” Kurt Schumacher, “A German Democrat Speaks.”

51. Brown to Lovestone, 17 February and 23 April 1947, and Lovestone to Brown, 23 May 1947, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 7. Production of the French edition was expected to cost an additional $1,500 per month.

52. Brown to Lovestone, 17 May 1947, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 7; Irving Brown, “Confidential Report on Greece, France and England,” 7 July 1947, Thorne files, box 17, file: International Labour Relations Committee; Brown to Lovestone, 7 August 1947, Lovestone papers (Hoover), box 698, file: Irving Brown.

53. W. E. Davis, report no. 121, 30 September 1947, LAB 13/246.

54. Brown to Lovestone, 19 December 1947, Lovestone papers (Hoover), box 698, file: Irving Brown. For an account of the strikes, see Val R. Lorwin, The French Labor Movement, 120–25.

55. Brown to Lovestone, 28 December 1947, IAD Brown files, box 29, file 3. Force ouvrière’s founding congress voted 3:1 to seek affiliation to the WFTU, but the application was rejected.

56. Brown to Zimmerman, 16 December 1947, Dubinsky records, box 14, file 5; Brown to Lovestone, 17 December 1947, Lovestone papers (Hoover), box 698, file: Irving Brown.

57. Brown to Lovestone, 12 February 1948, and Lovestone to Brown, 17 May and 9 June 1948, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 9. Lovestone notified Brown that “Ray” had assured him that the $10,000 requested for the one hundred typewriters “would be given you very soon.”

58. Lovestone to Lillie Brown, 31 August 1948, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 9.

59. Brown to Lovestone, 16 October 1948, IAD Brown files, box 29, file 5.

60. US Embassy, Paris, telegram to State Department, 24 October 1948, U.S. Department of State, RG 59, Central Decimal Files, 1910–1963, 851.5045/10-2748. Brown’s sources informed him that the CGT had a total of $350,000 to finance the strike activity. Brown to Lovestone, 6 October 1948, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 9.

61. Brown to Lovestone, 15 May 1948, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 9.

62. “Sacha Volman, Grey or Red Eminence: Idealist, Adventurer or Marxist,” n.d., Lovestone papers (Hoover), box 583, file: Volman. Sacha Volman (1923–2001) appears to have spent his entire adult life in the shadowy world of secret intelligence. He admitted to working for British and American intelligence while in Romania after the war, but he had also been an informant for the Soviet Union. His sudden departure from the country thus became necessary when the latter realized that he was playing a double game. Although he was fluent in several languages, his soft delivery and conspiratorial manner led wags to observe that he was incomprehensible in any of them. On first arriving in the West, he claimed to be representing Constantin Titel Petrescu, the veteran president of the Social Democratic Party of Romania, and, with Brown’s help, he unsuccessfully sought recognition by the Committee of the International Socialist Conference (COMISCO) as that party’s sole representative outside Romania. Serban Voinea, “Note on Sacha Volman,” 14 July 1958, Benedict papers, box 54, file: Business Correspondence 1 and 2.

By 1951, as ICFTUE secretary, Volman was benefiting from CIA finance through its front, the National Committee for a Free Europe. It was when he was sent to New York in 1952 to liaise with the committee that Lovestone first became aware that Volman enjoyed independent links to the CIA, discovering that his fare to the United States had been paid by the agency—what Lovestone referred to drily as the “Joint Distribution Committee.” Thoroughly disenchanted, Lovestone wrote Brown: “It is one big mess—never should have got involved. He is a nice boy who should go to school and not play with matches.” Lovestone to Brown, 26 March 1952, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 15.

In the mid-1950s, Volman switched his field of activity to Latin America when it appeared that an important way to fight communism in that region was to bring home to trade unionists the lessons of life under Eastern European communism. Initially based at the Institute of International Labor Research in New York, he became by turns a confidant of social democrat politicians José Figueres Ferrer, president of Costa Rica, and Juan Bosch, president of the Dominican Republic. Volman to Hans Gottfurcht, 2 May 1956, and Volman to Brown, 29 April 1957, IAD Lovestone files, box 12, file 9; Volman to Benedict, 23 April 1957, and Volman to Arturo Jauregui Hurtado, 22 June 1955, Benedict papers, box 54, file: Business Correspondence 1 and 2, and box 101, file: untitled. See also Patrick J. Iber, “‘Who Will Impose Democracy?’: Sacha Volman and the Contradictions of CIA Support for the Anticommunist Left in Latin America.” Volman was alleged to have hosted the meeting of mostly Cuban exiles in 1976 at which the assassination in Washington of Salvador Allende’s former foreign minister, Orlando Letelier, was planned. Much about his life remains obscure—even his age was disputed—and to most people he was simply a mystery man. When he died in the Dominican Republic, a local newspaper paid tribute to him under the appropriate heading “Sacha el misterioso.” Georgie Anne Geyer, “Sacha Volman: Classic Original and Latin American Legend,” Universal Press Syndicate, 16 March 2001; Jean-Guy Allard, “CIA Patented the Crimes of Posada and Bosch in Bonao,” Granma internacional, 21 June 2007, reprinted by the National Committee to Free the Cuban Five, http://www.freethefive.org/usTerrorism/USTerrBonao62107.htm.

63. Brown to Lovestone, 16 October 1948, IAD Brown files, box 29, file 5; Lovestone to Woll, 19 July 1948, IAD Lovestone files, box 65, file 2; Lovestone to Brown, 20 October 1948, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 9; Lovestone to Brown, 27 December 1948, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 11; minutes of ICFTUE meeting, 31 December 1948, IAD Lovestone files, box 35, file 25.

64. Minutes of International Labour Relations Committee meeting, 19 October 1948, Thorne files, box 17, file: International Labour Relations Committee.

65. To relieve pressure on FTUC finances, the cost of Brown’s rent was borne by the AFL from the outset. Brown to Lovestone, 13 March, 20 March, and 28 March 1947, and Lovestone to Brown, 28 March 1947, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 8.

66. Lovestone to Brown, 2 June 1947, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 7.

67. Lovestone to Brown, 11 March 1947, and Brown to Lovestone, 13 March 1947, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 8.

68. Hannah Haskel to Brown, 13 May 1948, and Lovestone to Brown, 17 May 1948, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 9; Brown to Haskel, 19 May 1948, IAD Brown files, box 29, file 4; Lovestone to Brown, 12 and 20 October 1948, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 9.

69. Lovestone to Brown, 31 July 1947, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 7.

70. Brown to Lovestone, 23 April 1947, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 7. As a thrusting twenty-six-year-old member of the American delegation to the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, Bullitt had been sent to Moscow to explore with Bolshevik leaders the possibilities for peace between the Allies and the new Soviet government. He met Lenin, formed a favourable view of him, and reported back to the Paris conference on the possibilities for a deal. However, sensing that Lenin saw Bullitt as a “useful idiot,” American and British leaders at the conference declined to act on his report. Bullitt was shattered by the experience, but during his subsequent years as America’s first ambassador to the USSR from 1934, he became a fervent anti-communist. Margaret Macmillan, Peacemakers, 86–89. Brown to Lovestone, July 1947 and Lovestone to Brown, 28 July 1947, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 7; Lovestone to Brown, 12 January 1948, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 9. The coded reference to sums of money as “books,” “anthologies,” “poems,” and “pages” was a new departure that was adhered to throughout the period during which the FTUC came to rely on funding from intelligence sources.

71. Lovestone to Brown, 23 December 1947, IAD Brown files, box 29, file 3; minutes of FTUC meeting, 11 December 1947, IAD Lovestone files, box 35, file 29.

72. Lovestone to Brown, 12 January 1948, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 9.

73. Lovestone to Brown, 6 April 1948, IAD Brown files, box 29, file 4.

74. Lovestone to Brown, 25 May 1948, IAD Brown files, box 29, file 5; Lovestone to Woll, 25 May 1948, IAD Lovestone files, box 65, file 1; Lovestone to Rutz, 24 June 1948, IAD Brown files, box 29, file 10; minutes of International Labour Relations Committee meeting, 9 September 1948, Thorne files, box 17, file: International Labour Relations Committee.

75. Lovestone to Brown, 20 October 1948, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 9.

76. Winthrop Aldrich to Donovan, 10 December 1948, Lovestone papers (Hoover), box 291, file: Donovan 1951; FTUC Contributions 1948, IAD Lovestone files, box 73, file 4.

77. Lovestone had met Forrestal when accompanying Kurt Schumacher to a meeting of the National Security Council during his 1947 visit to the United States. Lovestone to Fritz Heine, 5 January 1971, IAD Country files, 1969–80, box 3, file 21.

78. Morgan, A Covert Life, chap. 14.

79. Woll to Wisner, 10 December 1948, cited in Morgan, A Covert Life, 197.

80. Anthony Carew, “The American Labour Movement in Fizzland: The Free Trade Union Committee and the CIA.”

81. Denis MacShane, International Labour and the Origins of the Cold War, 122; W. E. Davis, “World Federation of Trade Unions,” report no. 50, 26 February 1946, and telegrams from Sir M. [Maurice] Peterson, British Embassy Moscow, to Foreign Office, 15 June, 17 June, and 30 June 1946, LAB 13/569: WFTU: General File.

82. Brown to Lovestone, 27 December 1946, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 7; Brown to Woll, n.d. [December?] 1946, Zimmerman papers, box 21, file 1. J. H. Oldenbroek (1897–1970) had been employed in the labour movement since leaving school, beginning in 1915 when he joined the head office of the Dutch trade union centre NVV. There he began to learn about the international trade union movement at the feet of General Secretary Edo Fimmen, a man now largely forgotten but who was destined to become a towering figure in the world of trade unionism in the interwar years. When Fimmen became general secretary of the IFTU in 1919, Oldenbroek moved with him as administrative secretary, and then again accompanied Fimmen when he took on the general secretaryship of the ITF in 1921, working as office manager and interpreter. He was appointed assistant general secretary under Fimmen in 1937 and became de facto general secretary when Fimmen died in 1942. Based in London during the war, Oldenbroek was drawn into the world of secret intelligence and even entered into a written contract with the labour desk of the OSS to engage in covert ITF activities in enemy-occupied countries. (The full English text of this agreement, “ITF-OSS Agreement Dated 20 October 1942,” appears in a Flemish typescript of Becu’s unpublished “Memoirs,” n.d., 182–85; I am grateful to John Vanderveken for supplying a copy of these pages. See also Bob Reinalda, “ITF Cooperation with American Intelligence, 1942–1944,” esp. n. 606.) In 1946, Oldenbroek was confirmed as ITF general secretary in his own right, and, during a period when he was closely identified with the Americans, he was strategically the most important European trade union opponent of the WFTU. Following election as the ICFTU’s first general secretary in 1949, his good relations with Brown and Lovestone would soon deteriorate in spectacular fashion.

83. Brown to Harvey Brown, 13 January 1947, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 8; MacShane, International Labour and the Origins of the Cold War, 76; Free Trade Union News, November 1947.

84. Lovestone to Woll, 31 January 1947, IAD Lovestone files, box 64, file 27; Lovestone to Brown, 1 April and 30 April 1947, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, files 7–8. Although the AFL and ITF combined to block incorporation of the trade secretariats within the WFTU, their motives were not identical. For the AFL, the main objective was to undermine the WFTU, an organization that was likely to end up dominated by communists. For the ITF, the battle was mostly about preserving its autonomy. As Harold Lewis, a former general secretary of the ITF, notes: “The ITF . . . would have taken the same stand on the WFTU issue if ‘integration’ had come without a trace of communist presence or influence.” Lewis to author, 3 October 2007. See also Harold Lewis, “The International Transport Workers’ Federation (ITF), 1945–65: An Organizational and Political Anatomy,” 212, where he argues persuasively: “There might have been a ‘cloak and dagger’ air to some of Oldenbroek’s . . . dealings with the American Federation of Labor, but he had declared his determination to defend the ITF’s independence from the outset. Single-minded and relentless as he was, Oldenbroek would have used the AFL every bit as much as it thought it was using him.”

85. Brown to Ilg, 8 January 1948, IAD Brown files, box 1, file 10; Brown to Lovestone, 15 February, 21 March, 10 April, and 26 April 1948, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 9; Oldenbroek to Brown, 21 August 1948, and Brown to Oldenbroek, 23 August 1948, IAD Brown files, box 32, file 3; Brown to Lovestone, 16 October 1948, IAD Brown files, box 29, file 5. Brown’s close dealings with the ITF also opened up prospects for taking the ideological fight into Eastern Europe. Herman Kaufken, who represented workers on the inland waterway system in Europe, including people whose work took them into the Soviet zone of Germany, offered to provide Brown with a network of contacts able to supply information on conditions there. Brown requested additional funding from Lovestone to support Kaufken, but Lovestone turned him down and told him simply to use his judgment (and existing funds) in rendering moderate assistance. Still, Lovestone was soon able to report that an underground network was in place and ready for an active campaign. Earlier, in January 1947, Brown had proposed that he be permitted to make a trip to Poland and Hungary to assess what was happening in the labour movement, but Lovestone was concerned for his safety and vetoed the idea as too risky. Brown to Lovestone, 17 February 1947, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 7; minutes of FTUC meeting, 21 March 1947, IAD Lovestone files, box 35, file 29; Lovestone to Brown, 28 March 1947, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 8; Irving Brown, “Confidential,” 10 November 1947, and minutes of International Labour Relations Committee meeting, 11 November 1947, Thorne files, box 17, file: International Labour Relations Committee.

86. Brown to Ilg, 8 January 1948, IAD Brown files, box 1, file 10; Brown to Lovestone, 15 February, 21 March, 10 April, and 26 April 1948, IAD Lovestone papers, box 11, file 9; Oldenbroek to Brown, 21 August 1948, and Brown to Oldenbroek, 23 August 1948, IAD Brown files, box 32, file 3; Brown to Lovestone, 16 October 1948, IAD Brown files, box 29, file 5. In the 1960s, Zander himself would play a significant role in harnessing the Public Services International, as Bolle’s organization had now become, to CIA operations in Latin America.

87. Lovestone to Brown, 2 June, 28 July, and 31 July 1947, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 7; Brown to Lovestone, 18 June 1947, Lovestone papers (Hoover), box 698, file: Irving Brown.

88. Irving Brown, “Confidential,” 10 November 1947, Thorne files, box 17, file: International Labour Relations Committee.

89. “Workers of the World” and “World Trade Unions: Relations with the American Federation,” Times (London), 17 November 1947; “TUC Asked to U.S. Talks: Drive Against Communists,” Daily Telegraph, 17 November 1947.

90. Walter Galenson to Zimmerman, 29 November 1947, Dubinsky records, box 14, file 5; Brown to Lovestone, 17 December 1947, Lovestone papers (Hoover), box 698, file: Irving Brown.

91. Brown to Lovestone, 13 March, 7 April, and 23 April 1947, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 8.

92. Secretary of State to Ambassador, Washington, 24 December 1947, FO 371/62784, National Archives, Kew.

93. Brown to Lovestone, 25 December 1947, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 7; Brown to Lovestone, 26 December 1947, IAD Brown files, box 29, file 3.

94. Secretary of State to Ambassador, Washington, 24 December 1947, FO 371/62784, National Archives, Kew.

95. Secretary of State to Ambassador, Washington, 19 February 1948, FO 371/71806, National Archives, Kew.

96. Lovestone to Brown, 20 February 1948, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 9.

97. Brown to Lovestone, 25 February 1948, IAD Brown files, box 29, file 4.

98. Brown to Lovestone, n.d. [November] 1947, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 7.

99. Kennan to Lovett, 30 June 1948, Records of the Policy Planning Staff, cited in Eric Thomas Chester, Covert Network: Progressives, the International Rescue Committee, and the CIA, 26–27. Number one on Kennan’s list was Frank Wisner, who eventually landed the job.

100. Brown to Lovestone, 5 May 1948, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 9.

101. Lovestone to Dubinsky, 12 May 1948, IAD Lovestone files, box 33, file 5; Lovestone to Lillie Brown, 10 June 1948, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 9.

102. Brown to Lovestone, 21 March, and Lovestone to Brown, 26 March 1948, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 9. In practical terms, the ERP Conference led to the creation of the ERP-Trade Union Advisory Committee (TUAC), which eventually evolved into the OECD-TUAC.

103. Brown to Lovestone, 21 March 1948, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 9; New York Times, 10 March 1948. In general, there was a marked absence of overt anti-communist sentiment at the European Recovery Program Trade Union Conference in London, all the more remarkable given contemporary events in the world. In the wake of the communist coup in Czechoslovakia, the alleged suicide of Czech foreign minister Jan Masaryk occurred while the conference was in session; the Finnish government was, at that moment, under intense Soviet pressure to enter into a Pact of Friendship; the Hungarian and Czech socialist parties were facing imminent expulsion from COMISCO for bowing to pressure to merge with the communists; and, only two days before the ERP conference opened, the Soviet ambassador in London had formally protested the illegality of recent decisions at the London Six-Power Conference, whose purpose had been to lay the basis for a permanent partition of Germany. For detailed treatment of the complex TUC manoeuvring that enabled the WFTU to remain in business for nine more months, see Anthony Carew, Labour Under the Marshall Plan: The Politics of Productivity and the Marketing of Management Science, chap. 5.

Sir Vincent Tewson (1898–1981) started work in Yorkshire as an office boy in the head office of the dyers’ and bleachers’ union. Following military service in World War I, he returned to the union with responsibility for negotiating piece rates. He joined the TUC after the 1926 general strike and was in charge of its organization department. As a loyal lieutenant of Walter Citrine, he became assistant general secretary in 1931, eventually succeeding Citrine in 1946. He was a capable administrator with a meticulous concern for detail (his finickiness led Lovestone to dub him “the pompous clerk”), but he was more cautious and hesitant than Citrine and personified the lack of drive that Meany saw in the British and European unions more generally. He was ICFTU president, 1951–53, and through his close collaboration with Jaap Oldenbroek was arguably the most influential member of the ICFTU executive board up to his retirement in 1960.

104. European Recovery Programme: Report of the Second International Trade Union Conference (London, 29–30 July 1948); Lovestone to Brown, 21 February 1948, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 9.

105. Brown to Lovestone, 1 July 1948, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 9. A couple of months later, a barbed comment about the TUC leadership made by Brown at a private dinner in London caused Tewson to “hit the roof” when word got back to TUC headquarters. The upset felt was conveyed informally to David Dubinsky, and Lovestone was compelled to write and tell Brown to cool it—his lack of diplomacy was having a negative effect on AFL-TUC fraternal relations. Lovestone to Brown, 20 October 1948, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 9.

106. Krane to Cope, 1 December 1948, Krane papers, box 1, file 2; Diary, 16–17 December 1948, Krane papers, box 1 file 4. Jay Krane was assistant to Elmer Cope, the CIO’s nominee as WFTU assistant general secretary. He was a witness to many private conversations of European trade union leaders and kept a detailed diary. He was a particularly close observer of Walter Schevenels.

Chapter 3: For Multilateralism or “Independent Activities”?

1. New York Herald Tribune, 11 January 1949.

2. Elmer Cope, “An Interim Programme of Activities for the CIO in Europe,” 17 February 1949, CIO Secretary-Treasurer records, box 115, file: WFTU Correspondence.

3. “Confidential Memorandum About Walter Schevenels,” 18 November 1948, and Lovestone to Brown, 18 January 1949, IAD Brown files, box 29, file 6. The dossier was the work of Jiri Stolz and was a scurrilous attack on Schevenels’s character. Yet Schevenels readily admitted that where the WFTU was concerned he played both sides of the fence. As he told Jay Krane, within the federation he had done all he could to strengthen it and steer it away from trouble. Meanwhile, outside the WFTU he had made every effort to undermine the organization. He had no qualms of conscience about such behaviour. Krane to Cope, 14 December 1948, Jay Krane papers, box 1, file 4.

Walter Schevenels (1894–1966) had worked as a toolmaker in Antwerp before becoming a full-time official of the Belgian socialist metalworkers’ union. From 1929 to 1945, he was assistant general secretary and then general secretary of the International Federation of Trade Unions (IFTU), where he worked closely with its president, Walter Citrine. He was appointed assistant general secretary of the WFTU from 1946 to 1949. Having failed to become the general secretary of the ICFTU when it was founded in 1949, he served as the secretary of its European Regional Organization until his death in 1966.

4. Minutes of ERP-Trade Union Advisory Committee meeting, Berne, 22 January 1949, and Brown to Lovestone, 24 January and 1 February 1949, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 11; Tewson to Bill Green, 28 January 1949, Schevenels papers, box 1, file: AFL Controversy.

5. Brown to Lovestone, 16 January 1949, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 11. Brown believed that Jim Carey of the CIO, with his close links to Secretary of State Dean Acheson, was behind this.

6. Bevin to Dubinsky, 14 February 1949, Dubinsky records, box 7, file 3. Foreign Office officials were alert to the potential seriousness of the rift over the Schevenels affair and judged that Brown’s “excursions into international trade union activities were a real menace.” Their recommendation was that Bevin suggest to Secretary of State Acheson or even to President Truman that someone “talk a little sense into the AFL.” But Bevin’s preference was to write to Dubinsky. H. G. (Hubert) Gee to Secretary of State, 26 January, 4 February, and 7 February 1949, LAB 13/600: Break-up of WFTU.

