LABOR AND THE CIA
Lens, Sidney
LABOR and the CIA by SIDNEY LENS WHEN GEORGE MEANY, the "honest plumber" who presides over the AFL-GIO, recently told reporters that his organization, unlike certain student, educational, and...
...I did my best to try to lift the lid on it...
...This tale was relatively easy to trace, because money was passed to the NSA through suspect foundations, some of which were little more than mail drops, and because other student leaders also decided to tell the truth...
...Several years ago I made a date with a union man who, I was convinced, had documentary evidence on this subject, but I received a letter from him the following day stating he had changed his mind about revealing it...
...subsidizing Pierre Ferri-Pisani in Marseilles and other ports in 1949-50 to break dock-workers' boycotts of American arms shipments...
...Only in the Communist world, Lovestone and his friends constantly tell us, are the unions and union leaders agents of their government...
...Ernest Lee, Meany's son-inlaw and also of the department...
...In the opinion of many, in and out of the labor movement, this evidence is sufficient to establish the case...
...Though Perlik denies he knew the original source of the funds his organization dispensed, it stretches credulity to believe that anyone receiving a million dollars can be that innocent...
...who, Lovestone the CIA or vice versa, but there's no doubt of the relationship...
...During that period he negotiated more than 150 union contracts with a wide variety of Chicago employers...
...Did any of this money come from the CIA...
...But the CIA's involvement with the Guild makes this unlikely...
...Frederic Delano Houghteling, now a Federal Government lawyer, who, as a student leader, first arranged for CIA to finance a trip abroad of twelve students in 1950, recounts casually how the CIA man made a check on the twelve young people before the money was forthcoming...
...The revelations con cerning the National Student Association and other recent "leaks" have opened the dam only a crack...
...American unionists who worked in Latin America and were well informed on the strike, told me that some U. S. unionists gave moral and material support to Peter D'Aguiar's United Force—a rightist party which receives money from Fred Schwarz' Christian Anti-Communism Crusade and other such extremist groups...
...Cheddi Jagan charged that it was $1.2 million...
...sources for this strike was also unusual...
...According to Neil Sheehan, reporting in The New York Times February 23, "operations of the Central Intelligence Agency, working under cover of an American labor union, helped organize strikes in British Guiana in 1962 and 1963 against Dr...
...This was certainly not true in British Guiana...
...One high union official estimates that AFL-CIO spends $6 million a year in Latin America alone, in addition to its outlays in Europe, Asia, and Africa...
...Yet Zander, a liberal and longtime World Federalist leader, was able to raise money for a shipment of food to the Guianians on the picket line...
...The contingent of union staffers who flocked there and the sheer volume of money spent were evidence of something more sinister than one private organization coming to the aid of another...
...There are no intermediaries and no messy possibilities, unless one or the other talks, that the transaction will be revealed...
...Altogether, this was a massive and strange concentration that cannot be explained as normal procedure...
...We teach the fundamentals of union operation...
...Two of them, with whom I have been acquainted for many years, told me they took themselves out of contention when they were told that the "Michigan Fund" would funnel large sums into the organization...
...helping Germans form a non-Communist federation...
...Where did the money come from...
...Since the Federation claims that twenty-five per cent of its budget goes for international affairs—out of $10 or $12 million—there is a good deal of overseas expenditure unaccounted for...
...The Western Hemisphere operation, however, functioned autonomously, and Zander, as a PSI board member, was permitted to spend funds from a separate account here...
...Donald Robinson, in his laudatory Reader's Digest article, wrote that Hans Jahn "told me about an undercover organization he has set up...
...His successor, Wurf—who closed down this phase of the union's activities when he took office, and dismissed McCabe—says there are no records in the union office...
...That all of this could have been done for a mere $100,000 is obviously not possible...
...It is reasonable to assume that this is standard procedure: CIA makes security investigations of all AFL-CIO people working in the international field who benefit directly or indirectly from its coffers...
...According to Riesel, labor and the CIA collaborate on "a vast international front—and with labor leaders headquartered in Washington, New York, Chicago, Detroit, San Francisco, and even Denver...
