10

The Show, the CIA, and international unionism

The titanic internal struggles in the clerks’ and shop assistants’ unions were rooted in John Maynes’s undemocratic power, exercised over the unions’ affairs from his office at NCC headquarters. He was able to enforce this power through his authoritarian control of the considerable force of cadres who — as a condition of their NCC membership — were ‘pledged’ to blindly follow the orders of the national vice-president directing industrial affairs. But at its core were the competing priorities of the industrial interests of the unions’ members with the ideological priorities pursued by NCC headquarters. For unionists who believed their first job was to serve the members’ interests, Maynes’s pursuit of extraneous ideological issues inevitably resulted in bitter conflict.

In both unions, the conflict was brought to a head by the international activities of Maynes and his closest supporters. These involved both the clerks’ and shop assistants’ unions in expensive and politically disastrous affiliations with international trade union organisations that effectively operated as arms of the United States government, often at the direction and with the financial assistance of the CIA. As news of the CIA’s involvement in such operations seeped out, it caused considerable alarm to the federal secretaries of these unions — John Grenville and Barry Egan. The revelations coincided with a barrage of negative publicity about the CIA’s numerous illegal ‘dirty tricks’ operations — involving, among other things, the covert overthrow of democratically elected governments, the use of mind-bending drugs such as LSD in experiments on innocent people, and assassination plots against America’s political enemies. In the mid-1970s, such scandals reached a crescendo, resulting in a series of US congressional and other official inquiries that cast the CIA in a decidedly negative light.1

The two international organisations that prompted bitter internal fighting in NCC-controlled unions were the International Federation of Commercial and Technical Employees (known by its French acronym as FIET), which had affiliates representing white-collar workers in the Western world, Asia, Africa, and Latin America; and the International Federation of Petroleum and Chemical Workers (IFPCW). Both were part of elaborate schemes designed and funded by various US government agencies to establish a network of international unions capable of acting in America’s political and economic interests. Operating under the auspices of the anti-communist International Confederation of Free Trade Unions, such organisations were seen by many Western unionists as vital cogs in the Cold War fight against the communist-dominated World Federation of Trade Unions and its international unions. But several, including FIET and IFPCW, were largely pawns in the hands of American unionists who effectively worked at the direction of US government agencies.

From the late 1960s, their clandestine operations began to leak out.2 Congressional hearings later exposed IFPCW and FIET’s roles in CIA-directed intelligence operations. This not only caused considerable embarrassment to the US government; it also fuelled a widespread debate inside the Australian trade union movement, especially among those affiliated to FIET and IFPCW. It rapidly emerged that IFPCW had been a CIA-funded and -directed organisation since its inception in the early 1950s, and that its leader, Lloyd Haskins, had utilised the organisation to carry out clandestine CIA operations that favoured American companies and US government policies.3 It was also established that FIET, through its leading American affiliate, had also been involved in several clandestine intelligence operations, most particularly in using CIA funds to prolong a politically motivated strike in British Guyana that helped to topple a leftist administration in 1964 — a goal that suited US policy aims in the region.4

Under Maynes’s direction, the clerks’ union had affiliated with FIET in 1958, followed soon after by the shop assistants’ union. Maynes always insisted on exercising total control of the clerks’ union’s international operations, especially as they related to IFPCW and FIET. This obsession grew after 1973, just as the scandal surrounding their involvement in covert intelligence operations grew to breaking point. ‘It must be understood that most of the relationships were channelled by him, through him, and to him,’ John Grenville said, having experienced this first-hand.5 In effect, Maynes was the point man for both his own union and the shop assistants’, sitting on the FIET international executive with the shop assistants’ Jim Maher, another of the unionists under Maynes’s control in his role as the NCC’s industrial czar.