7. Brown to Lovestone, 24 January 1949, and Lovestone to Brown, 3 February and 15 February 1949, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 11; “AFL Opposes Schevenels in TUAC Post,” Free Trade Union News, March 1949.

8. Cope to Ross, 13 March 1949, IAD Ross files, box 10, file 23; Brown to Lovestone, 31 May 1949, and Lovestone to Brown, 1 August 1949, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 11; George Lichtblau, “Internationalism and the World Federation of Trade Unions” (typescript, 1949), 76; FTUC Financial Accounts, June–July 1949, IAD Lovestone files, box 73, file 4. During his trip to India, Brown met Prime Minister Nehru and recommended to Lovestone that he be invited to the AFL’s 1949 convention. Lovestone commented: “No one in Washington . . . is awake to the overwhelming import of what has happened in China. . . . They cannot see the organic connection between a street corner in Berlin, the Bund in Shanghai and the critical conditions in Calcutta.” But the situation could be saved “provided we play a true and politically progressive policy in countries like Indo China, Burma, Ceylon, Siam and Indonesia. . . . Here is the big task for American labour.” Lovestone to Brown, 7 June 1949, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 10.

9. “Statement by AFL International Relations Committee,” 7 April 1949, and minutes of TUC International Committee meeting, 26 April 1949, TUC Archives, MSS 292/901/15. Despite these assurances, for much of the next decade relations between the AFL and TUC within the ICFTU were conducted in an atmosphere that was often strained, each regarding the other as seeking pre-eminence. The affairs of an international organization should never be narrowed down to an account of how just two of its members related to one another, but in the case of the ICFTU a central dynamic of the organization cannot be adequately conveyed without dwelling on the suspicions the AFL and the TUC had of one another.

10. Lillie Brown to Lovestone, 13 July 1949, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 10; Berger to Dubinsky, 26 August 1949, Dubinsky records, box 248, file 8c.

11. It would be an oversimplification to reduce the situation to a simple contest between Brown and Tewson or the AFL versus the TUC. In such meetings, the TUC did in fact often reflect the values of the smaller, social democratic centres of the Benelux and the Nordic countries, while the AFL saw itself as the champion of those national bodies that did not share the social democratic perspective of most Europeans.

12. The AFL had already organized a hemispheric grouping, the Confederación interamericana de trabajadores, and Brown’s initial line was that this should become a directly affiliated, self-governing regional body within the international. As such, it would naturally add greatly to the influence of the AFL.

13. Brown to Lovestone, 30 July 1949, Lovestone papers (Hoover), box 355, file: Irving Brown, 1949–53; Lovestone to Brown, 2 August 1949, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 10; Ross and Krane, “Summary of Meeting of the Trade Union Preparatory Committee, London, 21–23 September 1949,” CIO Secretary-Treasurer records, box 123, file: ICFTU.

14. The then British labour counsellor in Washington, Archie Gordon, subscribed to a different version, claiming that the TUC had favoured Oldenbroek for the post from an early date but had refrained from publicizing the fact for fear that the AFL would then oppose him out of spite. It played its cards close to its chest until it was too late for the AFL to do other than follow the TUC’s lead. Lovestone to Brown, 6 December 1951, Lovestone papers (Hoover), box 283, file: Irving Brown, 1951. I have found no evidence to support this interpretation. Less wedded to Oldenbroek, the CIO went along with his candidacy simply for the sake of harmony. Within a few years it found itself in the ironic position of defending him against AFL attacks when the latter turned violently against him.

15. Walter Reuther remarks at CIO International Affairs Committee, 7 January 1954, CIO Washington Office records, box 56, file 10; Lovestone to Meany, 13 March 1955, Lovestone papers (Hoover), box 705, file: George Meany.

16. Brown to Lovestone, 30 July 1949, Lovestone papers (Hoover), box 355, file: Irving Brown, 1949–53; Ross and Krane, “Summary of Meeting,” CIO Secretary-Treasurer records, box 123, file: ICFTU; Diary, 10 January 1950, Krane papers, box 1, file 4, reporting a conversation between David Lasser and David Dubinsky. Lovestone was in full agreement with Brown on the need to continue independent activities, though he warned that the British would gain support “on a demagogic basis if we allow them to put us in the position of placing the Communist issue in a negative sense.” Lovestone to Brown, 2 August 1949, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 10.

17. Under George Meany’s presidency, the AFL’s Latin American operation would continue to be a closed book as far as Lovestone was concerned—a situation that extended into the 1960s and 1970s, when AIFLD was the key American organization.

18. Lovestone to Brown, 23 May 1950, and Brown to Lovestone, 30 May 1950, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 12.

19. Cope to Ross, 27 March 1950, IAD Ross files, box 10, file 25.

20. Along with general AFL claims that European trade unions lacked dynamism, it was routine for them also to be criticized for their unimaginative approach to public relations. The ICFTU’s director of publicity who incurred so much AFL criticism was John Riddell. Lovestone harboured suspicions of Riddell on grounds that he had once worked in Moscow and was married to a Polish woman, though Brown tried to reassure him that there was little to worry about on that score. Lovestone to Brown, 16 October 1952, and “Irving Brown Report,” 22 October 1952, IAD Brown files, box 11, file 14. That Riddell was English and a nominee of the TUC was sufficient reason for mistrust.

21. On this occasion, Brown’s powers of persuasion proved inadequate. Oldenbroek decided to appoint Phil Delaney, the AFL’s representative at the ILO, to the seat without first consulting Dubinsky and Woll. Such lack of consultation and the appointment of a “technician” rather than a ranking union leader—Woll had wanted the seat for himself—caused such offence that he and Dubinsky both tendered their resignation as consultants, thereby opening up another front in what had, by this time, become an undeclared FTUC war on the ICFTU general secretary. Lovestone to Oldenbroek, 17 January 1950 and 31 January 1950, IAD Lovestone files, box 52, file 20; Brown to Lovestone, 16 November 1950, and Lovestone to Brown, 21 March 1951, Lovestone papers (Hoover), box 283, file: Irving Brown, 1951. This matter would fester for many months, and Lovestone wrote of his “creeping feeling that the AFL is sort of being taken for granted by the dominant leaders. . . . The reaction to such lack of consideration is becoming more marked.” Lovestone to Brown, 2 April 1951, Lovestone papers (Hoover), box 283, file: Irving Brown, 1951.

22. Brown to Lovestone, 23 December 1949, IAD Brown files, box 29 file 8; George Meany, “The ICFTU in Session,” Free Trade Union News, August 1950; Cope to Ross, 27 March 1950, IAD Ross files, box 10, file 25.

23. Brown to Lovestone, 19 February 1950, and Lovestone to Brown, 28 February 1950, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 13.

24. Lovestone to Brown, 29 June 1950, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 12. In fact, Lovestone doubted that the State Department itself really understood what was at stake in Korea. America was not just fighting the North Koreans, but also the Chinese and behind them the Russians. He summed up the danger in simplistic terms: “If we lose Korea, we lose Asia. If we lose Asia, Europe is automatically lost.” Lovestone to Brown, 4 December 1950, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 12.

25. Brown to Lovestone, 8 July 1950, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 12; Brown to Meany, 16 August 1950, Meany files, 1947–60, box 56, file 21.

26. Jay Krane (1923–61) had worked for UNRRA before a two-year stint in the CIO’s Paris office, 1948–50. With horn-rimmed glasses and bow tie, he resembled a young college lecturer. He joined the ICFTU in 1950 and, in 1956, became assistant to Charles Millard as director of regional affairs. At that time, Brown supported his appointment: Krane, he reckoned, would be an “objective and hardworking secretary. . . . He is honest enough not to act as a factional CIO man.” Brown to Lovestone, 19 June 1950, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 12. On leaving the ICFTU in 1961 following a vicious battle to oust Oldenbroek and his closest associates, Krane was briefly director of international affairs of the AFL-CIO’s Industrial Union Department.

Always a controversial figure, Richard Deverall (1911–80) was active in the Association of Catholic Trade Unionists before appointment to the UAW education department, 1940–42. After war service, he worked in the labour education branch during the American military administration of Japan. From 1949 to 1956, he served as the FTUC’s Asia representative in India and Japan. He worked as assistant to the assistant general secretary of the ICFTU from 1956 to 1959 and thereafter was employed in the AFL-CIO education department on his return to the United States.

27. Lovestone to Brown, 17 April 1950, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 13; Lovestone to Brown, 12 May 1950, and Brown to Lovestone, 19 June 1950, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 12; Oldenbroek to Lovestone, 19 May 1950 and 19 June 1950, and Lovestone to Oldenbroek, 22 June 1950, IAD Lovestone files, box 52, file 20. Woll stated that the idea for an FTUC office in Tokyo came from Secretary of Defence James Forrestal. Minutes of International Labour Relations Committee meeting, 7 April 1949, Thorne files, box 17, file: International Labour Relations Committee. Deverall’s reputation for informing on “communists” dated back to wartime when he worked for the UAW in Detroit. Richard Deverall to Federal Bureau of Investigation, “Re: United Auto Workers—CIO,” 3 August 1943, Victor Reuther papers, box 5, file 19. On learning of Deverall’s appointment by the FTUC, the former chief of SCAP’s labour division, Theodore Cohen, wrote: “I think it would be tragic if the sole qualification of any representative the AFL may send there were to be [a] loud but negative anti-communist.” Cohen to Lovestone, 26 July 1949, Lovestone papers (Hoover), box 296, file: Japan.

28. According to Lovestone’s secretary, General MacArthur personally granted Deverall special permission to enter Japan with the ICFTU party, but this was “sabotaged” by his military government staff. Ann Larkin to Oldenbroek, 26 July 1950, IAD Lovestone files, box 52, file 20; Burati to Oldenbroek, 9 May 1950, Burati papers, box 2, file 8; Burati to Phil Delaney, 5 June 1950, IAD Country files, 1945–71, box 27, file 7: Burati to Potofsky, 12 June 1950, Burati papers, box 1, file 12; Burati to Oldenbroek, 29 June 1950, Burati papers, box 2, file 8; Ko Ono, “Subject: ICFTU Delegation,” 20 July 1950, Burati papers, box 2, file 8. Lovestone would hound Burati in subsequent years, vetoing his attempts to secure government posts in the labour field. The fact that Burati had groomed Minoru Takano for the general secretaryship of Sōhyō rebounded against him after Takano swung to the left in the early 1950s. For Lovestone, this was ex post facto proof of Burati’s political unreliability. Yet Burati had in fact been a major architect of the military government’s 1949–50 campaign against communism in the trade unions, which, in the hands of Japanese employers, snowballed into the infamous “Red Purge.” Burati to Victor Reuther, 1 September 1955, Benedict papers, box 86, file: Business and Personal Correspondence, 1952–58.

29. Lovestone to Oldenbroek, 11 August 1950, IAD Lovestone files, box 52, file 20; Lovestone to Brown, 5 September 1950, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 12; Lovestone to Brown, 2 April 1951, Lovestone papers (Hoover), box 283, file: Irving Brown, 1951.

30. Oldenbroek to Lovestone, 21 August 1950, and Lovestone to Oldenbroek, 7 May 1951, IAD Lovestone files, box 52, file 20; Lovestone to Brown, 2 April 1951, Lovestone papers (Hoover), box 283, file: Irving Brown, 1951.

31. Deverall also complained to Lovestone that in Taiwan, Krane had indulged in loose talk about FTUC support for the clandestine Free China Labour League, which was financed by US intelligence. Lovestone concluded: “If Mr. Krane worked under orders of Russia he could not have done as much damage to us.” Lovestone to Brown, 8 August 1950, and 5 September 1950, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 12. Eighteen months on, an editorial in the ICFTU’s Free Labour World written by Krane, which contained critical references to anti-communist American senators McCarran and McCarthy, led Lovestone to comment: “I still think that Jay Krane has connections with the Communists and their fellow travellers.” “The Dignity of the Free World,” Free Labour World (March 1952); Lovestone to Brown, 7 April 1952, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 15.

32. Among AFL figures with a low opinion of Deverall was Jim Killen, vice president of the pulp and sulphite workers, who had been his boss in the labour division of the military government in Japan and went on to have a stellar career as labour attaché. In 1956, Meany pressured Oldenbroek to find a job for Deverall in Brussels when FTUC activities in Asia were winding down. Almost certainly Meany was relieved to be rid of him: the problem was now one for the ICFTU to deal with.

33. Oldenbroek’s earlier links with the AFL had been very close, and he came to realize that this needed to change. In the summer of 1950, he had been subject to sharp criticism from within his own Dutch national trade union centre, NVV, for being too subservient to the American point of view. Critics cited loans received from the Americans to cover administrative expenses and his ownership of an American car, in the purchase of which Irving Brown had acted as intermediary. The NVV leadership felt strongly enough to raise these matters with ICFTU president Paul Finet. A. Greenhough to Turner, 12 July 1950, LAB 13/632: ICFTU General File, 1949–52. Oldenbroek was astute enough to realize that he could not afford to let such impressions take firm hold.

34. Minutes of FTUC meeting, 31 October 1950, IAD Lovestone files, box 35, file 29; FTUC Circular 27, October 1950, Thorne files, box 14, file: FTUC.

35. Tension between Woll and Meany was assumed to be over the future of the FTUC. There were persistent rumours that it might be closed down now that the AFL had been successful in helping to split the WFTU. Phil Delaney, the AFL’s ILO representative, had been telling people in Washington that Brown himself favoured such a development, and the latter’s transfer to the AFL staff in 1950 had fuelled a belief that the FTUC’s days might be numbered. Cope to Ross, 17 March 1950, IAD Ross files, box 10, file 25; Lovestone to Brown, 8 May 1950, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 12.

36. Tewson to Meany, 13 March 1951, and Meany to Tewson, 23 March 1951, Meany files, 1940–80, box 59, file 14.

37. Brown to Lovestone, 14 December 1951, Lovestone papers (Hoover), box 355, file: Irving Brown, 1949–53. It seems that Tewson also made known his feelings about the role of the FTUC to other AFL leaders. Consequently, Meany anticipated criticism by members of the executive council at its meeting in Florida in February 1952. To forestall this, he secured prior agreement in the FTUC that Dubinsky and Woll would close ranks with him if any attempt were made at the council meeting to criticize Lovestone and Brown. Lovestone to Brown, 7 January 1952, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 16.

38. Brown to Green, 2 August 1951, Lovestone papers (Hoover), box 283, file: Irving Brown, 1951; minutes of ICFTU Executive Board meeting, 12 July 1951, ICFTU Archives, folder 10: CIO World Affairs Bulletin, vol. 1, no. 1 (October 1951); Lovestone to Meany, 9 November 1951, Meany files, 1947–60, box 56, file 1. Increasingly, Lovestone was inclined to view Oldenbroek as an honorary Englishman. It marked quite a change: “phooey” had been his response in 1949 to Swedish suggestions that Oldenbroek was “too pro-British.” Lovestone to Brown, 9 May 1949, Lovestone papers (Hoover), box 698, file: Irving Brown.

39. Brown to Green, 2 August 1951, Lovestone papers (Hoover), box 283, file: Irving Brown, 1951. The Economist had criticized the AFL for elevating the anti-communist struggle above all else and for maintaining independent regional offices. The Economist, 21 July 1951. Writing in response, Woll disputed the argument that his organization was out of line with other national centres. Matthew Woll, “The International Role of the AFL: Reply to the London Economist,” Free Trade Union News, October 1951. A few months earlier the labour correspondent of the Times of London had also chided the AFL for continuing its independent programs. “World Trade Unions: Two Internationals in Opposition,” Times (London), 14 December 1951.

40. A. Gordon to C. F. Heron, 29 October 1951, and Heron to Gordon, 23 November 1951, LAB 13/632: ICFTU: General File.

41. Meany’s suggestion that Tewson couldn’t count reflected the tenor of the meeting: there were only sixteen voting members present, and in each of the three votes taken the split was identical—nine for, five against, and two abstentions, with Tewson and Oldenbroek both among those voting “for.” In asking for a roll call vote, Meany was doubtless also showing his displeasure with the two abstainers, Robert Bothereau, of FO, and Farhat Hached, of Tunisia’s UGTT, both of whose organizations were highly dependent on AFL assistance.

42. Agenda item 5: “General Secretary Report,” and minutes of ICFTU Executive Board meeting, 26–30 November 1951, ICFTU Archives, folder 11; Lovestone to Brown, 29 November 1951, Lovestone papers (Hoover), box 283, file: Irving Brown, 1951; Brown to Lovestone, 22 December 1951, Lovestone papers (Hoover), box 355, file: Irving Brown, 1949–53.

43. Lovestone to Brown, 5 January and 23 January 1952, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 16.

44. Brown to Lovestone, 2 December 1951, Lovestone papers (Hoover), box 355, file: Irving Brown, 1949–53; Lovestone to Brown, 6 December 1951, Lovestone papers (Hoover), box 283, file: Irving Brown, 1951. On the recurrent criticisms of lack of dynamism in the ICFTU and its affiliates, see Lovestone to Brown, 2 April 1951, Lovestone papers (Hoover), box 283, file: Irving Brown, 1951; Brown to Lovestone, 14 December 1951, Lovestone papers (Hoover), box 355, file: Irving Brown, 1949–53; Brown to Meany, 30 June 1952, Meany files, 1947–60, box 57, file 21.

45. Ann Larkin to Brown, 2 April 1952, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 15.

46. Brown to Green, 28 April 1952, Meany files, 1947–60, box 57, file 21; Lovestone to Meany, 30 April 1952, Meany files, 1947–60, box 56, file 1; Lovestone to Brown, 8 May 1952, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 15. “Bevanites”—practitioners of “Bevanism”—were parliamentary followers of British Labour politician Aneurin Bevan and reflected the main strand of left-wing Labour thinking in the 1950s. They included many who were attracted to CND and were critical of NATO. As an organized group, Bevanites were ranged against the right-wing Gaitskellites in Labour’s ideological debates of that time.

47. Brown to Lovestone, 3 April 1952, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 15.

48. Brown to Green, 28 April 1952, Meany files, 1947–60, box 57, file 21. There is no indication as to whether Green took his interest in the job seriously or acted on his letter.

49. Green to ICFTU affiliates, 2 May 1952, CLC Archives, MG28 I 103, vol. 257, LAC.

50. Lovestone to Brown, 26 May 1952, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 15.

51. AFL International Labour Relations Committee Meeting, 18 June 1952, Thorne files, box 17, file: International Labour Relations Committee.

52. Lovestone to Brown, 13 October 1952, IAD Brown files, box 29, file 14; Lovestone to Brown, 16 October and 21 October 1952, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 14.

53. Brown to Lovestone, 13 May 1952, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 15; Brown to Meany, 30 June 1952 and 21 October 1952, Meany files, 1947–60, box 57, file 21.

54. Several of the issues that had exercised the Americans were resolved or were overtaken by events by the time the executive board met in New York. Over the following six months, the outstanding ones were referred to ICFTU committees, and by July 1953, eighteen months after the row first erupted, the outstanding ones were reported “resolved.” Minutes of ICFTU Executive Board meeting, 1–5 December 1952, ICFTU Archives, folder 21; Lovestone to Brown, 16 October 1952, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 14; agenda item 6: “Report of the Emergency Committee on the Circular Letter from the AFL Dated 2 May 1952, Addressed to All ICFTU Affiliated Organizations,” ICFTU Executive Board meeting, Stockholm, 1–2 July 1953, ICFTU Archives, folder 22; Brown to Lovestone, 13 March 1953, IAD Brown files, box 30, file 15.

55. The program in support of the FCLL cost almost $100,000 in just over two years. The league’s agents, trained in Formosa, were intended to provide leadership to an estimated 450,000 anti-communist guerrillas operating in largely spontaneous fashion on the Chinese mainland. In a disastrous development, CIA funding was suspended in 1950 and several FCLL members, who were thus stranded in southern China, were rounded up and executed. More than anything else, Lovestone’s experience of this failed operation undermined his confidence in joint activities undertaken with the CIA. Lovestone to Etter, 6 October 1950, IAD Lovestone files, box 35, file 14; Lovestone to Brown, 26 October 1950, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 12; Lovestone to Brown, 23 February 1951, Lovestone papers (Hoover), box 283, file: Irving Brown, 1951; Etter to Lovestone, 9 May 1951, Lovestone papers (Hoover), box 368, file: Willis Etter, 1942–52; Anthony Carew, “The American Labour Movement in Fizzland: The Free Trade Union Committee and the CIA,” 27.

56. Harry Goldberg was the son of a founding member of the ILGWU. He taught philosophy at New York College and led a Lovestoneite faction in the teachers’ union. Within the Communist Party (Opposition) his nom de guerre was “Jim Cork.” A snappy dresser, classically trained pianist, and sometime music critic for a paper, he cut an unlikely figure as an international representative of a trade union. In Indonesia, he ran a training program aimed at non-communist trade unionists intended to steer them away from their neutralist, “third force” political orientation. In the two years 1951–52, $30,000 of CIA money was channelled into this effort. Suffering from ill health and exhaustion, Goldberg returned to the United States and was subsequently redeployed as FTUC representative in Italy. Goldberg to Lovestone, 29 September 1951, and Goldberg, “Report from Indonesia,” 12 November 1951, IAD Brown files, box 29, file 11; Lovestone to Sam Berger, 31 March 1952, IAD Lovestone files, box 10, file 11; Lovestone to Brown, 26 May 1952, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 15; Carew, “The American Labour Movement in Fizzland.”

