This is the second part of the lecture on the degeneration of the US Socialist Workers Party in the years following the publication of the initial findings of the investigation into Security and the Fourth International, delivered at the 2025 Summer School of the Socialist Equality Party (US). The first part, titled “The Carleton Twelve,” given by Tom Mackaman, was published here. The second part, “Hansen builds a world network of agents,” was delivered by Andrea Lobo. The third part, “The Barnes group and the decline and fall of the SWP,” was delivered by Patrick Martin. To accompany the second part, the WSWS is publishing as a supplementary text “Hansen’s World Network Exposed,” first published in 1979 This document is a milestone in the development of the Security investigation and is essential reading for the education of Trotskyist cadre today.

Our discussion today delves into an intersection of a critical period in the history of the Fourth International marked by the Cuban Revolution and the subsequent drive for reunification led by the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). It’s worth stressing at this point in the school that the state operation within the SWP was connected to a political line tied to definite class forces in response to tumultuous events, many of them in Latin America. This is the significance of the statement made by opponents of Security and the Fourth International that “agents do good work,” in the sense that they represent one of the forms through which class pressures and their related ideological content are exerted in the workers movement and its revolutionary party.

In June 1963, a congress of reunification took place between the SWP, with its supporters in Latin America and Asia, and the Pabloite International Secretariat, forming the United Secretariat. This new body was an “international alliance of the petty bourgeoisie” fundamentally dedicated to overthrowing the program of the Fourth International, which was based on “the exclusive and non-transferable role of the international working class in the abolition of capitalism,” as was analyzed and carefully reviewed by Comrade Tomas Castanheira in his lecture to our summer school two years ago, already mentioned by Comrade Tom, “The Cuban Revolution and the SLL’s opposition to the unprincipled Pabloite reunification of 1963.”

A pivotal element in this shift was the SWP’s response to the Cuban Revolution, but not because the Pabloites and state agents like Hansen really cared about the fate of the Cuban people. Instead, the Pabloites, who had oriented as loyal advisors to the Soviet bureaucracy and its satellite Communist parties internationally, were advancing the line of applying pressure to the United States in defense of the interests of Moscow.

Meanwhile Hansen, who had a record as an agent for first Moscow and then Washington, sought to use the events in Cuba to effectuate the split with the IC, begin the slander that the IC opposed the Cuban Revolution, and liquidate the SWP as a revolutionary party.

Initially, after the Cuban revolution, Hansen had advanced a more “orthodox” line opposing the characterization of Cuba as a workers state.

Another key figure backing the 1963 reunification with the Pabloites, the Argentine revisionist Nahuel Moreno, had defended the US-backed dictator Fulgencio Batista and opposed strikes against him. Moreno initially denounced the overthrow of Batista in 1959 and characterized Fidel Castro as a right-wing “Gorilla.”^[1]

But only weeks after the dubious creation of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee by politically connected businesspeople and journalists, as explained by Comrade Tom Mackaman, Hansen implemented a sharp shift in the political line, claiming that Cuba was a workers state and that most “Trotskyists,” grouping the Pabloites and ICFI already into the same category, supported this description of Cuba.

By 1962, Hansen wrote that Cuba had become “the acid test,” proving that “the political differences had been narrowing for some time” between the Pabloite IS and supposedly the majority of the International Committee, and made unification the “logical consequence.” Hansen would insist that the SLL was acting in a “sectarian” fashion and ignoring the so-called “facts,” namely that the nationalization of key industries and plantations and other radical measures, under the pressure of US imperialism, turned the Castroite leadership into “natural” Marxists and Cuba into a workers state. Hansen even insisted that empiricism—that is, starting from the immediate surface of apparent “facts”—was consistent with Marxism.^[2]

