As well as effectively destroying Wisner, Hungary signaled the final abandonment by Washington of both the main strategic goal identified by Kennan in the late 1940s, the disintegration of the Soviet empire, and the principal tactic used to achieve that purpose, the covert use of eastern-bloc émigrés. A few irreconcilables, such as C. D. Jackson, still banged the rollback drum; and some CIA money continued to find its way through the NCFE to exile organizations, such as Brutus Coste’s Assembly of Captive European Nations (ACEN) (which, like the National Councils, caused its share of headaches for its covert patron). Most, however, accepted that the future of American policy in eastern Europe now lay in the encouragement of gradual reform—“evolution, not revolution.” In May 1958, the National Security Council decreed that government officials should no longer work as closely with the “national committees”
because “there [was] no evidence that émigré politicians [had] any significant following in their homelands.” And in a message clearly intended for the American management of RFE and RL as well as the Voice of America, the NSC discouraged “the use of U.S. Government facilities to convey messages of exiled leaders.”91 The fading of rollback was accompanied by the death, in February 1959, of one of its most stalwart advocates, Wild Bill Donovan, whose last substantial act of government service had been helping Hungarian refugees over the Austrian border three years earlier.92
Of course, this is not to say that the CIA gave up using émigré leaders altogether. Exiles would form an important element in agency programs for new theaters of operation, most notably Fidel Castro’s Cuba (with equally little success). Neither would the front group tactic Kennan had borrowed from the communists be discarded. Indeed, its use in liberation proved to be one of its less significant Cold War applications. The CIA front only really came into its own in the other major field earmarked for covert action in Kennan’s 1948 political warfare plan: the
“support of indigenous anti-Communist elements in threatened countries of the free world.”
T H R E E
AFL-CIA
L A B O R
In March 1951 an FBI wiretap picked up the following conversation between former OSS chief Wild Bill Donovan and Jay Lovestone, onetime leader of the U.S. Communist Party (CPUSA) and now chief foreign policy advisor to the American Federation of Labor (AFL):
Besides showing how disaffected with the CIA the retired American spymaster had grown by 1951, this dialogue reveals two important characteristics of the CIA’s front program in the first years of the Cold War.
One of these was the Agency’s readiness to employ in its covert operations members of the so-called non-communist left (NCL)—that is, trade unionists, socialists or social democratic politicians, and even former communists like Lovestone—mainly because of their preexisting links with similar elements in western Europe. The other was the tendency of the NCL groups involved, especially the ex-communists, to chafe against the
52
A F L- C I A
constraints imposed on them by clandestine official patronage. These two factors are the dominant themes of the United States’s first major campaign in the Cold War contest for western hearts and minds.
Jay Lovestone’s life story reads like a strange, shadowy, even sinister version of the classic American narrative of the poor immigrant boy made good. The son of a Polish rabbi, Lovestone emigrated to the United States in 1907 at the age of nine and grew up on New York City’s Lower East Side, a lanky and startlingly blond-haired adolescent with a reputation as a tough neighborhood boxer and magnetic soapbox orator. Like many other cash-strapped but bright young Jewish men of his generation, he attended New York’s City College, where he thrived in a gladiatorial atmosphere of aggressive intellectualism and factional radicalism. After graduating in 1919, he rose rapidly to the position of general secretary in the newly formed CPUSA before being deposed by Stalin during the 1929
Comintern congress in Moscow for his “deviationist” position on the question of American “exceptionalism.” “Who do you think you are?” the Soviet leader shouted at the rebellious U.S. delegation. “Trotsky defied me. Where is he? Zinoviev defied me. Where is he? Bukharin defied me.