Security and the Fourth International, the investigation launched by the International Committee of the Fourth International in May 1975 into the circumstances surrounding the assassination of Leon Trotsky, is a historic conquest of the working class and a milestone in the construction of the World Party of Socialist Revolution.
It is both the continuation and the culmination of the struggle waged by Trotsky, co-leader of the 1917 October Revolution and founder of the Fourth International, to expose the crimes of Stalinism and rid the international workers movement for once and for all of its counterrevolutionary legacy. In exposing the police agents who now lead the US revisionist Socialist Workers Party, the International Committee is settling historical accounts with the whole apparatus of counterrevolutionary violence employed by the combined state agencies of imperialism and the Soviet bureaucracy against the Fourth International.
In referring to Security and the Fourth International as an “investigation,” it must be grasped that this word only partially embraces the full political and historical content of the struggle waged by the International Committee during the last six years. Like Trotsky's exposure of the Moscow Trial frame-ups of 1936-38, it is the highest conscious expression of the objective movement of the working class against the bourgeoisie and all its agencies.
The impulse for the investigation has been derived from the monumental developments of the World Revolution. The decision taken by the International Committee at its Sixth World Congress to begin the investigation occurred just three weeks after the smashing defeat of American imperialism in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. The material impact of the victories of the masses in Angola, Iran, and Nicaragua were registered in the development of the Security investigation—not only in the fact that it produced politically devastating exposures of the network which murdered Trotsky. The development of the investigation established that the whole fate of the World Socialist Revolution hinges on the outcome of the struggle embodied in Security and the Fourth International.
The assassination of Leon Trotsky in August 1940 by an agent of the Stalinist secret police, the GPU, was the crime of the century. It was the most consciously directed attack by the combined agencies of world imperialism against the revolutionary Marxist vanguard of the working class. Trotsky personified Bolshevism and the World Revolution. Though Trotsky lived without a passport, every imperialist and Stalinist bureaucrat lived in terror of him and the movement he founded in 1938. Even from his exile in remote Coyoacán, the specter of Trotsky haunted Roosevelt, Hitler, and Stalin. The historical incident captures the essence of Trotsky's role in world affairs: as war erupted in 1939 between France and Germany, Hitler castigated the French imperialists for provoking a military conflagration that would lead inexorably to the victory of Trotsky and the World Revolution.
The vast apparatus assembled by the Kremlin bureaucracy to liquidate Trotsky and his closest comrades in the leadership of the Fourth International, including his son, Leon Sedov, was the most brutal manifestation of Stalinism’s historical role: that of “gravedigger of the revolution.” The assassination of Trotsky was the outcome and most politically concentrated expression of the defeats of the working class produced by the treachery and betrayals of Stalinism and its partner in reaction, Social Democracy.
Trotsky’s death—at the height of his political and theoretical powers as a revolutionary and dialectical materialist—was an enormous blow to the oppressed of all countries and to the Fourth International. Adding to the impact of this blow upon the cadre of the Fourth International was the fact that the events and circumstances surrounding the assassination of its politically irreplaceable leader were left unclarified and unexplained. The fact that so little was known within the Trotskyist movement itself about the assassination for 35 years—until the investigation of the International Committee got underway—is to be attributed to two major factors.
The first is the unfavorable situation which predominated in the years following the assassination of Trotsky: the outbreak of World War II, the postwar restabilization of capitalism which was made possible by the Stalinist betrayals of the proletariat in Western Europe, and, as a consequence, the unprecedented duration of the economic boom. The second—and it required Security and the Fourth International to establish this fact—is that the Stalinist agents who had organized the assassination of Trotsky did not leave the scene after the murder had been executed. Rather, they set about to organize its cover-up, so that the murder machine that had been used to eliminate Trotsky could remain in operation. This proceeded with the active support of the American government, which, despite its persecution of American Stalinists during the cold war, encouraged GPU agents to join forces with US intelligence agencies against their common enemy: Trotskyism.
The agent who personified this objective counterrevolutionary alliance of Stalinism and imperialism was the late Joseph Hansen, longtime leader of the SWP. His exposure as a double agent of the FBI-CIA and GPU-KGB by the International Committee’s investigation conducted between 1975 and his death in January 1979 has immense historical significance. Hansen was not only the connection between the two principal components of world reaction: US imperialism and the Soviet bureaucracy. He also personified the link between the past and present generations of counterrevolutionary conspiracy and violence against the Fourth International.