Cliff Slaughter led the Socialist Labour League’s charge against this falsification of Marxism as part of the struggle against unprincipled reunification. The significance of Slaughter’s essays, including Opportunism and Empiricism, written in March 1963, was compared by David North to that of Trotsky’s defense of Marxism against the Shachtmanite tendency in 1939-40. This material became a central component in the education of cadre in the Workers League and internationally. In a devastating exposure of Hansen’s method, Slaughter wrote:

It is a false and non-Marxist view of “the facts” which leads to these revisionist ideas. What our “objectivists” are saying, with their message “history is on our side,” is this: look at the big struggles taking place, add them together without analysing them, go on your impressions of their significance, and add all these together—and you have “the facts.” Colonial revolutions are successful here, and successful there, and in another place; then the success of the colonial revolution is a fact. Nationalist leaders like Nkrumah and Mboya and Nasser make “anti-imperialist” speeches and even carry out nationalizations; this suggests that history is tending irreversibly and inexorably to force non-proletarian politicians in a socialist direction. But “objectivism” of this kind is a collection of impressions and not a rich dialectical analysis of the whole picture, with the parts related to one another. A truly objective analysis begins from the economic relations between classes on a world scale and within nations. It proceeds through an analysis of the relations between the needs of these classes and their consciousness and organization. On these it bases its programme for the working class internationally and in each national sector…

The essence of the history of the proletarian revolutionary movement is the conscious effort to develop scientific theory and a strategy conforming to that science. All talk about “natural” developments toward Marxism are an attack on the necessity to carry on this process. The empiricist believes that he can study the various parts of the social process as they present themselves from day to day. Adding these together will then give a “realistic” or “objective” total picture and international perspective.^[3]

The liquidationism promoted by Hansen had catastrophic consequences, especially in Latin America.

Nahuel Moreno and others followed Hansen in using the Cuban Revolution to break fully with the Trotskyist program and support reunification with the Pabloites, which in turn facilitated their integration into the same bog of petty-bourgeois radicalism and nationalism as the Pabloites. Moreno would fuse his movement with the Guevarist Mario Roberto Santucho to establish the Partido Revolutionario de los Trabajadores (PRT) in 1965.

Moreno responded to the Stalinist Cuban Communist Party’s launch in August 1967 of the Latin American Solidarity Organization (OLAS) by proposing that his party’s “number one militant task” was to build guerrillas as part of a “technical apparatus rigidly disciplined under OLAS.”^[4]

The Pabloites’ glorification of guerrilla warfare and renunciation to the revolutionary role of the working class helped lead thousands of radicalized workers and youth into suicidal adventures and caused the complete political disorientation of workers and the left, setting the stage for a brutal turn by imperialism and its local clients toward fascist counterrevolution. Bill Van Auken’s 1998 lecture, “Castroism and the Politics of Petty-Bourgeois Nationalism,” is fundamental reading to review the consequences and lessons of this political betrayal.

The Pabloite turn to petty-bourgeois nationalism was so firmly established by 1982 that SWP national secretary and Carleton alum Jack Barnes declared that the New Jewel Movement in Grenada, the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, and the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front in El Salvador represented a new international, with Barnes openly denouncing Trotsky’s theory of Permanent Revolution. Comrade Patrick Martin will deal with this in his lecture.

The founding of Intercontinental Press

The shutting down of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee after the assassination of JFK was not really a setback in the development of Hansen’s spy network at the service of US imperialism. Following the 1963 split with the International Committee and reunification with the Pabloites into the United Secretariat, Hansen founded the magazine Intercontinental Press, published in the SWP national headquarters in New York City, with a special bureau in Paris. During the following years, the magazine became the nerve center of an operation to organize the international interventions of the Pabloite movement, recruit agents worldwide, liquidate cadres, and enforce a line consistent with the interests of the CIA.