57. Lovestone to Offie, 13 March 1950, Lovestone papers (Hoover), box 310, file: Carmel Offie; Eliezer Liebenstein, “Israel and Its International Ties,” Free Trade Union News, September 1950.

58. Lovestone to Brown, 28 February 1950 and 10 July 1950, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 13. Lovestone to Offie, 15 January 1951, Lovestone papers (Hoover), box 310, file: Carmel Offie. Lovestone informed Brown: “On November 17th we sent the funds to Mr. Meany for shipment of the books to Australia. . . . We have already received work [sic] from Australia and New Zealand that they have gotten notification of the arrival of the books.” Lovestone to Brown, 27 December 1950, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 12.

59. For FTUC annual accounts, Lovestone papers (Hoover), box 403, file: Free Trade Union Committee; box 416, Financial Documents, 1954–58; and box 417, file: Free Trade Union News; Carew, “The American Labour Movement in Fizzland,” 25–42. Paul Sakwa, who worked on the French desk of the CIA’s Western European division during 1951–54, confirms Philipsborn’s role as Brown’s paymaster. Author interview with Paul Sakwa, 18 September 1995.

60. Burton Hersch, The Old Boys: The American Elite and the Origins of the CIA, 320.

61. Lovestone to Dubinsky, 3 January 1949, IAD Lovestone files, box 33, file 3. In the thinly disguised code used by Lovestone in correspondence when discussing CIA-financed transactions, a “volume” was $1,000 and there were associated references to “books” and “libraries.” Lovestone liked playing with words, couldn’t resist a pun, and when specific countries were involved he would often change the allusion, with financial help referred to as “pottery” in Italy; “perfume” in France; “sausages” in Germany, “lumber” in Finland, and “glassware” in Czechoslovakia.

62. Lovestone to Brown, 21 January and 26 January 1949, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 11.

63. Brown to Lovestone, 6 March 1950, IAD Lovestone files, box 33, file 6.

64. Brown to Lovestone, 8 February and 15 February 1949, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 11.

65. Brown to Lovestone, 31 October 1949, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 10; Brown “Report on Finland,” October 1949, IAD Brown files, box 10, file 5; “Finnish Report: Visit of Mr. Irving Brown,” 25 October 1949, LAB 13/656: USA-AFL General File, 1947–54. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Leskinen was successively minister of trade and industry and foreign minister.

66. “Memorandum Aku Sumu and Olavi Lindblom,” 4 May 1950, Lovestone papers (Hoover), box 310, file: Carmel Offie; Brown to Lovestone, 19 June 1950, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 12; Lovestone to Brown, 30 June 1950, IAD Brown files, box 29, file 10.

67. Ann Larkin to Brown, 26 February 1951, and Lovestone to Brown, 13 March 1951, Lovestone papers (Hoover), box 283, file: Irving Brown, 1951; Ann Larkin to Lillie Brown, 5 March 1951, IAD Brown files, box 29, file 11. Ann Larkin (Stolte) was Lovestone’s secretary.

68. Brown to Lovestone, 1 April 1951, Lovestone papers (Hoover), box 283, file: Irving Brown, 1951.

69. Lovestone to Brown, 4 April 1951, Lovestone papers (Hoover), box 283 file: Irving Brown, 1951.

70. Lovestone to Brown, 26 May 1951, Lovestone papers (Hoover), box 283, file: Irving Brown, 1951; Arvo Tuominen, “Finnish Unionists Again Beat Back Soviet Seizure,” Free Trade Union News, October 1951; Mijo Majander, Demokratiaa dollareilla.

71. Brown to Lovestone, 2 January 1949, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 11. The idea of training an elite force, schooled in Leninist tactics and capable of challenging communist trade unionists on their own turf, was recurrent in Brown’s thinking. In 1954, in Italy, he hoped to establish a school for such purposes at FIAT’s Turin plant with the backing of the firm’s management and the US embassy in Rome. FIAT was willing to contribute financially, but the embassy declined to match its contribution. Untitled document (“The major fortress of communism in Italy . . .”), June 1954, IAD Brown files, box 12, file 20.

72. Pierre Ferri-Pisani (1901–63), a native of Marseille, became leader of the seamen’s union in 1927 and later the city’s socialist deputy mayor. His wartime role in the resistance led to his arrest in 1943 and imprisonment in Buchenwald. After the war, unable to re-establish leadership of the socialist party in Marseille, which was now under the control of Gaston Defferre, he focused on trade union work and identified with Robert Bothereau and the group around Résistance ouvrière. Following Force ouvrière’s breakaway from the CGT, he became secretary of the small FO maritime union in Marseille. As head of the CIA-financed Mediterranean Committee, he led the anti-communist campaign for control of the Marseille waterfront and other Mediterranean ports in the early 1950s. When this source of money dried up in the mid-1950s, he drifted from prominence. He committed suicide in 1963.

73. Alexander Werth, France: 1940–1955, 442.

74. For a colourful account of the Marseille waterfront scene at this time, see Alfred W. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade, which describes the Guerini family’s involvement in drug trafficking. His treatment of their role in labour events is less reliable. The development of secretive cadre organizations in the French labour movement at this time in the struggle with communism chimed perfectly with advice given by the ECA chief of mission in France, David Bruce, who had been head of OSS wartime activities in Europe. At a May 1950 meeting of the ECA’s Labor Information staff in Paris, he advocated the use of black propaganda to “sabotage” the communist effort. Anthony Carew, Labour Under the Marshall Plan: The Politics of Productivity and the Marketing of Management Science, 126–27.

75. “Report of AFL Representative in Europe for July 1949–July 1950,” IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 12.

76. In an industry with an estimated 38,000 union members, 25,000 of them belonging to the CGT, the FO union’s optimistic claim was to have around 5,000. Harold Lewis, “The International Transport Workers’ Federation (ITF), 1945–65: An Organizational and Political Anatomy,” 281. I am grateful to Harold Lewis for many insights into ITF policy and field activities during this period and also for generous help in making sense of the complexity of international trade union developments more generally in the postwar period.

77. Lovestone to Bergeron, 2 May 1967, Lovestone papers (Cornell), box 1, file 17; Alfred Pacini and Dominique Pons, Docker à Marseille, 86.

78. A detailed account of the events in Naples was provided by the ITF’s Fred Strauss. Strauss to Becu, “Confidential Report on Italian Trip, 1–5 September 1950,” International Transport Workers’ Federation, 1896–2012, MSS 159/1–18, Modern Records Centre, University Library, University of Warwick, Coventry, UK. The founding of the Mediterranean Committee revealed the tenuous nature of its link with the International Transport Workers’ Federation. An international conference of European dockers and transport workers was planned for Naples immediately following the foundation, and for months Jay Lovestone had been working to mobilize the support of AFL transport union leaders with a view to a strong American delegation being present at the conference. His hope was that, while they were in Europe, the Americans would participate in anti-communist rallies as part of an offensive to “drive the Russian rats out of their piers.” However, at a late stage, the ITF leaders became alarmed and vetoed American participation, fearful that the operation was drifting too far away from their control. In fact, this was never in any real sense an ITF-led exercise. When challenged over the chaotic conference arrangements, Brown announced that the Americans had the wherewithal to launch the Mediterranean Committee on their own if necessary, insisting: “We don’t like red tape: we act.” Indeed, three months earlier Lovestone had notified him that the CIA had instructed their man in Rome to “make the ITF transaction,” and FTUC accounts duly recorded an “ITF loan” of $2,800 to cover the cost of the conference. The ITF leadership was reminded of its ill-judged sponsorship of the committee at its 1952 congress when none other than Force ouvrière’s railway union secretary wondered aloud about the committee’s source of financing. Lovestone to Carmel Offie, 9 March 1950, Lovestone papers (Hoover), box 310, file: Carmel Offie; Lovestone to Brown, 7 June 1950, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 12; Lewis, “The International Transport Workers’ Federation (ITF) 1945–65,” 261–65 and 281–82.

79. As a trade union journal, Air-Terre-Mer was a much more substantial affair than anything the ITF was capable of producing.

80. Lewis, “The International Transport Workers’ Federation (ITF) 1945–65,” 266.

81. Irving Brown, “Mediterranean Vigilance Committee in Action,” Free Trade Union News, September 1951.

82. Brown to Lovestone, 22 December 1950, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 12; Brown to Lovestone, 9 January 1951, Lovestone papers (Hoover), box 283, file: Irving Brown, 1951. Brown first met Eisenhower in 1951 when, as NATO Supreme Commander, he had invited Brown to accompany him while travelling between Frankfurt and Paris. The following year at a meeting with Oldenbroek at NATO headquarters, Eisenhower told the ICFTU leader that everything he knew about labour and its international problems came from Irving Brown: “We think he is pretty good.” Brown to Lovestone, 26 January 1951, Lovestone papers (Hoover), box 355, file: Irving Brown, 1949–53; Brown to Lovestone, 25 February 1951, Lovestone papers (Hoover), box 283, file: Irving Brown, 1951; Brown to Lovestone, 19 January 1952, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 16.

83. See Daniele Ganser, NATO’s Secret Armies: Operation GLADIO and Terrorism in Western Europe.

84. Air-Terre-Mer could truthfully point out, for example, that the Soviets had also shipped war materials from Gdynia to Albania, initially for use by insurgents in Greece and then available for a possible attack on the dissident communist regime in Yugoslavia. All this was a necessary corrective to Soviet attempts to claim the moral high ground with its “peace campaigning,” which helped foster a growing mood of neutralism in Western Europe.

85. Brown to Lovestone, 30 May 1950, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 12; Brown to Lovestone, 9 December 1950, 25 February 1951, 1 and 25 April 1951, Lovestone papers (Hoover), box 283, file: Irving Brown, 1951; Brown to Lovestone, 21 May 1951, Lovestone papers (Hoover), box 355, file: Irving Brown, 1949–53. The Turkish trade unionists who visited the AFL were financed by a $6,000 grant from the Rockefeller Foundation.

86. Lewis, “The International Transport Workers’ Federation (ITF), 1945–65,” 278.

87. Leon Dale, untitled document, 31 March 1953, IAD Brown files, box 14, file 6; Dale to Giornelli, 13 January 1953, IAD Brown files, box 13, file 2. Dale also reported in the same document a meeting with “Philips” (John Philipsborn, the CIA officer based in the Paris embassy under cover of assistant labour attaché) in which they discussed in some detail the need for “new offices” for the Mediterranean Committee. “Philips” complained to Dale about the present lack of organization within the committee and planned to write a special report on it. Leon Dale’s appointment to Paris as CIA assistant to Brown lasted from February 1951 to September 1953. Strangely, for one whose role was clearly meant to be secret, Dale appears to have been lax in inviting the curiosity of others. In November 1951, at the CISL congress in Naples, he stood in for Brown as the formally accredited AFL fraternal delegate. His fraternal address, quoting Karl Marx on workers having “nothing to lose but their chains,” won him loud applause. This aroused the interest of Joe Curran, president of the CIO’s National Maritime Union, who was also attending the congress as the CIO’s fraternal delegate and demanded to know what Dale was doing there. I lavori e gli atti: le congresso nationale (Naples: CISL, November 1951), 32–36; Leon Dale, “Report on CISL Congress in Naples, November 1951,” IAD Brown files, box 14, file 6; Lovestone to Brown, 21 November 1951, Lovestone papers (Hoover) box 283, file: Irving Brown, 1951. The US embassy in Rome seemed more sensitive to the incongruity of a CIA operative delivering a fraternal address to a foreign trade union gathering: labour attaché Tom Lane blocked official release of Dale’s speech and its favourable reference to Karl Marx.

88. Giornelli to Brown, 6 June 1953, IAD Brown files, box 13, file 2; Brown to Lovestone, 6 December 1954, IAD Lovestone files, box 12, file 1; Brown to Meany, 23 June 1955, IAD Lovestone files, box 41, file 3.

89. Dubinsky’s financial support for Le Populaire was long-standing, though assistance was withheld for a period in 1949–50 when socialist party (SFIO) members were divided over the hard-line policing of strikes introduced, with AFL backing, by socialist interior minister Jules Moch. When, as a consequence, Moch lost his seat on the party’s ruling body, Dubinsky temporarily stopped funding the paper. Brown considered this action folly and had to work hard to persuade Dubinsky and Lovestone to reintroduce the subsidy. To improve the chances, he urged the editor of Le Populaire to present a more favourable image of America in its reporting. Late in 1950, Dubinsky relented and promised a further injection of $60,000 while at the same time advising that the publication be separated from the SFIO and turned into a general paper of liberal opinion. Brown to Lovestone, 23 October 1950, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 12. The subsidy was still in place at the end of 1952 when Le Populaire was seeking to having it increased to $4,000 a month (1.3 million francs). Robert Blum to Dubinsky, 28 August and 27 November 1952, Dubinsky records, box 255, file 4a.

90. Carmel Offie to Lovestone, 12 January 1951, Lovestone to Brown, 17 January 1951, and Lovestone to Offie, 30 April 1951, Lovestone papers (Hoover), box 310, file: Carmel Offie.

91. Rousset was one of the first people to draw public attention to widespread use of labour camps in the Soviet Union, for which the communist party demonized him. The FTUC’s subsidy to Franc-Tireur covered the period during which Rousset successfully defended himself in a court case over charges of defamation brought by the communist journal Les Lettres françaises. Rousset broke with Sartre over the issue of the labour camps. The AFL took a keen interest in the Rassemblement democratique revolutionaire, sending greetings to its congress in April 1949 and assisting a number of Americans to attend alongside people like Camus, Sartre, Ignazio Silone, and Carlo Levi. But Lovestone was critical of the congress’s hesitation in making an all-out condemnation of totalitarian communism. He wrote to Altman that no good purpose was served by having Trotskyites, vegetarian pacifists, anarchists, and “other nuts” on the platform. Lovestone to Altman, 11 May 1949, IAD Lovestone files, box 35, file 13.

92. Lovestone to Brown, 26 October, 17 November 1950, and Brown to Lovestone, 30 November 1950, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 12; Lovestone to Offie, 15 March 1951, Lovestone papers (Hoover), box 310, file: Carmel Offie.

93. Leon Dale, untitled document, 24 March 1951 (“On March 24, 1951 I had a conversation with Marzet and Clouzet . . .”), IAD Brown files, box 14, file 6.

94. Brown to Lovestone, 23 October 1950, and Lovestone to Brown, 17 November 1950, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 12; Peter Coleman, The Liberal Conspiracy: The Congress for Cultural Freedom and the Struggle for the Mind of Postwar Europe, 46, 51.

95. Coleman, The Liberal Conspiracy, 35. Brown’s association with the CCF was essentially on an individual basis; as an organization the AFL was only peripherally involved. From the CCF’s earliest days Lovestone urged Brown to restrict the amount of time he devoted to its affairs, a view increasingly shared by the FTUC leadership. Lovestone to Brown, 26 March 1951, Lovestone papers (Hoover), box 283, file: Irving Brown, 1951. Brown didn’t include himself among the intellectuals and was amused by their lack of worldly wisdom, but he certainly understood the propaganda value of having film stars associated with the congress. He took Gary Cooper with him to a CCF conference in Berlin in 1953 and urged Lovestone: “Keep after this Hollywood business because it is the biggest thing we can do. . . . If we can have them on our side . . . it will be one of the biggest blows against the communists in Europe.” Brown to Lovestone, 30 October 1951, Lovestone papers (Hoover), box 283, file: Irving Brown, 1951; Jeffrey Meyers, Gary Cooper: An American Hero, 265.

Having urged American action on the cultural front in India following his May 1949 visit, Brown was actively involved in extending CCF organization into the subcontinent in 1951. During this phase the extent to which the CIA regarded the FTUC as part of its apparatus became apparent. A request was made by US Ambassador Loy Henderson via EUR-X’s Raymond Murphy that the local FTUC representative, Mohan Das, be assigned to Delhi for six weeks in the early spring of 1951 to assist with preparation for the founding conference of the CCF’s section in India. However, Lovestone rejected the request, reminding people: “We are still a trade union movement.” Raymond Murphy to Lovestone, 19 February 1951, IAD Lovestone files, box 51, file 6; Lovestone to Lillie Brown, 19 February 1951, Lovestone papers (Hoover), box 283, file: Irving Brown, 1951.

96. Josselson to Brown, 9 October 1956, and Brown to Lovestone, 13 October 1956, IAD Lovestone files, box 12, file 7; Frances Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper: The CIA and the Cultural Cold War, 99–100. See also Hugh Wilford, The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America; Giles Scott-Smith, The Politics of Apolitical Culture: The Congress for Cultural Freedom and the Political Economy of American Hegemony, 1945–1955.

97. Donald Robinson, “Mr. Brown vs. Generalissimo Stalin,” Reader’s Digest (September 1952), 116.

98. Brown to Lovestone, 15 November 1951, and Lovestone to Brown, 21 November 1951, Lovestone papers (Hoover), box 283, file: Irving Brown, 1951. In 1952, Lovestone discovered that a piece of intelligence from Profous, which he had been assured was meant exclusively for the FTUC, had actually been shared with others in the Czech exile group. This amounted to “double dealing,” and nobody worked for long with Lovestone if they also reported to someone else. He was also annoyed that Profous had attended a Conference of the Free Peoples of Europe in Düsseldorf along with some politically dubious exiles from the Ukraine and Russia who, Lovestone insisted, “are no damn good despite . . . being lavishly financed by the Fizzmaniacs.” All this spelled the end of the road for the relationship with their prize Czech contact: “I am sorry to see Profous go wrong,” wrote Lovestone. “We rather liked him. . . . But I think he has finished himself. As far as I am concerned support for his special project is out of the window.” Lovestone to Brown, 11 July 1952, IAD Brown files, box 29, file 14. Profous was eventually brought over to the United States in 1953 to work for the National Committee for Free Europe.

99. Zygmunt Kratko, “Irving Brown, alias ‘Bronzovy’—American Secret Service Agent,” World Trade Union Movement, April 1953; “Who Is Irving Brown?” Trud, 11 September 1953.

100. The NCFE described itself as a “group of private citizens drawn together to carry out direct action to strengthen man’s most valuable possession—freedom.” In fact, it was created by the CIA and had an annual budget of $8 million.

101. It was for the purpose of arguing the counterclaim on behalf of the Paris group that Sacha Volman was sent to New York in 1952. See also Quenby Olmsted Hughes, “In the Interest of Democracy”: The Rise and Fall of the Early Cold War Alliance Between the American Federation of Labor and the Central Intelligence Agency, chap. 6.

102. C. D. Jackson to Royall Tyler, 18 September 1951, Lovestone papers (Hoover), box 355, file: Irving Brown, 1949–53; Dennen to Lovestone, 29 October 1951, IAD Lovestone files, box 26, file 9. Leon (Denenberg) Dennen (1908–74) was born in New York but brought up in the Ukraine, where his father worked as a journalist. Returning to the United States, he became education director of ILGWU Local 60 and managing editor of the Jewish Labor Committee’s journal. After the war, he represented the Jewish Labor Committee in Turkey and on the International Rescue and Relief Committee. At the time of his appointment to the NCFE, he was foreign correspondent for the Scripps-owned Newspaper Enterprise Association in Europe.

103. Phenix to Augustine, 19 September 1951, Lovestone papers (Hoover), box 355, file: Irving Brown, 1949–53; Lovestone to Dennen, 3 October 1951 and 7 November 1951, IAD Lovestone files, box 26, file 9; Brown to Lovestone, 30 October 1951, Lovestone papers (Hoover), box 283, file: Irving Brown, 1951; Dennen to Lovestone, February 1952, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 15.

104. Lovestone to Brown, 12 October 1951, Lovestone papers (Hoover), box 283, file: Irving Brown, 1951; Jackson to Brown, 15 January 1952, and Brown to Jackson, 22 January 1952, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 16; Brown to Jackson, 14 May 1952, IAD Brown files, box 31, file 4; Woll to Jackson, 31 October 1951, Lovestone papers (Hoover), box 355, file: Irving Brown, 1949–53; Lovestone to Meany, 21 December 1951, Meany files, 1947–60, box 56, file 1. Jackson was also president of the CIA’s dummy Farfield Foundation, which took over from the FTUC as the main conduit for funding the Congress for Cultural Freedom. After losing his job with the NCFE, Henry Kirsch was appointed as FTUC representative in Turkey. He resurfaced again briefly in the mid-1960s as an “AFL-CIO” representative in Saigon.

105. Draft letter, Woll to Admiral H. B. Miller, 16 April 1952, Lovestone papers (Hoover), box 382, file: NCFE, 1952; Lovestone to Dubinsky, 17 April 1952, Lovestone papers (Hoover), box 305, file: David Dubinsky; Lovestone to Brown, 8 May 1952, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 15.

106. Lovestone to Brown, 8 May 1952, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 15.

107. Brown to Lovestone, 26 April and 5 May 1948, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 9: Ronald Filippelli, American Labour and Postwar Italy, 1943–1953: A Study of Cold War Politics, 153.

108. Dunn to Acting Secretary of State, 21 September 1948, Department of State, RG 59, Central Decimal Files, 1910–1963, 865.5043, National Archives, Washington, DC.

