A Covert Life. Jay Lovestone: Communist, Anti-Communist, and Spymaster
Ted Morgan
New York: Random House, 1999, $29.95
Freedom’s War: The US Crusade Against the Soviet Union
Scott Lucas
Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999, £45
Secret History: The CIA’s Classified Account of its Operations in Guatemala 1952-54
Nick Cullather
Stanford (California): Stanford University Press 1999, £8.95
These three books dovetail together rather nicely. The Lucas book is the first attempt I am aware of to try and describe the massive anti-communist propaganda effort made the US during the first decade of the Cold War. Lucas’ particular emphasis is on the private-public partnership this entailed: Mr Corporate Director and the organs of the US state (CIA, State Department et al) working together. Much of this is new to me (but I am not expert in the field), the detail Lucas has assembled is impressive, and the scale of the operations mind-boggling. For example, in 1951 an inter-departmental ‘Inventory of Cold War operations’ was 144 pages long, with organisations such as the Lions, the US David Cup tennis team and the Yale Glee Club listed alongside the more obvious American Legion. Something not too far from a kind of corporate state was created in this period.
Yet despite the massive detail there are obvious things missing from Lucas’s account. Most striking is the tiny space devoted to the role of US labour unions and transnational labour bodies created and run by the US. This is surprising, for their activities in the immediate post WW2 period strongly support his thesis of some autonomous role for non-governmental organisations during the Cold War. For while the US state later took over most of the anti-communist operations and maintained a kind of private ‘front’ for them, in the 1945-47 period, when the US state was uncertain about its response to the Soviet Union and before the CIA had yet been created, Jay Lovestone and the American Federation of Labor (AFL) had already begun clandestine anti-communist operations in the trade unions of Europe. Morgan concludes that:
From November 1945…..until the first Marshall Plan goods were unloaded in Europe in the spring of 1948, [Lovestone] and his Free Trade Union Committee stood alone in acting against Soviet expansion via the trade unions…the [Irving] Brown-Lovestone-orchestrated splitting of the united-front unions in France and Italy and the sponsorship of the German DGB [labour federation] against the wishes of the U.S. military government, contributed substantially to the political stabilisation of Western Europe at a time when a Communist takeover had to be taken seriously.
Well maybe so: Lovestone’s biographer, Morgan, takes it for granted that a ‘communist takeover’, was a serious threat; but the evidence on that is mixed, to say the least. This comment of his illustrates the tone of the book: this is the Cold War revisited as if the revisionists had never existed. It was simple: freedom versus the Red Menace. US imperialism? The imposition of US control under the guise of the Marshall Plan etc? Nothing like that gets a look in. Nonetheless it is an entertaining and informative read. But be aware that almost half of the book deals with Lovestone’s factional activities on the US left before WW2. The really important stuff, about Lovestone and the CIA, is surprisingly patchy, in part because the author has declined to stray beyond the orthodox sources. Nonetheless there are some interesting snippets in here, notably more details on the relationship between Lovestone and James Jesus Angleton, who ran Lovestone as another of his off-the-books operations.
Morgan’s history of Lovestone’s operations completely ignores the wider context of CIA operations (American imperialism) in the 1950s. You would never know from it that while Lovestone and his agents were gathering information on, and trying to manipulate the unions in the decolonising countries of Africa, his employers were elsewhere engaged in more robust forms of intervention.
Nick Cullather was a young historian hired by the CIA to read the Agency’s files on its Guatemala operation and write them up. This published version has been sanitised a little but not enough to obscure the details of a picture we knew already: when the interests of an American company were threatened by a modest reforming government, the US military, intelligence and propaganda organisations – the network detailed by Lucas – stepped in, fabricated a ‘Soviet threat’ with a little help from their assets in the media, armed an opposition and overthrew the regime. The ghastly, blood-soaked, terror regimes in Guatemala ensued and hundreds of thousands of people have been murdered to maintain the profits of US shareholders. Wonderful stuff this American ‘freedom’.