...Zander insists this figure is an exaggeration and that he received only $12,000 to $15,000 a year from "foundations," about $150,000 over a period of years...
...Meany's denial of CIA support was received with cynicism by those on the inside in Washington and elsewhere who had been persuaded by considerable evidence over a period of many years that Lovestone worked closely with the CIA...
...When the 'CIA man' won," wrote James Wechsler in The New York Post, "the union's staff and budget rose and its international activity suddenly increased in Latin America and the Middle East...
...Cheddi Jagan, a Marxist who was prime minister there...
...Here are a few items, by no means complete, which tend to indicate there is more to the story than we are being told: ITEM: When I interviewed Irving Brown in 1965 he claimed that in twenty years he had donated some $100,000 to foreign unions in Europe and Africa...
...Money contributed by the CIA buys it a partnership in choosing the men who benefit from it...
...Washington was extremely anxious that this small colony of 600,000 people should not remain under radical leadership after becoming independent—a "second Cuba" in the Western Hemisphere...
...It is an ominous day both for labor at home and labor abroad, as well as the democratic process, when decisions on open policy must be made in secret and must be paid for, in part at least, by a spy agency...
...To argue, then, that the choice for this sensitive work lies exclusively with the unions themselves or that the rank and file union members have a voice either in selecting men such as Meakins or McCabe or in reviewing what they do, is not reasonable...
...Although the CIA has given money to unions through foundations, sometimes it handles its money matters in other ways, more difficult to track down...
...but how the pieces are put together is up to the people involved...
...Even if we were willing to admit that CIA and State have a right to practice subversion where they please, the question remains whether they have a moral or legal right to use a private organization—a labor organization—as a secret accomplice...
...ITEM: William Doherty Jr., current director of AIFLD, told a reporter a couple of years ago that Brazilian unionists trained by AIFLD "were so active that they became intimately involved in some of the clandestine operations of the revolution [Castelo Branco's coup d'etat] before it took place on April 1 [1964], What happened in Brazil on April 1 did not just happen—it was planned—and planned months in advance...
...In addition, Serafino Romualdo, then director of AIFLD (which receives eighty per cent of its budget for educating Latin American unionists and 100 per cent of its more expensive social program financing from a U.S...
...He gave me copies of the paper...
...Since the CIA is known to have played some role in this so-called "revolution," it seems likely that the AIFLD graduates were also involved with the CIA...
...Unionists at home often plead for pennies to organize their field...
...government agency, AID ) kept six Guianian union leaders on its payroll during this period...
...Part of those funds came from a $1 a month assessment on each of its 1,600 local unions...
...The number of AFL-CIO unionists who descended on British Guiana during the crisis was remarkable...
...and many similar undertakings...
...It should not come as a surprise: In the Dominican Republic, during Bosch's regime, the puppet union federation—CONATRAL—supported by AFL-CIO and the American labor attache, fought Bosch vigorously at the same time that Ambassador John Bart-low Martin was supporting him...
...has in recent years obtained much of its primary information about international Communism from Lovestone...
...Another method is a little more complicated: An American unionist gives his CIA contact the names of foreign unionists who are ripe either for recruitment to the CIA, bribes, or both, and the CIA itself handles the transaction from there on...
...There is a plaintive tone to these words...
...the formation of a Free Trade Union Center in Exile in the late 1940's which The New York Times said "appears to have at its disposal a working intelligence division...
...Cesar Chavez and his agricultural workers union involved in the highly-important strike of grape workers in Delano, California, last year, received about $10,000 a month aid from unions, and half of that came from Reuther's UAW...
...Also among those who shuttled into British Guiana to give moral and material aid to the strikers were Arnold Zander, then president of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), and his assistant, William Howard McCabe...
...And their line was suspiciously attuned to the rabid anti-Communism of the spy agency...
...Many of the trade union leaders—some of whom were actually trained in our institute—were involved in the revolution, and in the overthrow of the Goulart regime...
...The foreigner is not likely to talk...
...His books include "The Crisis of American Labor," "The Futile Crusade," and "Radicalism in America...
