A Covert Life: Jay Lovestone,

Communist, Anti-Communist, and Spymaster

by Ted Morgan. 402 pp. (New York: Random House, 1999)

Reviewed by Dashiell Shenk

[Jay Lovestone; CIA; James Angleton]

Jay Lovestone was born Jacob Liebstein in 1897 to Orthodox Jewish parents who never felt quite at home in the bustling America whose political life their son helped shape. He was one of the most influential individuals in American foreign policy, particularly during the Cold War. He believed that the "long twilight struggle," as John Kennedy called it, between the capitalist West and the communist East was decided as much by cloak-and-dagger operations as by U.S. economic and military might. Lovestone became a spy and a spymaster, a schemer and a conspirator, a faction-fighter and a political insider-as well as a grand strategist who never doubted that the "final battle" would be between the communists and the ex-communists. He certainly helped define America's anti-Soviet and anti-communist mission.

      Sympathetic to its subject, Ted Morgan's superficial biography makes no attempt to diminish or apologize for Lovestone's principal life's work, not merely collaborating with the CIA in subverting labor movements and democratic organizations around the world with CIA money, but actually being on the Agency's payroll.

      It is fashionable in certain conservative circles to claim that the only thing wrong with CIA involvement in the labor movement was that there was not enough of it. This argument is, of course, based upon the premise that America's foreign policy instruments, including the CIA, were overwhelmingly forces for good in the world. Morgan limits himself to describing how the cooperation between the labor movement and the CIA was a cause of strain and trouble. In this regard, the conservatives' point about the CIA is turned on its head: According to Morgan, Lovestone thought the "fizz-kids," as he called them for their shallowness, were insufficiently anti-communist, and the problem was not too much CIA in the AFL, but not enough AFL (e.g., Meany, Lovestone, and Dubinsky) in the CIA.

      At one level, this was because their fundamental purposes were different. Lovestone had been a leader of the American communist movement in the ‘20s and ‘30s (after graduating from City College of New York), first as a Party leader, and later, after he was removed and nearly killed on Stalin's orders, as a dissident. Like James Cannon, the Trotskyist leader, Lovestone hoped the Stalinist factions around the world would see the error of their ways and reinstate them.

      The great purges convinced him that the communist movement was beyond repair, and he devoted the rest of his life to anti-communism within the labor movement. Lovestone believed the overriding purpose of U.S. foreign policy must be the defeat of the Soviet Union, a belief he pursued with relentless deviousness.

      But the function of intelligence agencies should be to gather intelligence and present it to "intelligence consumers," those officials whose job is to formulate and carry out policy. Those goals often did not coincide with Lovestone's. America's foreign policy, even when viewed as driven by hegemonic ambitions, was always less coherent than grand theorists would like to believe. Lovestone complained that U.S. policymakers, including those in the CIA, were fickle, often stupid, and almost always too soft on communism. It is not surprising to learn that the only man he deeply trusted in the CIA was counterintelligence chief James Jesus Angleton, himself notorious for distrusting and despising most of his own colleagues.

      One person Angleton did have full confidence in was a beautiful Boston debutante and model, Louise Page Morris ("Pagie"), whom he recruited in 1949. Pagie had worked with the OSS during the War in the Russia division and then, after the War, for the OSS chief, "Wild Bill" Donovan, infiltrating "communist" women's groups. Angleton hired her away from Donovan as his personal secret agent, outside the CIA hierarchy. For the next 25 years, under the cover of a librarian at Lovestone's Free Trade Union Committee, she traveled the world on dangerous assignments for both Angleton and Lovestone, paid off the books with CIA money.

      She also had a 30-year affair with Lovestone, along with flings with Donovan and Henry Cabot Lodge. An entire chapter in Morgan's book is devoted to how Pagie and Lovestone, from such disparate backgrounds, were connected through the worlds of espionage and love, in a relationship "based on trickery, deception, and the need-to-know principle."

      Throughout the second half of his life, as one of the leaders of the AFL and head of president George Meany's cadre of international agents, of whom the most notorious was Irving Brown, Lovestone wielded tremendous power and influence. Yet this was often in an effort to change, not to support, U.S. foreign policy.

      But the American government establishment is not so much ideological as conservative and pragmatic, concerned with the promotion of U.S. corporate interests. The CIA and other agencies were quite willing cynically to use Lovestone and his foreign friends, who saw themselves fundamentally in perpetual political combat against the communists. Lovestone was well aware of this, and often railed against the intelligence agencies, but in the last analysis felt he needed all the help he could get, even from the U.S. government.

      Who got the better of the bargain? Morgan notes drily, "The CIA connection and the AFL's unconditional support for the Vietnam War seemed to show that organized labor had become an arm of the government. In fact, the Lovestone-Meany policy was often at variance with the government.... Yet...the union membership knew only in the vaguest terms how their dues were being spent in the foreign field." Not so much by their uncompromising anti-Sovietism as by their secretiveness, Morgan suggests, Lovestone and his allies overstepped their mandates and thereby made it more difficult for American labor to build, or rebuild, an international program.

      Though it is not touched upon in the book, the wholesale torture and murder by U.S. state security agencies of honest labor leaders in Latin America, Southeast Asia, and throughout the Third World made possible the closing of U.S.-based factories and their export to those countries. With independent, democratic labor unions crushed and their leaders physically eliminated, workers could be more easily exploited, and toxic waste dumps more easily created. Lovestone's legacy is clear: Not only was he operating without the informed consent of American labor union members, he was acting against their interests. U.S. labor union bureaucrats are painfully re-learning the truth: If wages go down anywhere, they go down everywhere.

      Angleton at the CIA and Lovestone at the AFL were both forced into retirement in 1974, marking the end of the influence of the purest Cold Warriors.