The present gang of FBI-CIA agents in the leadership of the SWP—whose nucleus consists of a group of ex-students from Carleton College in rural Northfield, Minnesota—were trained by Hansen. These agents are the direct descendants of those who organized and carried out the assassination of Trotsky.
The exposure and political destruction of these agents, along with their accomplices in revisionist organizations in every part of the world, is the supreme responsibility of the International Committee. The issue here is not vengeance for Trotsky’s death. The essence of Security and the Fourth International is the struggle for working class power. No matter how favorable the objective conditions are for the overthrow of world capitalism—and they are very favorable—the activities of Stalinist and imperialist agents are a deadly menace to the working class. Gathering information, organizing provocations, and preparing assassinations, the agents work incessantly to set the stage for what would be, unless prevented by the relentless and ruthless struggle of Marxist revolutionaries, another round of catastrophic defeats of the working class from which there could be no recovery.
The findings of Security and the Fourth International constitute an indispensable foundation for the training of Marxist cadre and a powerful material weapon of the World Revolution. The agents which this weapon has already exposed and those whom it will ultimately destroy politically represent the spearhead of the counterrevolution. This fact must be grasped by every class conscious worker and youth: all the historically accumulated instinct of the bourgeoisie for self-preservation finds its greatest level of consciousness in the elaboration of its strategy for destroying the revolutionary leadership of the working class.
The chief lesson drawn by world capitalism from the 1917 October Revolution was that Bolshevik leadership must never arise again within the workers movement of any country. As 1917 demonstrated to the working class the decisive importance of building a revolutionary party based on Marxism, it demonstrated to the bourgeoisie the importance of preventing its construction. It was this conclusion that the bourgeoisie applied in practice just 15 months after the Bolshevik seizure of power by murdering the two most important Marxist revolutionaries in Germany, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht.
In 1921 Trotsky issued this warning to the working class:
Europe and the whole world are passing through a period which is, on the one side, an epoch of the disintegration of the productive forces of bourgeois society, and, on the other side, an epoch of the highest flowering of the counterrevolutionary strategy of the bourgeoisie. We must understand this clearly and precisely. Counterrevolutionary strategy, i.e., the art of waging a combined struggle against the proletariat by every method from saccharine, professorial-clerical preachments to machine-gunning of strikers, has never attained such heights as it does today. (The First Five Years of the Communist International, New Park, p. 6.)
When Trotsky made this warning, Social Democracy had already been converted into a bourgeois instrument of counterrevolution within the workers movement. The murders of Liebknecht and Luxemburg had been carried out under its directives. But the degeneration of Social Democracy only foreshadowed the fate of the Third (Communist) International following the physical incapacitation and death of Lenin. The pressures of world imperialism on the first workers’state—manifested in the encirclement of the USSR, the backwardness of the Soviet economy which had been devastated by three years of civil war, and the defeats of the working class in Europe during the early 1920s—created the material conditions for the growth of bureaucracy in the Soviet Union.
Despite the nationalization of the productive forces, the Soviet Union remained a land of “generalized want,” generating the growth of bureaucracy as the “policeman of inequality.” Stalin rose to power as the representative of the Thermidorian reaction against 1917 and the historical demands of the World Revolution, which conflicted with the increasingly narrow caste interests of a bureaucracy preoccupied with assuring for itself the lion's share of the national wealth. The slogan of “socialism in one country”—the ideological essence of Stalinism—expressed the growing recognition by the bureaucracy in the Party and state apparatus that its material interests were distinct and hostile to those of the Soviet and international working class. As Trotsky explained, gathered beneath the official Stalinist slogan of “socialism in one country” were all those who were thinking: “Not everything for the World Revolution... why not something for me too?”
The Left Opposition had been formed in 1923 under the leadership of Trotsky to counter the growth of bureaucratism within the Party. As the huge bureaucratic state apparatus was the product of objective economic problems within the USSR created by world imperialism, it was through this apparatus that the pressures of world imperialism were transmitted into the Bolshevik Party. The degeneration of a large section of the leadership of the Bolshevik Party was the product of this pressure.
Trotsky recognized that the objective conditions which had given rise to bureaucracy and the related problem of the political degeneration of the Bolshevik Party could only be grappled with and successfully resolved at the level of international struggle. The prolonged isolation of the USSR, the often-frustrated hopes for direct material assistance from the workers of Western Europe, the terrible hardships endured for so many years: all these elements combined to produce a mood of discouragement which aided the bureaucracy as it usurped political power from the Soviet working class. Trotsky understood that it would require the victory of the working class in Asia and Western Europe to rekindle the smoldering fires of Bolshevism in the consciousness of the Russian proletariat.