...It would endanger the lives of his associates and jeopardize their missions...
...If labor officials were involved in collecting such intelligence it would serve no union purpose...
...ITEM: O. A. Knight, retired President of the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers (OCAW) , concedes that while he was head of the International Federation of Petroleum and Chemical Workers (IFPCW) for twelve years, "we received foundation money quite easily...
...National Student Association officers have charged that the CIA solicited agents from their top echelons for fourteen years...
...In addition to those American labor officials listed above who were directing the strike in British Guiana, there was Gene Meakins of the American Newspaper Guild, a union now known to have taken nearly a million dollars from foundations that were CIA conduits...
...George Meany has blandly asserted: "We in the AFL-CIO do not even try to influence the structure of the labor movements in other nations...
...But the confusion over money—enormous amounts considering the tiny country involved— hints at something more...
...The public—and particularly the rank-and-file unionist—must take a hand at this point, for, as The New York Times observed: "When a government finds it necessary to set up an agency to fight subversion with subversion everywhere, the tragic danger it opens up is that among the people it subverts are its own...
...There are just too many coincidences about money and special operations to make the Meany-Lovestone disavowals credible...
...Among them were Andrew McClellan, in charge of Latin American activity for the AFL-CIO international affairs department...
...The exposure of student-CIA links came when a disenchanted National Student Association (NSA) leader told his story to friends in Washington, who eventually passed it on to Ramparts magazine...
...After our brief talk on the telephone last night," his letter read, "I retired for a hectic and frightful nightmare...
...Take the eighty-day general strike in British Guiana during 1963, which ostensibly was called to prevent a certain labor relations law from being enacted, but was actually designed to overthrow the leftist government of Cheddi Jagan...
...But a former AIFLD official has told me that the grant was aborted as a result of Patman's publicity, and Dan Kurzman of The Washington Post wrote on January 2, 1966: "Some time ago, the AIFLD communicated with a certain Michigan Fund about the availability of funds...
...And somehow or other they never seem to lack for money in their endeavors...
...AFSCME is affiliated with the Public Services International (PSI), a trade union secretariat representing public employes throughout the world, with headquarters in London...
...Sam Brown of the NSA advisory board told newsmen that NSA officers gathered information overseas "and reported it to their CIA counterparts...
...McCabe's activities were much more extensive, doubtless costing larger sums—though Zander, in a telephone interview with me, now claims he cannot recall exactly what his assistant did...
...Collusion between AFL-CIO and the CIA distorts both the democratic process and the character of the labor movement...
...considerable help to the Greek labor organization which was virtually a satellite of his for many years until he undercut one of its strikes...
...Much of what he [Brown] has done in the cloak-and-dagger realm cannot be recounted...
...I suppose it's just my natural ingrained opposition to spy activities," Meany said...
...The injection of CIA into labor's affairs not only destroys AFL-CIO independence abroad but dilutes it at home...
...Innumerable strikes have taken place around the world without eliciting this kind of response from the AFL-CIO, or anything approaching—on a per capita basis—this kind of money...
...Charles A. Perlik, Jr., secretary-treasurer of the Guild, insisted at the time I interviewed him in April, 1965, that all he knew of Meakins' work was what had been published in the union paper...
...I happened to be in British Guiana not long after the strike and when I asked a Trades Union Council official named Pollidor about the matter, he said that the 20,000 to 25,000 strikers were each given about $3 a week in money and food for the eleven and one-half weeks of the walkout—somewhere between $700,000 and $850,000...
...Here as elsewhere, the AFL-CIO international affairs officers, while following closely the CIA-State Department propaganda line, often shift it a bit to the right...
...According to Edwin Lahey, Washington correspondent for the Knight newspapers, "it can be stated without qualification that the CIA...
...Even labor columnist Victor Riesel, who expresses the warmest feelings for Lovestone and Meany, commented: "Certainly the Central Intelligence Agency and the American labor movement have cooperated...
...More recently The Denver Post reported that the CIA had used the Federation "to pump hundreds of thousands of dollars into undercover activities in Latin America and the Middle East...
