(1)
Harry Kelber, AFL-CIO’s
Dark Past, Labor Educator (15th November, 2004)
On December
10, 1948, Matthew Woll, president of the photoengravers union and
one of the four labor leaders on the AFL's Free Trade Union Committee,
wrote Frank Wisner, a top officer of the Central Intelligence Agency:
"This is to introduce Jay Lovestone… He is duly authorized
to cooperate with you in behalf of our organization and to arrange
for close contact and reciprocal assistance in all matters."
Thus, the
AFL began a relationship with the intelligence agency that was to
endure for better than two decades. Wisner recognized that the FTUC
could be an important intelligence-gathering asset and was willing
to pay a substantial price for its assistance, said to have amounted
to many millions of dollars over the years.
From Lovestone's
perspective, the additional funding would help him expand operations
in China, Japan, India, Africa and the Arab countries. Although
he chafed at having to make reports to Wisner, he needed the agency's
help. While he supplied the CIA with intelligence reports from his
FTUC operatives, he also received information from Wisner, who advocated
"support of anti-communists in free countries."
Lovestone
had no trouble cooking the FTUC's balance sheets from the prying
eyes of any dissident. In 1949, for example, AFL-affiliated unions
contributed $56,000 to the committee, but an additional $203,000
was attributed to "individuals," actually the CIA. In
1950, the agency funneled another $202,000 to the FTUC; in later
years, the agency's funding to the AFL was kept secret, with the
amount dependent on the size and nature of the covert operation.
Lovestone's
very extensive, and expensive, anti-communist operations in Europe
were largely financed from money siphoned off from the Marshall
Plan (officially the European Recovery Plan), which provided $13
billion to Western European nations between 1948 and 1950.
Under the
Plan's rules, each country receiving financial aid had to refund
5% of the total to U.S. occupation forces for administrative expenses.
That turned out to be a slush fund (referred to as the "sugar
fund") of more than $800 million that the Free Trade Union
Committee was allowed to draw from and spread lavishly to subvert
a gallery of European labor leaders to support whatever American
policy was demanded of them.
When Marshall
Plan funds dried up, Lovestone became more dependent on CIA funding.
But the CIA's new director, Gen. Walter Bedell Smith, who had been
Eisenhower's chief of staff in Europe during World War II, was a
tough administrator who started questioning the expenditures for
the AFL's clandestine operations.
To clarify
the relationship, a "summit" meeting was held on November
24, 1950. In attendance for the AFL were Meany, Dubinsky, Woll and
Lovestone. The CIA was represented by Smith, its director, and his
top assistant, Frank Wisner.
There was
general agreement that the collaboration had worked well and should
continue. But Lovestone, while complimenting the CIA for the assistance
it had given the AFL in several emergency situations, still insisted
that improvements had to be made in the relationship. He had given
the CIA a list of the funding he required for special projects,
but it had been ignored. Smith said he would review the proposals.
When Smith
brought up the idea of including the CIO into the agency's operations,
the AFL group quickly voiced their strong objections. They said
he CIO was inexperienced in this kind of activity and was riddled
with communists and other undesirable elements. Lovestone said that
if the CIO were brought in, all their work would be placed in jeopardy.
The CIO could not be trusted to maintain the secrecy that was required
by both the AFL and CIA operations.
Meany said
he was worried that the CIO would get some of its friends in the
Truman administration to recommend that they share equally in funding
and participation in international labor activity. (Just a few months
earlier, the CIO had expelled eleven international unions with over
one million members for "following the Communist Party line.")
Meany threatened to withdraw from the arrangement with the CIA if
the CIO were brought into the partnership.
But to Smith
and Wisner, it seemed absurd to work closely with one wing of the
labor movement while totally ignoring the other. The best that the
AFL guests could get out of them was that enlisting the cooperation
of the CIO was not imminent.
The propriety
of an American labor movement becoming the instrument or partner
of a government intelligence agency was fully acceptable to the
Meany-Dubinsky-Woll trio, as long as it was in the service of an
anti-Soviet crusade and the defeat of communist-led unions. Nor
did any U.S. union leader dare to challenge the clandestine, quid
pro quo relationship between organized labor and the international
spy agency.
It was Thomas
Braden, an assistant to CIA director Allan Dulles, who became the
contact man with the CIO. Walter Reuther, the UAW president, received
$50,000 in cash from Braden, who flew to Detroit to deliver it.
