'In the interest of democracy': The rise and fall of the early Cold War alliance between the American Federation of Labor and the Central Intelligence Agency

Based upon archival collections opened in the mid-1990s at the George Meany Memorial and the Hoover Institution Archives, this dissertation investigates the early Cold War relationship between the American Federation of Labor and the Central Intelligence Agency, and examines the complex interactions between the individuals, ideologies, and institutions which, beginning in the late nineteenth century, resulted in that alliance. Contrary to scholarly arguments that the AFL's international activities were controlled by the U.S. government to the detriment of the independent international labor movement, or that the AFL acted on its own to foster legitimate anticommunist trade unions, the AFL and the CIA made an alliance of convenience based upon common goals and ideologies, which dissolved when the nongovernmental partner felt that the government was trying to control its actions.; Officials of the CIA and the AFL, who shared a common ideology of anticommunism and a democratic emphasis upon independence and choice, initiated a partnership in which each availed itself of the other's strengths in order to offset its own weaknesses. In a period when the Soviet Union threatened domination of Europe through politically significant Communist-led labor unions, the established AFL provided the nascent CIA with a ready-made web of intelligence contacts and in-the-field operatives, in exchange for bureaucratic support, increased legitimacy, and an influx of cash which the labor federation needed to conduct its international activities. Three specific examples of how the AFL worked with the CIA are investigated in this dissertation: the development of the anti-communist trade union federation Force Ouvriere in France; the AFL campaign against the Soviet Union's use of "slave labor" at the UN; and labor's role in the activities of the National Committee for a Free Europe, including Radio Free Europe and the Free Trade Union Center in Exile. In each, the AFL-CIA partnership resulted in significant advances toward shared Cold War goals. Within a few years, however, the AFL-CIA relationship declined rapidly, the victim of the challenges of balancing control, authority, and personal conflicts in a nongovernmental/governmental alliance.