The group of agents left behind by Hansen after his death on January 18, 1979, “function not only as domestic stool pigeons within the American labor movement but as the organizers and instigators of provocations against revolutionary movements all over the world,” as explained in the ICFI statement “FBI spies in the SWP” from 1979.^[5]

Holden Roberto and Angola

Among the SWP operations most blatantly following this pattern was that related to Holden Roberto. Through Intercontinental Press, the SWP explicitly “defended the ‘right’ of the puppet armies of imperialism of Holden Roberto and Jonas Savimbi to accept CIA money.”^[6] Holden Roberto founded and led the National Liberation Front of Angola (FNLA), and Jonas Savimbi created its split-off, UNITA. It was then widely recognized and it is now documented that the US government began giving thousands of dollars to Roberto in the 1950s for intelligence gathering. Roberto met personally with John F. Kennedy in April 1961.

Intercontinental Press justified Roberto’s receipt of CIA cash and promoted the US State Department line on Angola in the mid-1970s, opposing the struggle led by the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) backed by the Soviet Union and Cuban government.[7]

Ahead of the 1974 Carnation Revolution in Portugal which overthrew the fascist dictatorship founded by António Salazar and led to the granting of formal independence to Angola, the SWP began publishing reports of “tribal carnage,” and the National Committee of the SWP declared that its “position is of opposition to the fratricidal war.”^[8]

The case of Fausto Amador

Historical context in Nicaragua and Latin America

However, the case of Fausto Amador, who became the main representative of the international Pabloite movement in Latin America during the late 1970s, became the starkest illustration of the methods used by Joseph Hansen to build this international network of agents through Intercontinental Press and deserves to be treated in detail.

While the late 1960s and early 1970s were a period of a mass upswing in revolutionary class battles and anti-colonial struggles, the betrayals at the hands of Social Democracy, Stalinism and Pabloism had allowed the capitalist ruling elites and imperialist powers to take the offensive. In Latin America, this took the form of US-backed military dictatorships that ruled most of the region by the mid-1970s, most famously that of General Augusto Pinochet in Chile installed during the bloody September 1973 coup.

Nonetheless, a period of intense revolutionary struggle continued in Central America and culminated in the July 19, 1979 Nicaraguan Revolution led by the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) that overthrew the bloody Somoza dictatorship, a family dynasty that epitomized US domination since the early 20th century. The FSLN installed a radical nationalist government allied with Castro in Cuba and the Soviet Union.

In El Salvador, a series of failed offensives by the guerrillas organized in the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front amid an upsurge of mass strikes and class battles into 1981 ultimately failed to overthrow the military junta.

In this context, the position of the ICFI was summed up in the 1978 statement by the Workers League, “The World Economic Political Crisis and the Death Agony of U.S. Imperialism:”

The impending collapse of the Somoza regime—even if it is able to stagger on a bit longer—reflects not only the bankruptcy of this dictatorship but the crisis of U.S. imperialism throughout Latin America. In neighboring El Salvador, a popular revolt against the Romero dictatorship grows despite a state of siege imposed by the government. These developments mean that revolutionary conflict throughout Latin America is well underway. This makes the fight for revolutionary leadership, the construction of sections of the International Committee throughout Latin America, of vital importance. This can only be carried out through assimilating the entire history of struggle by the International Committee against Stalinism and revisionism, which have been the props for the counter-revolution in Latin America.^[9]

Amador’s political biography: An official of the Somoza dictatorship

On the very eve of the defeat by Somoza, whose desperate last attempts to crush the mass movement against him included the bombing of working-class neighborhoods, Fausto Amador intervened after being elevated by Joseph Hansen to the title of “leading Latin American Trotskyist” in Intercontinental Press.^[10] The fact is that Amador was a well-known anti-Communist and former Somoza official who had been disowned by his own brother Carlos Fonseca, a Sandinista leader.

