later moved Goldberg to Italy after the latter publicly accused President Ahmed Sukarno of an “outstanding lack of statesmanship.”)14 A former labor education officer in the U.S. military government in Japan, the brilliant but neurotic Richard Deverall, presided over an FTUC bureau in Tokyo until he too was recalled due to his habit of accusing U.S. embassy staff of being secret communists. Willard R. Etter, another ex-government officer whose excessive anticommunism had gotten him in trouble with his superiors (he was sent home from the U.S. consulate in Shanghai after claiming to have discovered a nest of communist agents there) set up shop on Formosa (Taiwan) and trained Chinese nationalists to carry out espionage and sabotage on the communist mainland. In February 1950, Wisner, his fascination with paramilitary “rollback” operations as yet undimmed, approved a six-month “laundry budget” for Etter of $145,472.15 The FTUC, it seemed, had an agent in every major theater of the Cold War, functioning, in the apt phrase of Lovestone’s biographer, Ted Morgan, as a sort of “anti-Cominform.”16
Before the CIA’s front operations were exposed, American trade unionists who went abroad to fight communism in foreign labor organizations during the early years of the Cold War tended to be portrayed in writings on the subject as disinterested, even heroic, defenders of political freedom.17
After the revelations of the late 1960s, this view was exchanged for the image of a puppet on a string, with the individuals involved now depicted as so many stooges, or “patsies,” of the American national security state.18
In recent years, with the opening to researchers of Jay Lovestone’s volumi-nous personal files, a third picture has emerged.19 This presents a far more complicated relationship than was previously painted, one in which both sides jealously guarded their independence and even fought each other for control of covert operations.
The first issue to come between the OPC and FTUC was, perhaps predictably, money. To be sure, Lovestone was glad of the extra income coming from his “luncheon friend,” Wisner—it had been clear for some time that the AFL’s subsidies were not enough on their own to support the sort of activities that were needed to win the Cold War contest for labor’s allegiance.20 But his long experience in anti-Stalinist political warfare meant that Lovestone was bound to resent any attempts by the OPC to tell him
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how its money should be spent. He adopted a simple definition of his new patron’s role: it was to provide large quantities of cash, then leave the actual job of fighting communism to himself and his agents. Lovestone’s attitude toward the professional spies with whom he dealt was condescend-ing, even disdainful. They were raw novices in the struggle against Stalin, dashing perhaps, but lacking in substance. The code name he invented for them summed it up: they were the “Fizz kids.”21
Unfortunately for Lovestone, the OPC did not share this interpretation of its role. Although generous, its subsidies were not indiscriminate.
Rather, they were carefully targeted, reflecting the U.S. government’s strategic priorities in the Cold War. Hence, when in 1950 the focus of international tension in Southeast Asia shifted from China to Korea, support for Willard Etter’s insurgency operation on Formosa dried up, leaving several of his agents stranded on the Chinese mainland, where they were soon captured and executed. Lovestone was appalled. “I curse the day I ever introduced you to that pack of bribers and corrupters in Washington,” he told Etter.22 Meanwhile, Brown’s operations in Europe were constantly stymied by the failure of the OPC to honor the financial pledges Wisner had made to Lovestone. “Volumes” for “the lumber people” were promised and then withheld; delays to the “French budget” meant Brown was unable to purchase any “perfume”; having assured Lovestone “that there would be five cook books for the spaghetti chefs,” the Fizz kids
“backwatered and doublecrossed” him.23 To add insult to injury, the OPC
also demanded that Lovestone provide a fuller accounting of his spending than the AFL had required, CIA security chief Sheffield Edwards even opening the FTUC’s mail to monitor its expenditures.24 Lovestone was in-furiated by what he perceived as “petty snooping” and “insolent bookkeeping.”25 In April 1951 he told his CIA liaison, Samuel D. Berger, that he was on the verge of instructing “Irving, Goldberg, Deverall and all our other friends to pack their grips, close their shops, and come home. You see,” he continued, “I am not a nylon merchant—black market or otherwise. I do not intend to lend aid and comfort to any attempt of second-class bookkeepers determining the policies of our organization.”26