109. Counterpart funds consisted of payments by participating governments for goods and services received under Marshall aid. They were held in the currency of the particular country for use there—but only with the approval of the ECA. A part of the funds was also reserved for use by the CIA on unvouchered programs. The first significant use of such funds for labour programs was in Italy in support of the LCGIL, where expenditures would rise to some $3 million per year by 1951. Lane to Brown, 17 December 1948, IAD Brown files, box 1, file 11; Rome Embassy to State Department, 15 January 1949, Department of State, RG 59, Central Decimal Files, 1910–1963, 840.50 Recov; untitled document (“1. The Corporation expressed a desire to work closely with the worker . . .”), n.d. [1951?], Lovestone papers (Hoover), box 381, file: Monk, 1951. This document, making the claim of a $3 million annual subvention to the Christian Democrat trade unions, appears to have been prepared by Carmel Offie as a briefing for Lovestone prior to a meeting with CIA Director Walter Bedell Smith in April 1951.

110. Filippelli, American Labour and Postwar Italy, 153.

111. Lovestone to Brown, 15 June and 21 June 1949, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 10.

112. Dubinsky to Harriman, July 1949, Dubinsky records, box 255, file 3b; minutes of AFL International Affairs Committee meeting, 27 October 1949, Thorne files, box 17, file: International Labour Relations Committee.

113. Lovestone to Brown, 15 June 1949, Brown to Lovestone, 21 July 1949, and Lovestone to Brown, 1 August 1949, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 10.

114. Filippelli, American Labour and Postwar Italy, 165.

115. Ibid., 161, 165, 185–86; minutes of AFL International Affairs Committee meeting, 27 October 1949, Thorne files, box 17, file: International Labour Relations Committee.

116. Lovestone to Lillie Brown, 2 May 1950, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 12.

117. Filippelli, American Labour and Postwar Italy, 189; Brown to Lovestone, 1 April 1951, Lovestone papers (Hoover), box 283, file: Irving Brown, 1951; Lovestone to Brown, 16 May 1950, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 12.

Chapter 4: The AFL and CIO Abroad

1. Anthony Carew, “The American Labour Movement in Fizzland: The Free Trade Union Committee and the CIA.” Lovestone discovered that alongside the FTUC operation in Finland, the CIA also had quite separate contact with the Finnish trade unions through the Norwegian labour leader Haakon Lie. Soon, and without the AFL being informed, the CIO would also have a finger in that pie. He was concerned when Arthur Koestler revealed to him inside knowledge of FTUC activities that could only have come from the CIA. Later, when the agency deployed Leon Dale as assistant to Irving Brown in Paris to help him with the administration of his budget, Lovestone was alarmed to discover that a journalist on Reader’s Digest was aware of Dale’s position and that as a result rumours were circulating about this new mystery man in Paris. At the same time, German railway union leader Hans Jahn, who had a CIA-supported network of contacts in the Eastern zone for distributing copies of his paper, Die Kleine Tribune, complained to Brown that in the absence of his regular contact, George Silver, the agency had sent a complete stranger to liaise with him over activities in the East. Jahn demanded from Brown “an unequivocal statement” that the CIA middleman would merely be used for passing money, with all policy questions still settled directly between himself and Brown. As far as he was concerned, the project was a trade union one and, failing clarification that this was still the case, Jahn favoured having the whole operation being taken over by the ITF in London. Brown to Lovestone, 16 November and 9 December 1950, Lovestone papers (Hoover), box 283, file: Irving Brown, 1951; Lovestone to Brown, 26 December 1950, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 12; Jahn to Brown, 1 August 1951, Lovestone papers (Hoover), box 355, file: Irving Brown, 1949–53.

2. Lovestone to Brown, 19 January 1952, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 16.

3. “Memorandum,” 24 November 1950, Lovestone papers (Hoover), box 528, file: Carmel Offie. Carmel Offie (1909–72) was a career foreign service officer who had earlier worked in the State Department as assistant to Frank Wisner, with responsibility for East European refugee affairs. When Wisner became head of the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC) in 1948 (which was absorbed into the CIA in 1951), Offie assumed responsibility for liaison between the FTUC and OPC/CIA, becoming Lovestone’s most valuable contact in intelligence circles. After Senator McCarthy began to investigate him as a security threat on the grounds that he was a known homosexual—he had been arrested in 1943 for loitering near the men’s room in Washington’s Lafayette Park, only escaping prosecution through the intercession of senior State Department officials—he was formally placed on the payroll of the FTUC in June 1950 in order to spare the OPC’s embarrassment, though the intelligence service continued to fund his salary. In Lovestone-Brown correspondence, he was referred to as “the Monk” (on the basis of his first name, which summoned to mind the Carmelite order). Within the CIA, he remained a controversial figure, and from the moment he joined the FTUC the FBI placed him under investigation. This also led to the tightening of FBI surveillance of Lovestone: his phone began to be tapped, and, in January 1951, J. Edgar Hoover urged that “a very thorough and searching investigation of Lovestone should be made.” Ted Morgan, A Covert Life: Jay Lovestone, Communist, Anti-Communist, and Spymaster, 226, 230.

4. For the origin of the secret arrangement that allowed the CIA to access counterpart funds as agreed between Averell Harriman, Frank Wisner, and Richard Bissell of the ECA, see Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA, 40.

5. Lovestone was still apt to refer to the CIO as the “American section” of the (long-disbanded) Red International of Labour Unions.

6. “Memorandum,” 24 November 1950, Lovestone papers (Hoover), box 528, file: Carmel Offie.

7. In a telephone conversation with former OSS chief General Donovan that was bugged by the FBI, Lovestone said that if the CIA remained obdurate, he would enlist the support of Senator Pat McCarran, chairman of the Senate Internal Security Committee. An undated letter from Senator McCarran to Bedell Smith indicates that Lovestone did contact him for help. It referred to the deteriorating relationship between the FTUC and CIA, identified the “great harm to security” and the “irreparable damage to labour” at home and abroad caused by the CIO having access to counterpart funds, and spoke of “many complaints, some of them very bitter . . . reaching my office” over the failures of the CIA’s work with Eastern European refugee trade unionists. The FBI sent a memo to Bedell Smith describing Lovestone as “a proficient con-man capable of intrigue and assuming any role . . . the type of operative relied upon by Russia to assume an inactive and anti-Communist role for a number of years. . . . This informant’s opinion [is] that Lovestone is still a Communist and a very dangerous individual.” Morgan, A Covert Life, 230; Lovestone memo to Bedell Smith (“My dear General,”), n.d., Lovestone papers (Hoover), box 381, file: Monk, 1951.

8. Brown to Lovestone, 30 November 1950, Lovestone to Brown, 1 December, 4 December, and 26 December 1950, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 12.

9. Woll to C. D. Jackson, 31 October 1951, Lovestone papers (Hoover), box 355, file: Irving Brown, 1949–53; Lovestone to Meany, 21 December 1951, Meany files, 1947–60, box 56, file 1.

10. Lovestone to Brown, 27 December 1950, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 12; Brown to Lovestone, 9 December 1950, 9 January, and 22 January 1951, and Lovestone to Brown, 26 March 1951, Lovestone papers (Hoover), box 283, file: Irving Brown, 1951; Brown to Lovestone, 22 December 1950, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 12.

11. David Dubinsky and A. H. Raskin, David Dubinsky: A Life with Labor, 261. Written twenty-five years after the event, Dubinsky’s account of the meeting with Bedell Smith was self-serving and intended to suggest that the AFL link with the CIA was just a brief, passing affair. It was no such thing. He, personally, would have brought it to an end, but he couldn’t get Meany to agree.

12. Lovestone to Berger, 18 May 1951, Lovestone papers (Hoover), box 283, file: Sam Berger. S. D. (Sam) Berger (1911–80), with his long-standing links with Harriman, was a highly significant figure in postwar international labour relations. From 1942, he worked with Harriman in London on lend-lease. Having established contacts with senior figures in the British labour movement, he was appointed labour attaché in London in 1945 and was reunited with Harriman when the latter returned as ambassador to Britain in 1946. He was given a clear remit to help break up the WFTU and in this capacity collaborated closely with Irving Brown. It was through Berger and Harriman that Brown obtained his introduction to Secretary of State Byrnes in 1946. In London, Berger arranged discreet meetings for the ambassador with British labour figures at his apartment, and for this he was attacked at the British Communist Party congress in 1948. In 1947, partly at the suggestion of Ernest Bevin, he was sent to Greece as US labour attaché for six months and again worked with Brown in helping to reconstitute the GSEE free from communism. He rejoined Harriman at the Truman White House in 1950, where the latter’s position was special advisor responsible for interfacing between the departments of State and Defence.

From the White House, Berger acted as the liaison man between the CIA and FTUC from 1950 to 1953, featuring in Lovestone’s correspondence under the name “the Prophet.” In that position, he also played a key role in drafting the anti-communist strategy for use in Japan, which was adopted by Eisenhower’s Psychological Strategy Board as resolution NSC 125/6 in June 1953. That same year he was appointed labour attaché to Japan, but he soon fell from grace when Vice President Nixon, on a visit to Japan, believed that he had been “set up” after he found himself dealing with a “communist” trade union official at a meeting that Berger had arranged. Berger was recalled after only fourteen months and was subject to internal investigation until 1956 over his labour contacts. (This coincided with a period during which Lovestone himself was also under congressional and FBI investigation as a suspected closet communist.) Berger was so concerned at the threat to his career that he destroyed his papers: thus, despite his importance, there exists no “Berger collection.” Eventually, with his name cleared, Berger was appointed ambassador to South Korea, 1961–64. His hopes of serving as deputy chief of mission in London following the election of Harold Wilson’s Labour government in 1964 were disappointed, though he did become deputy ambassador to Ellsworth Bunker in South Vietnam from 1968 to 1972. Graenum Berger, A Not So Silent Envoy: A Biography of Ambassador Samuel David Berger, 72, 88–89, 92–94.

13. With an Ivy League background, Tom Braden (1917–2009) had worked for the OSS during the war. Back in civilian life, he maintained his intelligence contacts while serving as executive secretary of the Museum of Modern Art, where he became an advocate of the view that official support for abstract expressionism would serve America well in waging the cultural side of the Cold War. In 1949, he joined the American Committee for a United Europe, a CIA front, before moving to become assistant to CIA Deputy Director Allen Dulles in 1950 and later director of the agency’s International Organizations Division. Donovan to Lovestone, 29 July 1949, IAD Lovestone files, box 33, file 2; Frances Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper: The CIA and the Cultural Cold War, 259.

14. In the course of the struggle in the auto industry between the AFL and CIO in 1937, Lovestone had famously met Walter Reuther at the Woodward Hotel in Detroit and attempted to make a deal under which he offered to shift his loyalty from Homer Martin and to back Reuther for the union presidency if the latter would break with the communists. Offered a twenty-point program of peace terms, Reuther replied that he could accept 95 percent of it but would not openly fight the communists. He didn’t support them, but he wouldn’t fight them. It wasn’t acceptable to Lovestone, and they parted company with the seeds of lasting bitterness sown. Anthony Carew, Walter Reuther, 25–26.

15. European Recovery Programme: Report of the Second International Trade Union Conference (London, 29–30 July 1948), 26–28; “Interview with Jay Lovestone,” 30 May 1968, Cormier and Eaton papers, box 2, file 26.

16. Lovestone to Brown, 21 December 1951, Meany files, 1947–60, box 56, file 1, in which Lovestone reports of Mike Ross telling him that he was critical of “big shots” like Victor and was glad that he was not a big shot himself. The fact that Victor Reuther owed his position to his brother was at times a source of resentment among union colleagues. Because of his sizable ego, many people found him arrogant and self-regarding. Yet his personal record of service in the early years of the union gave him standing on his own merits, and though he was always Walter’s loyal assistant, he remained his own man.

17. On the debate over the treatment of European workers under the Marshall Plan, see Anthony Carew, Labour Under the Marshall Plan: The Politics of Productivity and the Marketing of Management Science, chaps. 6, 8, and 9.

18. Milton Katz and CIO international affairs committee chairman, Jake Potofsky, had been in discussion about appointing Reuther, with Katz keen to know what would be the AFL’s reaction. Potofsky told him there would be no problem—on that he had David Dubinsky’s assurance. As well as being less comfortable with the CIA link than his FTUC colleagues, Dubinsky was also more open to cooperation with the CIO abroad. With his personal pre-eminence as American labour representative on the continent apparently under threat as a consequence of Reuther’s presence, Brown’s relations with Katz were soured for several months until the latter denied ever making Reuther a job offer. Brown to Lovestone, 3 March 1951, IAD Brown files, box 29, file 11.

19. Jack Carney, “Further Report from England,” 27 August 1951, Lovestone papers (Hoover), box 285, file: Jack Carney, 1951.

20. Charles Levinson (1920–97) was a Canadian who had worked briefly on the staff of the Canadian Department of Labour before undertaking postgraduate studies in the late 1940s, during which time he assisted Val Lorwin on his important study of French trade unionism. In 1950, he went to work in the special media section of the ECA’s Labor Information Division in Paris, from where Victor Reuther hired him as assistant in the CIO’s Paris office. Some suspected that he had a communist past in Canada, although the Canadian Congress of Labour’s secretary-treasurer, Pat Conroy, had vetted him before he was proposed for the position on Reuther’s staff. However, Levinson’s politics would return as an issue when the CIO office in Paris later encountered general criticism not only from the AFL but also from anti-Reuther sections of the CIO. Levinson transferred to the staff of the IMF in 1954, when the CIO closed its Paris office. In the early 1960s, he was disappointed at Reuther’s failure to support him for promotion as assistant general secretary within the IMF, and, in 1964, Levinson quit his job to become general secretary of the International Factory Workers’ Federation, a moribund organization that he converted into the dynamic International Chemical Workers’ Federation. At the head of this organization until 1983, Levinson adopted the UAW approach to relations with multinational companies, which involved the creation of “world coordinating councils,” and became the leading publicist for the notion of transnational collective bargaining in the 1970s.

21. “Report of CIO Committee to Europe to CIO Committee on International Affairs,” March 1951, IAD Ross files, box 7, file 20.

22. Lovestone to Brown, 4 April 1951, Lovestone papers (Hoover), box 283, file: Irving Brown, 1951; Lovestone to Meany, 27 June 1951, Meany files, 1947–60, box 56, file 1. Name-calling apart, Lovestone was sure that the CIO represented “a deadly menace” and that Victor Reuther, as representative of the “pseudo lefts,” was the most “demagogic” and “dangerous” of the lot. Brown, too, would sometimes dismiss Reuther as an ingenue, though the seriousness with which he viewed the latter’s presence in Paris was better reflected in the transfer of his own office back from Brussels to Paris, so as to be on hand to counter the CIO’s initiatives.

23. Untitled document by Irving Brown, 9 January 1952, IAD Brown files, box 10, file 10. Brown even suggested the membership of his proposed SPD-DGB committee—it was to consist of Schumacher’s close SPD allies, Fritz Heine and Alfred Nau, DGB international specialist Ludwig Rosenberg, and Kuno Brandel, editor of IG Metall’s journal and a former member of the Communist Party (Opposition) and staunch ally of Lovestone.

24. Brown to Lovestone, 13 May 1952, and Lovestone to Brown, 16 May 1952, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 15; Lovestone to Brown, 2 March 1953, IAD Brown files, box 29, file 13.

25. Untitled document by Irving Brown, 9 January 1952, IAD Brown files, box 10, file 10; Lovestone to Brown, 23 April 1952, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 15. As part of this exercise, Irving Brown was passing 250,000 lire ($400) a month to Ignazio Silone to fund a letter-writing program to communist party members. Brown to Silone, 18 April 1952, IAD Brown files, box 13, file 13.

26. Brown to Lovestone, 2 August 1952, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 14. Dockers’ leader Paolo Giornelli proposed a small monthly budget of $500 to $750 for activities in Trieste. Giornelli to Dale, 1 January 1953, IAD Brown files, box 13, file 2.

27. By the early 1960s, the CFTC left would come to dominate the confederation and end its confessional link with the Church.

28. Lovestone to Brown, 13 March 1951 and 24 May 1951, Lovestone papers (Hoover), box 283, file: Irving Brown, 1951. Lovestone was present at the meeting between Dubinsky and Reuther and objected to the approach being discussed.

29. “Irving Brown Report,” 25 April 1951, Meany files, 1947–60, box 57, file 21. Commenting on Reuther’s bid for parity of treatment with Brown in the dispensing of government funds, Lovestone wrote Sam Berger: “Victor Reuther might be a very nice guy . . . . But to put [him] and Irving Brown on a par in carrying on the frontal struggle against totalitarian Communism and its machinations . . . is enough, as Stalin said, to make a horse laugh.” Lovestone to Berger, 18 May 1951, Lovestone papers (Hoover), box 283, file: Sam Berger.

30. Lovestone to Brown, 30 April 1951, Lovestone papers (Hoover), box 283, file: Irving Brown, 1951. Arthur Goldberg, the wartime head of the OSS’s Labor Division, was now legal counsel to the CIO. He would later serve as secretary of labour and UN ambassador during the Kennedy and Johnson presidencies before being appointed to the US Supreme Court.

31. A quiet, thoughtful figure, H. S. (Mike) Ross (1898–63) was the CIO’s first director of international affairs, a post he had held since 1945. Born in England, he served in the British army in World War I and was gassed on the Western Front, leaving him with a chronic chest complaint that remained with him for the rest of his life. He joined the British Communist Party in the late 1920s and worked in Moscow in 1931–32 as an editor in the Foreign Section of the State Publishing House. Having abandoned his communism, he emigrated to the United States in 1933 and became a naturalized citizen in 1941. Prior to joining the CIO, he had been employed in the Public Works Administration and then as a researcher for the La Follette Committee before becoming research director for the Marine and Shipbuilding Workers in 1942. In the merged AFL-CIO he became director of international affairs in 1957, with Lovestone as his assistant, and held the post until his death.

32. Jacob (Jake) Potofsky (1894–1979) succeeded Sidney Hillman as president of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers in 1946 and had been chairman of the CIO’s international affairs committee since 1950. He was one of the most senior figures in the CIO and also a close ally of Walter Reuther. Following the CIO merger with the AFL in 1955, he was elected joint chairman of its international affairs committee but resigned in 1957, finding it impossible to work in harness with his co-chairman, George Meany.

33. Braden to Ross, 21 June 1951. I am grateful to Frances Stonor Saunders for this reference.

34. Lovestone to Meany, 21 July 1951, Meany files, 1947–60, box 56, file 1. That it was Mike Ross rather than Reuther who was dealing with Braden is of interest. Like Dubinsky, in later years Victor Reuther would seek to minimize his contacts with the CIA, claiming that his attempts to secure government financial backing for labour projects overseas was restricted to the ECA, a different matter from dealing with the CIA. He also maintained that if the CIO had been cooperating with the CIA, it was through Mike Ross, and he and Ross never saw eye to eye. When Lovestone dined with Ross in New York in 1951 after attending a meeting of the Council for Foreign Relations, he reported the latter as saying he was critical of “big shots like Victor and he was glad he was not a big shot himself.” Lovestone to Brown, 21 December 1951, Meany files, 1947–60, box 56, file 1. Lovestone was later heartened to learn that the agency had not been overly impressed by the Bellanca-Salla mission. Apart from useful work among the dockers of Genoa, they had also made contact with a person purporting to represent socialist leader Pietro Nenni. He told them that the PSI leadership was unhappy in its alliance with the communist party and was looking for some financial inducement to make a break. Bellanca to Potofsky, 2 July 1951, and Potofsky to Dulles, 10 July 1951, IAD Ross files, box 10, file 10. Hearing the intelligence, and suspecting that the CIA was being taken for a ride, Allen Dulles chose to disregard the request for money. Lovestone gloated at the outcome, telling Brown that “Mr. Fizzlander is now keenly disappointed over his ever having come into partnership with Victor and company” and predicting that “the Victor Boys will find themselves out on a limb.” Lovestone to Brown, 7 November and 29 November 1951, Lovestone papers (Hoover), box 283, file: Irving Brown, 1951.

35. Olavi Lindblom, Pitkalla Palkilla, 182. I am indebted to Kari Tapiola for this reference and for help with background information on these events.

36. Lovestone to Brown, 9 November and 21 November 1951, Lovestone papers (Hoover), box 283, file: Irving Brown, 1951.

37. Lindblom to Victor Reuther, 10 January 1952, Lovestone papers (Hoover), box 305, file: Finland. It is of interest that a copy of this letter from Lindblom to Reuther, with its highly sensitive contents, found its way into Lovestone’s files.

38. Lovestone to Meany, 17 June 1951, Meany files, 1947–60, box 56, file 1; Brown to Lovestone, 1 November 1951, Lovestone papers (Hoover), box 283, file: Irving Brown, 1951; Reuther to Ambassador Dunn, 13 December 1951, IAD Ross files, box 16, file 1.

39. Reuther to Becu, 4 December 1951, Lovestone papers (Hoover), box 355, file: Irving Brown, 1949–53.

40. Brown to Lovestone, 25 February 1951, Lovestone papers (Hoover), box 283, file: Irving Brown, 1951.

41. Minutes of CIO International Affairs Committee meeting, 1 November 1951, IAD Ross files, box 7, file 20.

42. Lovestone to Brown, 21 December 1951, Lovestone papers (Hoover), box 283, file: Irving Brown, 1951.

43. Lovestone to Brown, 19 January 1952, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 16; Lovestone to Brown, 21 January 1953, Meany files, 1947–60, box 56, file 16.

