Allocation of Funds in France Embarrassing

In a seven-page expose, the trendy Paris tabloid Liberation reported that the Reagan Administration, as part of a $1.5-million program to defend democracy in France, was funding a right-wing student organization that used part of the money to plaster Paris with posters attacking the French government.

“The Secret Funds of Reagan in France,” proclaimed the main headline.

Liberation reported that Force Ouvriere, a well-known and well-regarded anti-communist labor union, received the bulk of the funds in the program. But $575,000 had gone to the small student organization long accused of ties to the extreme right.

The disclosures raised some troubling questions. Did the Reagan Administration really believe that democracy was so fragile in France that it needed defending? Did U.S. officials think it was wise to fund a rightist student group that irritated the Socialist government of France?

The allocation of funds, however, had nothing to do with what the Reagan Administration really believed or with what U.S. officials really thought. In Paris, an embarrassed American Embassy quickly issued a statement that said, in effect, “Don’t blame the U.S. government.”

Continuing Battle

The U.S. decision to fight for democracy in France reflected the influence and philosophy of a private American citizen and a private organization that have long used official U.S. funds in what they regard as a continuing battle against communism abroad. The citizen is Irving Brown; the organization is the AFL-CIO.

Brown--pugnacious, glib, personable and combative at age 74--is the Paris-based director of international relations for the AFL-CIO. He arrived in Europe in 1944 as the old American Federation of Labor’s representative here and has remained ever since, battling to strengthen non-communist trade unions overseas and to weaken communism.

In his mind, France is still a battleground. “We’re defending democracy in France,” Brown said in an interview at his office on the Rue de la Paix in Paris. “Let’s go back to Jefferson: ‘The price of liberty is eternal vigilance.’

“France is not threatened by the 10% vote of the Communist Party,” he said. “It is threatened by the Communist apparatus. Is it a clear and present danger? It is a clear and present danger if the present is thought of as 10 years from now.”

The money used by Brown and the AFL-CIO came from the National Endowment for Democracy, which was created by Congress in 1983 to help strengthen democracy abroad. The endowment turned over 60% of its funds for the 1984-85 fiscal year to the AFL-CIO’s Free Trade Union Institute for distribution overseas.

Embarrassed Endowment

The disclosure by Liberation that $575,000 was allocated to the rightist National Inter-University Union in France embarrassed the National Endowment for Democracy; Carl Gershman, its president, decided to suspend payments while he investigated the student organization. This suspension has annoyed Brown.

“The suspension was wrong,” said Brown. “Investigate. Check. Sure. But I have always believed that someone is not guilty until proven otherwise. I’m not questioning the endowment’s motives. I’m questioning their judgment. I don’t run from the first whiff of powder. Remember, tomorrow if there is no National Endowment for Democracy, we’ll survive. Even better.”

The AFL-CIO has long practiced a militant anti-communist policy in its international activities, a policy guided for decades by Jay Lovestone, Brown’s predecessor as director of international relations. Brown was always regarded as Lovestone’s most effective man on the foreign scene.

When Brown came to Europe in 1944, he was a young veteran of the union organizing battles of the United Auto Workers in the Chicago area in the 1930s. He had contact through the American labor movement with French Socialist leader Leon Blum and began helping European workers with American-donated food packages from the closing months of World War II onward.

Postwar Breakaway

Many analysts credit Brown with using U.S. government funds to help break the Communist Party hold on the French trade union movement after World War II. He helped finance the Force Ouvriere after it broke away from the party-controlled UGT (the General Union of Labor) in the 1940s.

Brown said the funds then came from Marshall Plan aid and from the AFL-CIO, but critics have long insisted that he used U.S. intelligence money as well. Former CIA agent Philip Agee, in his book “Inside the Company,” describes Brown as the “principal CIA agent for control of the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions.” The confederation, once supported heavily by the AFL-CIO, was set up after World War II as a rival to a Communist-controlled international organization of unions.