Maynes was especially close to another FIET international executive member, Gerald O’Keefe, the head of the department of international affairs of the Washington-based Retail Clerks International Association. O’Keefe actively participated in operations directed by the CIA and other US government agencies. Together the two men co-ordinated FIET operations, especially in Asia, where Maynes was Asia–FIET’s vice-president. One matter that occupied their time was Barry Egan’s emerging independence from Maynes. In September 1973, Maynes wrote to O’Keefe, suggesting they meet ahead of an impending FIET executive meeting in London to discuss the shop assistants’ NSW branch which, under Egan’s influence, had raised objections to the union’s affiliation with FIET.6

Egan had attended an Asia–FIET meeting in Singapore earlier in 1973, delivering a paper on multinationals. He came away underwhelmed, refusing to attend another ‘because of my observations at that meeting and the response of members to my report’. Indeed, he actively campaigned for the shop assistants’ union to disaffiliate from FIET, loudly objecting to ‘the involvement of Australian union officials … when foreign countries are involved with commercial and political interests conceivably not in the best interests of the Australian people’. By 1977 he was scandalised by the huge amounts of money being spent by the shop assistants’ union on its affiliation with FIET, estimating that over five years it had incurred hundreds of thousands of dollars in affiliation fees, airfares, and related travel costs.7

His campaign to end what he viewed as the wasteful expenditure of members’ money hit a brick wall called Jim Maher, the shop assistants’ federal president and Victorian branch secretary. As Grenville witnessed first-hand, Maher got his ‘riding instructions on how to handle Egan’ directly from Maynes. In June 1974, Grenville and Maher travelled together to attend an Asia–FIET seminar in Kuala Lumpur, where ‘the whole operation between Maher and Maynes was designed to ensure that the biggest can possible would be tipped all over Egan in terms of his reputation in the eyes of … other international trade union people’. One shop assistants’ official ‘even told the doorman of the hotel what a louse Egan was. So that’s how far that particular operation went … and it was designed to destroy Egan in the international field, especially in relation to FIET where Maynes wanted to have total control insofar as Australian representation was concerned.’8

In mid-1977, the Australian union movement was rocked by intense media coverage revealing the extent of US government — especially CIA — infiltration of international unionism, including within Australia. For a number of years prior to this scandal reaching a crescendo in 1977, Egan had been especially concerned by the evidence demonstrating ‘that FIET was receiving funding from the US government’. In response, the shop assistants’ NSW branch had ‘put up a proposition to the national executive that we should not participate in FIET’s international conferences and cease paying affiliation dues’. But when the national executive convened, ‘Maher as presiding officer overruled me, stating that this wasn’t worth discussing and he then proceeded to the election of three delegates and three observers’ to a ‘series of international conferences in Seoul, Tokyo, and Honolulu’, including a FIET executive meeting. Egan was furious, particularly as key officials were absent during a period of intense industrial campaigning by union members.9

THE SHOP ASSISTANTS’ was not the only NCC-dominated union involved in Maynes’s international operations and expensive junkets. They also had ramifications inside the clerks’ union. Maynes and other clerks’ union officials bolstered the contingent of up to twelve Australian unionists to attend this particular set of international meetings. Along the way, they linked up with representatives of the US government, who also wore hats as officials of American unions and FIET executive members. As Grenville recalled, ‘The international aspect was becoming something of a scandal.’ Deeper resentments about being treated as Maynes’s cipher were central to Grenville’s growing disenchantment, but ‘Maynes’s version of the need for the NCC, per medium of the shop assistants’ and clerks’ unions, to be operative in this international arena led to very sharp divisions … In fact, [it] led to the schism in the National Civic Council.’10

Grenville was strongly in favour of policies and actions ‘to combat multinationals’, and believed ‘that people who have had a little bit of exposure to other parts of the labour movement around the world are all the better for it’.11 But when it came to Maynes’s international activities:

We are talking about a continuous stream of trips abroad which don’t appear to relate in any great substance to the needs of the clerks’ union at the particular point in time … which was one that really had still to be fought in the grass-roots situation back here in Australia. So it is very dubious that any real benefits were accruing to members. This was the debate: what are we getting out of this junketing?12

Grenville’s answer was that the union’s members were getting nothing out of Maynes’s international activities, but that his role in FIET ‘gave the clerks’ union a base in South-East Asia, which meant it gave the NCC a base in South-East Asia, and it was a conduit right through to the executive-board level of a relationship between people like Maynes and the NCC dealing with a number of very interesting people who appear to have links right throughout the world with that government agency known as the CIA’.13

