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At a Chicago gathering of relatively well-placed union officials in November 1967, U.S. auto union leader Victor Reuther recounted how the AFL-CIO had been acting covertly as an agency for the U.S. State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency. The gathering was a meeting of the short-lived Labor Leadership Assembly for Peace, an anti-Vietnam War labor group. Some 520 union officials attended, including more than 50 vice presidents, secretary-treasurers or executive board members of international unions. Also on hand was a prominent antiwar activist and socialist, Fred Halstead, who later related what Reuther revealed in “Out Now,” Halstead’s account of the U.S. antiwar movement against the Vietnam War.

Halstead wrote that Reuther told how the AFL-CIO, then headed by George Meany, together with the CIA participated “in the 1964 coup d’etat that overthrew the elected liberal government of Joao Goulart in Brazil and, in the process, helped weaken the auto workers’ unions there…. [T]he AFL-CIO’s blind obedience to the State Department and its associations with the CIA made it difficult for the UAW—which was an AFL-CIO affiliate—to be trusted by legitimate unionists overseas.” Goulart had earlier ordered the nationalization of Brazil’s oil industry.

“The listing of organizations with which the AFL-CIO under [then president] Meany has affiliated itself,” declared Reuther, “comprises the listing of almost all major rightists groups in the U.S. and in South American affairs.” In Reuther’s memoir, “The Brothers Reuther,” he wrote, “Meany’s lieutenants in the arena of international intrigue had woven a worldwide net financed by huge sums. Sometimes they used dummy international or regional trade union structures. At other times they penetrated bona fide international trade secretariats. The monies they manipulated made them vulnerable to the control of the donor.” And the chief donors were agencies of the U.S. government. In turn, “the AFL-CIO became, quite literally, a disbursement agent for the State Department.”

Furthermore, the “foreign policy of the AFL-CIO was worked out in a hush-hush atmosphere in the Washington headquarters, usually in conjunction with the State Department and other agencies. Rarely was there any discussion beforehand with the Executive Council members; there was not even a pretense of democratic process.”

At some point Victor Reuther went to his brother, UAW President Walter Reuther, and told him, he said, that the two auto leaders should no longer remain silent about the AFL-CIO’s secret links to the government. Walter Reuther replied that he thought it was wrong to split the labor federation over foreign relations rather than domestic issues. “He also said that, while he knew as I did that the CIA was using the trade union movement in disgraceful ways, I would never be able to produce enough documentation to stand up against the barrage of fabricated documents the agency could produce so easily.”

However, the Reuthers themselves, as they admitted, were recipients of CIA funds. Six months before the Chicago meeting, a CIA division chief wrote in the Saturday Evening Post that at Victor Reuther’s request, “I went to Detroit one morning and gave Walter $50,000 in fifty-dollar bills. Victor spent the money, mostly in West Germany to bolster labor unions there. He tried to keep me from finding out how he spent it, but I had my own undercover techniques… In my opinion and that of my peers in the CIA he spent it with less than perfect wisdom, for the German unions he chose to help weren’t seriously short of money and were already anti-Communists.”

Victor Reuther denied giving the money to German unions, but did admit that the CIA monies were allocated to Italian and French unions. The younger brother wrote that he was “naïve” about the source of the money, but he and his brother didn’t feel tainted when the facts came out. Walter Reuther issued a statement, saying, in part, “The labor movement of Europe was weak and without resources and therefore especially vulnerable to Communist subversion. In this emergency situation fifteen years ago the UAW did agree reluctantly on one occasion to transmit government funds to supplement the inadequate funds being made available by the U.S. labor movement.”

But that’s hardly the whole story, in their own union, the Reuthers “were personally identified with the clause in the UAW constitution that barred Communists from holding any union office, appointive or elective,” wrote labor historian Nelson Lichtenstein (Walter Reuther). In fact, Walter Reuther was a leading Cold War liberal, a member of the Americans for Democratic Action (ADA). When Reuther in 1947 was elected UAW president, the ADA, wrote Lichtenstein, “hailed his sweep in the UAW a vindication of its brand of anti-Communist liberalism. Within the CIO, anticommunists from [CIO head] Philip Murray on down recognized that they could now move with far greater determination to isolate and then expel Communist affiliates.”

As students of the U.S. labor movement should know, that’s exactly what happened. A witch hunt was undertaken to silence or intimidate all reds, radicals and dissidents in organized labor. The labor movement paid a heavy price for that witch hunt. Perhaps the best evidence for that is organized labor’s general refusal to fight back for more than three decades, despite the most outrageous of provocations. While there’s no shortcut to preparing the labor movement for a fight to defend and restore the living standards of workers, organized or not, it seems hard to imagine a labor turnaround without the organized involvement of today’s labor militants that know their debt to labor’s witch-hunt victims.