44. At the end of 1951, the ICFTU’s total income for what was termed “solidarity activity” amounted to only $190,000—far less than the combined sums then being discussed in TUC and CIO circles. And, for the whole of 1952, only a further $276,000 was contributed to the RAF by all ICFTU affiliates combined.

45. Lovestone to Brown, 21 January 1953, Meany files, 1947–60, box 56, file 16. It would take three more years before Meany finally agreed that it was time for Lane to be removed. This followed his obstructive role in 1954 in blocking a proposal by Irving Brown for an anti-communist training school based at the FIAT plant in Turin. Even then, it required the combined efforts of Allen Dulles, Tom Braden, Assistant Secretary of State Robert Murphy, and FOA administrator Harold Stassen to convince Meany that the time was right. Not least of the arguments against keeping Lane on was the scope for anti-American propaganda that he afforded the Italian communists. As Irving Brown observed to Meany: “The latter can gleefully point out that there are no Russian government officials walking around the premises of the CGIL while there is an American official as large as life not only walking around the CISL premises but acting as though he were the landlord.” Offie to Brown, 30 August, 10 December 1954, and 14 January 1955, IAD Brown files, box 32, file 2; Brown to Meany, 18 December 1954, Meany files, 1947–60, box 57, file 23.

46. Lovestone to Brown, 19 January 1952, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 16. It was of interest that Time magazine carried a profile of Brown to coincide with his March 1952 visit to Washington. It lionized him as “one of the Americans that [European] Communists know best—and hate most.” It also drew an unflattering comparison between Brown and Victor Reuther, quoting the latter’s observation that “Europeans are tired of little men who run around with little black bags.” Editorially on Brown’s side, Time noted that “with far greater experience, Brown finds Reuther naïve” and recorded with approval that the previous week he had been in Washington “filling his little black bag with plans for a lot more anti-Communist deviltry.” It was a teasing reference to the literal truth—that Brown had been there on CIA business. Only a handful of people would have known the purpose of the visit, but they certainly included C. D. Jackson, on leave from his post as managing director of Time-Life International, currently president of the CIA’s National Committee for Free Europe, and soon to become President Eisenhower’s personal advisor on psychological warfare and the White House’s liaison between the CIA and the Pentagon. “The Most Dangerous Man,” Time, 17 March 1952.

47. Lovestone to Berger, 18 March 1952, IAD Lovestone files, box 10, file 11.

48. Lovestone to Brown, 23 January 1952, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 16.

49. “Memorandum on the Need for Strengthening Free Trade Unionism in France,” 17 December 1951, IAD Brown files, box 22, file 18; “Report on Propaganda in France and Italy,” ICFTU Emergency Committee, 17–19 March 1952, ICFTU Archives, folder 15a.

50. For a discussion of the pilot plant program in France and Italy, see Carew, Labour Under the Marshall Plan, chap. 10.

51. Brown to Lovestone, 19 January 1952, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 16; Brown to Lovestone, 3 April 1952, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 15.

52. Brown to Lovestone, 19 January 1952, Brown to Hayes, 22 January 1952, and Lovestone to Brown, 23 January 1952, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 16; Lovestone to Brown, 7 April 1952, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 15; Brown to Lovestone, 12 April 1952, IAD Brown files, box 23, file 4; Lovestone to Brown, 8 May 1952, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 15; Brown to Lovestone, 13 May 1952, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 15. Indeed, there were signs that steelworkers’ union officials were attempting to make life difficult for Reuther, reviving rumours that Charles Levinson had a communist past. The steelworkers’ vice president, Alan Haywood, and the union’s Canadian director, Charles Millard, were again questioning his political reliability. Victor reacted impatiently, sick of all the “unnecessary vetting” and the expectation that people be pure. Millard to Haywood, 13 December 1952, and Reuther to Ross, 14 December 1952, IAD Ross files, box 16, file 1.

53. Leon Dale to Volonté, 18 November 1952, and Brown to Volonté, 18 December 1952, IAD Brown files, box 12, file 21. Why, given the generous American financial support to CISL, Pastore could not fund Volonté himself was a mystery to Lovestone. On financial support for the social democrats within CISL, which took the form of assistance to Alberto Simonini’s paper Giustizia, see Dale to Lovestone, 29 April 1952, Lovestone papers (Hoover), box 362, file: Leon Dale, 1952; Brown to Lovestone, 13 May 1952, and Lovestone to Brown, 16 May 1952, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 15; G. Mariotti to Brown, 25 November 1952, IAD Brown files, box 26, file 10.

54. Le Figaro, 23 September 1952; Levinson to Reuther, 6 November 1952, CIO Washington Office records, box 64, file 18.

55. Point 8 of an untitled, undated document of 1951 drafted by Offie as a working paper for Dubinsky prior to the April 1951 meeting with Bedell Smith, Lovestone papers (Hoover), box 381, file: Monk, 1951; Brown to Lovestone, 2 December 1951, Lovestone papers (Hoover), box 355, file: Irving Brown, 1949–53; Irving Brown, “Report on Meeting of the Interim Committee for the Regional Activities Fund,” 29 October 1951, IAD Brown files, box 11, file 16.

56. “Suggestions for Work to Be Done in the Lyon Cultural Area,” AFL International Affairs Committee, 12 March 1952, Thorne files, box 17, file: International Labour Relations Committee. Tronchet, a former anarcho-syndicalist but by now a fierce anti-Stalinist member of the Swiss Socialist Party, had recently visited the United States by invitation of the US embassy. He remained a close ally of Brown for the next thirty years, and the school he ran in Geneva would become the location for Brown’s annual “exchange of views” with trade union delegations, mostly from Africa and Asia, attending the annual ILO Conference. Luc Van Dongen, “Brother Tronchet: A Swiss Trade Union Leader Within the U.S. Sphere of Influence,” in Luc Van Dongen, Stéphanie Roulin, and Giles Scott-Smith, eds., Transnational Anti-Communism and the Cold War: Agents, Activities and Networks, 50–63.

57. Golden to Sender, 4 January 1952, IAD Brown files, box 23, file 4; Lovestone to Brown, 6 December 1951, Lovestone papers (Hoover), box 283, file: Irving Brown, 1951; Irving Brown, “Report on the Meeting of the Interim Committee for the Regional Activities Fund,” 29 October 1951, IAD Brown files, box 11, file 16; Woll to Florence Thorne, 7 April 1952, Thorne files, box 8, file: Ford Foundation; Thorne to Woll, 15 April 1952, Thorne files, box 17, file: International Labour Relations Committee.

58. Lovestone to Brown, 19 January 1952, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 16.

59. Assistant Director of Supply (MSA) to Golden, 27 May 1952, Casserini to Reuther, 5 May 1952, Guaranty Trust Co. to Golden, 27 May 1952, and Oldenbroek to Reuther, 12 June 1952, Clinton S. Golden papers, box 5, file 12, Special Collections Library, Penn State University, State College, PA; Oldenbroek to Brown, 5 August 1952, IAD Brown files, box 32, file 4.

60. Brown to Lovestone, 12 August 1952, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 14. The MSA also gave technical support for the courses by handling photographic, film, radio, and press relations at La Brevière.

61. Tom Braden, “I’m Glad the CIA Is Immoral,” Saturday Evening Post, 20 May 1967. Braden’s account of the CIA funding and the explanations that Walter and Victor Reuther were forced to make in consequence do not tally, and all lack dates and precise details. Braden claimed that he gave the money in 1952 in response to a request from Victor Reuther. Having seen a leaked copy of Braden’s article before publication, Victor Reuther prepared a draft statement, which made no mention of the $50,000. He stated that he had been introduced to Braden by Ross in 1951, shortly after being appointed CIO representative to Europe, and had the impression Braden was with the State Department or a Marshall Plan agency. They discussed the CIO program for Europe, but Reuther denied making a request for funds then or subsequently. His statement went on to describe being contacted in Paris in the late summer of 1952 by Charles Thayer, who was with the CIA under the cover of “political officer” at the US embassy, and asked him to call in for a talk with Braden. On this occasion, Braden surprised Reuther by telling him that he was responsible for supplying some of the CIO’s operating budget and that he had been funding the AFL for years and would like to establish a similar arrangement with the CIO if Reuther would agree to serve as a CIA agent. In his statement, Reuther claims to have rejected the proposal and to have reported the approach to CIO President Phil Murray. Victor Reuther to Joseph Walsh, 4 May 1967, Victor Reuther papers, box 17 file 30.

Separately, Walter Reuther issued a press statement admitting that the UAW “did reluctantly agree on one occasion to . . . transmit government funds” for use in Europe to supplement the inadequate funds of the American trade unions and that his action had been approved by President Phil Murray. In his autobiography nine years later, Victor Reuther stated that in “carrying out the request to transmit financial assistance,” he acted with “unjustified innocence” as to the source, repeating his belief at the time that Braden was with the State Department or MSA and that funds from such sources were acceptable as they had been publicly voted and were being used for purposes intended by Congress. Victor Reuther, The Brothers Reuther, 424–26. He also told Walter Reuther’s biographer that the $50,000 was not handed to his brother personally and that it was only later that Walter realized the funds were from the CIA. Victor Reuther to William Eaton, 15 June 1970, Victor Reuther papers, box 70, file 28.

From all this it seems clear that, in June 1952, Jay Lovestone was justified in claiming that Victor Reuther had access to substantial funds from non-union sources, though whether it was as much as $20,000 per month, as he alleged, is unclear. Lovestone to Berger, 9 June 1952, IAD Lovestone files, box 10, file 11. In the one previous documented link between the CIO and the CIA, relating to Frank Bellanca’s exploratory mission to Genoa in 1951, the contacts were between Ross and Braden. On that occasion, Victor Reuther was mentioned only in passing in a Braden letter to Ross suggesting that he be alerted to the need for secrecy. It was always Victor Reuther’s contention that the CIA’s real contact with the CIO was Michael Ross. Author interview with Victor Reuther, 27 August 1986. I have found no other hard evidence of the Reuthers dealing directly with the CIA, although in 1966, when the IMF was hoping to encourage non-communists to split away from the Italian CGIL, Victor Reuther talked to John Riley, a staffer in Vice President Hubert Humphrey’s office responsible for liaison with the CIA, and was advised that the best way to canvass support from that quarter would be for Walter Reuther to have a prior meeting with President Johnson. Whether the advice was followed is not known. See the discussion in chapter 7, in the section headed “Reuther and the Italian Centre-Left.”

62. Bill Kemsley to author, 9 August 1986. Unravelling the threads of these sub rosa payments and their provenance—Marshall Plan counterpart, Ford Foundation, CIA—can only be a matter of educated guesswork from this distance, but the source of funds for all three was often the same.

63. Brown to Lovestone, 13 October 1952, Lovestone papers (Hoover), box 316, file: ICFTU; Benoît Frachon, “Corrupteurs sans visa,” L’Humanité, 6 November 1952; Brown to Meany, 10 January 1953, Meany files, 1947–60, box 57, file 22; Samuel H. Barnes, “The Politics of French Christian Labour”; Brown to A. Hayes, 24 May 1953, Meany files, 1947–60, box 57, file 22; minutes of CIO International Affairs Committee meeting, 18 March 1953, IAD Ross files, box 7, file 22.

64. Victor Reuther to Walter Reuther, 22 January 1953, Victor Reuther papers, box 9, file 21.

65. Faupl called for the negotiations over the contract to be conducted publicly, but as Kemsley pointed out in private correspondence: “This we could not afford so a deal was made that he would keep his mouth shut on the thing and the IMF people would hold off any action until Vic and Walt [Reuther] got back to the States. They would then talk to Hayes [IAM President] and, if they can convince Hayes, Faupl will go along.” Kemsley to Bill Friedland, 15 February, 30 April, 8 June, 30 June, and 25 July 1953, Kemsley papers, box 2, files 7–8.

Bill Kemsley (1908–90) joined the UAW in Detroit in 1937, became a member of the Reuther faction, and was close to Walter and Victor. He served briefly in Germany on the staff of the US Office of Military Government’s Manpower Division in 1945. After the war, he was the CIO’s director of education for Michigan before being again recruited into government service on the staff of the labour education department of the Mutual Security Agency (later the Foreign Operations Administration) in Paris in 1952. The ICFTU appointed him its representative to the United Nations in New York in 1954, a post he held until 1961, when he resigned following the ouster of Oldenbroek and severed his employment with the labour movement.

66. Victor Reuther to Ross, 7 May 1954, CIO Washington Office records, box 74, file 22; minutes of CIO International Affairs Committee meeting, 18 March 1953, IAD Ross files, box 7, file 22.

67. Back in 1948, AFL president Bill Green had identified Reuther as the CIO leader most likely to promote unity. Frank Cormier and William J. Eaton, Reuther, 315. CIO president Philip Murray seems not to have regarded Meany in a similar light, reputedly describing him as “some kind of loud-mouth bum from New York. . . . I don’t want to have anything to do with him.” Robert H. Zieger, The CIO, 1935–1955, 472.

68. “Meany Would Quit to Aid Labour Unity,” New York Times, 8 December 1952; Goulden, Meany, 184–85.

69. Irving Brown recognized that many Europeans hoped that the CIO would come to dominate a merged American federation and thus take the lead in international affairs, with Lovestone ousted from the scene. “Report from Irving Brown,” 3 November 1954, Meany files, 1947–60, box 57, file 23. At other times, Brown’s impression was that Jaap Oldenbroek was fearful that the loss of the CIO as an independent voice would rob him of vital American support on which, together with British and German backing, he had counted to secure a majority against AFL disruption. Brown to Lovestone, 2 December 1954, Lovestone papers (Hoover), box 698, file: Irving Brown. There was a similar perception in Britain, where some feared that the TUC might lose influence as the numerical weight of the Americans increased, with the CIO voice muted. “Strengthening U.S. Labour’s Voice,” Times (London), 11 February 1955.

70. Walter Reuther to Oldenbroek, 18 September 1953, CIO Secretary-Treasurer records, box 123, file: ICFTU General Correspondence.

71. Minutes of CIO International Affairs Committee meeting, 7 January 1954, CIO Washington Office records, box 56, file 11; Victor Reuther to Ross, 1 December 1953, CIO Washington Office records, box 74, file 21. At the time, Hans Gottfurcht was the sole assistant general secretary.

72. Remarks by Carey to CIO Executive Board, Cleveland, 12 November 1953, CIO Secretary-Treasurer records, box 124, file: ICFTU Miscellaneous; Carey to Oldenbroek, 29 October 1953, CIO Secretary-Treasurer records, box 123, file: ICFTU General Correspondence. James Carey (1911–73) started work in a Philadelphia radio manufacturing plant in 1929 where, aged twenty-two, he helped establish a small union of radio workers. In 1934, he was engaged as a general organizer for the AFL and, in 1936, took his union into the new United Electrical Workers, becoming its first president. With the split in the AFL, Carey became secretary-treasurer of the CIO in 1938, a position he held until 1955. Influenced by Catholic social teaching, he opposed the communists within the UE and, as a consequence, was defeated as president in 1941. When the UE was expelled from the CIO in 1949, he helped launch the International Union of Electrical Workers in opposition. From the earliest postwar days, he played a prominent role in international affairs, helping to launch the WFTU, dealing with the Soviet trade unions at close quarters on three missions to the USSR, and then leading the campaign to disaffiliate from the WFTU in 1949 and form the ICFTU. He was a close colleague of Walter Reuther but had a particularly strained relationship with George Meany.

73. Minutes of FTUC meeting, 14 October 1953, IAD Lovestone files, box 35, file 24.

74. Lovestone to Brown, 14 April and 30 April 1953, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 18; Lovestone to Woll, 12 May 1953, IAD Lovestone files, box 65, file 5; Lovestone to Kirsch, 28 May 1953, IAD Brown files, box 29, file 13. Dubinsky reduced financial and other material support, billing the committee retrospectively for expenditure on postage and telegrams over the previous two years while removing from the union’s books Lovestone’s secretary, Ann (Larkin) Stolte, whose salary it had covered. Dubinsky’s subsidy to the FTUC was worth $15,000 a year, and the sum now reclaimed for postage alone amounted to $6,000. Lovestone was up in arms, complaining about being treated as “everyone’s janitor,” railing at Dubinsky’s “deflationary practices,” and telling Irving Brown that “if the present trends continue, you can look for a marked shrinkage of AFL activities” and that “I will be compelled to recommend curtailment of our publications as well as representation.” But Dubinsky persisted, and Lovestone warned that “if things keep up the way they are going, I doubt whether I will continue with the work after the AFL convention.” The treasury was low, and Lovestone began to economize by axing Henry Kirsch from his recently created post as representative in Turkey.

75. Lovestone to Brown, 5 November and 6 November 1953, IAD Brown files, box 29, file 16; Brown to Lovestone, 26 November 1953, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 19; Lovestone to Brown, 30 November 1953, IAD Brown files, box 29, file 16.

76. Minutes of CIO International Affairs Committee meeting, 7 January 1954, CIO Washington Office records, box 56, file 11.

77. Lovestone to Brown, 27 October 1953, IAD Brown files, box 29, file 16.

78. Brown to Meany, 4 November 1953, Meany files, 1947–60, box 57, file 22; Lovestone to J. Godson, 19 October 1953, IAD Brown files, box 29, file 16.

79. Omer Becu (1902–82) occupies a central place in our history from this point on. As a Belgian merchant seaman, he had gone into exile in 1940 and spent much of the war in New York representing the ITF, during which time he formed strong relations with the AFL. In 1944, he undertook a mission for the OSS behind enemy lines in North Africa and Italy in support of anti-fascist trade unionists. He succeeded Oldenbroek as ITF general secretary in 1950 and, while holding this post, also became the ICFTU’s third president at its 1953 congress. Becu was very much the AFL’s candidate for the post; the federation was the architect of a necessary constitutional change agreed on by the congress specifically to allow Becu to run for the presidency since he wasn’t a member of the executive board. Subsequently, he became the AFL-CIO’s favourite to succeed Oldenbroek as ICFTU general secretary and eventually acceded to this position in 1960, holding it until his resignation in 1967.

80. Minutes of AFL International Affairs Committee meeting, 14 November 1953, IAD Brown files, box 29, file 16; Brown to Lovestone, 26 November 1953, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 19.

81. Minutes of CIO International Affairs Committee meeting, 7 January 1954, CIO Washington Office records, box 56, file 11.

82. Archie Robinson, George Meany and His Times, 169.

83. “Union Policy on Communism,” Times (London), 2 July 1953.

84. “Trade Unionist Stresses Conflicting Views,” Times (London), 6 July 1953.

85. AFL News-Reporter, 17 July 1953, 3.

86. “The Great Debate: Anglo-American Relations” (parts 1 and 2), Free Trade Union News, December 1954–January 1955.

87. “Report from Irving Brown,” 23 May 1953, Meany files, 1947–60, box 56, file 2. A senior figure in Force ouvrière, André Lafond was a railway trade unionist who became the FO national secretary in charge of international affairs. He was extremely close to Brown, though they differed over the question of the European Defence Community and later more seriously over Lafond’s support for French government policy in Algeria and his backing for de Gaulle in 1957.

88. Untitled document (“The major fortress of Communism in Italy . . .”), June 1954, IAD Brown files, box 12, file 20; J. E. Jacobs, “Memorandum of Conversation: FIAT’s Efforts to Combat Communist Labour Domination,” 28 July 1954, and “Memorandum: Gist of a Proposed Letter from FIAT to the Ambassador Concerning FIAT’s Efforts to Combat Communist Domination of Its Labour Force,” 24 August 1954; draft letter, Professor Valletta to Ambassador Luce, 6 September 1954, cited in Maria Eleonora Guasconi, L’Altra faccia della medaglia: Guerra psicologica e diplomazia sindacale nelle relazioni Italia-Stati Uniti durante la prima fase della guerra fredda (1947–55), 131.

89. Lovestone to Rutz, 16 March 1954, Meany files, 1947–60, box 56, file 18.

90. Walter Freitag and Albin Karl to Victor Reuther, 22 October 1953, CIO Washington Office records, box 74, file 20; Reuther to Freitag and Karl, 11 November 1953, CIO Washington Office records, box 69, file 16.

91. Lovestone to Woll, 20 April 1953, IAD Lovestone files, box 65, file 5; Lovestone to Brown, 3 August 1953, IAD Brown files, box 29, file 13; “Meany Hits Attacks on German Labour,” Free Trade Union News, November 1953.

92. Lovestone to F. Heine, 19 November 1953, Meany files, 1940–80, box 59, file 26.

93. Brown to Lovestone, 24 March 1954, IAD Lovestone files, box 12, file 2.

94. “AFL in Arms Plea to German Unions,” New York Times, 8 February 1955.

95. Lovestone to “Dear Friend” [Dubinsky], 7 March 1955, and Lovestone to Meany, 13 March 1955, Lovestone papers (Hoover), box 705, file: George Meany.

96. Brown to Lovestone, 29 December 1953, Lovestone papers (Hoover), box 355, file: Irving Brown, 1949–53. Laconic, unassertive, and without personal ambition, Ross lacked the drive and energy of either Victor Reuther or Irving Brown. But for people who recoiled from the Reuther-Brown rivalry, he was a safe pair of hands. John Boughton, “From Comintern to the Council on Foreign Relations: The Ideological Journey of Michael Ross.”

