CIA FINANCE UNIONS

Between 1962 and 1963, America's Central Intelligency Agency was subsidizing the Kenya Federation of Labour, led by Tom Mboya, at the rate of £1,000 a month.

In 1963 and 1964, CIA agents spent about £150,000 in their operation in British Guiana, using as a cover the Public Services Internationala trade union centre to which are affiliated such unions as the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees and, in Britain, the General and Municipal Workers' Union. These are just two of the more exposed cases manipulation of workers' organizations by the CIA, the work of Jay Lovestone Stalinist, ex-centrist, the CIA's man in International Affairs department of the AFL-CIO.

There have been others. Lovestone himself has boasted of the part played by graduates of the American Institute for Free Labour Development, which he founded, in bringing down governments such as that of Joao Goulart in Brazil, 1964.

In the Dominican Republic, according to Dan Kurzman in the 'Washington Post' (June 14, 1966), the bulk of the labour movement regarded the National Federation of Free Dominican Workers, CONATRAL-the trade union organization which the AAL-CIO International Affairs department supported-as a 'tool of the AFL-CIO, the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency'.

Victor Reuther, of the American auto-workers' union, who visited the Dominican Republic in 1966, when US troops occupied the country, also cited events in that country as a case where co-operation between the CIA and trade union leaders could be less business-like than the systemized corruption of academic and other institutions by the intelligence service, as has been exposed in the United States.

But as a way of recruiting and placing contacts it makes a lot less noise!

Likewise, the alignment of labour and trade union leaders in this country with imperialists' foreign policies has not attracted so much attention as American union's ties with the CIA-because, for one thing, it has been established for so long that it tends t° 80 unnoticed: just part the scenery.

Nevertheless, it was a former Transport and General WorkBevin, who declared: leader I am not ers' Union Ernest prepared to give up the British Empire, because it would mean living of my members? drop 1n the standard of It was a Labour government under Clement Attlee which became the first British government to maintain 'peaceful' conscription-in order to send soldiers all over the world to enforce colonial repression.

It was a Labour government under Harold Wilson which after 1964 maintained brutal repression, including the use of torture in Aden, and which gave political and practical support to the US war in Vietnam. It was another Labour man', George Brown, who went on record with a speech defending the My Lai massacre.

These are, course, the men who are always available, speech deplorin sive and for any occasion, to a denouncing 'violence'; providing only that the 'violence' concerned is of the left, of militant workers, or of oppressed colonial peoples.

Lenin characterized this type of leadership as 'social imperialist'. In Britain it has generally taken the form of Fabianism. This is the theory which insists that the working class must limit itself to gradual, peaceful reforms within the capitalist system.

The objective historical basis union leaders. It succeeded in providing the channel for bourthat union leaders in Britain have gone along with the It has been argued, of course, that the Soviet trade