...McClellan could not recall the exact sum when I talked with him, but he estimated it at about $50,000...
...labor groups designed to sustain fellow-workers of another nation on strike, it would have been perfectly legitimate...
...I really cannot stand any more of this stuff and want no part of the subject...
...Brown's activities included splitting the French and Italian labor movement...
...The man who did get the job, Serafino Romualdi, denied to me that AIFLD had ever received money from this source...
...But little distinguishes the AFL-CIO top officials, and particularly its international affairs department, from the Communists in this respect...
...The Michigan Fund, they found, had an address but no telephone number in the directory...
...ITEM : "We had relationships with people behind the iron curtain," Brown told me, "through men such as Hans Jahn of the German railroad unions...
...It is even more difficult to believe that if AIFLD leaders know of this that they or the American unions with whom they are associated can remain as independent of government as they and government spokesmen claim...
...It was the Michigan Fund and seven others that supplied that sum—but Kurzman is probably accurate in the rest of his story...
...It may have...
...Inside American labor, cooperation with the CIA privately is considered a badge of honor...
...Leslie R. Colitt of The New York Times related that when he was a student at the Free University in West Berlin he was "approached in my room in the city by a man who identified himself as 'from the CIA.' He knew everything about me, even details that I had only mentioned on my scholarship application form...
...Apart from the fact that this most likely is illegal, intelligence-gathering has no role as a legitimate labor union function...
...I'm not sure if I would," he replied...
...When I talked with him, Zander could not remember the name of the "foundations" from which the money came, but he conceded in light of the National Student Association expose it was "quite possible that our money came from CIA sources...
...Victor Reuther, who directs the United Automobile Workers international affairs department for his brother, UA W President Walter Reuther, caused a mild sensation in May, 1966, when Harry Bernstein of The Los Angeles Times quoted him as saying that the AFL-CIO is heavily "involved" with the CIA...
...I'm not certain at this moment...
...A Government official who has been in the center of international labor affairs for two decades claims that "it's hard to tell who uses SIDNEY LENS, a Chicago labor official for thirty years, is director emeritus of the United Service Employes Union Local 329...
...Therefore, it must have been gathered for some other purpose...
...But this year when a newsman spoke with Guild officials about CIA he was told: "If you find what you're looking for and you print it, we're dead so far as this program is concerned...
...AFL-CIO officials and the foreign unionists they train keep turning up in the same places where the CIA has a critical interest...
...But according to David Langley, in an article for New Politics magazine (Winter, 1966) : "Zander spent more than $100,000 per year on permanent Latin American operations, without a trace showing up in the union's accounts...
...LABOR and the CIA by SIDNEY LENS WHEN GEORGE MEANY, the "honest plumber" who presides over the AFL-GIO, recently told reporters that his organization, unlike certain student, educational, and religious groups, had never received financial favors from the Central Intelligence Agency, his comment was received with skepticism...
...Without this money from North American coffers the strike, everyone admits, would have collapsed...
...And some day it will all come out...
...Other unionists on the scene in British Guiana were Gerard P. O'Keefe and Tim Bornstein of the Retail Clerks' Union, who were there to assist the Guianian Trades Union Council and help in strike relief work...
...He has since repeated and widened the charge: "All I can say now," he told James A. Wechsler of The New York Post recently, "is that there is a lot bigger story in the CIA's financial and other connections with the AFL-CIO...
...The amount of money available from U.S...
...Three times I pressed him for a definite answer but that was the best I could get...
...Neil Sheehan reported in The New York Times recently that two CIA agents were in charge of AFSCME's international affairs department...
...I think the CIA has a job to do, but it can do it without using or subsidizing the labor movement...
...Here again is another evil by-poduct of secrecy and subterranean activity...
...Like the Newspaper Guild, Zander's union was in serious financial trouble —when Zander lost the presidency to Jerry Wurf a year or two later the organization, according to Wurf, was bankrupt and hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt...
...CONATRA L ran a newspaper advertisement calling on the people to put their faith in the "armed forces" to restrain the growing forces of Communism, the same armed forces which were then plotting to overthrow Bosch...