On March 24, 1977, the United Secretariat moved a resolution declaring that “the actions of Amador in 1969-1973 objectively aided the Nicaraguan dictatorship in its struggle against the Nicaraguan people. Such actions are incompatible with the defense of the interests of the working class and therefore incompatible with membership of the Fourth International.” It insisted that he needed to make a “clear public rejection” for the Central American public.^[11]

Far from responding to this demand, Joseph Hansen organized the publication on June 27, 1977, of a six-page interview with Amador titled, “How I Came to be a Trotskyist,” as a failed attempt to whitewash his political background.^[12]

Amador himself recounted how he briefly followed his older brother Carlos Fonseca into the Sandinista National Liberation Front before leaving Nicaragua ostensibly to escape the repression. He would then spend two years in Cuba before returning to Nicaragua. He “managed to get in touch with my father, and discussed the question with him. He is a personal friend of the dictator and has managed his property for twenty-five years.” Amador stated: “He told me that he could easily get permission for me to return to a legal existence and secure a guarantee of my complete physical safety. It was under these conditions that I returned to Nicaragua.”

Back in Nicaragua in 1969, Amador started spying and informing on the Sandinistas and called a press conference to denounce Cuba, attack the Sandinistas and call them to surrender. He described having spent two “traumatic” years in Cuba feeling “revulsion at the bureaucratic methods.”

A La Prensa report on his return to Nicaragua stated: “After investigating Amador, security officials determined that there were no grounds for pressing any legal charges against him, as his participation in the Sandinista National Liberation Front consisted of leaving the country and remaining on standby, reflecting on issues related to politics, religion, and society.” La Prensa then summarizes that Amador “said that it is dishonest for a young person to follow international slogans, adding that socialism is not the solution for the Nicaraguan people and that he has never been a socialist.” Moreover:

He clarified that he never belonged to the Sandinista National Liberation Front and that he only helped his brother Carlos when he was in Managua in mortal danger, finding him houses to hide in and personally moving him from one place to another. Instead of joining the Sandinista National Liberation Front, he preferred to ask his brother for an opportunity to visit socialist countries. He has just returned from that long journey, which lasted two years of study, and as a result, he can say that the solution for Nicaragua does not lie in a socialist regime.[13]

Amador, as he later sought to explain away to Intercontinental Press, said his brother Carlos, the FSLN leader jailed in Costa Rica, no longer considered him his brother but also “called on me to return to the organization, which shows, obviously, that he did not consider me a traitor.”

Amador also admitted going to a Christmas Party given by the Nicaraguan Embassy in London and accepting the post of cultural attaché at the Nicaraguan Embassy in Belgium, arguing absurdly that it was all to avoid taxes on a new car while living in Brussels.

Livio Maitan, a co-editor of Intercontinental Press, was prompted to write an open letter on July 1, clarifying: “Amador’s claim that he is working in the Fourth International is absolutely false. He is not a member of any section or sympathizing organization. Nobody of the International has ever agreed to admit him. This must be absolutely clear.” At the same time, Maitan cautioned: “None of us wanted a public polemic over this whole distressing story. This could only discredit us and be exploited by our opponents.”^[14]

Subsequently a “Dear Joe” protest to Hansen was voted by the United Secretariat on July 21-22, 1977, for publishing the interview with Amador without prior consultation. [15]

Within a few weeks there was a sharp shift in the European USec leadership’s attitude. During a meeting of the United Secretariat on October 31, Amador presented a statement acknowledging “two very grave political errors before becoming a Trotskyist”: “1. GRANTING a press conference in Managua on August 21, 1969 which the Somoza regime exploited; 2. ACCEPTING the formal post of cultural attaché at the Nicaraguan embassy in Brussels in 1972.”

A majority of the United Secretariat (14 to 4) voted for a resolution claiming this statement “meets the conditions of the United Secretariat motion of March 24, 1977.” [16]

A countermotion was introduced by the Colombian PST led by Nahuel Moreno, who had sought asylum in Colombia from the Argentine dictatorship, declaring Amador’s self-criticism “insufficient.” But it was overwhelmingly rejected.

Finally, it must be stressed that the SWP and its closest collaborators internationally ruthlessly bulldozed opposition to Amador. Another motion was passed to instruct the Bureau “to send a letter immediately to the PRT of Costa Rica—and any other Fourth International organization that wrote public polemics against Amador or the OST—telling them to cease and desist all such attacks and to co-operate in the defense of Amador, the OST, and the Fourth International against the Stalinists’ slander campaign.”

