One of the great but seldom-heard stories of the Cold War is the subject of Ted Morgan’s superb new biography, A Covert Life, and its hero, Jay Lovestone, is crisply summarized by the book’s sub-title: Communist, anti-Communist, and spymaster.

A founding member of the Communist party in the United States, a force to be reckoned with in George Meany’s American Federation of Labor, and an agent in James Angleton’s CIA counter-intelligence division, Lovestone led one of the most fascinating American lives of this century. But until now, the tale of his life — and the larger story of the struggle against the Soviets’ seventy-year campaign to control the free world’s labor unions — has been found mostly in the clotted prose of doctoral dissertations or academic journals, where it is usually buried in condemnations of the AFL for the great sin of rejecting world socialism and the even worse sin of working with the CIA.