...Donald Robinson, whose praise for Brown in a Reader's Digest article was unqualified, said in 1952 that Brown had spent "close to $1 million" as of that date...
...One top AFL-CIO official who is grooming himself for Meany's post boasts that he has "top security clearance...
...One is simple and direct: A union official meets a CIA official somewhere, and money changes hands...
...Its total administrative expense for the year ending May 31, 1956, was $60.51, and it was subsequently listed by Representative Wright Patman as a fund that was a conduit for the CIA...
...He has taught courses on industrial relations at the University of Chicago...
...The Post said sources in Washington and Switzerland confirmed that the Federation received a total of $40,000 in 1961 and 1962 from the Andrew Hamilton Fund of Philadelphia—a CIA-connected foundation...
...McCabe spent "considerably greater sums...
...The conclusion is inescapable that the AFL-CIO officials did for the CIA and the State Department what these government agencies could not possibly have done by themselves...
...If this had been a fraternal effort by private U.S...
...The disclaimers of CIA links, financial and otherwise, by Meany, Love-stone, Brown, and others, clearly need further examination...
...It is inconceivable that $700,000 to $850,000 from the AFL-CIO alone is that easily available for a strike in a relatively obscure place like British Guiana...
...Colitt said that the university "was used both by the CIA and American army intelligence to recruit American and foreign students for what members of the agencies often called 'part-time work.' " It is hard to believe that the CIA would seek recruits at the P'ree University in Berlin and overlook so fertile a field as the foreign union students at AIFLD...
...Would he have turned it down "if you knew it was CIA...
...Since there is no explicit testimony, the AFL-CIO relationship with the CIA must be deduced from what lawyers call circumstantial evidence...
...The CIA story has been whispered in Washington's corridors for more than a decade...
...A committee in Denver, he said, solicited these outside sources but he could not remember its name, how much money was received, or what foundations were involved...
...The walkout occurred against this background...
...Moreover, there is evidence that in at least one instance the CIA gave money to an American union leader to help him win an election in his own union at home...
...Next day, in talking with Haskins, it turned out that the committee referred to was the League for Economic and Social Cooperative Development in Denver, and that its chairman was O. A. Knight...
...A pamphlet published by the International Federation of Journalists, directed by Charles Perlik's American Newspaper Guild, states: "The International Federation of Journalists is a non-governmental organization that takes orders from its members and no one else...
...I asked...
...However, a government official in charge of labor policy for most of Western Europe in the 1950's told me: "Undoubtedly Irving gave out millions of dollars...
...Irving Brown helped us...
...It is the subversion of precisely the quality that is supposed to distinguish American organizations from their totalitarian counterparts that is the heart of the moral crisis generated by the recent and current revelations regarding the operations of the CIA...
...Furthermore, too many of the people assigned to "help" were from organizations which today are suspected of having received CIA money...
...He referred me to his former assistant, Lloyd Haskins, who is now secretary general of IFPCW...
...the CIA man is assumed to be closemouthed, so there is little prospect of a leak...
...The disclaimer was followed by others from Jay Lovestone, director of the AFL-CIO international affairs department, who was once termed by Edwin Lahey of the Knight Newspapers "a real mystery man," and Irving Brown, Lovestone's closest associate and representative to the United Nations from the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions...
...However, the connection was severed after Representative Wright Patman (Democrat, Texas) charged that this Fund supplied the J. M. Kaplan Fund of New York, which he said was a CIA organ, with nearly $1 million from 1961 to 1963...
...ITEM: When AIFLD was formed in 1962, three or four men were considered for the top post...
...William Doherty, Jr., then second in command of the AID-financed American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD) ; Pat Terrill of the steelworkers, and two officials of the Retail Clerks Union...
...Meany's denial of CIA connections, accompanied by those of Lovestone and Brown, places sandbags against the leaks, but does not stop the waters of suspicion from filtering through...
...So far, no one in labor who has been personally involved with the CIA has been willing to divulge the facts...
Vol. 31 • April 1967 • No. 4