But it was precisely against the international struggles of the working class and the oppressed masses that the Stalinist faction delivered the worst blows. Its policy of bureaucratic centrism produced defeats in Britain (1926) and China (1927).These defeats, in turn, accelerated the process of degeneration of the Bolshevik Party.
World imperialism was not at all indifferent to the outcome of the struggle between Trotsky and Stalin. It unerringly identified Stalin as the representative of a conservative tendency within the USSR. In Trotsky and the Left Opposition, it recognized an implacable enemy. One leading British Tory publicly called upon Stalin to place Trotsky and other Left Opposition leaders in front of firing squads.
In 1936 the Stalinist bureaucracy adopted that policy. The defeat of the German proletariat by Hitler in 1933, the direct consequence of the ultra-leftist policy dictated by the Soviet leaders, completed the transformation of the bureaucracy into a counterrevolutionary force within the USSR and international workers movement. Its avowed program of international collaboration with imperialism—concretized in the policy of “Popular Frontism”—required the extermination of every surviving trace of Bolshevism within the Soviet Union and beyond its borders. The Moscow Trials and the blood purges were carried out by the bureaucracy to terrorize the Russian proletariat, eradicate the revolutionary traditions of Lenin within the USSR, and assure world imperialism that Stalinism had broken all connections with Bolshevism.
Shortly before the beginning of the first of the Moscow Trials, Stalin granted an interview to Roy Howard of the reactionary American chain of Scripps-Howard newspapers.
“What is the state of affairs—he asked Stalin—as to plans and intentions in regard to world revolution? ‘We never had any such plans or intentions.’ But, well… ‘This is the result of a misunderstanding.’ Howard: ‘A tragic misunderstanding?’ Stalin: ‘No, comic, or, if you please, tragi-comic.’” (Quoted by Trotsky in Revolution Betrayed, New Park, p. 202.)
The foreign policy of the Soviet Union, determined by the objective interests of the bureaucracy as a privileged caste, was transformed by Stalinism into the defense of the international imperialist status-quo. The workers movement in each country was relegated to the role of a pawn in the Soviet bureaucracy's diplomatic intrigues with imperialism. The Stalinist parties in different countries were utilized to apply pressure on “their” bourgeoisie to adopt a favorable diplomatic stance toward the Soviet Union. In return, the Stalinists guaranteed the complete subordination of the working class to the “national interest,” i.e., private property and the rule of capital.
Trotsky’s analysis of the Soviet bureaucracy as counterrevolutionary “through and through” was his fundamental point of departure in his struggle against Stalinism. The founding of the Fourth International was the political expression of the irreconcilable social antagonism between the parasitic bureaucratic caste and the Soviet proletariat, between the needs of the planned Soviet economy and the corrupt privileges embezzled by the bureaucracy, between international “Permanent Revolution” and “socialism in one country.”
Trotsky summoned the Soviet masses to political revolution as an essential component of the World Socialist Revolution, whose strategy embraces both the unconditional defense of the USSR against imperialism and the destruction of the parasitic bureaucracy. At the heart of the preparation of the political revolution lay the struggle to expose the crimes of the GPU before the international workers movement. Its crimes were not aberrations of Stalinism but the inevitable product of the social position of the bureaucracy within the USSR and its objective role as an agency of world imperialism within the working class.
On November 2, 1937, Trotsky issued an open letter to all workers organizations. It began:
The world socialist movement is being consumed by a terrible disease. The source of the contagion is the Comintern, or to put it more correctly, the GPU, for whom the apparatus of the Comintern serves only as a legal cover. The events of the last few months in Spain have shown what crimes the unbridled and completely degenerate Moscow bureaucracy and its hirelings from among the declassed international scum are capable of. It is not a case of “incidental” murders or “incidental” frame-ups. It is a case of a conspiracy against the world labor movement. (Writings of Leon Trotsky: 1937-38, Pathfinder, p. 28.)