Hansen subsequently led a delegation to the PST in Colombia in December 1977, which Moreno denounced as an “attempt to threaten, intimidate, and blackmail us.” Moreno accused Hansen of organizing a “destabilization campaign against the PST equal to anything attempted against the Latin American working class by the CIA.”

At a United Secretariat meeting in January 1978, the Colombian PST Central Committee presented a resolution denouncing Amador as “a collaborator of the Somoza dictatorship” and stressed that “any support given by the Fourth International to Fausto Amador places in danger the very existence of the Fourth International in Central America.”^[17] They rejected his de facto admission as a “full member of our International” and his promotion by Intercontinental Press and called for a public debate. Moreno’s letter further denounced a “factional policy aimed at liquidating our party.”

The United Secretariat, however, voted 17-1 to reject the PST’s resolution, deeming a public discussion potentially “harmful to our movement.” Significantly, Ernest Mandel, leader of the Pabloite United Secretariat using the pseudonym “Walter,” acknowledged voting with the majority to “avoid an explosive public conflict which could be very damaging to the Fourth International.”

This about-face in the attitude toward Amador took place in the summer of 1977, when Security and the Fourth International had concluded that Hansen had begun working with the FBI in September 1940, having previously worked with the GPU.

In May of 1977, the International Committee of the Fourth International succeeded in locating and interviewing Sylvia Franklin, the Stalinist GPU agent who infiltrated the SWP and served as the personal secretary for party leader James P. Cannon from 1938 to 1947. On July 29, 1977, the ICFI published indisputable evidence that Hansen had passed over from service to the GPU in the assassination of Leon Trotsky to his recruitment by the FBI as their most important agent inside the Trotskyist movement. The evidence included a letter from Hansen on October 23, 1940, to George P. Shaw, the American Consul in Mexico City, “respectfully” thanking him for setting up a confidential contact with the agent-in-charge of the FBI’s New York City office, B.E. Sackett.

It is worth noting that as early as September 1976, Fausto Amador had signed the fraudulent “Verdict” drafted by the United Secretariat denouncing Security and the Fourth International and the initial findings on Hansen.

In the final analysis, the International Committee concluded that the United Secretariat was determined to prevent the eruption of a scandal and that it was “the rotten opportunism of the Pabloite leaders, which played into Hansen’s hands.” With the SWP clearly pulling the strings and no one in the Pabloite movement saying Amador was clearly an agent, the ICFI concluded: “They would rather live with Hansen’s network of agents than subordinate themselves to the historic principles of Trotskyism.”^[18]

Amador enforces the State Department line on the Nicaraguan Revolution

Having been installed as the main correspondent for Latin America, Amador’s political line during the Nicaraguan Revolution was consistently critical of the FSLN’s armed struggle. In Intercontinental Press on November 21, 1977, Amador wrote: “The actions of the FSLN were doomed to failure. In that sense, the senseless deaths of these brave and valuable rebels were inevitable and tragic... So much so that, by carrying out these actions, the FSLN gave the government a pretext to restart a general repression.”^[19]

On June 11, 1979, just before the final offensive that would overthrow Somoza, Amador denounced the military campaign, suggesting the Sandinistas should instead surrender: “No insurrection prepared and executed outside the daily struggle of the masses can succeed... This time, they [the Nicaraguan people] watched with horror as they were forced to be present against their will in a confrontation from which they would surely suffer the consequences. Such a course is fatal for the mass movement in Nicaragua. It would be totally irresponsible to join those who simplistically applaud the actions of the FSLN.”^[20]

Amador’s statements were outright false and sought to discourage support for the offensive in the face of terror from the Somocista National Guard, which was bombing entire neighborhoods. At the beginning of June, the FSLN had made a renewed call for a final offensive, sparking popular uprisings in Chinandega and Chichigalpa on June 2 and 3. Then, on June 4, the FSLN called for a general strike and a general insurrection, which received massive support.

