Secret Work

SECRET WORK. Since the 1880s, when German American socialists and labor activists were widely accused of introducing “foreign” ideas into US society, the immigrant Left has often been charged with real or potential conspiracy. The Bolshevik Revolution prompted new levels of attack. Communist ideology, for its attackers in the press, in Congress, and in the new Bureau of Investigation headed by young J. Edgar Hoover, could only be a seditious, anti-American import; anyone involved in the Communist movement or even sympathetic to its range of activities served the interests of foreign powers.

US authorities at various levels of government weaponized these assumptions against many varieties of Communist activities or suspected activities. The Attorney General among others used the Smith Act, the Taft-Hartley Act, the Hiss and Rosenberg trials, and others, with great effect. The charge and the prosecution contained a single grain of truth. Anti-Communist rhetoric dramatized, even in misinterpretation, the long history of interaction by American radical movements with like-minded movements in other lands. Such interaction pre-dated by generations the existence of the Soviet Union and continued in various forms since 1991.

German political refugees, in the years after 1848, sent substantial funds to their European comrades and sought to encourage them in other ways viewed as “subversive” by existing governments. Irish Americans and a scattering of other groups, notably Cubans, did likewise in this period. Such activity had little impact on the dominant American culture. In the immediate post–Civil War era and the severely depressed 1870s, however, the Paris Commune and the role of German American trade unionists sent a shiver of fear through the conservative press. Especially after the Bismarckian repressive laws drove thousands of German radicals to American shores, the connections between new Americans and their homeland comrades tightened. Along with union efforts and fraternal activities, the rallying of support took on major proportions for Left organizational life. If a revolution could not be made in the foreseeable future in a bourgeois America, immigrants could at least support one in the society they had left behind. Inevitably, legal niceties had to be avoided, for instance, by the ingenious methods of Irish Americans shipping a coffin to the homeland filled with top-quality rifles, alternatively with cash and weights, instead of a deceased immigrant inside. The quiet transfer of cash was simpler.

By the end of the nineteenth century, nearly a dozen immigrant groups had established close ties to their homeland Lefts. Some published propaganda in the freer atmosphere of the United States and conducted other work blatantly illegal at home, none more than Russian Jews. World War I spawned an intense development of ties, with agents sent to and from the United States by dozens of movements. Only with the Russian Revolution and the actual takeover of a state apparatus, however, did secret work acquire the degree of notoriety (and perhaps for some on the Left, the allure) attached to modern espionage. Intense activities, generally inept on both sides, marked the first years of the Comintern’s influence within the United States. Veterans of that time later recalled that the chaos of the first years was largely due to Moscow’s confusion and lack of control over the new Communist movement and its allies in the United States.

During the following decades, the overwhelming flow of money went from American shores to the Soviet Union, mainly for specific campaigns, such as food support in the early 1920s and war relief in the 1940s. Nonetheless, funds also flowed from the Soviet Union to the United States, primarily as subsidies for a range of American Communist activities such as subsidizing the perennially money-losing Communist press. The transmission of such funds continued, as before the Russian Revolution, the chief aspect of illegal work. Espionage efforts apparently known only at the top levels of the CPUSA proved to be a distraction from more useful activities.

Supporters of the Soviet Union gained high appointive office under the New Deal, but lacked access to important security documents until World War II. A handful of later trade union officials, most prominently Jay Lovestone, former Communist Party leader and future client of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), had secret communications with the Soviet regime in the 1920s-1930s, as did a handful of liberal intellectuals. The substance involved personal information without any great importance or high-level security connections. US entry into World War II and the establishment of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) added a crucial new element to secret work. Activity on behalf of the Resistance by immigrants from Greece, Finland, Italy, China and Indo-China but most especially the Balkans, Hungary and Russia often intersected with US government efforts and gained support until the war’s end.

Seeking to keep the assorted anti-fascist groups at arm’s length politically, the OSS nevertheless unleashed an unprecedented flurry of left-wing spy activity, including exchanges of information with Russians. In the urgent but highly secret effort to build atomic weapons, the Roosevelt administration knowingly employed scientists well known for their Soviet or left-wing sympathies. This decision virtually ensured the passage of some highly classified information to a crucial ally. Julius Rosenberg and Morton Sobell, among others, passed secrets related to atomic weapons to the Soviet Union during the war.

