"LABOR LIEUTENANTS" OF THE CIA
By Les Evans
A former top official of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency created a furor in the world press May 7 by exposing ties between his counterrevolutionary outfit and top functionaries of the American labor movement. Close connections between the imperialist spy network and the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations [AFL-CIOy have long been suspected in radical circles but this confirmation by one of the architects of the cold-war marriage was a deadly blow to the bureaucratic misleaders of the U.S. labor federation.
The revelations were made by Thomas W. Braden, former assistant to CIA chief Allen Dulles, and director of the CIA's Division of International Organization from 1951 to 1954.
Writing in the Saturday Evening Post of May 20 (postdated), Braden, now editor of a California newspaper, made an impassioned defense of the network of secret subsidies and subversion he helped organize in the early tifties. In order to prove he was not alone in wanting to "help his country" he implicated his accomplices, many of them top labor bureaucrats.
AFI-CIO President George Meany's chief foreign policy adviser, Jay Lovestone; his assistant Irving Brown; and both Walter and Victor Reuther who head the 1,500,000-member United Automobile Workers union were all named.
Lovestone, once a leader of the American Communist party, has prostituted his knowledge of the left and labor movements in different countries for many years.
Braden crossed his trail in 1947 when the Confédération Générale du Travail led a strike in Paris "which came very near to paralyzing the French economy
"Into this crisis stepped Lovestone and his assistant, Irving Brown... they organized Force Ouvriére, a non- Communist union. When they ran out of money, they appealed to the CIA. Thus began the secret subsidy of free trade unions which soon spread to Italy. Without that subsidy, postwar history might have gone very differently."
This was at a time when Europe was emerging devasted from the war, when union leaders lacked the barest essentials to begin to reorganize. The funds for printing, salaries, offices -- this was an immense advantage to the handpicked anti-Communist union "leaders" selected for Lovestone's and the CIA's gratuities.
Lovestone was responsible for the disbursement of secret subsidies of "nearly two million dollars annually."
Irving Brown was given money by the CIA to break dock workers strikes in Marseilles and other ports directed against the unloading of American armaments after the war. Braden testifies that he personally gave Brown $15,000 under a "cover" name for this operation: "He needed it to pay off his strong-arm squads in Mediterranean ports, so that American supplies could be unloaded against the opposition of Communist dock workers."
Even the Reuther brothers came in for a drubbing. The Reuthers have been piously denouncing the AFL bureaucrats for accepting money from the CIA. Braden chides them for their modesty in not re~ vealing their own role in the same game:
"Victor Reuther ought to be ashamed of himself. At his request, I went to Detroit one morning and gave Walter $50,000 in $50 bills. Victor spent the money, mostly in West Germany, to bolster labor unions there.
The ex-CIA official also revealed that CIA agents played a big role in founding and operating the Europe-based Congress for Cultural Freedom, and the British literary magazine, Encounter.
Both the Congress of Cultural Freedom and Encounter have admitted accepting the CIA subsidy.
As might be expected, the response of U.S. labor officialdom to the disclosures has been somewhat less candid. The early American socialist Daniel De Leon called the trade-union bureaucrats the "labor lieutenants" of capital. They are not about to admit to being stooges for American imperialism and literally CIA agents -- if they can avoid it.
Victor Reuther, interviewed by the New York Times in Tokyo, May 7, denied the charges, calling them "incredible" and "ridiculous."
At the same time his brother Walter in Detroit was admitting that he received the $50,000 as Braden revealed.
On May 10 Victor Reuther changed his story and acknowledged that he and his brother had accepted the money and spent it to promote anti-Communist union activ-
ity in Europe. He defended himself by adding that Braden had also tried to recruit him as a full-time agent for the CIA. He refused saying that would be "improper."
AFL-CIO President George Meany denied that he or Jay Lovestone had ever received money from the CIA, calling the charge "a damn lie."
"As far as I know," Meany professed, "the A.F.L. during my term as secretary-treasurer and president, and the A.F.L.-C.1.0., during my term as president, has never received any C.I.A. money for any activity -- either directly or indirectly -- and that goes no matter what Mr. Braden might have said.
"Not one penny of C.I.A. money has ever come in to the A.F.L. or the A.F.L.- C.1.0. to my knowledge over the last 20 years, and I can say to you if it had come in I would know about it."
Meany abruptly terminated the news conference and walked out of the roon.
Newspaper columnist Drew Pearson last February raised the charge in his nationally syndicated column that the CIA had been pumping money into the AFL-CIO to influence foreign labor unions. At the time Meany accused Pearson of being a liar.
In the aftermath of Braden's revelations, Pearson commented drily on May 15: "The public can decide for itself, despite Meany's continued denials, who is the liar."