97. Brown to Lovestone, 26 November 1953, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 19; Brown to Lovestone, 29 December 1953, Lovestone papers (Hoover), box 355, file: Irving Brown, 1949–53; Lovestone to Brown, 30 November 1953, IAD Brown files, box 29, file 16; “Report from Irving Brown,” 3 November 1954, Meany files, 1947–60, box 57, file 23. George (Phil) Delaney (1909–72) was appointed AFL international representative in 1948 and served as US worker delegate at the ILO. Uncomfortable with the tensions in the international affairs department of the AFL-CIO, he became the Department of Labor’s special assistant for international labour affairs in 1959 and, in 1964, transferred within the federal government to become director of the Office of Labor Affairs in AID, where he remained until 1970.

98. Brown to Lovestone, 5 April 1954, IAD Lovestone files, box 12, file 1.

99. Irving Brown, “Report on ICFTU Executive Board,” May 1954, IAD Lovestone files, box 12, file 1.

100. Kemsley to Gottfurcht, 4 May 1953, Kemsley papers, box 2, file 16.

101. Gottfurcht to Kemsley, 8 June 1954 and 12 February 1955, Kemsley papers, box 2, file 16.

102. A. E. (Art) Lyon (1900–1976) was a railway worker who became president of the Brotherhood of Railroad Signalmen in 1934. In 1945, he was appointed executive secretary of the Railway Labour Executives’ Association (RLEA), a lobbying body that existed to represent the interests of US railwaymen at government and industry levels. At the urging of the AFL as well as US government foreign and security officials, Lyon negotiated the affiliation of the RLEA with the ITF in 1946, bringing in 700,000 railway members, a figure rising to over one million ten years later. Representing one of its most powerful affiliates, Lyon served on the ITF executive committee until 1962. Self-effacing and taciturn, he rarely spoke at governing body meetings but kept meticulous notes. Harold Lewis, a personal assistant to the ITF general secretary from 1956 to 1966 and responsible for the minutes, recalled that Lyon always made clear that his priority, to the exclusion of anything else on the ITF’s agenda, was unqualified opposition to communist activities and influence in the international trade union movement.

103. Meany to Brown, 19 July 1955, Meany files, 1947–60, box 56, file 5; Lovestone to Brown, 1 August 1955, IAD Lovestone files, box 41, file 3.

104. Brown to Meany, 9 June 1954, and Irving Brown, “Report on ICFTU Executive Board 24–29 May 1954,” IAD Lovestone files, box 12, file 1.

105. Victor Reuther to Ross, 7 May 1954, CIO Washington Office records, box 74, file 22; Ross to Victor Reuther, 31 May 1954, CIO Secretary-Treasurer records, box 133, file: IAD M. Ross 1953–54.

106. Brown to Lovestone, 26 November 1953, IAD Lovestone files, box 11, file 19; Brown to Lovestone, 10 July 1953, IAD Brown files, box 29, file 17; Lovestone to Brown, 30 November 1953, 14 July 1954, IAD Brown files, box 29, files 16–17. James Angleton, who had formerly been the liaison officer between the CIA and the FBI, was now the agency’s head of counterintelligence. He and Lovestone were kindred spirits and became firm friends. They shared an obsession with the threat posed by “communist” enemies, real and imagined, and were intent on collecting every possible shred of evidence against them. Interestingly, it was George Meany’s discovery that this secret funding arrangement with Angleton was still in existence in 1974—long after all AFL-CIO ties with the intelligence community were supposed to have been severed—that led him to “retire” Lovestone. Morgan, A Covert Life, 276, 350–51.

107. Pegler deployed a scattergun approach: among other things, he claimed that Brown had been responsible for imposing the system of co-determination in Germany to deliver control of industry to “socialist union bosses,” and he saw something particularly dangerous in the fact that Lovestone had been allowed to lecture at the Army War College. Lovestone concluded that Pegler was being briefed by people in the CIA hostile to the overseas work of the FTUC. Articles by Pegler appearing in the New York Journal-American were: “Plans to Sift Dubinsky’s Union Activities in Europe,” 9 November 1951; “More About Activities of U.S. Unions in Europe,” 15 November 1951; “Paris Communist Paper Discusses ‘Arrogant Valet,’” 31 December 1951; “More About AFL ‘Envoys’ Contacting Europe Labour,” 3 January 1952; “An Exchange of Letters with Envoy Irving Brown,” 16 January 1952; “Fair Enough,” 26 March 1952; “Praise of Irving Brown in the Readers Digest,” 12 October 1952; “Red Lectures to Army,” 21 February 1954; “More About Activities of Lovestone and Brown,” 8 April 1954. Pegler’s articles led Lovestone to draft an untitled and undated document—most probably intended for the director of the CIA—that began: “Inestimable damage has been done to the Free Trade Union Committee, AFL, both here and abroad, as well as to the interests of the United States by recent attacks of Pegler, inspired by CIA officials, according to Pegler’s own written and oral statements; not to mention injury to various personalities associated with the FTUC.” Lovestone went on to threaten to end the existing relationship between the FTUC and “CIA representatives, cut-outs, and other persons controlled by the CIA” unless a more satisfactory modus operandi could be agreed upon. Lovestone papers (Hoover), box 403, file: FTUC.

Spencer Miller joined the fray in late 1953, alleging that Brown had used $30,000 of CIA money to buy gold on the black market in Greece. The White House was also drawn into the affair, and President Eisenhower’s chief of staff asked J. Edgar Hoover for an opinion on Lovestone. The FBI director responded that he was “a rather sinister character” conducting intelligence work within the labour movement for the CIA and whose abandonment of communism he had “always doubted.” Miller gave testimony to the House Un-American Activities Committee and the Senate Internal Security Committee, while Senator Joseph McCarthy began to probe the roles of Lovestone and Carmel Offie. With no evidence to substantiate these allegations, McCarthy’s assistant, Roy Cohn, told Lovestone in May 1954 that they had no interest in causing him further trouble. The FBI settled for keeping Lovestone under surveillance. Morgan, A Covert Life, 234–43.

108. L’Affaire Dides, as it became known, gripped Paris for several weeks before the official inquiry exonerated Mitterand. Behind it was a strong hint of an attempt to discredit the Mendès France government amid suggestions that the recently concluded war in Indochina had been lost through “treason” in the ranks of government. Brown feared that the arrest of Dides was part of a wider move by Mitterand to expose American links to the police’s extra-legal anti-communist work. Interestingly, just before the scandal broke, Brown had come into possession of a verbatim report of the communist party’s political committee that he had forwarded to Lovestone. Admitting to being “insecure and keyed up,” he lay low for a week in Paris and then sought safety across the German border. From Munich, he sent Lovestone’s secretary, Ann Stolte, a close friend and confidante, a handwritten letter setting down his “most troublesome thoughts and suspicions” for the record. Of the Dides affair, he wrote: “It is more important than the mere revelation of espionage. . . . Mitterand originally attempted to move against the so-called American reseau in France (this was obviously to be directed against myself and all the other anti-communists who have been . . . supporting the Americans). . . . In going after Dides . . . it was expected to uncover how he was being financed by and working for the Americans—and if possible by chance yours truly. . . . They would certainly like to pin a lot on me but there is no chance. I have been around. I have seen people. I have talked.” Nonetheless, clearly troubled, he asked her to “become the living recorder of my deepest anxieties about France and whither we are drifting. . . . Keep records of these love notes for me in NY.” “From Irving,” 21 October 1954, Meany files, 1947–60, box 57, file 23.

109. Jack Carney (1887–1956) was born in Dublin. He became a close associate of Irish republican trade union leader James Larkin, with whom he moved to Chicago following the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin. In Chicago, he became the editor of the Irish Worker and later of the Duluth-based Socialist Party paper Truth. He was a founding member of the Workers’ Party of America, where he first met Lovestone. Imprisoned briefly in 1922 for criminal syndicalism, he subsequently returned to Ireland. After 1945, he worked as a journalist in London and in 1951 began submitting regular reports to Lovestone.

Klaus Dohrn (1909–79) was an Austrian journalist who fled Nazism and during the war joined the German emigration in the United States, where he met Lovestone. After 1945, he settled in Switzerland and worked as a special reporter for C. D. Jackson, editor-in-chief of Henry Luce’s Time-Life publications. He enjoyed direct access to the highest levels of the West German foreign ministry during the Adenauer years and acted as a conduit between Adenauer and Lovestone. As a Catholic, he was well connected to the Vatican, but he also enjoyed good contacts with sometime Austrian chancellor Bruno Kreisky.

John Bruegel was a London-based Czech refugee who combined journalism with freelance translating work for the Socialist International, the Labour Party and the TUC. He took over from Jack Carney in 1957 and for the next twenty years, as a by-product of his regular translating work, he was able to supply Lovestone with confidential labour movement documentation. Bruegel’s daughter, who became a leading figure in Jews for Justice in Palestine, severed relations with him when she discovered that he was in the pay of the CIA.

Mohan Das began work for the FTUC in India in the late 1940s and was subsequently employed in a similar capacity in the 1960s by the Brotherhood of Railroad and Steamship Clerks. Throughout, he reported regularly to Lovestone on India’s labour affairs. It was Das whom the US ambassador wanted Lovestone to second to the Congress for Cultural Freedom when the Indian section of that body was being established in 1951.

By and large, the tittle-tattle content of the “JX reports” emanating from these stringers was hardly earth-shaking. Of greater possible significance was the so-called HTLINGUAL program launched by Angleton in December 1955, which ran for the next eighteen years. Under this, with a base at La Guardia airport, Angleton arranged to have correspondence of targeted individuals opened and photocopied. The information gleaned was shared with Lovestone. Over the period some 215,820 pieces of correspondence were opened. In the 1970s, the Church Committee heard evidence that most of this was “worthless.” Whatever the truth, the operation indulged Lovestone’s taste for the clandestine. Morgan, A Covert Life, 245–46, 252–53; Michael Holzman, James Jesus Angleton: The CIA and the Craft of Counter-Intelligence, chap. 9.

110. “Statement for Meeting of AFL and CIO International Affairs Committee,” 25 February 1955, CIO Washington Office records, box 56, file 17; “Confidential Notes on Joint Meeting Between Representatives of the CIO-AFL International Affairs Committees,” 25 February, 1955, CIO Secretary-Treasurer records, box 129, file: IAD Correspondence 1955; minutes of FTUC meeting, 16 April 1955, IAD Brown files, box 29, file 16; Lovestone to Brown, 18 April 1955, Lovestone papers (Hoover), box 698, file: Irving Brown.

111. Brown to Lovestone, 22 April 1955, IAD Lovestone files, box 12, file 4; Lovestone to Meany, 13 March 1955, Lovestone papers (Hoover), box 705, file: George Meany; Brown to Lovestone, 2 December 1954, Lovestone papers (Hoover), box 698, file: Irving Brown.

112. Brown to Meany, 19 March 1955, Meany files, 1947–60, box 57, file 24; Lovestone to Brown, 18 April 1955, Lovestone papers (Hoover), box 698, file: Irving Brown.

113. Meany to Brown, 7 July 1955, IAD Lovestone files, box 12, file 4.

114. “Confidential: American Labour and the ICFTU,” n.d., CIO Secretary-Treasurer records, box 124, file: ICFTU Vienna meeting May 1955 Correspondence.

115. Victor Reuther to Ross, 14 June 1955, CIO Washington Office records, box 74, file 26.

116. Victor Reuther to Bill Gausmann, 29 July 1955, Kemsley papers, box 2, file 13.

117. Lovestone to Brown, 7 July 1955, IAD Lovestone files, box 12, file 4.

118. Gausmann to Victor Reuther, August 1955, Kemsley papers, box 2, file 13; Ted Morgan, “The Grey Eminence” (typescript, n.d.), 861–62.

119. “Suggested Programme for Strengthening the ICFTU,” 28 April 1955, CIO Washington Office records, box 69, file 25.

120. Lovestone to Meany, 1 August 1955, and “Report from France,” 30 August 1955, Meany files, 1947–60, box 56, file 6.

121. “Memorandum of Meeting with Phil Delaney,” 10 October 1955, Meany files, 1947–60, box 56, file 7.

122. Morgan, “Grey Eminence,” 864; Kemsley to Gausmann, 27 November 1955, Kemsley papers, box 2, file 13.

123. Brown to Lovestone, 3 November 1955, IAD Lovestone files, box 12, file 4.

124. Untitled note, Lovestone to Meany, 9 December 1955, Meany files, 1947–60, box 56, file 8.

125. “ICFTU Executive Board Meeting Incidents,” n.d. [December] 1955, Meany files, 1947–60, box 56, file 8.

Chapter 5: A Wedding Without a Honeymoon

1. Lovestone to Brown, 11 January 1956, IAD Lovestone files, box 12, file 6; Lovestone to Brown, n.d. [February] 1956, Lovestone papers (Hoover), box 355, file: Irving Brown, 1954–56; Ross to Brown, 19 February 1956, IAD Brown files, box 33, file 13; Dan Benedict to Victor Reuther, 20 February 1956, Reuther-Carliner records, 1955–63, box 83, file 24. The merger had brought together two quite different organizations, and between them they had yet to establish basic administrative practices. The AFL’s international “department”—an operation barely justifying the name—had a loose structure with no fixed pattern of procedures. It was quite unlike the CIO equivalent, where systems were clearly laid down. Prior to the merger, Meany had hoped to preserve the AFL ethos, and Lovestone approved of this since it made for greater informal control and allowed him and his vest-pocket organization, the FTUC, more room to manoeuvre. The international affairs committees of the two centres also differed greatly in their modi operandi. AFL committee meetings followed a very loose agenda, and minutes were sketchy or non-existent. For the CIO committee, verbatim transcripts of proceedings were kept and policy making was thus more transparent. Rosy Ruane to author, 2 January 2004. Rosy Ruane worked as secretary to both Mike Ross and Jay Lovestone and was employed in the CIO and then AFL-CIO international affairs department for thirty years.

2. Lovestone to Brown, 29 February 1956, IAD Lovestone files, box 12, file 6; Lovestone to Brown, 6 March 1956, Brown to Lovestone, 7 March 1956, and Lovestone to Brown, 15 March 1957, IAD Lovestone files, box 12, file 10; Brown to Meany, 1 March 1956, enclosing “Memorandum on the Possible Reorientation of the ICFTU,” n.d., Meany files, 1947–60, box 56, file 10. In hoping to land the directorship in charge of organizing, Brown had been quietly canvassing potential backers. But among European centres, Force ouvrière was the only one willing to endorse him. He claimed that Robert Bothereau believed him to be the best candidate, while Ferri-Pisani, now a fading star, supplied a testimonial deploring a perceived softening of the ICFTU’s stand on communism and urging Meany and company to take the initiative and force through Brown’s appointment. The Chinese Federation of Labour in Taiwan was also on his side, and word from Latin America was that the Cuban Confederation of Labor, led by Eusebio Mujal, who had made his peace with the Batista dictatorship, also favoured him. Otherwise, Brown’s support was hard to identify, and he was reduced to appealing to Meany’s anti-British instincts by forwarding to him a report from Dick Deverall stating that the ICFTU secretariat was full of Britons.

3. Ross to Brown, 19 February 1956, IAD Brown files, box 33, file 13; Joseph C. Goulden, Meany, 276; Lovestone to Brown, n.d. [February] 1956, Lovestone papers (Hoover), box 355, file: Irving Brown, 1954–56.

4. Lovestone to Brown, 29 February and 6 March 1956, IAD Lovestone files, box 12, file 6. Lovestone’s own letterhead reflected an even more cavalier approach to the recent merger—with “CIO” crudely typed in alongside the “AFL” logo on notepaper originally printed for the now-defunct Labor League for Human Rights.

5. Victor Reuther to Walter Reuther, 6 February 1956, Reuther-Carliner records, 1955–63, box 83, file 24.

6. Returning as “the hero of Geneva,” the president was guardedly optimistic about the prospects for peace in what came to be known as his “Spirit of Geneva Speech.” President Dwight D. Eisenhower, “Address at the Annual Convention of the American Bar Association,” Philadelphia, 24 August 1955; “Statement on Big Four Meeting,” CIO Executive Board, July 1955, box 4; untitled document (“The Geneva Summit . . .”), n.d., IAD Brown files, box 12, file 4; Lovestone to “Dear Friend,” 22 July 1955, Lovestone papers (Hoover), box 701, file: Dulles.

7. Lovestone to Brown, 29 February 1956, n.d. [February] 1956, and 15 March 1956, IAD Lovestone files, box 12, file 10.

8. Goulden, Meany, 272; David Burgess, Fighting for Social Justice: The Life Story of David Burgess, 112; Mohan Das, “Report from India,” 23 December 1955, Meany files, 1947–60, box 56, file 8; Tripathi to Meany, 14 December 1955, 14 March 1956, and Meany to Tripathi, 4 February 1956, ICFTU Archives, folder 359d; Ross to Brown, 27 February 1956, IAD Brown files, box 33, file 11; “Nehru Says Pacts Encircle Indians,” New York Times, 30 March 1956; “Mission to India,” New York Times, 3 April 1956; George Meany, “Criticism of Nehru,” New York Times, 13 April 1956.

9. Walter Reuther to J. F. Dulles, 23 March 1956, and Lovestone, “Memorandum on UAW President Walter P. Reuther’s Letter to Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, Dated 23 March 1956,” n.d., IAD Brown files, box 12, file 9; Stanley Levey, “Reuther Disputes Meany India Talk,” New York Times, 29 March 1956.

10. “Walter Reuther Statement on Arrival in Delhi, 4 April 1956,” Reuther-Carliner records, 1955–63, box 105, file 13. During his travels around India, Reuther was accompanied by labour attaché David Burgess, who calculated that he made 118 speeches in eleven days. Burgess, Fighting for Social Justice, 113; Walter P. Reuther, “India, the United States, and the Free World: Address Before the Indian Council on World Affairs,” New Delhi, 5 April 1956, in Henry M. Christman, ed., America’s Labor Statesman Speaks Out: Walter P. Reuther, Selected Papers, 108–20.

11. Lovestone to Brown, 23 April 1956, IAD Lovestone files, box 12, file 6.

12. The Free Trade Union News gave extensive space to the issue from April to August 1956. In September, it reported a sharp exchange between Meany and Nehru over the highly symbolic censoring in India of an award-winning film, With These Hands, made by the ILGWU, that dealt with the union’s battle with the communists. The film had been circulating in India for five years, but recently the Board of Censors had insisted on cuts of detrimental remarks about the USSR contained in the film and about the battle with the communists in the ILGWU in the 1920s. Burgess to Victor Reuther, 15 June 1956, Reuther-Carliner records, box 104, file 28.

13. Goulden, Meany, 273–75.

14. Lovestone, “Confidential,” 3 May 1956, IAD Lovestone files, box 12, file 9; Lovestone to Brown, 9 March and 24 April 1956, IAD Lovestone files, box 12, file 6.

15. Charles Millard (1896–1978) had been suggested for the job of ICFTU director of organization some months earlier by Bill Kemsley, based in the ICFTU’s New York office, and the Reuthers had quickly backed his candidacy. He was a labour official of considerable experience who had been an organizer of the unemployed during the Depression and then headed the autoworkers’ organizing drive in Canada in the 1930s before becoming the head of the CIO in Canada (which helped to organize the Canadian Congress of Labour, founded in 1940) and subsequently the leading figure in the steel union. A lay preacher as well as a democratic socialist, he had also served two terms in the Ontario provincial legislature as a representative of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation. In the 1940s, he had been regarded as the most powerful trade union figure in Canada. Representing the Canadian Congress of Labour, he was recognized as one of the more energetic members of the ICFTU’s Regional Activities Fund Committee from 1951 to 1954. With an ICFTU loyalist like him in the post, the director of organization would not be someone to shackle or undermine Oldenbroek, as originally envisaged by Lovestone, but someone who would work to expand the essential role of the ICFTU. Anthony Carew, “Charles Millard, a Canadian in the International Labour Movement: A Case Study of the ICFTU, 1955–61.”

16. A memorandum drafted by Dubinsky seems to have been the only written record of what was agreed to. “Memorandum,” transmitted to Lovestone by Dubinsky’s secretary Hanna Haskel, 8 November 1956, IAD Lovestone files, box 33, file 9; Kemsley to Oldenbroek, 24 June 1956, ICFTU Archives, folder 1121: Personal Correspondence of J. H. Oldenbroek; Millard to Geddes, 13 June 1956, United Steelworkers of America, Canadian Division fonds, MG28 I 103, vol. 34, LAC.

17. Lovestone to M. A. Khatib, 8 June 1956, Lovestone papers (Hoover), box 367, file: David Dubinsky, 1956–70; Lovestone to Deverall, 19 June 1956, IAD Lovestone files, box 12, file 9.

18. To ensure there was no doubting where he stood, Millard also disassociated his Canadian steelworkers’ union from Meany’s criticisms of Nehru. Millard to Oldenbroek, 3 January and 27 February 1956, ICFTU Archives, folder 1121: Personal Correspondence of J. H. Oldenbroek.