Such intrigues had almost no role in the day-to-day activities of the American Left, save for the need of Communists to deny the existence of spying by or for the Russians and for anti-Communist socialists to insist upon its central importance to American Communism at large. Little would be said within the Left or on its fringes concerning the most important single instance of illegal activity: the illegal transfer of money, arms and assorted war materiel to the new state of Israel.

New revolutionary regimes arising out of the anti-colonial movements of the post–World War II period naturally used friends and contacts within the United States. From the Philippines and pre-independence India to parts of Africa and the Caribbean, freelancers and disciplined cadres wrote popular accounts of uprisings, provided medical services, distributed funds, and engaged in every manner of logistical assistance. Only perhaps in China, Puerto Rico, and the English-speaking Caribbean, however, were leftwing Americans as important as their counterpart European nationals of the former colonial authorities. The Soviet leadership, preoccupied with deteriorating Russo-American relations and the integration of Eastern Europe within a cordon sanitaire, would nevertheless play an increasing role in the Global South. Russian engagements would be rivaled by activities of erstwhile American socialists in the other political direction, seeking continued US dominance (in the Western Hemisphere) or the replacement of European colonies with neo-colonial regimes friendly to American interests in every way.

Heavily funded by CIA sources and institutionally backed by the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, Jay Lovestone, by the middle 1940s fervently anti-Soviet, used his personal network to shape labor’s own counterintelligence operations. Millions of dollars were passed to friendly labor officials in Europe, particularly in France and Italy. Strategic connections between the CIA and heroin-trade gangsters reputedly began in a complex alliance against French Communists in Marseilles. The establishment of bodies of the American Federation of Labor and the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations in Asia and Latin America replicated this pattern, sometimes with former socialists and former Trotskyists in charge of the operation. Lovestone’s personal emissary, Irving Brown, led the CIA operation in Europe, often registering great frustration with the “soft” anticommunism of European labor leaders open to collaboration with their Left counterparts on both sides or the Iron Curtain.

Seeking sympathy and support, Communist leaders outside Russia, such as the Vietnamese, Chileans, Nicaraguans, and South Africans, generally found it wiser to go over the heads of the American Communists to connect directly with American student and peace activists. Yugoslavian leaders had earlier reached out to Slovenian and Croatian nationals in the United States over the heads of, and opposed to, the bitterly anti-Tito CPUSA. Central America and Cuba offered another special case, as funds went out from the United States, mainly in humanitarian projects, in the case of Cuba more from veterans of the New Left than elsewhere. By the middle 1980s, the Maryknoll Fathers might rightly have been called the leading left-wing “international” operating among those battling American imperialism in Central America and thus committing the greatest variety of “illegal” acts by American Cold War definitions. American support for the African National Congress against the apartheid regime in South Africa followed a similar pattern. Numerous African American, religious, and humanitarian groups played more significant roles than did the formal Left, although current and former American Communists played important roles, especially in building solidarity at local levels.

The collapse of the Soviet Union and the collapse of the leadership of the American labor movement promised to turn up more documentation of secret relationships between Americans and either the KGB or CIA. The papers of Jay Lovestone and his close associates such as Irving Brown and their staffs remained unavailable or, when examined, had been purged of the most concentrated cases of widespread illegal activities. Newer documents from the Kremlin turned out to be mostly of a similar unverifiable nature. Disputes continued to swirl around the familiar Hiss and Rosenberg cases, with much of the supposed new evidence based on disputed materials. Documents examined in the Soviet Union or reprinted for scholars offered more details, especially in regard to Americans actually living in Russia during the 1930s-1940s, but little new or revealing in regard to illegal or secret work by Soviet sympathizers.

Buhle, Paul. “Spies Everywhere.” Radical History Review 67 (winter 1997).

Carew, Anthony. America Labour’s Cold War Abroad, from Deep Freeze to Detente, 1945-1970. Edmonton: Athabasca University Press, 2018.

Klehr, Harvey, John Earl Hayes, and Fridrikh Igorevich Firsov. The Secret World of American Communism. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995.

Morgan, Ted. A Covert Life: Jay Lovestone, Communist, Anti-Communist and Spymaster. New York: Random House, 1999.

Rathbun, Ben. The Point Man: Irving Brown and the Deadly Post-1945 Struggle for Europe and Africa. Montreux: Minerva Press, 1996.

Jay Lovetone Papers. Register. Hoover Institution. https://oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/tf4q2nb077/