Victor responded to Braden’s claims by alleging that the CIA officer had attempted to recruit him as an agent during a meeting at the U.S. embassy in Paris in 1952, asking him to perform a role within the CIO similar to that played by the AFL’s Irving Brown. According to his own account of the incident, Reuther “categorically rejected” this proposal “on the spot,”
a decision that received the strong approval of CIO leader Philip Murray when it was reported to him shortly afterward.48
Dramatic though these encounters between Braden and the Reuther brothers undoubtedly were, they serve to distract attention from what appears to have been a more important link between the CIA and the CIO provided by the latter’s British-born Director of International Affairs, Mike Ross, who transmitted disguised Agency subsidies to Victor Reuther’s Paris office. According to Braden’s later recollection, Allen Dulles would periodically ask him, “Have you seen Mike Ross lately? You ought to go and see him, Tom, maybe he needs ten thousand dollars.”49
This claim is supported by evidence in Ross’s papers at the George Meany Memorial Archives in Maryland, which contain scattered references to the relationship, including a coded letter from “T,” as well as by documents in Irving Brown’s files, such as a letter of May 1952 in which Lovestone informed his European deputy that “Squinty” (Dulles) had just let slip “that Tom B. is his contact with Mike Ross.”50 Lovestone, who was already “convinced that Victor and his friends are operating . . . with the
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aid of substantial injections from Dr. Fizzer,” was predictably outraged by this admission.51 “The more I hear of what these fellows do,” he told Brown, “the more I feel this is a disgusting outfit and situation.”52
Combined with the other tensions in the relationship, the Fizz kids’ affair with the CIO led to a series of bitter showdowns between the Office of Policy Coordination and the Free Trade Union Committee in early 1951.
Infuriated by the antics of “uninformed and irresponsible sophomores,”
Brown berated senior CIA officials in Washington and then, accompanied by Offie, confronted the staff at the Rome embassy who had been feeding government money directly to Italian socialists.53 In March, Lovestone approached Dulles with the proposal that, in the future, the Agency subsidize the FTUC by means of blanket grants, a move clearly designed to increase Lovestone’s operational independence.54 Not surprisingly, the Deputy Director/Plans refused to play along, instead coming up with a demand of his own: the removal of Offie from the FTUC payroll as a condition of continued CIA funding. The Monk was charged, so Lovestone reported to Brown, with “giving too much confidence to outsiders” (an allegation that, when it reached Offie’s ears, provoked him to exclaim, “we are not whores . . . to be used . . . by politically incompetent dilettantes”).55 By this stage, AFL leaders such as Dubinsky were advocating a complete end to relations with the CIA. Tensions came to a head at a meeting between the FTUC and Smith (“the super-duper Fizz kid”)56 on April 9, 1951, which “degenerated into a shouting match.”57 According to Dubinsky’s later account: “We told them they would ruin things [in Italy], but they wouldn’t stay out. General Smith kept sounding more and more dictato-rial at our conference. Finally, Lovestone said to him: ‘You’re a general, but you sound like a drill sergeant.’ When he protested, I told Smith,
‘You’re not telling us what do; we are from the labor movement.’”58
This angry exchange, more reminiscent of a failed wage negotiation between management and labor than a covert operation, neatly captures the contradictions at the heart of the CIA-FTUC partnership. On one side were professional spies wanting to exert the maximum degree of control possible over the activities they were financing, concerned about security and uninhibited by loyalty to any one private group, yet at the same time constrained by their need for concealment and access to certain noncommunist left elements that only the Lovestoneites could provide. On the other were representatives of the American labor movement entirely
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confident of their own ability to carry out covert operations, indeed positively jealous of their independence in the field, yet bound to the CIA by the purse strings of covert patronage. It was a marriage of convenience, beset by mutual suspicion and resentment.