The debate was brought to a head in 1974 by the visit to Australia of Charles ‘Chips’ Levinson, the secretary of the International Chemical Workers’ Federation (ICF). After assuming this position in 1964, the distinctly anti-communist Levinson had re-built the moribund ICF into a dynamic organisation that quickly overpowered its competitor — the CIA’s creation, the International Federation of Petroleum and Chemical Workers (IFPCW). Grenville had a long meeting with Levinson in Sydney, together with John Forrester, the secretary of one of the clerks’ union’s larger and more important sections — the Central and Southern Queensland branch. A skilled operator who had learned his politics in the hard school of the NSW ALP as an undercover NCC member, Forrester was brought up in The Movement. His father had been a founding member in the early 1940s, and the son, in turn, joined in 1951.14 Forrester supported Grenville during his confrontations with Maynes, who declared all-out war because of their refusal to obediently follow his instructions.

Levinson’s presentation was devastating. ‘We were acquainted with the full story, which totally discredited the IFPCW,’ Grenville recalled, and ‘as the federal secretary of the union, it was something of an acute embarrassment to learn about our association with this discredited organisation. Along with Forrester, I … recommended we cease our association with the IFPCW as quickly as possible and affiliate with the International Chemical Workers Federation’ — the course taken by the shop assistants’ union under Egan’s influence.15

The reaction was volcanic. ‘Brother Maynes hit the roof and said that we had no right discussing this type of thing because international discussions were his preserve.’ Later in 1974, when Grenville visited the International Labour Organisation in Geneva (where the International Chemical Workers’ Federation headquarters were also located), Maynes instructed him ‘to make no contact whatsoever with Chips Levinson’. The battlelines were by now drawn between Maynes and his clerks’ union loyalists, and Grenville and Forrester. As Grenville rhetorically asked, ‘Why is it that there was a strong insistence that the clerks’ union remain affiliated with the discredited and rump organisation called the IFPCW and why have resolutions been carried … to not go into the ICF?’16

This heated debate was not confined to the clerks’ union’s affiliation with the CIA-controlled IFPCW. It extended to the entire range of Maynes’s international operations. Grenville and Forrester had touched a raw nerve. In May 1974, Maynes circulated an extraordinary document to the union’s federal executive. Headed ‘Where I Went and Why’, it was a five-foolscap-page defence of his then-recent five-week international junket. As Grenville ironically noted:

It reads like a regular Cook’s Tour. It includes a visit to Geneva, Singapore, Rome, Indonesia, London, Washington, Denver, San Francisco, Tokyo, Hong Kong and you name and I’ll play it.17

The most revealing section dealt with Maynes’s meetings in Washington. These included a Who’s Who of American unionists who worked under the direction of the CIA to promote US political and economic interests. Most had been directly involved in clandestine CIA operations to undermine and destabilise unions and governments that posed a perceived threat to such interests. At the apex of American unionism were the senior representatives of the AFL–CIO, the equivalent national peak body to Australia’s ACTU.18

The AFL–CIO’s international department was the controlling headquarters directing the clandestine operations of active CIA agents inside US unionism. As Grenville drily commented about Maynes’s Washington connections, ‘So we find ourselves meeting people like Harry Goldberg, Jay Lovestone, and Ernest Lee of the AFL-CIO. I understand they wear some other hats from time-to-time.’19 Indeed, their activities were so notorious that the organisation came to be known among its growing band of critics as the ‘AFL-CIA’.

Goldberg, Lovestone, and Lee, however, wore their CIA hats as badges of honour. As head of the AFL–CIO’s international department, former communist leader Jay Lovestone directed the CIA’s union operations worldwide over several decades.Goldberg was the AFL–CIO’s Asian expert with a special focus on Indonesia — where he had run the CIA’s labour operations since the early 1950s20 — and Australia (which he visited several times). Lee had a similar background, playing a key role, for example, for the CIA in destabilising British Guyana in the early and mid-1960s. Furthermore, Maynes held discussions with prominent CIA unionist Gerald O’Keefe of the Retail Clerks International Association, senior State Department officials — including the head of the Australian desk — and US Labor Department personnel.21