19. Lovestone to Deverall, 19 June 1956, and “Letter from Irving Brown,” 19 June 1956, IAD Lovestone files, box 12, file 7; Lovestone to Freitag, 19 June 1956, Lovestone papers (Hoover), box 369, file: Walter Freitag, 1956.

20. Deverall to Meany, 3 June 1956, Meany files, 1947–60, box 56, file 11. Deverall’s ICFTU post had been demanded by Meany following the winding up of the FTUC program in Asia.

21. “Letter from Irving Brown,” 19 June 1956, IAD Lovestone files, box 12, file 7.

22. Lovestone to Meany, 19 June 1956, Lovestone papers (Hoover), box 379, file: George Meany, 1950–59.

23. Lovestone to Brown, 26 June 1956, IAD Lovestone files, box 12, file 6.

24. Ibid.; Meany to Oldenbroek and Becu, 25 June 1956, CLC Archives, MG28 I 103, vol. 257, file 14.

25. Minutes of ICFTU Executive Board meeting, 2–7 July 1956, ICFTU Archives, folder 60; Irving Brown, “Report on ICFTU Executive Board Meeting, 2–7 July 1956,” Meany files, 1947–60, box 56, file 12; Gausmann to Kemsley, 18 July 1956, Kemsley papers, box 2, file 14.

26. Irving Brown, “Report on ICFTU Executive Board Meeting 2–7 July 1956,” Meany files, 1947–60, box 56, file 12; Brown to Lovestone, 2 July 1956, Lovestone papers (Hoover), box 355, file: Irving Brown, 1954–56; “Letter from Irving Brown,” 7 July 1956, IAD Lovestone files, box 12, file 7; Lovestone to Brown, 26 July 1956, IAD Lovestone files, box 12, file 6.

27. Walter Reuther to Potofsky, 20 July 1956, Reuther-Carliner records, 1956–62, box 83, file 25.

28. Millard to Krane, 10 September 1956, Krane papers, box 17, file 32.

29. Millard to Krane, 28 September 1956, Krane papers, box 17, file 32; agenda item 10: “Report by Director of Organizing,” ICFTU Executive Board meeting, 26–30 November 1956, ICFTU Archives, folder 62; Schnitzler to Oldenbroek, 19 August 1957, ICFTU Archives, folder 1121: Personal Correspondence of J. H. Oldenbroek.

30. Lovestone to Brown, 13 August 1956, IAD Lovestone files, box 12, file 6.

31. The solidarity fund for Poland was initially characterized as an extension of the ICFTU’s “Berlin Committee Fund,” which had financed activities in the Soviet zone following the 1953 Berlin uprising. As a member of the Berlin Committee, Irving Brown cabled asking the AFL-CIO to respond to the appeal. Among other things, he was concerned about his reputation among the Eastern European exiles belonging to the ICFTUE who were then cooperating with the CIA’s sensitive “redefection” program to the Soviet bloc. But Meany was unenthusiastic and irritated by Reuther’s decision that the AFL-CIO’s Industrial Union Department under his direction would itself contribute $50,000 to the appeal for Poland regardless of Meany’s reaction. Lovestone supported Meany and told Brown: “I will not give any assist. . . . I don’t trust Oldenbroek and co. with any finance for a Solidarity Fund,” adding that such funds were “rackets,” from which the Polish workers were unlikely to benefit. His reaction also reflected concern over factional disputes among the ICFTUE leadership and especially the fact that the organization’s $50,000 budget from the NCFE—now secretly channelled through the ICFTU but not recorded in its books—left it, as Brown said, “pretty much an instrument in the hands of the bureaucracy in Brussels.” “Projected Exile Trade Unionist Budget for Remainder of Fiscal Year 1955–56,” IAD Brown files, box 39, file 14; Volman to Brown, 13 September 1956, IAD Brown files, box 39, file 14; Brown to Ross, 18 October 1957, IAD Brown files, box 33, file 13.

32. Lovestone to Dubinsky, 24 May 1956, IAD Lovestone files, box 33, file 10; Lovestone to Brown, 30 July, 4 September, and 17 September 1956, IAD Lovestone files, box 12, file 6. Payments to the FTUC by the CIA almost halved between 1955 and 1956, when they amounted to only $25,239. By 1957, the only foreign activities being financed by the committee were in India ($3,950), Italy ($13,000), and Macao ($4,161). Lovestone papers (Hoover), box 417, file: Free Trade Union News.

33. Lovestone to Hannah Haskel, 24 April 1956, IAD Lovestone files, box 33, file 10; Lovestone, “Memorandum,” 24 September 1956, Meany files, 1947–60, box 56, file 14.

34. One of the factors in the dispute between Meany and Potofsky was the Industrial Union Department’s decision to upstage Meany with its donation to the solidarity fund for Poland. John Herling, “Meany-Reuther Rift?” Washington Daily News, 12 February 1957; W. H. Braine to A. Greenhough, 4 February 1957, LAB 13/1270; Goulden, Meany, 268–69.

35. Lovestone to “Dear Friend” [Dulles], 22 July and 19 September 1955, Lovestone papers (Hoover), box 701, file: Dulles; Lovestone to Meany, 1 August 1955, Meany files, 1947–60, box 56, file 6; Lovestone to Meany, 17 March 1958, Meany files, 1947–60, box 57, file 1.

36. Brown to Meany, 23 January 1956, including “Report from France,” 24 January 1956, Meany files, 1947–60, box 56, file 9. It is unclear whether Brown’s secrecy regarding the unnamed personnel meant that their commitment to the DGB-related project was uncertain or, perhaps, that he was afraid of their names leaking out to unsympathetic members of the international affairs staff in Washington.

37. Brown, “Memorandum on DGB Congress at Hamburg” (1–6 October 1956), n.d., IAD Brown files, box 12, file 7; Lovestone to Brown, 11 October 1956, IAD Brown files, box 12, file 6; Brown to Lovestone, 8 October 1957, IAD Brown files, box 12, file 11.

38. Willi Richter soon joined forces with leaders of other national trade union centres who called for the shutting down of the FTUC, and he complained vocally to Meany on a number of occasions about the way articles by Lovestone in the Free Trade Union News failed to reflect fairly the DGB point of view in international affairs. Richter to Meany, 23 May 1958, IAD Country files, 1945–71, box 2, file 9.

Willi Richter (1894–1972) was a skilled engineer who joined the metalworkers union in 1913 and worked for the city of Frankfurt, where he became a prominent trade unionist before losing his job under Nazism. He re-emerged as a leading trade union figure in the American zone in the late 1940s and was a full-time officer of the DGB from 1949 and an SPD deputy in the Bundestag, 1950–57. He was DGB chairman from 1956 to 1962.

39. “Recollections and Appreciation of Adenauer,” 1967, Lovestone papers (Cornell), box 3, file 51; Victor Reuther to Walter Reuther, 28 November 1956, Reuther-Carliner records, 1955–63, box 2, file 3.

40. Lovestone to Meany, 5 June 1957, Meany files, 1947–60, box 56, file 21.

41. Der Spiegel, 11 September 1957.

42. Brown to Meany, 23 January 1956, Irving Brown, “Report from France,” 2 February 1956, and “Letter from Irving Brown,” 16 February 1956, Meany files, 1947–60, box 56, file 9.

43. Brown to Lovestone, 15 April 1956, IAD Lovestone files, box 12, file 8; agenda item 11: “The Social and General Situation in Algeria and Its Repercussions on North African Labour as a Whole,” minutes of ICFTU Sub-Committee meeting, 9–11 April 1956, ICFTU Archives, folder 53; “M. Lacoste confirme à L’Internationale syndicale libre son opposition à l’entrée en Algérie de M. Irving Brown,” Le Monde, 13–14 May 1956. Brown’s support for UGTA over the more broadly based Union des syndicats des travailleurs algériens, with its stronger commitment to basic trade union aims, is interesting and was evidently based on the hope that the former would prove to be more nationalist than communist in the long run. Mathilde von Bülow, “Irving Brown and ICFTU Labour Diplomacy During Algeria’s Struggle for Independence 1954–62,” 221–24.

44. Meany to Guy Mollet, 14 June 1956, cited in Ben Rathbun, The Point Man: Irving Brown and the Deadly Post-1945 Struggle for Europe and Africa, 291.

45. Brown to Lovestone, 19 June 1956, IAD Lovestone files, box 12, file 7; Brown to Meany, 2 July and 27 July 1956, Meany files, 1947–60, box 56, file 12.

46. Lovestone to Brown, 26 June 1956, IAD Lovestone files, box 12, file 6. In fact, Victor Reuther did speak out on behalf of Brown when the recomposition of the Algerian delegation was being debated. He told the ICFTU executive board that as the ICFTU had asked Brown to perform a task, they now had a moral obligation to support him. Irving Brown, “Report on ICFTU Executive Board Meeting 2–7 July 1956,” Meany files, 1947–60, box 56, file 12.

47. Harry Goldberg, Report 5656 from Italy, 19 May 1956, Meany files, 1947–60, box 56, file 11; Lillie [Brown] to Lovestone, 22 June 1957, IAD Lovestone files, box 12, file 2. Delaney passed on the details of the meeting between the ambassador and the foreign minister to Bill Kemsley, based in the ICFTU’s New York office. Kemsley to Krane, 9 February 1958, Kemsley papers, box 3, file 7.

48. “Letter from Irving Brown,” 29 August 1958, IAD Brown files, box 7, file 17.

49. Levinson to Victor Reuther, 11 February and 10 March 1959, Reuther-Carliner records, 1955–63, box 120, file 2. Gaullist Prime Minister Michel Debré offered Lafond the post of minister of labour in 1959 on condition that Bothereau endorse the appointment, but Bothereau refused.

50. Kemsley to Krane, 28 January 1959, Reuther-Carliner records, 1955–63, box 124, file 11.

51. “Irving Brown Report,” 17 May 1957, Meany files, 1947–60, box 57, file 25.

52. Lovestone to Meany, 4 September and 10 September 1956, Meany files, 1947–60, box 56, file 14; “Irving Brown Report,” 17 May 1957, Meany files, 1947–60, box 57, file 25; Harry Goldberg, report nos. 5572, 5651, and 5671, from Italy, 3 October 1955, 3 May 1956, and 4 July 1956, Meany files, 1947–60, box 56, files 7, 11, and 12.

53. Barny Taylor to Victor Reuther, 31 July 1956, Victor Reuther papers, box 34, file 25; Gausmann to Victor Reuther, 7 January 1957, Reuther-Carliner records, 1955–63, box 95, file 20.

54. Adolphe Graedel to Walter Reuther, 4 April 1957 and 13 May 1957, Victor Reuther papers, box 43, file 19; Italo Viglianesi, “Programme for the Training of Union Leaders and Productivity Training,” 7 October 1958, Victor Reuther papers, box 36, file 19.

55. Brown to Meany, 3 June 1957, IAD Lovestone files, box 12, file 12.

56. Victor Reuther to Schevenels, 29 August 1957, Reuther-Carliner records, 1955–63, box 3, file 9.

57. “Memorandum” (unsigned: Fotis Makris?), 28 June 1957, Benedict papers, box 54, file 3, Business Correspondence, 1954–57; “Letter from Irving Brown,” 21 May 1957, Lovestone papers (Hoover), box 356, file: Irving Brown, 1957.

58. “Letter from Irving Brown,” 12 October 1958, Meany files, 1947–60, box 57, file 3.

59. Hugh Wilford, The CIA, the British Left and the Cold War: Calling the Tune? 244–45. Lovestone had advised Brown to steer Bill Schnitzler away from Brussels in the first instance, thereby dramatizing the fact that the ICFTU headquarters was being cold-shouldered. At the same time, he suggested that Dick Deverall, recently installed in his new position as special assistant in the ICFTU secretariat, should be invited to join Schnitzler’s party in London for the irritant effect it would have on the TUC: “Sir Vincent would probably get cross-eyed and might smoke his pipe from the wrong end. Watch me weep!” Before returning to the United States, Schnitzler did call in at the ICFTU head office, taking the opportunity to tell Jaap Oldenbroek and Jay Krane that it was they who were on trial and not the FTUC or Irving Brown. Lovestone to Brown, 24 August, 14 September, and 17 September 1956, IAD Lovestone files, box 12, file 6; “Report from Irving Brown,” 3 October 1956, Meany files, 1947–60, box 56, file 15.

60. Ben Rathbun, interview with Irving Brown, 5 April 1983, cited in Rathbun, The Point Man, 281, 306. No sum of $350,000 appears in the FTUC accounts, and the figure was certainly beyond the means of the AFL. In July 1952, Brown had a meeting in London with General William Donovan, former head of the OSS and still a presence in intelligence circles, to discuss the Tunisian situation. Lovestone to Brown, 16 July 1952, IAD Brown files, box 29, file 14. According to Rathbun’s account, the French foreign ministry complained to US ambassador David Bruce about Brown’s activities in Tunisia. The ambassador went through the motions and called him in to read out the French complaints. Brown responded that he was acting as a private citizen, not an agent of the US government, and it was therefore of no concern to the embassy. The two men then sat down and had a friendly chat about other matters.

61. In December 1954, Lovestone invited Tayeb Bouazza to New York and supplied him with funds to set up a Committee for the Establishment and Development of Free Trade Unions in Morocco, which later gave rise to the Union marocaine du travail (UMT), with the economist Mahjoub Ben Seddik as general secretary. Ted Morgan, A Covert Life: Jay Lovestone, Communist, Anti-Communist, and Spymaster, 256.

62. “Union Aide to Prod U.S.: Brown Pledges Drive to Back North African Nationals,” New York Times, 22 November 1956. “We have to give them certain types of military assistance to enable them to maintain order at home,” Lovestone wrote James Angleton. Morgan, A Covert Life, 256.

63. In answer to African calls within the ICFTU for the continent to be treated as a single entity with the creation of a regional trade union organization, Louis Major, of the Belgian FGTB, argued that such talk was meaningless as the territories differed so much. The Force ouvrière line was to reject any suggestion that it stand aside in favour of purely African unions. TUC general secretary Vincent Tewson maintained that much of the talk of “colonialism” was outdated; trade union rights existed in British territories, and the need was to focus on building unions patiently from the bottom up. This involved a time frame that plainly did not satisfy the Africans—or Americans. Minutes of ICFTU Executive Board meeting, 12–16 December 1955, ICFTU Archives, folders 44–55.

64. Krane to Kemsley, 10 August and 24 November 1956 and 2 January 1957, Kemsley papers, box 3, file 2; Victor Reuther to Walter Reuther, 10 September 1957, Reuther-Carliner records, 1955–63, box 3, file 10. Tom Mboya (1930–69) worked as a sanitary inspector for Nairobi City Council and became chair of its staff association, which later evolved into the Kenya Local Government Workers’ Union, affiliated to the Kenya Federation of Labour (KFL). Mboya became KFL general secretary in 1953, at a time when political parties were banned under the Mau Mau emergency. He used the KFL as a platform for the independence movement, which he led during the imprisonment of Jomo Kenyatta. In 1955–56, he studied at Ruskin College, Oxford. In 1958, he was elected chairman of the All-African Peoples’ Conference and, in 1960, helped found the Kenya African National Union, whose first general secretary he became. He remained KFL general secretary until 1963 but was already heavily involved in national politics as a member of the legislative assembly and negotiator at the Lancaster House independence talks in London. In the run-up to independence he served as minister of labour, and was later minister for justice and minister for economic planning. A potential successor to Kenyatta as president, he was assassinated in 1969.

65. Although not on the list of scheduled speakers at the ICFTU’s regional conference, Schnitzler ignored a specific request of chairman John Tettegah to limit his contribution to five minutes, speaking for much longer than anyone else. FO delegate Marcel Babeu protested that it ill became “fleeting guests” to attack other countries and, by implication, another ICFTU affiliate, when those same guests made no contribution to the Regional Activities Fund that had enabled the conference to take place. “Letter from Irving Brown,” 22 January 1957, Lovestone papers (Hoover), box 356, file: Irving Brown, 1957; “Draft Address for William Schnitzler—Accra ICFTU Conference,” Meany files, 1947–60, box 56, file 17; Krane to Millard, 22 January 1957, Kemsley papers, box 3, file 4; “Resolutions and Statements Adopted by the First African Regional Conference of the ICFTU,” TUC Archives, MSS 292/919.66/1: General Correspondence re the African Regional Bodies, ICFTU, 1952–57.

66. “Report to the President on the Vice President’s Visit to Africa, 5 April 1957,” Foreign Relations of the United States, 1955–1957, Africa, vol. 18; “Letter from Irving Brown,” 9 April 1957, Meany files, 1947–60, box 56, file 19; “Letter from Irving Brown,” 21 May 1957, Lovestone papers (Hoover), box 356, file: Irving Brown, 1957; Lovestone to Meany, 5 April 1957, Meany files, 1947–60, box 56, file 19.

67. “Report from Irving Brown,” 7 September 1956, and “Letter from Irving Brown,” 8–15 September 1956, Meany files 1947–60, box 56, file 14.

68. Lovestone to Meany, 10 September 1956, Meany files, 1947–60, box 56, file 14.

69. Lovestone to Brown, 28 September 1956, IAD Lovestone files, box 12, file 6.

70. Meany to Oldenbroek, 23 October 1956, and “Proposals for Action, Respectfully Submitted by the AFL-CIO to the ICFTU Executive Board Meeting, 26–30 November 1956,” Meany files, 1947–60, box 56, file 15.

71. James Carey to Meany, 28 November 1956, Reuther-Carliner records, 1955–63, box 83, file 25.

72. Krane to Kemsley, 14 November 1956, Kemsley papers, box 3, file 2.

73. Minutes of ICFTU Executive Board meeting, 26–30 November 1956, ICFTU Archives, folder 63; Krane to Kemsley, 2 January 1957, Kemsley papers, box 3, file 2; Irving Brown telegram transmitted by Lovestone to Meany, 1 December 1956, and handwritten note from Brown to Lovestone, n.d., Meany files, 1947–60, box 56, file 16.

74. Lovestone to Meany, 22 March and 11 April 1957, Meany files, 1947–60, box 56, files 18–19; note from Lovestone, n.d. [June?] 1957, Meany files, 1947–60, box 56, file 21; Victor Reuther to Gausmann, 21 December 1956, Reuther-Carliner records, 1955–63, box 2, file 6; Victor Reuther to Potofsky, 9 January 1957, Victor Reuther papers, box 53, file 11; Deverall to Meany, 28 April 1957, Meany files, 1947–60, box 56, file 19.

75. “Dissensions in International Workers Organization,” Times (London), 18 March 1957.

76. Lovestone to Meany, 22 March 1957, Meany files, 1947–60, box 56, file 18.

77. George Meany, “Conflicts of Policy,” Times (London), 12 April 1957. Meany wrote in the wake of a recent sharp exchange between Brown and Tewson over British obstruction of trade unions in Cyprus. Brown had been in the colony to take stock of the situation soon after the guerrilla fighting began and had reported on how, in a wholly discreditable episode, Vincent Tewson had colluded in a British government manoeuvre to grant union leader Michael Pissas freedom from prison, where he was being held without trial, provided he would agree to go into voluntary exile. Brown to Meany, 15 March 1957, Meany files, 1947–60, box 56, file 18; Tewson to Oldenbroek, 14 August 1956, ICFTU Archives, folder 1121: Personal Correspondence of J. H. Oldenbroek.

78. Walter Reuther to Meany, 11 January 1957, Victor Reuther papers, box 53, file 11; John Herling, “Meany-Reuther Rift?” Washington Daily News, 12 February 1957; W. H. Braine to A. Greenhough, 4 February 1957, LAB 13/1270.

79. Kemsley to Friedland, Gausmann and Krane, 23 March 1957, Kemsley papers, box 3, file 3; “Confidential B” [Krane to Ted Barber], 27 February 1957, Krane papers, box 17, file 8.

80. Kemsley to Gausmann, 24 February 1957, Kemsley papers, box 2, file 14. Shortly after his appointment as director, Ross confessed to Brown that Meany had assigned an AFL-CIO representative to a project in Singapore without consulting him and that he had no knowledge of the federation’s plans or program for the upcoming ICFTU congress. He told Brown: “At the moment am feeling more empty than ever.” Ross to Brown, 3 April 1957, IAD Brown files, box 33, file 13.

81. Hugh Chevins, “Inquiry into World Trade Union Dropped: U.S. Caused Offence,” Daily Telegraph, 18 June 1957; Brown to Meany, 18 May 1957, Meany files, 1947–60, box 56, file 20. The teamster corruption case focused unwelcome international attention on the seamier side of American trade unionism. In a report to Meany in March, Brown noted a marked increase in anti-Americanism in Europe and also observed that the teamster scandal had provided much ammunition for US labour’s enemies abroad. Indeed, Meany felt it necessary to write to the German magazine Der Spiegel to refute a charge that the corrupt behaviour of the teamster president, Dave Beck, had its roots in the form of business unionism developed by AFL founding president Samuel Gompers. Rejecting this allegation, Meany claimed that, through his misbehaviour, Beck had actually betrayed “Gompersism.” George Morris, “World of Labour: Meany’s Letter to Germany on Gompersism and Beckism,” Daily Worker, 1 July and 3 July 1957 (published in two parts).

