Considering this prehistory of voluntary and highly effective anticommunist agitation, it is hardly surprising that Frank Wisner should have wanted to team up with Jay Lovestone. Not only was the latter supremely knowledgeable about the Cold War enemy—“He is better informed on the subject of Communist theory as well as its activities than anyone I know,” Donovan once told a colleague—his hatred of Stalinism was such that he even felt compelled, during an audience in the Sistine Chapel, to lecture Pope Pius XII on the subject (prompting the pontiff to respond, “But, Mr. Lovestone, I too am anti-Communist”).8 More important still was the fact that, by virtue of their association with the AFL, the Lovestoneites enjoyed unrivaled connections to the trade union movement in western Europe, a crucial battleground in the propaganda Cold War, given European labor’s vast postwar power, both economic and political, and its historic susceptibility to communist influence. Here, then, was the perfect cover for U.S. government-sponsored political warfare of the sort envisioned by George Kennan: a group of private American citizens, with conspicuous access to sources of nonofficial financial support, aiding “indigenous anti-Communist elements in threatened countries of the free world.” There was also the precedent of the OSS’s labor operations and the tradition of tolerance of, even sympathy for, non-communist left tendencies bequeathed to the CIA by World War II.
Lovestone and Wisner were formally introduced by the Free Trade Union Committee’s chairman, photo-engravers’ leader Matthew Woll, in December 1948.9 The FTUC received its first payment from the Office of Policy Coordination, $35,000, the following month. This and subsequent subsidies were disguised in the FTUC’s accounts as donations from private individuals and referred to in the code language Lovestone soon evolved for his secret dealings with Wisner as “books” or “volumes” from the OPC’s “library.”10 Such payments soon overtook AFL contributions as a
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source of revenue for the FTUC: whereas by the end of 1949, union subsidies added up to a mere $56,000, “individual gifts” totaled some $203,000.11 Having been laundered by Lovestone in New York, OPC
funds were transferred to Brown in Europe via a variety of different bank accounts. The FTUC’s European representative also received payments directly from Marshall Plan officials or American embassy personnel drawing on the so-called counterpart funds.
Aided by his wife and secretary, Lillie, the indefatigable Brown then piggybacked the OPC monies to anticommunist labor elements all over the European continent. Some of these, such as Jouhaux’s Force Ouvrière and Ferri-Pisani’s Mediterranean Vigilance Committee in France, or the socialist unionists in Italy’s new anticommunist labor center, the Confederazione Italiana Sindacati Lavoratori, had already benefited from the genuinely private largesse of the AFL. Correspondence between Brown and Lovestone, who demanded regular reports from his lieutenant about events in Europe, contained frequent references to the purchase of
“French perfume” or “spaghetti.” (There was more than a hint of tongue-in-cheek humor about the code words invented by the Lovestoneites, who had been using secret language ever since the 1920s, when the U.S.
communist movement was compelled to adopt an underground or “illegal” existence.) “Lumber merchants” was Lovestoneite code for a new addition to the FTUC’s list of clients: socialist members of the Central Organization of Finnish Trade Unions (SAK), who from late 1949 became a major recipient of concealed U.S. government assistance.12 Reflecting a tendency for OPC front groups to overlap and sometimes become entangled, the FTUC also backed the exile operations of the National Committee for a Free Europe, including an International Center for Free Trade Unionists in Exile housed in the Paris offices of the Force Ouvrière, and an NCFE Labor Contacts Division in New York, designed to act as a focus for émigré eastern European unionists in the United States.13
Although the best known and most effective, Brown was not the only FTUC field agent handling OPC subsidies, nor were covert labor operations confined to western Europe. Lovestone had a network of agents, mostly ex-communists like himself, spanning the entire “free world.” In Indonesia, an old follower, the outspoken Harry Goldberg, ran a training program designed to rally noncommunist labor groups against the WFTU-affiliated All-Indonesian Central Labor Organization, SOBSI. (Lovestone
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