The important role of Indonesia in The Show’s international operations emerged clearly from Maynes’s report. In Jakarta, he met with Agus Sudono, who had been installed as head of the country’s tame-cat union movement in the aftermath of the brutal military operation that brought Suharto to power in Indonesia, resulting in the murder of at least 500,000 communists and leftists in 1965–66, and the destruction of independent trade union organisations. As vice-president of the IFPCW, Sudono had been a key CIA operative for many years, working closely with Goldberg. Goldberg had played a clandestine role that helped pave the way for the military coup, and then arrived back in Indonesia a few months later to ensure that Sudono took charge of the remnants of the union movement. Throughout 1966 he wrote a string of revealing reports, including informing his colleagues back in Washington of Sudono’s leading role in the mass killings as head of the Workers’ Action Front.22

Goldberg’s initial visit to Australia occurred in March 1960, at the invitation of Laurie Short, the head of the ironworkers’ union.23 In Honolulu on his way home, he wrote a lengthy report for his colleagues in Washington. Somehow the Labor barrister Lionel Murphy — later elected to the Senate — obtained a copy and passed it to a CPA member.24 It emerged in full in the initial edition of what was described as Underground Tribune, under the heading, ‘Price: What You Can Afford’. Goldberg was scathing about Australia, Australians, and their prime minister:

Let me say bluntly … in some of the most fundamental values, and in the chief issues activating our world, this country is backward, in a backwash it hasn’t gotten out of yet, isolated, insulated, provincial, etc …

The average Australian is … rather narrow visioned, and extremely short on theory, sensitivity and sensibility …

We saw a [Prime Minister] Menzies’ performance in Parliament. This is a puffed-up politician, not a statesman, supercilious, arrogant, smooth and slick, who tries nothing so much as to imitate Churchill in his oratory and mannerisms.25

Goldberg’s attitude towards the ALP and ALP unionists was even less complimentary. ‘They, more than anybody,’ he wrote, ‘illustrate the softness and complacency in character, as well as the ignorance in theory, which help to explain why the communists are so influential in Australia.’ They were described as displaying a ‘gutlessness’ because ‘they want to maintain their positions and if they need the support of the commies to do so, they’ll play ball with them. It’s as simple as all that.’26

The Show was practically the only ray of sunshine Goldberg observed on his visit. He met Archbishop Mannix in Santamaria’s company, and also had a long one-on-one discussion with the NCC head. Of Santamaria, he wrote:

Well, he certainly is quite a guy. He’s brilliant, forceful, speaks very well, logically, etc. It was quite a heart-to-heart talk we had …

As to Santamaria himself personally, his moral integrity and sincerity, I can’t offer myself as an authority after one session. All I can say, for what it is worth, is that he impressed me as sincere and that he’s thought of highly by all the Victorian Labor boys, with whom I met, and who are the minority opposition in the Trades Council, and most of whom … are members of the DLP.27

Goldberg attended a rowdy meeting of the Victorian Trades Hall Council, during which he was given an especially hard time by communist and other left-wing delegates. Maynes stood up and defended Goldberg, who wrote glowingly of him in his report: ‘A good one, obviously the floor leader of the anti-commie minority.’28 This was the start of a close personal and political relationship that stretched over many years. Goldberg concluded his report:

I think we ought to pay more attention to Australia than we have in the past. There are some things we can do. I have a number of proposals I’ll want to make when we get together.29

Apparently, one of the proposals involved cementing NCC-controlled unions into the ‘AFL-CIA’s’ international labour operations, which is precisely what Maynes obsessively did for three decades, expending vast sums of union members’ money on international junkets to advance the NCC’s ideological agenda.

By the time Maynes visited Washington in 1974, there was a mountain of publicly available information about the AFL–CIO’s clandestine role, demonstrating that its agenda was to further the interests of US government policies. This often also involved advancing the interests of US corporations in their worldwide operations, including gross exploitation of workers, especially in developing countries. This, of course, was the very behaviour that international unionism had been established to oppose in defence of workers’ rights. Likewise, significant evidence had emerged of the CIA’s use of US unions as the cover for clandestine operations around the globe. Maynes was willing to destroy three of the NCC’s most senior operatives rather than abandon his close working relationship with such US intelligence ‘assets’. However, by persisting with these links to such thoroughly discredited organisations, he was also sowing the seeds of his own destruction.