82. Schnitzler to Oldenbroek, 12 June 1957, Meany files, 1947–60, box 56, file 21.

83. Lovestone to Meany, “Report Number 1,” 7 July 1957, Meany files, 1947–60, box 56, file 22. Omer Becu had tendered his resignation as ICFTU president the previous year, claiming pressure of work, but really to test the water for a possible challenge for the general secretaryship at the Tunis congress. He was subsequently persuaded to stay in the post until the 1957 congress, on the basis that there needed to be continuity in the dangerous period following the crushing of the Hungarian uprising in November 1956. At that point, he dissembled in insisting that there was no friction between himself and Oldenbroek. Having previously seen Becu as an international leader on whom they could pin their hopes, Lovestone and Brown were disillusioned by his contortions in shying away from a challenge for the ICFTU general secretaryship and by his unwillingness to be candid about his differences with Oldenbroek. Lovestone to Brown, 4 September 1956, IAD Lovestone files, box 12, file 6; minutes of ICFTU Executive Board meeting, 26–30 November 1956, ICFTU Archives, folder 65; Brown to Lovestone, 3 December 1956, Meany files, 1947–60, box 57, file 24.

Lovestone wrote: “I have arrived at the conclusion that Becu is a very strong man over a cup of coffee in a restaurant which isn’t very well lit. I can understand his withdrawing his resignation, but why he should have hid his reasons for it, is beyond me.” Lovestone to Brown, 7 December 1956, IAD Lovestone files, box 12, file 6. Brown was even more critical of Becu: “He lacks forcefulness and directness. His handling of his personal resignation has reduced him in size because no one is fooled about his ‘good’ reasons as distinct from his ‘real’ reasons for resigning. This is a damaging blow to whatever Becu could have done to take away the leadership and policy-making powers from Oldenbroek and Tewson. Whether he stays or not, Becu has become a sort of lame duck.” “Irving Brown Report,” 17 May 1957, and Brown to Meany, 18 May 1957, Meany files, 1947–60, box 56, file 20.

84. Victor Reuther to Walter Reuther, 7 July 1957, Reuther-Carliner records, 1955–63, box 3, file 7. Arne Geijer (1910–79) was president of the Swedish national trade union centre Landsorganisationen i Sverige (LO) from 1956 to 1973. A metalworker by trade, he had previously been for over ten years the general secretary and then president of the metalworkers’ union. He combined his trade union role with the duties of a social democratic deputy in the Swedish parliament. His presidency of the ICFTU ran from 1957 to 1965. A man of few words but considerable presence, he became the public face of the powerful Swedish labour movement throughout the high point of that country’s successful tripartite system of industrial relations from the 1950s to the 1970s. He was, and remained throughout, Walter Reuther’s closest European ally.

85. Lovestone to Meany, “Report Number 1,” 7 July 1957, Meany files, 1947–60, box 56, file 22.

86. “U.S. Labour Rift Apparent Abroad,” New York Times, 20 October 1957; Goulden, Meany, 277.

87. Victor Reuther to Gausmann, 27 August 1958, Reuther-Carliner records, 1955–63, box 4, file 15; Victor Reuther to Schevenels, 29 August 1957, Reuther-Carliner records, 1955–63, box 3, file 9; Victor Reuther to Krane, 18 April 1957, Reuther-Carliner records, 1955–63, box 2, file 21; Victor Reuther to Krane, 4 September 1957, Reuther-Carliner records, 1955–63, box 3, file 10; Victor Reuther to George Weaver, 9 September 1957, Reuther-Carliner records, 1955–63, box 3, file 10. With the Reuther campaign to remove Joe Godson as London attaché on the point of succeeding, Lovestone noted that “GM [George Meany] simply will not and cannot get involved in any assignment of government personnel,” while admitting coyly: “I am not supposed to be, but I do get myself involved.” Lovestone to Brown, 6 October 1958, IAD Brown files, box 29, file 18.

88. Stanley Levey, “Labour Reshapes Foreign Policies,” New York Times, 9 December 1957; A. M. Morgan, “U.S.A. Labour Review for the Year Ended 31 December 1957,” LAB 13/1215.

89. “Letter from Irving Brown,” 14 October 1957, Meany files, 1947–60, box 56, file 23.

90. Brown to Lovestone, 7 January 1957, Lovestone papers (Hoover), box 355, file: Irving Brown, 1954–56; “Letter from Irving Brown,” 24 September 1958, IAD Lovestone files, box 12, file 13.

91. Handwritten letter from Lovestone to Meany, n.d. [December 1957], Lovestone papers (Hoover), box 379, file: George Meany.

92. Victor Reuther to Gausmann, 17 December 1957, Reuther-Carliner records, 1955–63, box 3, file 18; Walter Reuther to Oldenbroek, 16 December 1957, ICFTU Archives, folder 1121: Personal Correspondence of J. H. Oldenbroek.

93. However, within a few short months Brown was bemoaning George Harrison’s performance as fraternal delegate at the TUC annual conference, reporting that he had spoken approvingly of Walter Reuther in conversation with British labour leaders while falling for Vincent Tewson’s clever suggestion that he leave out the more controversial anti-colonial passages of his speech so as not to prompt a walkout by the conference delegates. “Letter from Irving Brown,” 15 September 1958, and Lovestone to Brown, 19 September 1958, Lovestone papers (Hoover), box 356, file: Irving Brown, 1958.

94. Lovestone to Deverall, 12 December and 31 December 1957, Victor Reuther papers, box 31, file 7. The Free Trade Union Committee’s operations were now ended, but the committee’s bank account remained active until at least 1961 and was used to make payments to Lovestone’s network of reporters, ostensibly for material supplied to the Free Trade Union News, seemingly from funds channelled by James Angleton through the “Gompers Library.” See Lovestone papers (Hoover), box 343, file: FTUC Financial Documents, 1961. In listing the members of the AFL-CIO’s international affairs staff, the GMMA records Lovestone as the director of the Free Trade Union Committee from 1949 to 1963. “Descriptive Inventory, RG 18-001: International Affairs Department, Country Files, 1945–71,” p. 6, GMMA.

95. Krane to Kemsley, 17 December and 29 December 1957, Kemsley papers, box 3, file 6.

96. H. F. B. Fane to A. Greenhough, 8 June 1956, LAB 13/1218; A. M. Morgan to Wilson, 13 December 1957, LAB 13/1270.

97. Lovestone to Meany, 10 November 1958, Meany files, 1947–60, box 57, file 3; “Memorandum of Interview: Discussion with Mr. Walter Reuther, AFL-CIO, 7 May 1959,” TUC Archives, MSS 292/973/16: Trade Unions, U.S., 1959–60.

98. Lovestone to Brown, 8 September 1958, IAD Lovestone files, box 12, file 13.

99. On his East African trip, Randolph delivered in person the AFL-CIO’s $35,000 grant for the KFL headquarters building to Mboya. Schnitzler to Mboya, 28 May 1957, IAD Country files, 1945–71, box 11, file 4.

100. For Springer’s account of her brief but eventful involvement in the training program, see Yevette Richards, Maida Springer: Pan-Africanist and International Labor Leader, chap. 6. Evidence of intense opposition from the British Colonial Office and the TUC to the original AFL-CIO program is to be found in “Proposed Contacts Between American Trade Union Movement and African Trade Unionists, 1957–58,” LAB 13/1271. Victor Reuther informed his brother that the State Department was alarmed at the damage Springer’s African trip might do to Anglo-American relations and that Assistant Secretary of State Robert Murphy had tried to get Meany to delay the mission. Victor Reuther to Walter Reuther, 9 October 1957, Reuther-Carliner records, 1955–63, box 3, file 12.

Maida Springer (1910–2005) had been education director in her ILGWU local and later business agent. She studied at Ruskin College, Oxford, in 1951–52 and, in 1959, was invited by Golda Meir to spend a year in Israel assisting with a program for a vocational training school for African women. She provided lodgings for Tom Mboya on his first visit to the United States and shortly after attended the ICFTU’s first African Regional Conference in Accra. From 1960 to 1966, she worked for the AFL-CIO International Affairs department.

101. Brown to Meany, 9 November 1957, Lovestone papers (Hoover), box 355, file: Irving Brown, 1954–56; Millard to Tewson, 19 November 1957, Kemsley papers, box 3, file 15; minutes of TUC International Committee meetings, 26 November and 17 December 1957 and 22 April 1958; minutes of TUC Commonwealth Advisory Committee meetings, 5 February, 2 April, and 16 July 1958; minutes of TUC General Council meeting, 26 February 1958, TUC Archives, MSS 292D/901; Millard to Tewson, 22 May 1958, TUC Archives, MSS 292/901/145; minutes of AFL-CIO International Affairs Committee meeting, 14 March 1958, IAD Brown files, box 33, file 14; Gausmann to Victor Reuther, 28 June 1959, Reuther-Carliner records, 1955–63, box 95, file 23.

102. “Confidential Report from Irving Brown,” 1 March 1958, Meany files, 1947–60, box 57, file 1.

103. “Report of General Secretaries’ Conference Held at Arusha, 15 February 1958,” Lovestone papers (Hoover), box 379, file: Tom Mboya, 1958–63.

104. Mboya to Meany, 11 March 1958, Lovestone papers (Hoover), box 379, file: Tom Mboya, 1958–63.

105. Mboya to Meany, 15 May, 4 June, and 27 November 1958, IAD Country files, 1945–71, box 11, file 4. Replying positively to one such financial appeal, Mike Ross wrote guardedly of the criticism heaped on the AFL-CIO following the original contentious donation of $35,000 but explained: “We are pursuing every possibility. . . . It probably would not be advisable to have much publicity around this matter. . . . You will be notified as soon as possible, and I know that we can rely on your discretion in this matter.” Ross to Mboya, 17 December 1958, IAD Brown files, box 33, file 14. A further $21,000 was later paid to the KFL without fuss or publicity. Harold Jack to Riggs National Bank, Washington, 18 February 1960, IAD Country files, 1945–71, box 11, file 5.

106. Mboya to George McCray, 6 February 1958, IAD Country files, 1945–71, box 11, file 4; Mboya to A. Philip Randolph, 30 January 1959, IAD Brown files, box 7, file 18.

107. The WFTU had only three affiliates in Africa, whereas the ICFTU had fourteen. Communist support for “neutrality”—meaning, in trade union terms, withdrawal from non-African organizations—was clearly intended to damage the ICFTU more than the WFTU. For an interesting treatment of “neutralism” in African trade unions, see John C. Stoner, “‘We Will Follow a Nationalist Policy; but We Will Never Be Neutral’: American Labour and Neutralism in Cold War Africa, 1957–1962.”

108. Irving Brown, “Report on the Accra Conference,” 9 December 1958, and Brown to Meany, 24 December 1958, enclosing “Report on All-African People’s Congress, 5–14 December 1958,” IAD Brown files, box 7, file 17; Maida Springer, “Observations of the AAPC Held in Accra and Its Trade Union Implications, 1–13 December 1958,” and George F. McCray, “Observations on the AAPC at Accra, 8–13 December 1958,” IAD Country files 1945–71, box 14, file 14; Brown to Lovestone, 26 December 1958, Lovestone papers (Hoover), box 356, file: Irving Brown, 1958; Brown to Lovestone, 7 January 1959, Meany files, 1947–60, box 57, file 4.

109. John Tettegah to Brown, 19 March 1959, IAD Brown files, box 7, file 18.

110. Brown to Meany, 24 December 1958, and Brown to Ross, 26 December 1958, IAD Brown files, box 7, file 17.

111. Brown to Lovestone, 24 December 1958, IAD Brown files, box 7, file 17; Lovestone to Meany, 22 December 1958, Meany files, 1947–60, box 57, file 3.

112. Meany to Oldenbroek, 9 January 1959, and Oldenbroek to Meany, 21 January 1959, CLC Archives, reel H-180; “Statement by the AFL-CIO Executive Council on Africa,” 20 February 1959, TUC Archives, MSS 292/901/15.

113. As the leader of the black trade unions in francophone West Africa, Sékou Touré doubted the AFL-CIOs commitment. He had complained to Brown on many occasions that “Americans are always there after the battle is won in order to feather their own nest. While the fight for freedom is on [they] are the absentees.” Irving Brown, untitled commentary on Africa, 11 February 1961, IAD Brown files, box 8, file 2.

114. David Goldsworthy, Tom Mboya: The Man Kenya Wanted to Forget, 116–19. Mboya urged more dynamism to override TUC fears of African nationalism. Reuther’s erstwhile American critics such as Maida Springer, who laid the abandonment of the AFL-CIO’s Africa training program at his door, viewed his change of heart with wry amusement. Lovestone commented sarcastically: “Nobody reminded our ‘saintly’ brother that this was a [new] line for him and that he owed it to himself as well as to us to explain why he changed his old position.” Richards, Maida Springer, 193.

Victor Reuther’s first reaction to the idea of sending black American organizers to Africa had been to oppose it on the grounds that American chances of being able to influence the policies of European governments in Africa through their trade union centres would be very limited if the AFL-CIO were to resume a freewheeling role. But a few months later a highly critical commentary on the TUC policy in Africa prepared by the UAW noted the British tendency to disregard the economic, social, and political problems faced in Africa and to explain the weakness of its labour movement almost exclusively in terms of the personal shortcomings of its leaders. The TUC said nothing about the obstacles presented by colonialism and the absence of progressive labour legislation. Victor Reuther to Walter Reuther, 12 February 1959, Reuther-Carliner records, 1955–63, box 5, file 3; “Notes on TUC Memorandum on African Trade Unions,” Reuther-Carliner records, 1955–63, box 95, file 28. Mboya kept up his flow of complaints about the ICFTU to the Reuthers, protesting to Victor two months later that the Brussels secretariat had prevented the KFL from purchasing a motor vehicle. Mboya to Victor Reuther, 4 July 1959, forwarded to Walter Reuther, 13 July 1959, Reuther-Carliner records, 1955–63, box 5, file 11; Gausmann to Victor Reuther, 26 October 1959, Reuther-Carliner records, 1955–63, box 95, file 23.

115. Goldsworthy, Tom Mboya, 152, 156, 161–62; Tettegah to Mboya, 14 December 1960, IAD Country files, 1945–71, box 10, file 20. Mboya was increasingly the object of a whispering campaign that he was a tool of the Americans and a traitor to pan-Africanism. Following the ICFTU congress in December 1959, a document purporting to be an annexe to a British government cabinet paper began to circulate in Africa. It reviewed the ICFTU’s activities in Africa in terms of rival schemes by the British and US government to take control of African trade unionism in the post-colonial world. The document represented Mboya as an unscrupulous tool of the Americans whose main motivation was pecuniary gain. The British insisted that the document was a forgery, while Mboya answered it at length and claimed it was the work of Gogo Nzeribe, a Nigerian communist trade union leader. Seven years later, during the war in Biafra, Nzeribe was murdered while in the custody of the Nigerian military government. In 1969, Mboya himself was assassinated in Nairobi. “Annexe to Cabinet Paper on Policy in Africa,” 12 December 1959, and Hood to Feather, 30 November 1960, “Dependent Territories: Assistance, ICFTU and America,” TUC Archives, MSS 292/932/551; Gogo Nzeribe, The Great Conspiracy Against Africa, NTUC, December 1960; Tom Mboya, “No Conflict of Loyalties: Tom Mboya Replies to the Ghana Times,” Free Labour World (May 1960): 185–87.

116. Reuther to Geijer, 26 May 1959, Victor Reuther papers, box 26, file 6.

117. Lovestone to Meany, 11 June 1959, IAD Lovestone files, box 69, file 26; Brown to Lovestone, 5 June 1959, Lovestone papers (Hoover), box 356, file: Irving Brown, 1959.

118. Brown cable to Lovestone, 3 July 1959, IAD Lovestone files, box 12, file 15; Geijer to Walter Reuther, 6 July 1959, Birger Viklund personal papers, Arbetarrörelsens arkiv och bibliotek, Stockholm.

119. Reuther to Geijer, 22 July 1959, Victor Reuther papers, box 26, file 11.

120. Kemsley to Adamczyk, 4 February 1959, Kemsley papers, box 2(1); “Memorandum of Conversation at Luncheon with Soviet Deputy Premier A. I. Mikoyan, 6 January 1959,” Reuther-Carliner records, 1955–63, box 100, file 7; John Herling, “U.S. Labour vs. Mikoyan”; Frank Cormier and William J. Eaton, Reuther, 362–63.

121. “Khrushchev and the American Unions,” The Freedom Fund, April 1960, Reuther-Carliner records, 1955–63, box 100, file 8; Trud, 29 October 1959; Cormier and Eaton, Reuther, 363–67.

122. Brown to Lovestone, 10 October 1959, Lovestone papers (Hoover), box 356, file: Irving Brown, 1959; Brown to J. M. Aguirre, 26 November 1959, IAD Brown files, box 23, file 11.

123. Brown to Lovestone, 27 July and 10 October 1959, Lovestone papers (Hoover), box 356, file: Irving Brown, 1959.

124. It is of interest that in the same year that Adenauer honoured Meany and Lovestone, Willy Brandt’s choice of guest speaker at the SPD’s May Day rally in Berlin was Walter Reuther. Anthony Carew, Walter Reuther, 97–98. For the Reuthers’ view of the Adenauer-Brandt rivalry and how it impinged on them, see Victor Reuther, The Brothers Reuther, 347.

125. ICFTU Report of Sixth World Congress, Brussels, 3–11 December 1959 (Brussels: ICFTU, 1960), 259, 372–73, 431–33, 435.

126. The resolution for the appointment of the ad hoc committee was introduced by Geijer and seconded by Walter Reuther. ICFTU Report of the Sixth World Congress, 525–39; Times (London), 7 December 1959. A strong supporter of Oldenbroek, Bill Kemsley would refer to this as “Reuther’s dirty job.” Earlier in the congress he had tried to persuade Reuther against forcing the resolution through, but the UAW leader rounded on him and told him that so long as he kept his nose clean and stopped meddling in ICFTU politics, he would continue to have a job. This was the end of Kemsley’s long association with Walter Reuther; within a year he had resigned from the ICFTU in disillusionment. Author interview with William Kemsley, 19 April 1987. Also in disagreement with American tactics, Vincent Tewson asked rhetorically what the ICFTU’s reaction would have been had it been a case of Soviet trade unions bringing heavy-handed pressure to get rid of Louis Saillant as general secretary of the WFTU. Tewson to Geijer, 15 June 1959, Birger Viklund personal papers, Arbetarrörelsens arkiv och bibliotek, Stockholm.

127. Geijer to Walter Reuther, 8 January 1960, and Walter Reuther to Geijer, 7 January 1960, Geijer personal papers, box 54; Walter Reuther to Becu, 28 January 1960, Becu papers (ICFTU); Walter Reuther to Geijer, 28 January and 15 February 1960, Reuther-Carliner records, 1955–63, box 123, file 12; Geijer to Walter Reuther, 3 March 1960, Reuther-Carliner records, 1955–63, box 123, file 12.

True to type, Becu appeared to waver for a few weeks in April–May 1960. He told colleagues in the International Transport Workers’ Federation that he did not envisage leaving the organization and even proposed that its head office be moved to Brussels. His motivation was never clear. Was he hoping for a more congenial location in his native Belgium as the price for staying with the ITF? Did he then perhaps envisage combining the general secretaryship of the ITF and the ICFTU, as his predecessor, Edo Fimmen, had done in the 1920s? Or was he manufacturing an artificial dispute with his ITF colleagues and thereby creating an excuse for leaving an organization to which he was emotionally committed? Harold Lewis, “The International Transport Workers’ Federation (ITF) 1945–65,” 62–65. The latter seems the more plausible explanation and ties in better with his reasoning in his letter of resignation on 12 May 1960. The unfortunate manner of his leaving the ITF, and the fact that he also went back on his long-standing commitment not to challenge Oldenbroek for the leadership of the ICFTU while the latter held the post, played badly in Europe, with negative consequences for him during his early months as ICFTU general secretary.

128. Agenda item 12: “Recommendations of the Ad Hoc Committee,” minutes of ICFTU Executive Board meeting, 27 June–2 July 1960, ICFTU Archives, folder 103a. Noting that copies of Geijer’s report were collected up at the end of the meeting and destroyed, Millard described it as the worst document he had ever seen and commented that the manner in which Oldenbroek was treated had no place in a democratic movement. Millard to Kemsley, 5 July 1960, Kemsley papers, box 3, file 17.

129. Irving Brown, untitled report (“On Tuesday, June 28, a closed session of the Executive Board . . .”), n.d., Meany files, 1947–60, box 58, file 2.

130. Ibid.; minutes of ICFTU Executive Board meeting, 27 June–1 July 1960, ICFTU Archives, folder 103a.

131. Along with Oldenbroek, Millard, and Krane, other key figures also left the ICFTU around this time, providing further scope for a fresh start. Alois Adamczyk, whose direction of the ICFTU department responsible for monitoring Eastern Europe and developments under communism more generally had never impressed Lovestone, died in 1959; Bill Kemsley was soon to quit as director of its New York office, while Assistant General Secretary Hans Gottfurcht retired.

132. Lovestone to Brown, 11 July 1960, Lovestone papers (Hoover), box 356, file: Irving Brown, 1960. The British labour counsellor in Washington actually believed that Lovestone would have preferred Oldenbroek to survive—“for nuisance value”—so as to have a scapegoat when Lovestone himself failed. Kemsley to Krane, 29 May 1960, Kemsley papers, box 3, file 11.