There are
no public records of how much money the CIA gave both branches of
the labor movement. There was no congressional oversight of the
agency. As Braden said: "The CIA could do exactly as it pleased.
It could buy armies. It could buy bombs. It was one of the first
world-wide multinationals."
(2)
CIA and the
Labour Party, Radical Research Services (1974)
The launching
of the Congress for Cultural Freedom by Melvin Laskey in Berlin
in 1950 was financed in the same way. Disaster threatened the Cold
Warriors in 1950-51 when Congress refused to renew Marshall Aid.
As Thomas Braden has confirmed, they had either to shut up shop
or turn to the CIA. They chose the latter. Thus continued 17 years
of secret US funding.
When, in
the early sixties, it seemed to the National Security Council (NSC)
that the CIA's cover was about to be blown, funding was quietly
shifted to the larger charitable fundations whose directors were
well aware of what was going on. The Ford, Carnegie and Rockefeller
foundations moved into international affairs in a big way in 1950.
Ford's international director for the next 17 years was Sheperd
Stone under the NSC members Mr George Bundy, Presidential Adviser
on Security, and Robert McNamara, Defence Secretary. Carnegie president
was Joseph E. Johnson who organised the American end of Bilderberg.
Thomas Braden was a Carnegie trustee.
Rockefeller
trustees included Barry Bingham - ECA Administrator France 1949-50,
chairman International Press Institute, director Asia Foundation
- and Arthur Houghton, whose Foundation for Youth and Student Affairs
channelled millions of dollars of CIA money into the US and world
students movements. For those who continue to protest the innocence
of the US (and some European) foundations, massive documentary evidence
can - and will - be produced to show that in their international
affairs they acted as agents of the US State Department.
But to return
to the European Movement. Thomas
Braden had been in the US Military Government in Germany. From 1949
to 1951 he was executive director of the American Committee on United
Europe - a body resulting from a visit by Retinger and Duncan Sandys
to Allen Dulles and others in the United States in July 1948. Its
aims were to fund the European Movement and to bring about the establishment
of a European army rearming the Germans against the USSR. It also
worked closely with Cord Meyer's United World Federalists.
In a letter
to Duncan Sandys, 20 January 1950, Thomas Braden wrote that the
ACUE's purpose was ''not only to influence public opinion, but to
sell the idea of the European Movement . . . and to justify the
appeal for important sums of money."
According
to Allan Hovey, Jnr., ACUE representative in Europe, the vast majority
of US funds for Europe and nearly all for the European Youth Campaign
(EYC) came from State Department covert funds. This was, of course.
kept very secret. ACUE was a legal covering organisation.
Braden joined
the CIA as Dulles' assistant in 1950 while continuing as ACUE executive
director. Funds were sent to the European representative in Brussels,
and those intended for the EYC were passed through a covering body
in Paris - the Centre d'Action Europiènne - which submitted
a monthly budget to Brussels.
Total secret
US funding to the European Movement from 1947 to 1953 was £440,000.
(Source: EM Archives, FIN/P/6 "European Movement: EYC Treasurer's
Report 1949/53").
Thus, far
from being a spontaneous expression of the desire for unity of the
people of Europe, the European movement was launched by Retinger
with secret money from the State Department and kept afloat with
massive subventions through Thomas Braden, head of the CIA'S International
Organisation Division.
(3)
Andrew Roth, Melvin
Lasky, The Guardian (22nd May, 2004)
Melvin Lasky,
who has died aged 84, was, as editor of the magazine Encounter from
1958 to 1990, and of Der Monat (the Month) for 15 years, a combatant
in the struggle to keep western intellectuals in the United States'
cold war camp. But in 1967, it was disclosed that both Encounter
and Der Monat had been covertly financed by the US Central Intelligence
Agency and Mel's reputation shrivelled...
Mel's origins
in the anti-Communist Russian-Jewish community help explain why,
at 22, he became literary editor of the New Leader, an organ of
anti-Communist Jewish liberals. He held the post from 1942 to 1943.
In 1944, Mel belatedly signed up, as a US Army combat historian
in Europe.
Postwar,
with the cold war, Der Monat was launched in Berlin in 1948 with
Mel as editor, a job he did until 1958 and again from 1978 to 1983.
His intellectual and linguistic abilities were never in question,
and in 1958, as the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament took off, Mel
replaced Irving Kristol - co-editor since 1953 with poet Stephen
Spender - on Encounter. At that time, many British intellectuals
had clustered around Kingsley Martin's New Statesman, which tended
towards a cold war neutrality. US government thinking was that if
a Labour government were returned to power, dissident left-wing
MPs would make it difficult for the US to retain Britain as a secure
ally.
