Labor's Spymaster

...Elements within all Western governments were sympathetic to the Soviet Union, and isolationist conservatives had little interest in opposing Kremlin efforts to extend Communist influence in France, Germany and Italy...

...A Covert Life: Jay Lovestone, Communist, Anti-Communist, and Spymaster (Random House, 402 pp., $29.95) by Ted Morgan is the first attempt to tell the life story of this controversial, obnoxious, yet in many respects indispensable man...

...Early on, the AFL and the State Department financed Lovestone's operations...

...But what did such information have to do with the labor movement—or counterintelligence, forthat matter...

...The next year, Lovestone helped him get a line of credit at an American bank and put him in touch with Democratic Senator Burton Wheeler of Montana...

...The same cannot be said of the second part of Lovestone's Cold War activities: his involvement—starting in 1948 and lasting over two decades—with the Central Intelligence Agency...

...What is there in you that is always itching for a fight...

...When Lovestone subsequently visited Moscow to ingratiate himself with the Soviet leaders Stalin told him, "Even with our fingers in front of our eyes we can see the weakness of comrade Foster...

...So while the West muddled through, the Communists knew what they wanted, but Lovestone did too: He saw the coming struggle clearly and was among the few Americans who understood the importance of rebuilding non-Communist Left-wing parties and labor unions in Western Europe...

...The Communist parties and unions Lovestone fought also received secret subsidies, and in any case the AFL was not responding to political pressure...

...In this role, while still not in the good graces of the Right, he became a hate figure for most of the Left...

...Lovestone was a friend and disciple of Nikolai I. Bukharin, who in the mid1920s emerged as the chief defender of the New Economic Policy, tolerating small-scale private enterprise in the Soviet Union...

...Ultimately, his chief function was apparently supplying gossip to his close friend James J. Angleton, the CIA's paranoid counterintelligence chief...

...I told him that experiments in testing his loyalty had been going on for three years, but no good had come of them...

...it was the personal and political shortcomings that were interred with his bones...

...As the leader of a faction of independent Communists, "His strategy," Morgan explains, "was to agree with Stalin on domestic policy so that he would be free to criticize him on Comintern policy...

...assisted Dozenberg in his intelligence work...

...it was simply far more eager to engage the Communists than the government was...

...Thus Lovestone praised what he represented as the triumphs of Soviet agriculture, justified the early stages of the Great Purge, and in 1936 supported Earl Browder for President...

...Evaluations of embassy personnel came in handy...

...Now that the delegation had been broken, the Kremlin let most of its members depart but detained Lovestone...

...The remarkably naïve Lovestone, Morgan writes, "did not yet see that these new policies were a loyalty test in the battle between Stalin and Bukharin...

...At this point the United States and the USSR were allies...

...Shortly after graduating from City College in 1918 he became a Communist...

...Morgan doesn't mention these charges, which are repeated by Klehr and Haynes in their new book, Venona: Soviet Espionage in the Stalin Era...

...Lovestone's main rival in the party, William Z. Foster, would have won control in the mid-'20s if the Soviets had not intervened...

...The moral is not that evidence in Communist archives cannot be trusted, but rather that to assess Toohey's statement you have to know something about Mendelssohn...

...he sent two agents to New York to depose the leader of the CR Lovestone, who now seemed to be in almost total control, decided he would take a delegation to Moscow to protest...

...Lovestone, who continued to direct the AFL's foreign policy, claimed he was merely using the CIA's money to do what he had done before, but as Morgan shows, in time this ceased to be true: He became apure spymaster...

...delegation defected, and comrades in New York betrayed Lovestone by sending Stalin a copy of his telegram instructing them to take over the party's property on his behalf...

...Perhaps Mendelssohn was keeping an eye on Lovestone for the party, but this doesn't mean Lovestone was involved in espionage with him...

...A 1943 FBI report on Lovestone says: "Informants have stated that he continued working for the OGPU [the Soviet intelligence agency] after being expelled from the Communist Party...

...Lovestone sought to restore himself to the party's good graces until 1938...

...Toohey had read through documents stolen from Lovestone's New York office earlier that year—by Communist maids, Morgan discovered...

...Those qualities did not prevent him from assuming the party's leadership in 1927, but within two years they led to his removal by Joseph Stalin himself...

...Dozenberg quit the party in the late '30s and testified before a Congressional committee investigating subversive activities...

...As Stalin soon afterward told a commission formed to investigate the problems of the American party, "He was not looking for high positions [in it] but only begged to be tested and given the chance to prove his loyalty...

