Jay Lovestone

Jay Lovestone was the former leader of the Communist Party USA expelled by Joseph Stalin in 1929 for 'idealogical deviationism.'

In 1948, Frank Wisner's Office of Policy Coordination began funding Lovestone's anti-communist Free Trade Union Committee in its rivalry with the World Federation of Trade Unions.

Early Life

Lovestone was born in 1897 as Jacob Liebstein into an Orthodox Jewish family in the village of Molchad in the then Polish, and later Lithuanian, province of Grodno. He would later say he was born on Christmas Day, but may have been born on 15 December.

The family emigrated to New York in 1907. He entered the City College of New York in 1915, becoming President of the antiwar Intercollegiate Socialist Society prior to his graduation in 1918.

He entered New York University Law School in 1919. In the same year, he changed his name to Jay Lovestone, also inventing a new biography, in which he was born to a Jewish father and an English mother in upstate New York. The move was most likely a reflection of his emerging role as a political activist.

Communist Party

Initially a member of the left wing of the Socialist Party, Lovestone joined Charles Ruthenberg's Communist Party of America at its foundation in 1919. He was arrested during the Red Scare in November that year.

Lovestone was re-arrested in January 1920, but offered a deal in return for testifying at the trial of his friend Harry Winitsky. Ruthenburg told him to go ahead but not to say anything of value, and Lovestone duly testified. Although Winitsky did not hold this against him, the episode would later provide ammunition for his critics in the Communist Party.

In June 1922, Lovestone attended a Friends of the Soviet Union conference in Berlin.

By this time, Lovestone was under FBI surveillance, although he did not yet realise it, and was using the pseudonyms L.C Wheat and Roger B. Nelson.

In August 1922, Lovestone was arrested at a convention held to discuss whether to continue maintaining an underground communist organisation in addition to the open Workers' Party of America.

As a defence witness at Ruthenberg's trial in April 1923, Lovestone admitted to the existence of a number of Communist front organisations, including the Friends of Soviet Russia and the Federated Press news agency.

Lovestone travelled to Moscow in January 1925, as part of an American Communist delegation. While there, he formed a friendship with Nikolai Bukharin, who was then a factional ally of Joseph Stalin against Zinoviev and Kamenev.

In August 1925, Lovestone arranged a cable from Moscow that secured the Ruthenberg faction control of the party, despite the Foster/Cannon faction having more delegates.

Following the death of Ruthenberg in January 1927, Lovestone took over as Acting Secretary of the American Communist Party.

He was soon attacked by the Foster-Cannon faction for speaking of the "tremendous reserve powers of American capitalism." Both sides travelled to Moscow in 1927, in an attempt to win support from the Comintern.

Lovestone organised a July 1927 trade union delegation to Moscow, which was covertly backed by the Communist Party.

Lovestone won control of the American Party at a convention in New York in August/September 1927. However, the factional situation in Russia was moving against him.

At the Sixth Comintern Congress in July 1928, Bukharin backed Lovestone's view that "there is no revolutionary situation in America." Lovestone himself challenged Stalin by calling for the struggle in the Russian party to be brought before the Congress.

In an attempt to maintain his hold on the American Party, Lovestone repudiated Bukharin in March 1929, and travelled to Moscow to plead his case with Stalin.

Lovestone escaped from Moscow in June 1929 with the assistance of Comintern agent Nicholas Dozenberg. He would later assist Dozenberg in his intelligence work. Lovestone biographer Ted Morgan described these activities as "favors for a friend" that did not justify the FBI's conclusion that Lovestone was active in the OGPU as late as 1935.

Communist Party Opposition

Keith Jeffery, a historian with access to the MI6 archives writes of the Lovestoneite movement in this period:

In May 1935 Kathleen 'Jane' Sissmore of MI5 raised with Valentine Vivian 'the poverty of your information with regard to the progress of Communism in the United States', with one notable exception, a network run by Jay Lovestone in New York, which had been comprehensively penetrated by SIS. Lovestone who led the anti-Stalin Communist Party (Opposition), had worldwide contacts, and London was particularly interested in information about those in Britain and the empire. Canadian names were passed on to the Ottawa authorities, while others including the Indian Communist M.N. Roy, the Trinidadian 'rabid Trotskyite' C.L.R. James and the liberal-Marxist British intellectual Harold Laski (who could hardly be described as a 'subversive'), were passed on to Scotland Yard, MI5, and Indian Political Intelligence. Flatteringly for SIS, an October 1935 report quoted Lovestone (who was planning a trip to Europe) as saying 'that the British Intelligence Service was the only thing he had ever been afraid of' and he was fearful of being arrested if he went to England.

World War Two

In 1941, David Dubinsky brought on Lovestone to run the labour division of the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies, which became Citizens for Victory following American entry into the war.

On 24 August 1942, Lovestone applied to join the Office of Strategic Services, stating in a letter to George K. Bowden that "I have made a firsthand study of the Nazi movement and I have had practical experience in underground as well as open work in nearly fifteen countries."

An OSS memo dated 31 August 1942 stated "Lovestone is engaged not only in a number of intrigues involving the Communist Party, from which he broke ostensibly in 1929 when he formed the Communist Party Opposition, but also in other activities which may render him useless as an impartial source of information."

According to Ted Morgan, Lovestone's 'entourage' of ex-Communists during the War years included Ben Mandel, Ben Gitlow and Whittaker Chambers.

Post-War

Lovestone received classified reports from an embryonic intelligence service created at the State Department by Raymond Murphy.

From 1955, Lovestone was run as an agent by CIA counterintelligence chief James Angleton, through an aide, Stephen Millett, who also headed the agency's Israeli desk. Payments to Lovestone were handled by Mario Brod, a lawyer who also looked after Anatoly Golitsyn.

In the 1960s, Max Shachtman came to view Lovestone's support for American foreign policy as correct.

Affiliations

• Communist Party USA
• Free Trade Union Committee
• Central Intelligence Agency
• American Committee for a United Europe
• International Confederation of Free Trade Unions
• Committee on the Present Danger (1976 version)

Connections

• Irving Brown
• Samuel Berger
• Joseph Godson
• Matthew Woll
• David Dubinsky
• Willard Etter
• Roscoe Henry Hillenkoetter
• Frank Wisner
• Carmel Offie
• Allen Dulles
• Tom Braden
• Walter Bedell Smith
• Bill Donovan
• James Angleton

Post-War labour network

• Irving Brown
• Pagie Morris - North Africa, Iraq.
• Richard Deverall - Japan
• Harry Goldberg - Indonesia, Italy.
• Mohan Das - India.
• Maida Springer - Kenya, Ghana, Tanzania.

External Resources

• Jay Lovestone, Pages from Party History, 1929, archived at the Internet Archive.
• Paul Buhle Lovestone's Thin Red Line, The Nation, 6 May 1999.