The following year, it was the turn of President Eisenhower’s assistant secretary for international labor affairs, Spencer Miller, to fling the mud.
Miller, an unstable anti-Semite and obsessive anticommunist, believed that Lovestone was part of an international Jewish conspiracy to undermine the United States, describing him to the FBI as “a Rasputin-like character who desires to dominate the labor picture throughout the world.”70 Miller eventually resigned his post after testifying before the House Committee on Un-American Activities that there was a ring of communist agents in the Department of Labor and that Lovestone was their “kingpin.”71
As if this public probing of the CIA’s labor operations was not enough of a security worry, an ongoing FBI espionage investigation had Lovestone being trailed by G-men, his mail opened, and, as already noted, his telephone tapped. Evidently, J. Edgar Hoover was intrigued by the FTUC.
He suspected that it was somehow mixed up with the CIA, but he was not quite able to figure out the relationship and was deeply apprehensive about the Lovestoneites’ communist pasts. “We should be alert to Lovestone, Offie, and Brown, as I have grave doubts about this trio,” he told a colleague. The Monk’s sexuality appears to have caused Hoover particular concern. “It seems to be an inherent part of a pervert’s makeup to be also a pathological liar,” he reflected.72
While the Lovestoneites had to battle anti-Semitism, McCarthyism, and homophobia on their right flank, their left was being peppered by charges of corruption, cynicism, and class betrayal. Their enemies in the CIO, especially the Reuther brothers, had long resented their splitting tactics. “Jay was divisive,” Victor Reuther told Ted Morgan. “If you had three people in the room and he was one of them, you had three caucuses.”73 Now, as the CIO’s influence spread within the foreign policy apparatus, this view also began to be held by some U.S. government officers.
Most of the individuals selected for the new labor attaché program shared Lovestone’s preference for straightforward anticommunist political warfare, often because they owed their appointments to his influence. Elsewhere, however, especially in the Economic Cooperation Administration and U.S. information services, a CIO-like emphasis on productivity and
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government partnership prevailed, with the result that the official “labor diplomacy” effort in the Cold War reflected the internal divisions of the American labor movement.74 A Reutherite perception of Lovestone even spread into the CIA itself, turning some intelligence officers into “whistle-blowers.”
One such whistle-blower was Paul Sakwa. A young World War II veteran who during the late 1940s organized retail clerks and undertook research for the CIO while writing a master’s thesis at Columbia University, Sakwa was hired by the CIA in 1952 after having been judged a security risk by both the Department of State and the Department of Labor. Assigned to Paris as an officer in the French Branch of the Western Europe Division, he soon reached the conclusion that, whatever good they might have done initially, Irving Brown’s operations in France, especially his funding of the Force Ouvrière, were now positively harmful. “Elections were influenced if not purchased outright, union dues remained uncollected, organizing activities ceased,” Sakwa reckoned. Back in Washington, he complained about Brown’s activities to Tom Braden, who, to Sakwa’s surprise, agreed to cut subsidies to the FO. Later, after he had moved to Belgium under cover as Assistant Labor Attaché, Sakwa confronted George Meany in a similar fashion while escorting him and his wife around a fair in Brussels. Meany, however, proved less receptive than Braden, ordering Sakwa out of his car as they were on their way to a dinner function. (Mrs. Meany, who evidently agreed with the CIA officer, was likewise commanded to return to the hotel lobby.) “What began as an effort to promote and defend democracy,” wrote Sakwa later, “evolved into operations designed to thwart real, incipient, or imagined Communist threats at the expense of democracy itself.”75
After peaking in 1950, CIA subsidies to the FTUC declined steadily throughout the decade, falling to a mere $10,109 by 1958.76 By that date, the FTUC’s position within the American labor movement had been seriously undermined, thanks to the merger in 1955 of the AFL and CIO and the creation of a joint International Affairs Committee. In December 1957, following much infighting between the two federations’ international affairs staffs, it was eventually agreed that the FTUC should be abolished. This move did not, however, signal an end to CIA interests in the labor field. To be sure, the focus of Lovestone’s work shifted away from covert operation toward intelligence gathering, which he carried
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