In Moscow, the frame-up trials were in full swing. Old Bolsheviks like Zinoviev, Kamenev, Smirnov, and Piatakov—politically and physically broken by years of persecution and imprisonment—recited pre-staged “confessions,” were sentenced to death and shot. US ambassador Davies, the emissary of Roosevelt, and Duranty, correspondent of The New York Times, both sitting in the court room, were enthralled by the grotesque spectacle, praised Stalinist jurisprudence in their letters and articles, and, of course, welcomed the sentences.
The essential purpose of the frame-ups and judicial murders was to prepare public opinion for the assassination of Trotsky. Both Trotsky and his son, Sedov, were sentenced to death in absentia by the Moscow court. The GPU established a special section upon which it lavished unlimited funds to carry out the executions. The destruction of the Spanish Revolution had provided the GPU with enormous opportunities for perfecting their operational expertise. Special detachments of GPU assassins were organized and trained.
In the summer of 1937, Erwin Wolf, one of Trotsky’s most devoted political secretaries, was abducted and murdered by the GPU during a trip to Spain. In September 1937, Ignace Reiss, a GPU agent who defected from Stalinism and declared his support for the Fourth International, was assassinated in Switzerland. In February 1938, Sedov was murdered by the GPU in a Paris clinic where he had checked in for treatment of a relatively minor intestinal complaint. In July 1938, on the eve of the founding conference of the Fourth International, its secretary, Rudolf Klement, was abducted in Paris and killed. His dismembered body was discovered in the River Seine.
Trotsky knew that all these assassinations had been carried out to prepare his own liquidation. He wrote: “I live on this earth not in accordance with the rule but as an exception to the rule.” (Stalin’s Gangsters, p. 12.)
The first direct attempt was made on May 24, 1940, during the early morning hours. A death squad armed with machine guns and firebombs, led by the Stalinist painter David Alfaro Siqueiros, gained access to Trotsky’s villa when the guard on duty, Robert Sheldon Harte, opened the front gate for the killers. Trotsky miraculously survived the attack. The remaining three months of his life were devoted to exposing the GPU mechanism, directed from the Kremlin, that had organized the attempt.
On August 20, 1940, the GPU agent Ramon Mercader succeeded in carrying out Stalin’s order. Late that afternoon, he entered Trotsky’s private study to show him the draft of an article. While Trotsky read the text, Mercader slipped out from beneath the lining of his coat an ice-pick and brought it crashing down upon Trotsky’s skull. Trotsky rose and grappled with the assassin, thus preventing his escape. But Trotsky then collapsed and soon fell into a coma. He died in a hospital in Mexico City the following evening.
And, for nearly 35 years, that was virtually all that was known by the Trotskyist movement about the assassination of its founder. The Socialist Workers Party, which had had the main responsibility for defending Trotsky’s life, published a brief report on the assassination written by Party lawyer Albert Goldman.
It blamed the GPU for the killing, noting that “Jacques Mornard”—as the assassin was then known—had clearly indicated for whom he was working when he shouted, upon being apprehended, “I had to do it. They've got my mother.”
In the weeks following the assassination, the SWP held several memorial meetings in honor of Trotsky, and then, for all intents and purposes, forgot about the killing.
None of the politically disturbing questions which arose from Trotsky’s death were examined. The SWP leadership accepted everything and everybody at face value. Beyond reporting Mornard’s association with Sylvia Ageloff—a young member of the SWP from Brooklyn—no attempt was made to explain how the assassin had so easily penetrated the household in Coyoacan. No objective consideration had been made of the disastrously inadequate state of security around Trotsky. The fact that twice within three months—on May 24 and August 20—agents had passed without any trouble through the gates of the villa was simply not investigated. Though Trotsky, in the limited period left to him to investigate the May 24th raid, had absolved Sheldon Harte of complicity in the assassination attempt—mainly because Harte’s corpse was discovered one month after the raid—he raised one essential qualification:
In two of its announcements, the Central Committee of the “Communist” Party has repeated that the participation of Sheldon (Harte) casts a “suspicious” light on the assault. In reality the penetration of an agent of Stalin into my household could have indicated solely that the GPU had succeeded in deceiving my friends in New York, who recommended Bob Sheldon to me. Every informed person knows that the GPU floods its agents into all workers organizations and state institutions throughout the world. For this it spends annually tens of millions of dollars. (Writings of Leon Trotsky: 1939-40, p. 293.)
