Lovestone’s growing suspicion that Wisner was interested in initiating a relationship with the CIO was confirmed during a meeting held in the office of the Director of Central Intelligence in Washington on the morning of November 21, 1950. The purpose of this gathering was to allow the new DCI, Walter Bedell Smith, to meet with the international staff of the AFL and review the covert operations they were jointly undertaking. In attendance were George Meany (identified in coded minutes taken by Offie as “Mr. Plumber”), Woll (Photographer), Dubinsky (Garment Worker), Lovestone (Intellectual), Smith (Soldier), and Wisner (Lawyer). After an opening exchange of pleasantries between Woll and Smith, Lovestone took the opportunity to remind those present that the AFL had been active in the foreign labor field long before “Mr. Soldier’s employers” and that the federation’s total expenditure on international activities since 1945 far exceeded that of the OPC. The DCI then invited comments on possible future operations, “and the discussion moved to bringing another organization into the work.” Wisner admitted “that there had taken place certain conversations on this subject.” Then, one
62
A F L- C I A
by one, the AFL officers announced their objections, citing “the organization’s” (the CIO was never referred to by name) “inexperience, its insecurity and penetration by unreliable elements.” Meany was particularly vocal on this score, “mentioning dates, names, and places” of communist infiltration. The official response was emollient: Smith declared himself
“much impressed” by the unionists’ arguments, and Wisner laid out the tough conditions that any other organization would have to satisfy before receiving covert funding, including the existence of an established foreign apparatus and the swearing of secrecy oaths. After some further discussion of information exchange, the drafting of a Charter of Operations to for-malize the partnership (it is not clear if any such document was ever produced), and specific operations in South America, Germany, and France, the meeting broke up in a reasonably amicable atmosphere, with Smith reassuring the unionists that “he did not for one moment regard funds provided by his organization as a subsidy for the labor movement,” and Woll stating “that the chief value of labor in foreign operations was its independence from government influence.”42
Wisner’s comments were, of course, designed to leave the door open to possible dealings with the CIO, and in the months that followed the AFL-CIA summit, Lovestone’s worst fears were confirmed. In December, Allen Dulles arrived in the Agency, bringing with him as his assistant a young ex-OSS officer by the name of Thomas W. Braden. This development was significant for several reasons. As Deputy Director/Plans, Dulles was (Braden later recalled) “very much interested in the labor movement”
and believed that the CIO should be folded into CIA covert operations.43
Braden, to whom Dulles gave the responsibility of liaising with the CIO’s international officers, was favorably disposed toward Brown (“There should be a book called ‘The Guy Who Won The Cold War’ about Irving,” he later told Brown’s biographer),44 but was less impressed by Lovestone, particularly his habit of providing “just a chit under an assumed name” to acknowledge receipt of a covert subsidy, rather than detailed accounts. “I thought he was an asset,” the CIA officer remembered,
“but I never thought we had to go by his prescriptions.”45 On his side, Lovestone was bound to resent Braden’s new influence over his affairs: with his craggy good looks, heroic military record, and a dilettanteish postwar résumé that included spells at Dartmouth College, the Museum of
L A B O R
63
Modern Art, and the OPC’s front organization in the field of European federalism, the American Committee on United Europe, Dulles’s lieutenant must have struck the ex-communist as the archetypal Fizz kid. In contrast with this naturally fraught personal relationship, there seems to have been an instinctive political sympathy between the liberal Braden, who had been “idealistically pro-labor since the days of the New Deal,” and the social democrats of the CIO.46
The relationship between the CIA and the CIO is less well documented than the FTUC-OPC collaboration, but some evidence does exist. In 1967, the year of the “revelations,” a great deal of media attention focused on a statement by Braden that on one occasion in the early 1950s he had flown to Detroit and handed Walter Reuther $50,000 in $50 bills, which the UAW president then sent to his brother Victor in Europe, where it was spent bolstering anticommunist unions in West Germany.47