Encounter's
function was to combat anti-Americanism by brainwashing the uncertain
with pro-American articles. These were paid for at several times
the rate paid by the New Statesman and offered British academics
and intellectuals free US trips and expenses-paid lecture tours.
There was no room for the objective-minded in this cold war to capture
intellectuals.
Enormously
industrious, Mel doubled up by running publishing houses for his
masters. The premise was that they published pro-American books
knowing that the bulk of each edition would be purchased by US agencies
to donate to book-starved libraries in the third world.
Even at
its peak Encounter had never claimed a circulation above 40,000.
Its spider's web began to come apart in 1966-67 with publication
of pieces in the New York Times and the radical magazine Ramparts.
And Thomas Braden, previously a CIA divisional chief, confirmed
in the Saturday Evening Post that, for more than 10 years, the CIA
had subsidised Encounter through the Congress for Cultural Freedom
- which it also funded - and that one of its staff was a CIA agent.
(Lasky had been the CCF's sometime executive secretary). The magazine
also covertly received British government money.
Mel's co-editor,
Professor Frank Kermode, resigned, proclaiming he had been misled
by Mel. "I was always reassured that there was no truth in
the allegations about CIA funds."
Mel admitted
breezily that "I probably should have told him all the painful
details." Spender also quit the monthly and many contributors
pulled out.
The CIA
funds, had, in fact been replaced in 1964 by Cecil King's International
Publishing Corporation - the then owners of the Daily Mirror - which
bought the magazine. King's deputy, Hugh Cudlipp, sprang to Mel's
defence, insisting that "Encounter without him [Mel] would
be as interesting as Hamlet without the Prince".
(4)
Richard Fletcher, How
CIA Money Took the Teeth Out of Socialism (undated)
Since the
Second World War the American Government and its espionage branch,
the Central Intelligence Agency, have worked systematically to ensure
that teh Socialist parties of the free world toe a line compatible
with American interests...CIA money can be traced flowing through
the Congress for Cultural Freedom to such magazines as Encounter
which have given Labour politicians like Anthony Crosland, Denis
Healy and the late Hugh Gaitskell a platform for their campaigns
to move the Labour Party away from nationalisation and CND-style
pacifism. Flows of personnel link this Labour Party pressure group
with the unlikely figure of Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands,
who has for 20 years sponsored the mysterious activities of the
anti-Communist Bilderberg group launched with covert American funds.
There is
no suggestion that these prominent Labour politicians have not acted
in al innocence and with complete propriety. But it could be asked
how such perspicacious men could fail to enquire about the source
of the funds that have financed the organisations and magazines
which have been so helpful to them for so long. Nevertheless, they
are certainly proud of the crucial influence their activities had
in the years following 1959 when they swung the British Labour Party
away from its pledge to nationalisation, enshrined in the celebrated
Clause IV, and back towards the commitment to NATO from which the
Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament had deflected it. CIA operators
take the credit for helping them in this decisive intervention which
changed the course of modern British history.
The cloak
and dagger operations of America's Central Intelligence Agency are
only a small part of its total activities. Most of its 2000 million-dollar
budget and 80,000 personnel are devoted to the systematic collection
of information - minute personal details about tens of thousands
of politicians and political organisations in every country in the
world, including Britain. And this data, stored in the world's largest
filing system at the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, is used
not only to aid Washington's policy-machine, but in active political
intervention overseas - shaping the policies of political parties,
making and unmaking their leaders, boosting one internal faction
against another and often establishing rival breakaway parties when
other tactics fail.
In fact
the CIA carries out, at a more sophisticated level, exactly the
same sort of organised subversion as Stalin's Comintern in its heyday.
One of its targets in the years since the Second World War has been
the British Labour Party.
The Labour
Party emerged from the war with immense prestige. As the sole mass
working-class party in Britain it had the support of a united trades
union movement whose power had been greatly enhanced by the war,
and it had just achieved an unprecedented electoral victory. The
established social democratic parties of Europe had been destroyed
by the dictators, while in America all that remained of the socialist
movement was a handful of sects whose members were numbered in hundreds.
Labour was undisputed head of Europe's social democratic family.
