At the same time that the AFL leadership was clashing with the CIA directorate, another reshuffle was taking place within the Agency that would further reduce the influence of Wisner—and, therefore, Lovestone—over covert labor operations. Since moving to his new position in Washington a few months earlier, Tom Braden (or, to give him his new code name, “Homer D. Hoskins”) had come to the conclusion that management of the OPC’s front projects, spread out as it was between the organization’s various geographical divisions, lacked focus and coher-ence.59 What was needed, he decided, was a single unit responsible for mounting a concerted worldwide campaign against the Soviet propaganda offensive. Predictably enough, when Braden took this proposal to a meeting of the divisional chiefs, chaired by Wisner, it was overwhelmingly rejected. Braden responded by going straight to Dulles’s office and offering his resignation, only to learn that the DD/P had already overruled the head of OPC.60 Shortly afterward, a new entity was created within the Directorate of Plans, the International Organizations Division (IOD), with Braden as Division Chief assisted by a Deputy and Branch Chiefs. The IOD assumed responsibility for managing all front groups from the regional divisions. Although formally under Wisner’s authority, Braden “just went over his head” and reported directly to Dulles.61
With the CIO-leaning Braden now in charge, signs that the CIA intended reducing Lovestone’s power multiplied. The clearest of these was an attempt to circumvent Henry Kirsch, the Lovestoneite who directed the National Committee for a Free Europe’s Labor Contacts Division in New York. The FTUC’s relations with the NCFE were strained anyway, due to Lovestone’s dislike of the organization’s officers, whom he regarded as “over-priced Executives” (DeWitt Poole, in particular, was “an incompetent, empty fool”) and its courting of right-wing émigrés, including
“pro-Nazi Bulgarians, pro-Nazi Romanians, and pro-Nazi Hungarians.”62
At first Lovestone was pleased when another member of his circle, Leon Dennen, was brought in by the NCFE to help run the Free Trade Union-
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ists in Exile center in Paris. (He was also amused by rumors spread by the CIO that the physically unimposing Dennen was meant to serve as Brown’s bodyguard: he and Brown agreed that the arrangement would work better the other way round.)63 Soon, however, he realized that the ex-Lovestoneite’s primary allegiance was no longer to labor and that the move was really designed to eliminate Kirsch from the loop. “I suppose Henry will be another case of the Monk,” Lovestone forlornly told Brown (Offie had eventually been removed from the FTUC payroll in June 1951). “He will be punished for being loyal to the AF of L.”64
Lovestone took his complaint to a meeting with Kirsch and the NCFE
president, C. D. Jackson, at New York City’s Vanderbilt Hotel in October 1951. Again, the discussion seemed to owe more to bad industrial relations than spy-craft. After listing the AFL’s contributions to the work of the NCFE, Lovestone described various “anti-labor trends” in the organization and demanded a greater say in the planning of its operations. Jackson, a zealous advocate of free enterprise, retorted that he had hired Dennen as an individual, not a representative of American labor, and would “not have any AF of L stooges” in the NCFE.65 This confrontation permanently soured personal relations between the two men (in 1954
Jackson described Lovestone as “an intemperate, dishonest, ruthless Communist who had only changed his allegiance and not his tactics”)66 and dealt the coup de grâce to the collaboration between the FTUC and the Free Europe Committee. Shortly afterward, Lovestone broke off all contact with the NCFE and Matthew Woll resigned from its Executive Committee. Jackson considered retaliating by withdrawing funding for the Paris-based labor Center in Exile, but was dissuaded by Allen Dulles, who allegedly said, “We have enough trouble with Lovestone as it is.”67 In correspondence with George Meany, Lovestone tellingly accused the NCFE
of lacking the “spirit of collective bargaining.”68
Meanwhile, the FTUC-CIA partnership was drawing unwelcome attention from conservative outsiders similar to that visited on the NCFE
and its sister émigré organization, AMCOMLIB. A right-wing journalist, Westbrook Pegler, wrote a series of vituperative but well-informed columns alleging that Lovestone and Brown were communist agents who had succeeded in suborning U.S. foreign policy. The Lovestoneites suspected that Pegler had been primed by hostile elements within the CIA. In January 1953, Offie told Brown that the journalist’s “informants are in Fizzland
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who are giving him this stuff to discredit primarily labor, then Dubinsky, you and Jay, and to show in a sinister underlying rhythm that all these people who ‘run’ things are Jews.”69