...Lovestone's politics became equally questionable: Failing to recognize the strength of the democracies in their contest with the Communist bloc, he opposed all attempts to normalize relations with it...

...Several years ago, in The Secret World of American Communism, Harvey Klehr, John Earl Haynes and Fridrikh Igorevich Firsov reprinted a 193 8 memo from Pat Toohey, the American party's representative in Moscow, to Georgi Dimitrov, leader of the Communist International...

...Private entities do of course receive public funds, but in this instance they were disbursed secretly...

...These are not the only such charges against Jay Lovestone...

...In 1941 David Dubinsky, President of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, introduced Lovestone to George Meany, then Secretary-Treasurer of the American Federation of Labor...

...By early 1929, Stalin had had enough...

...Jay Lovestone, born Jacob Liebstein in Lithuania, arrived in New York City as a child in 1907...

...Although Morgan tells this dramatic story well, he seems to have unearthed very few documents that were not used by Theodore Draper in American Communism and Soviet Russia, published almost 40 years ago...

...Besides, assistance to foreign non-Communist unions was surely a legitimate function of American labor organizations...

...That April Lovestone met with the General Secretary...

...One of those few deals with Lovestone's flight from Moscow, which according to Morgan was organized by a friend from the United States: Nicolas Dozenberg, a Soviet intelligence agent...

...It was Bukharin's execution in 1938 that finally drove him out of the party's orbit...

...By 1944, Meany had put Lovestone in charge of a virtual AFL foreign ministry...

...Esther was the longest-standing lover of Lovestone, a lifelong bachelor...

...Klehr, Haynes and Firsov argue that "Toohey's comments and the handwritten annotations [the reference to the OGPU and the underlining of the word 'important'] confirm the hitherto undocumented statement by Benjamin Gitlow, who was expelled with Lovestone in 1929, that Lovestone continued to work with Soviet intelligence until 1936, hoping to reenter the Communist movement...

...Lovestone's raw reports, says Morgan, were filled with one of his agent's attacks on an American Embassy, another's "complaints about his health," and yet another's "gossip about the private lives of Indian politicians"—stuff that could easily be dismissed "as a farrago of hearsay and irrelevance...

...Lovestone seems especially close to Mrs...

...In 1928, Stalin turned against Bukharin and, among other things, began opposing alliances between Communist parties and non-Communists...

...But by the mid-1940s he had become intensely hostile to the USSR and was heading American organized labor's postwar campaign to rebuild the non-Communist Left in Western Europe...

...In any event, it is certain that throughout most of the 1930s Lovestone sought readmission to the party...

...Mendelsohn...

...In 1931, for example, Dozenberg was setting up a Romanian film company and asked Lovestone to introduce him to people in Hollywood...

...He liked to have fodder to pass on to Allen Dulles [the CIA chief], which Allen in turn could pass on to his brother [Secretary of State John Foster Dulles...

...Morgan, moreover, did some research on the Mendelssohns...

...But Stalin was Bukharin's ally and the Kremlin supported the faction led by Charles Ruthenberg, who named Lovestone as his successor on his deathbed...

...Some members of the U.S...

...But the author is clearly aware of them, since in his discussion of Lovestone's relationship with Nathan and Esther Mendelssohn Morgan notes that Earl Browder had said Nathan was a spy...

...But Lovestone stood Mark Antony's words on their head: The good he did lived after him...

...Nathan was her complaisant husband...

...But to Angleton they were a useful additive to his other sources...

...Morgan suggests that "The informant [the FBI report has 'informants'] was probably Nicholas Dozenberg...

...A couple of years later, writes Morgan, "out of gratitude to his rescuer, Lovestone on several occasions...

...He stuck to his "right-wing" deviations...

...Toohey informed Dimitrov that Lovestone "maintains very close connection with one Mendelsohn [sic] of Canada, whom Comrade Browder [leader of the CPUSA] believes to be a Soviet employee of an important branch (OGPU...

...In 1923, when he was a prominent American Communist, a friend asked him: "Why is it that you always make yourself so much disliked...

...Morgan never supplies the source of this information—the book, in fact, is alarmingly underdocumented— but he does note that Dozenberg and Lovestone had an ongoing correspondence...

...In the end, he was a bitter man angry at everyone except Angleton...

...What did I reply...

...Klehr, Haynes and Firsov did not describe Lovestone's correspondence with these two, but in view of his connection with them, it is not surprising that there was a lot of traffic to and fro...