Brown, in the interview, scoffed at Agee but left some ambiguity in discussing his relations with the CIA. Without waiting for the subject to come up, he said, “Your first question is whether I am a CIA agent. I was asked that by a British journalist once, and I’ll tell you exactly what I told him: ‘If I said yes, I’d be a goddamn fool. If I said no, you wouldn’t believe me.’ ”

But Brown did say it would not be wise for the American labor movement to accept CIA funds. “There should be some way--maybe it should be private--that funds can go somewhere without public knowledge, especially in areas where lives are in danger,” he said. “But, from the point of view of labor, it was not good to have that kind of funding--if it took place.”

Legality for Illegality

Nevertheless, he went on, some kind of funding must be used to fight the outside funding used by the Communist Party “as long as I know that we have enemies who are ready to use the labor movement to do precisely what Hitler said in the Reichstag--’I will use legality to introduce a system of illegality.’

“We went through it in France. We went through it in Italy. How many times do we have to go through it?”

Whether they are true or not, the accusations about CIA money and the descriptions of Brown as an agent distort a significant reality. They leave the impression that Brown and the AFL-CIO have been doing the bidding of the U.S. government.

There is a good deal of evidence to show that just the opposite is true. Brown and the AFL-CIO have often seemed like rogue elephants, rushing around loose, ready to defy U.S. policy whenever it got in the way of their vision of the battle against communism.

Supported Independence

In 1956, for example, Brown helped organize the Trade Union of Algerian Workers in the French territory of Algeria. The union was opposed to the Communist trade union of France, but its leaders supported Algerian independence. French newspapers and politicians demanded Brown’s expulsion. The French government was furious, banned Brown from entering Algeria and sent a protest to the U.S. Embassy. In those days of the Eisenhower Administration, the United States did not support Algerian independence.

Asked by the ambassador for suggestions on how to reply, Brown said he told him, “Mr. Ambassador, your answer is very simple. You are not responsible for Irving Brown. You are not responsible for the activities of a private citizen.”

The ambassador might have had difficulty making that kind of argument if Brown had used U.S. funds in his Algerian organizing, but Brown said in the interview that all the money for the Algerian work had come from the AFL-CIO treasury.

In 1968, Brown showed how he could have more influence with the U.S. government than an American ambassador. Brown, then head of the AFL-CIO’s African American Labor Center, which used AID money to sponsor projects in Africa, was part of a delegation traveling with Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey on an official visit to various nations of Africa.

Humphrey Overruled Envoy

Glenn W. Ferguson, the U.S. ambassador to Kenya, believed it would be unwise for Brown to accompany the vice president to Kenya because many Kenyan leaders resented his financial support of a political rival, the late Tom Mboya. Ferguson cabled the State Department asking that Brown be dropped from the Kenya stop, but Humphrey quickly overruled the ambassador. Brown went along.

With the Communist Party and its trade union generally regarded as weak in France these days, it was a surprise in late November to find Brown again involved in controversy about fighting communism in France.

According to the records of the National Endowment for Democracy and the Free Trade Union Institute, published by Liberation, France was listed as one of nine countries where the “recipients would either be endangered or embarrassed” if it were announced that they were receiving money.

“It’s the kind of thing,” said Brown, “that can be used propaganda-wise, especially in an area where the enemy is concentrated.”

Brown, however, denied that the grants had been kept secret. He said, instead, that they were “treated discreetly.”

The main recipients in France were the Force Ouvriere, which received $830,000, and the National Inter-University Union with $575,000. Four other organizations shared the remaining $160,000.

Rightist Musclemen

The grant to the National Inter-University Union raised the most questions in France, since the student organization had been accused by a parliamentary committee of having close ties to the now-disbanded Civic Action Service, a band of rightist musclemen who were first used to protect Gen. Charles de Gaulle and to maintain order at his party’s rallies. They later developed a reputation for rightist extremism and violence.

The student organization was created after 1968 as a counterforce to all the leftist student and university groups that mushroomed in those heady, rebellious days. In recent months, it has been most notable for mounting a campaign attacking Premier Laurent Fabius for the high rate of unemployment in France.

Asked in the interview about the National Inter-University Union, Brown said, “They have done a remarkable job, if you remember 1968, and I was here in the Sorbonne. . . . I saw the bordello that was going on there, and how France was paralyzed for a month, and how President de Gaulle--I wouldn’t say he ran away--disappeared in Germany for a couple of days. They had enough of this crap. They are one of the few in the school system combatting the Communist apparatus.”