But as the
euphoria wore off, old differences began to emerge with prolonged
post-war austerity. The Left wanted more Socialism and an accommodation
with the Russians, while the Right wanted the battle against Communism
to take precedence over further reforms at home. And those who took
this latter view organised themselves around the journal Socialist
Commentary, formerly the organ of anti-Marxist Socialists who had
fled to Britain from Hitler's Germany. The magazine was reorganised
in the autumn of 1947 with Anthony Crosland, Allan Flanders and
Rita Hinden who had worked closely with the emigres as leading contributors.
And Socialist Commentary became the mouthpiece of the Right wing
of the Labour Party, campaigning against Left-wingers like Aneurin
Bevan, whom they denounced as dangerous extremists. Crosland, who
ended the war as a captain in the Parachute Regiment, had been President
of the Oxford Union, and a year later, in 1947, became Fellow and
lecturer in economics at Trinity College, Oxford. Flanders was a
former TUC official who became an academic specialist in industrial
relations and later joined the Prices and Incomes Board set up by
the Wilson Government. Rita Hinden, a University of London academic
from South Africa, was secretary of the Fabian Colonial Bureau -
an autonomous section of the Fabian Society which she had set up
and directed since the early Forties. In this position she exercised
considerable influence with Labour Ministers and officials in the
Colonial Office, maintaining close links with many overseas politicians.
The new
Socialist Commentary immediately set out to alert the British Labour
movement to the growing dangers of international Communism, notably
in a piece entitled "Cominformity', written by Flanders during
a period spent in the United States studying the American trade
union movement. The journal's American connections were further
extended by its U.S. correspondent, William C. Gausmann, who was
soon to enter the American Government Service, where he rose to
take charge of US propaganda in North Vietnam, while support for
the moderate stand taken by Crosland, Flanders and Hinden came from
David C. Williams, the London Correspondent of the New Leader, an
obscure New York weekly specialising in anti-Communism. Williams
made it his business to join the British Labour Party and to take
an active part in the Fabian Society.
This close
American interest in Socialism on the other side of the Atlantic
was nothing new. During the war the American trade unions had raised
large sums to rescue European labour leaders from the Nazis, and
this had brought them closely in touch with American military intelligence
and, in particular, with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS),
whose chief in Switzerland and Germany from 1942 to 1945 was Allen
W. Dulles, later, of course, to become famous as head of the CIA
in its heyday.
The principal
union official in these secret commando operations had been Jay
Lovestone, a remarkable operator who had switched from being the
leader of the American Communist Party to working secretly for the
US Government. And as the Allied armies advanced, Lovestone's men
followed the soldiers as political commissars, trying to make sure
that the liberated workers were provided with trade union and political
leaders acceptable to Washington - many of these leaders being the
émigrés of the Socialist Commentary group. In France,
Germany, Italy and Austria the commissars provided lavish financial
and material support for moderate Socialists who would draw the
sting from Left-wing political movements, and the beneficiaries
from this assistance survive in European politics to this day -
though that is another story...
In 1953
the Congress for Cultural Freedom launched Encounter, an English
language monthly which was an immediate success under the editorship
of Irving Kristol, another of Levitas's New Leader proteg6s and
an exLovestoneite, and soon a bewildering range of publications
in several languages had joined the CCF stable, with Encounter becoming
one of the most influential journals of liberal opinion in the West.
As the CCF
network grew it embraced many prominent figures in the British Labour
Party -among them Anthony Crosland, who began attending CCF seminars,
where he met Daniel Bell, who was at this period moving away from
journalistic red-baiting in the New Leader towards academic respectability.
Bell's thinking was later summarised in his book The End of Ideology,
and it formed the basis of the new political thesis set out in the
major work that Crosland was now writing and which was published
in 1956 under the title The Future of Socialism. The book had also
been influenced by the arguments put forward at the Conference of
the Congress for Cultural Freedom held in the previous year in Milan,
where principal participants had included Hugh Gaitskell, Denis
Healey and Rita Hinden as well as Daniel Bell and a bevy of American
and European politicians and academics.
Put at its
simplest. Bell and his colleagues argued that growing affluence
had radically transformed the working-class in Europe - and Britain
- which was now virtually indistinguishable from the middle-class,
and thus Marx's theory of class struggle was no longer relevant.
Future political progress, they thought, would involve the gradual
reform of capitalism and the spread of equality and social welfare
as a consequence of continued economic growth.