After the Sandinista victory, Fausto Amador disappeared from the pages of Intercontinental Press, and the political line shifted dramatically. As explained by the Workers League in an open letter warning the FSLN, Amador was replaced first by Fred Murphy as chief correspondent for Nicaragua to make “glowing accounts of the Nicaraguan revolution, never once referring to the despicable record of the SWP and its notorious spokesman Fausto Amador.”^[21]

In October 1979, the United Secretariat “ordered Amador to contact the FSLN leadership and indicate that he ‘is willing to take whatever measures the FSLN leadership proposes to smooth over all the political problems caused by its past mistakes.’” Amador, who was present, “strongly opposed this, saying that the Sandinistas were going to kill him.”^[22]

What happened to Amador?

Amador would later join his political rivals within the United Secretariat, supporting Nahuel Moreno’s “Simón Bolívar Brigade.” This brigade, organized from Bogotá by the PST and announced on June 13, 1979, had taken approximately 100 volunteers to Nicaragua to fight in the final offensive. Although the extent of the Brigade’s participation is unclear, its activities in the battles focused on the capture of the remote port of Bluefields in the southern Caribbean.

During this time, the Colombian PST insisted that Sandinismo was “the objective, real leadership of the workers and popular movement in Nicaragua, which was fighting against dictatorship and imperialism,” but it later took a more critical stance, promoting the creation of unions in Managua that would operate outside the state apparatus, as well as denouncing the FSLN’s negotiations with imperialism. This was the moment when Amador backed the Brigade.

The FSLN then decided to arrest the leaders of the Simón Bolívar Brigade and hand them over to the Panamanian police under the Omar Torrijos regime, which allegedly tortured them. The SWP remained silent about their ousting and treatment, and organized a split with Moreno.

Years later, Fausto Amador would reappear as an official in the Nicaraguan government under right-wing President Enrique Bolaños, who “openly described himself as an anti-Communist.” Amador “served as technical secretary for his Decentralization Commission,^[23] holding private meetings with Bolaños, and was described in a TV interview as a ‘liaison between the Executive and Legislative Powers.’”[24] He also served as Nicaragua’s alternate representative in a cabinet-level meeting before the Organization of American States. Currently, he speaks on a weekly right-wing political radio show in Costa Rica “Alto Voltaje” where he argues from the perspective of protecting the hegemony of US imperialism combined with claims to oppose “neo-liberalism” from a right-wing standpoint and advocating for Trump to distance himself from the “Jewish Lobby” in Washington—a clearly antisemitic conception.^[25]

Both Amador and his replacements dovetailed with CIA operations

Amador’s case “laid bare the method of work of the Intercontinental Press network of imperialist agents created by Hansen on behalf of the FBI-CIA,” as explained by the International Committee.^[26] Hansen would introduce potential agents in Intercontinental Press as new “Trotskyist” leaders, an action which in US secret service parlance is called “opening doors.”

The Workers League’s open letter to the FSLN in November 1979 explicitly warned them:

That organization has sent and continues to send delegates who disguise themselves as Sandinista supporters. In reality, they are CIA agents and provocateurs engaged in preparing assassinations and counterrevolution. It even appears that they have been provided with unlimited funds for this major CIA effort to destabilize the new revolutionary government.

