out in league with his new controller in the Agency, James Angleton, who would squirrel away reports from the ex-communist’s worldwide chain of agents in the “JX Files.”77 Irving Brown, however, remained as active as ever, carrying out operations for the Agency on a freelance basis. (He had always enjoyed higher regard from the professional spies than his boss, and by 1960 personal relations between the two had become strained.) Also, as is discussed in later chapters, the CIA found other American unionists, based within the U.S. affiliates of the international trade secretariats, who were prepared to engage in clandestine work for their government.
Newly available evidence shows that the old imagery of puppet masters and marionettes fails utterly to capture the complexities of the partnership between the Lovestoneites of the AFL and the “Fizz kids” of the CIA.
Granted, the labor officials involved seem never to have been troubled by what would become the main issue of controversy in 1967, the ethical propriety of secret subsidies. Nonetheless, the numerous documented incidents of conflict between the two parties reveal the AFL representatives as bringing to the relationship a definite agenda of their own—and, for that matter, of having a conception of a “labor” interest that they were keen to protect from meddling by the executives of the CIA. It is even possible to detect a whiff of labor militancy in some of the top-level meetings of 1950 and 1951 that the AFL rarely displayed in postwar industrial relations. Perhaps the most appropriate metaphor for the FTUC-CIA liaison is one specific to this particular field of front operation: management-worker conflict. “The relationship worked satisfactorily until the Corporation began to try to dictate to the worker,” claims an undated memorandum in the Lovestone papers. “The worker refused to conduct itself as being ‘bought,’ resented the crude attempts at infiltration, and particularly resented the Corporation threatening to use the co-worker if the worker didn’t play ball the way the Corporation wanted to play it.”78
F O U R
A Deep Sickness in New York
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In March 1949 the Communist Information Bureau staged its most startling provocation of the whole Cold War. That month, New York City’s Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, an Art Deco edifice of midtown Manhattan elegance, hosted a gathering of Soviet and American intellectuals, the Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace. Modeled after the World Congress of Intellectuals for Peace held in Wroclaw, Poland, the previous August, where eminent Marxist thinkers such as Hungarian aesthetician Georg Lukács had denounced “the drift toward fascist imperialism in the United States,” the New York conference was intended to rally American intellectuals against the anti-Soviet foreign policy of their government.1
Similar Cominform-sponsored efforts to appeal to intellectuals’ dread of another world war—the Stalin Peace Prize, the Stockholm Peace Appeal, the launch in Paris of the monthly review
If so, they were to be bitterly disappointed. Indeed, the New York conference was nothing short of a publicity disaster. The State Department derailed preparations by refusing to grant visas to would-be European participants. Conferees arrived at the Waldorf to find anticommunist vigilan-
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tes, alerted by the Hearst press, parading on Park Avenue. Most unnerving of all was a series of disruptions staged by anti-Stalinist American intellectuals within the hotel itself. Organized by New York University philosophy professor Sidney Hook, who had rented a honeymoon suite on the hotel’s tenth floor to serve as headquarters, Americans for Intellectual Freedom (AIF), as this group called itself, asked deliberately awkward questions of the Soviet delegates, issued misleading statements in the name of the conference’s organizers, and, on the final day, at the aptly named Freedom House, staged their own public meeting, which was so well attended that speeches had to be broadcast via loudspeakers to an overflow crowd in Bryant Park. “We had frustrated one of the most ambitious undertakings of the Kremlin,” Hook congratulated himself later.2