The AFL and CIO between "crusade" and pluralism in Italy, 1944-1963

Abstract

Italy had a primacy in America’s Cold War policies. In 1947, it was the first country to be addressed by the newly established National Security Council; it was the nation in which the CIA’s first major covert operation was tested the following year; together with France, it became the first focus of "political warfare" tactics (involving a broad coordination of overt and covert activities ranging from white propaganda to sabotage) under the watch of prominent ambassador James C. Dunn.1 By the early 1950s, the Eisenhower administration intensified and institutionalized these factors when it established the Psychological Strategy Board (PSB), which began its activities by coordinating overt propaganda with actions-mostly covert-aimed at the economic and bureaucratic structures of the fragile democracies in France and Italy. It was in Italy also that the Cold War fears of falling dominoes favoring the Communist foe were expressed for the first time: As early as 1944, Italy’s exiled leaders in the United States explained to Washington that if their country fell to Communist subversion, the same fate would strike the Balkans, Spain, and France, leading to the "Sovietization of Europe."2 Italy’s strategic importance was beyond dispute: Gaining influence in the Mediterranean peninsula, said a 1945 report by the US State-War-Navy Coordinating Committee, was essential to preserve "American dependence upon the lines of communication to oil supplies in the Near East." US investments in the Italian economy had steadily increased through the first decade of the Fascist regime.