… Here was a man who could meet the requirements of the US State Department by providing up-to-date information on the FSLN and its leaders.[27]

In later years, the SWP sent Carleton alumni Cindy Mason Jaquith as the organizer of the Militant reporting team stationed in Nicaragua from late 1985 to 1987, when she assumed the effective role of chief Pabloite strategist in Latin America.^[28] Just like her previous role as SWP representative in Tehran after the Iranian Revolution, this was hardly a position to be expected from someone who boasted on her college application to Carleton about being in “church youth group” and working as a “Girl Scout leader’s aide and candy striper.”^[29]

Speaking on the July 19, 1979, Nicaraguan Revolution that overthrew the bloody dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza, Seth Galinsky, who worked with Jaquith in Nicaragua, said to The Militant: “Within weeks of the 1979 overthrow of Somoza the party set up what became the Managua bureau to learn from the revolution and to tell the truth about what workers and farmers were accomplishing.” Jaquith returned in 1990 before the bureau was closed later that year. ^[30]

Jaquith portrayed the Cuban, Nicaraguan, and Grenadian leaderships as the reincarnation of Lenin’s Bolshevik Party. For instance, she wrote in The Militant, on November 16, 1984:

The development of the Cuban Communist Party, the Nicaraguan Sandinista National Liberation Front, and the Grenadian New Jewel Movement under the leadership of Maurice Bishop marked the first revolutionary internationalist leaderships in power since the 1917-1923 period in Russia. For the first time since the Stalinist degeneration ·of the Comintern more than 50 years ago, leaderships committed to advancing the world socialist revolution and building the parties needed to do so—the goal of the Comintern at its founding—had taken power.

“Finding our own road.”

The Cuban, Nicaraguan, and Grenadian revolutionists returned to the lessons of the early Comintern—how it was established and what it did—as part of thinking out how to advance the revolution in their own countries. As Cuban Communist Party leader Carlos Rafael Rodriguez explained in his 1970 article on “Lenin and the Colonial Question,” the Cuban revolutionists found that “what we need to do is start from Lenin, as well as from Marx, in order to find our own road.”

By 1988, the ICFI reported:

Internationally, the Militant maintains a stable of foreign correspondents on a scale befitting Time magazine, consuming vast and unexplained resources. They operate as “socialist” journalists in countries such as Nicaragua, Angola, Burkina Faso and (before the US invasion) Grenada, countries where a capitalist reporter from America would be viewed with suspicion or barred entry altogether. In Managua, the Militant’s three-man bureau surpasses any of the capitalist dailies. It is second only to the US Embassy itself as an imperialist outpost in the Nicaraguan capital. ^[31]

Conclusion

Through a series of intermeshing gears that included the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, the conclusion that Cuba was a worker’s state, the “plugging in” of the Carleton Twelve, the drive for reunification with the Pabloites, where each gear was activated in an orchestrated manner and with careful timing, Hansen oversaw not merely a “political manipulation,” but rather a massive state intervention in the SWP and left-wing political movements globally during the key revolutionary struggles between the late 1960s and 1970s.

This operation was possible because of and further promoted the definite politics of Pabloism: the liquidation of the revolutionary leadership of the working class and capitulation to Social Democratic, Stalinist, bourgeois nationalist and Castroite movements and the trade union bureaucracies.

Pabloite leaders like Ernest Mandel and Nahuel Moreno signed the fraudulent “Verdict” denouncing Security and the Fourth International in 1976 and actively chose to avoid an explosive public conflict during the internal debate in the United Secretariat over Fausto Amador. This demonstrates how Pabloite opportunism provided the political and ideological cover that allowed an agent network to operate and directly undermine revolutionary movements internationally.

This adaptation to petty-bourgeois nationalism deprived the working class of a revolutionary leadership, which had profound and tragic consequences involving enormous defeats and thousands of deaths, particularly in Latin America.

At the same time, the alignment of the politics and objectives of Pabloism with Hansen’s network of state agents vindicates the fight for orthodox Trotskyism waged by the International Committee.

As capitalism in Latin America and the world enters an objective political crisis that eclipses that of the 1960s and 1970s, the working class must firmly base its response in the lessons of this struggle by the IC, where Security and the Fourth International played a key role. The main lesson from this period is that genuine socialism can only be the product of the conscious struggle of the working class to establish a revolutionary and internationalist party to overthrow capitalism and establish itself in power everywhere, including especially in the centers of world imperialism.