Crosland's
book, though not original in content, was a major achievement. In
over 500 pages it clothed the long-held faith of Labour's new leader
Hugh Gaitskell in the academic respectability of American political
science and was immediately adopted as the gospel of the Party leadership.
Labour's rank-and-file, however, still clung to their grassroots
Socialism, and Gaitskell's obvious preferences for the small coterie
of cultured intellectuals and visiting foreigners who met at his
house in Frognal Gardens, Hampstead, alienated the Party faithful,
and gave added bitterness to the internecine quarrels that were
to follow Labour's defeat in the 1959 election.
In 1957
Melvin Lasky had taken over the editorship of Encounter which had,
by then, cornered the West's intelligentsia through its prestige
and the high fees it was able to pay. Lasky was a trusted member
of Gaitskell's inner circle and was often to be seen at his parties
in Hampstead, while Gaitskell became at the same time a regular
contributor to the New Leader. Sol Levitas would drop in at his
house on his periodic tours to see world leaders and visit the CCF
in Paris.
It was during
the Fifties furthermore, that Anthony Crosland, Rita Hinden and
the other members of the Socialist Commentary group adopted the
argument put forcibly in the New Leader that a strong united Europe
was essential to protect the Atlantic Alliance from Russian attack,
and European and Atlantic unity came to be synonymous in official
thinking as Gaitskell and his friends moved into the Party leadership.
They received transatlantic encouragement, furthermore, from a New
York-based group called the American Committee on United Europe,
whose leadership was openly advertised in the New York Times as
including General Donovan, wartime head of OSS. George Marshall,
the US Secretary of State, General Lucius D. Clay and Allen Dulles
of the CIA...
But early
in 1967 the US journal Ramparts revealed that since the early Fifties
the National Student Association of America had, with the active
connivance of its elected officers, received massive subventions
from the CIA through dummy foundations and that one of these was
the Fund for Youth and Student Affairs which supplied most of the
budget of ISC. The International Student Conference, it appeared,
had been set up by British and American Intelligence in 1950 to
counteract the Communist peace offensive, and the CIA had supplied
over 90 per cent, of its finance. The Congress for Cultural Freedom
was similarly compromised. Michael Josselson admitted that he had
been chanelling CIA money into the organisation ever since its foundation
- latterly at the rate of about a million dollars a year - to support
some 20 journals and a world-wide programme of political and cultural
activities. Writing of Sol Levitas at the time of his death in 1961,
the editor of the New Leader, William Bohm said "the most amazing
part of the journalistic miracle was the man's gift for garnering
the funds which were necessary to keep our paper solvent from week
to week and year to year. I cannot pretend to explain how this miracle
was achieved.we always worked in an atmosphere of carefree security.
We knew that the necessary money would come from somewhere and that
our cheques would be forthcoming."
The "Miracle"
was resolved by the New York Times: the American Labour Conference
for International Affairs which ran the New Leader had for many
years been receiving regular subventions from the J. M. Kaplan Fund,
a CIA conduit.
The CIA
had taken the lessons taught back in the early Fifties by Burnham
and the New Leader to heart. With its army of cx-Communists and
willing Socialists it had for a while beaten the Communists at their
own game -but unfortunately it had not known when to stop and now
the whole structure was threatened with collapse. Rallying to the
agency's support, Thomas Braden, the official responsible for its
move into private organisations, and Executive Director of the American
Committee on United Europe, explained that Irving Brown and Lovestone
had done a fine job in cleaning up the unions in post-war Europe.
When they ran out of money, he said, he had persuaded Dulles to
back them, and from this beginning the world-wide operation mushroomed.
Another
ex-CIA official, Richard Bissell, who organised the Bay of Pigs
invasion, explained the Agency's attitude to foreign politicians:
"Only by knowing the principal players well do you have a chance
of careful prediction. There is real scope for action in this area:
the technique is essentially that of 'penetration' . . . Many of
the 'penetrations' don't take the form of 'hiring' but of establishing
friendly relationships which may or may not be furthered by the
provision of money from time to time. In some countries the CIA
representative has served as a close counsellor... of the chief
of state."
After these
disclosures the CCF changed its name to the International Association
for Cultural Freedom. Michael Josselson resigned - but was retained
as a consultant - and the Ford Foundation agreed to pick up the
bills. And the Director of the new Association is none other than
Shepard Stone, the Bilderberg organiser who channelled US Government
money to Joseph Retinger in the early Fifties to build the European
Movement and then became International Director of the Ford Foundation.
