A Covert Life: Jay Lovestone, Communist, Anti-Communist, and Spymaster.Written by Ted Morgan, published by Random House, 1999.

Jay Lovestone led such a covert life that few Americans today are familiar with his history. Lovestone was a behind the scenes political player who boldly confronted and challenged the international communist movement—but only after he had spent twenty years submerged in the murky depths of Marxist intrigue. Few men or women in history understood Communism better than Lovestone.

Jay Lovestone was born Jacob Liebstein in 1897 in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. While at City College, he joined the Intercollegiate Socialist Society. After graduating from City College in 1918, Jacob enrolled in New York University Law School. His ambition was to become a union lawyer but he dropped out of law school, changed his name to Jay Lovestone, and, soon thereafter, joined the Communist Labor Party of America. In January, 1920, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer launched the infamous Palmer Raids arresting over 2700 "Reds." Lovestone was among those arrested but the charges against him were later dismissed. The leader of the American Communist Party at that time was Charles E. Ruthenberg. When Ruthenberg died in March, 1927, his body was cremated and the ashes buried in Moscow beneath the Kremlin Wall. Lovestone was promptly named as Ruthenberg's replacement as the acting secretary of the American Communist Party. However, when Lovestone attended the Comintern Congress in Moscow in 1928, he soon learned that Stalin had other ideas. During the Congress, Lovestone and William Z. Foster feuded over leadership of the American party and Stalin openly favored Comrade Foster who was perceived as being more loyal to the Comintern. Lovestone got the message loud and clear and quickly fled Moscow using a false passport. (As he later summed it up, "when you're in a locked trunk, the last sound you hear from the outside is the snapping of the lock.")

Despite being considered a renegade, Lovestone continued to support the American Communist Party which had become marginally acceptable in America due to the international rise of fascism—"If you hated Hitler, it was okay to like Stalin." But, in 1937, Lovestone broke with the international communist movement over issues of Soviet control and domination and focused his efforts on becoming an advocate for the American labor movement which he firmly believed was being targeted by the Communists. One of his first assignments was to help rid the United Auto Workers of Communist influence. In 1941, Lovestone was introduced to George Meany, secretary-treasurer of the American Federation of Labor (AFL). Meany later picked Jay Lovestone to manage oversight of AFL foreign affairs which he did for the next thirty years. In the process, the AFL became a major defender against communist influence in the union movement. Once President Truman signed the National Security Act creating the CIA, Lovestone was recruited to facilitate collaboration between the CIA and the AFL and CIO. (This was an unorthodox arrangement which J.Edgar Hoover considered highly suspicious. An investigation was initiated which took years to evaluate Lovestone's bona fides.)

When James Jesus Angleton became head of counterintelligence for the CIA in 1954, he reached out to personally solicit Jay Lovestone's covert services. Angleton also recruited Lovestone's girlfriend, Louise Page Morris, as his personal spy. (She had previously worked for Wild Bill Donovan, legendary chief of the OSS.) In 1963, Lovestone was named as the head of the AFL-CIO International Affairs Department. This position enabled Lovestone to further facilitate the ongoing CIA funding of both the AFL and CIO. As was subsequently reported in a newspaper article written by Drew Pearson, "No CIA money for labor is spent without Lovestone's approval." The public exposure of this clandestine relationship eventually induced President Lyndon Johnson to order a review of relations between the CIA and private organizations eventually ordering that "no federal agency shall provide any covert financial assistance … to any of the nation's educational or private voluntary organizations."

In 1974, both Angleton and Lovestone were "replaced" in their respective roles for the CIA but Jay Lovestone wasn't done quite yet. His last initiative against communism was to invite Alexander Solzhenitsyn to make his first public speech (after being exiled) at an AFL-CIO banquet in Washington, D.C. Both President Ford and Henry Kissinger declined to attend. A few years later, Jay Lovestone's papers were acquired by the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. On March 7, 1990, Lovestone died of heart failure at the age of ninety-two.