On several occasions during the last months of his life, Trotsky had raised sharply the problem of GPU infiltration—especially inside the Socialist Workers Party itself. In the midst of the faction fight against the petty-bourgeois minority inside the SWP led by James Burnham, Max Shachtman, and Martin Abern, Trotsky sent the following advice to the majority on December 27, 1939:
It is absolutely sure that the Stalinist agents are working in our midst with the purpose to sharpen the discussion and provoke a split. It would be necessary to check many factional “fighters” from this point of view. (In Defense of Marxism, New Park, p. 86.)
Trotsky wrote again on January 24, 1940:
It is belated and sterile to lament now over the flaring up of the discussion. It is necessary only to keep a sharp eye on the role played by Stalinist provocateurs, who are unquestionably in the party and who are under orders to poison the atmosphere of the discussion and to head the ideological struggle toward split. (In Defense of Marxism, p. 128.)
A prominent Mexican journalist who met with Trotsky shortly before the assassination recalled years later his suspicions of GPU penetration:
There came a moment when Trotsky trusted absolutely nobody. He trusted in no one. He didn’t specify or name names, but he did say to me: “I will be killed either by one of them in here or by one of my friends from outside, by someone who has access to the house. Because Stalin cannot spare my life.” (Interview with Eduardo Tellez Vargas, quoted in Trotsky's Assassin at Large, Labor Publications, p. 16.)
Despite Trotsky’s warnings, the SWP never investigated either the possibility or the implications of GPU infiltration of its own organization in the United States or that of the Fourth International. Instead, in the years following Trotsky’s death there emerged out of the SWP leadership the line that suspicions about the infiltration of agents cause more damage to the Party than their actual activities. The main advocate of this position was Joseph Hansen, who had worked as Trotsky’s secretary in Coyoacan between 1937 and 1940 and was particularly responsible for the organization of his security.
While the SWP members were being taught to ignore the dangers of police infiltration, facts began to emerge that cast new light on precisely that side of the Stalinist conspiracy against the Fourth International that the SWP did not want to deal with, that is, internal penetration of the SWP and the Fourth International.
In the late 1940s, the former editor of the Daily Worker and a GPU agent, Louis Budenz, published books which revealed that the personal secretary of SWP leader James P. Cannon was a Stalinist plant. In 1950, the SWP issued a carefully worded statement in its newspaper, The Militant, in which it denounced Budenz’s charges. Without naming the individual in question, Sylvia Callen, party name Caldwell, Cannon declared that she had been questioned and cleared by an SWP Control Commission. No further statement was made to refute the charges.
It became publicly known in 1956 that a certain Mark Zborowski, then a professor of anthropology at a distinguished university in the United States, was being questioned by the FBI for espionage activities on behalf of the GPU-KGB from the early 1930s on. He faced perjury charges for having denied knowing the new prize catch of the FBI, Jack Soble.
For the SWP, working in the US where this was front-page news, the information was of staggering significance. Mark Zborowski had been known inside the Fourth International as Etienne, the right-hand man of Leon Sedov, Trotsky’s son, in the Paris center of the Fourth International.
Following the Paris assassinations of Leon Sedov and Rudolf Klement, secretary of the International Secretariat of the Fourth International, it was Zborowski who assumed control of final organizational plans for the founding conference of the Fourth International on September 3, 1938. As Zborowski elaborated his role as a GPU agent inside the Trotskyist movement in the course of testimony before the US Senate and in the perjury trial, it became clear that the assassinations of Wolf, Reiss, Sedov, and Klement had all been prepared through GPU infiltration of the Fourth International in Paris, where Zborowski and his constant political companion, Lola Estrine, worked.
Nor was the face of Jack Soble unknown to experienced leaders inside the Socialist Workers Party. Between 1931 and 1933, he was one of the principal leaders of the German Left Opposition. His party name was Senin. Working alongside him was his brother, Well—who established himself in the United States as Dr. Robert Soblen. It was this name that was to appear in a 1960 indictment naming him as a Soviet wartime agent.
The SWP remained virtually silent on the Zborowski and Soble exposures. It never reprinted the voluminous testimony given by Zborowski before the Senate in 1956 and at his perjury trial in 1958. Although the exposure of Zborowski and Senin created a completely new picture of the Stalinist conspiracy against the Fourth International and the actual organization of Trotsky's assassination, the SWP made no attempt to either investigate this or draw conclusions from it.
This was not an accidental omission. It was the expression of two interconnected elements in the leadership of the SWP. The first was the rapid and profound degeneration of the old Cannon leadership. The pressures of American imperialism upon the SWP generated by the post-war boom produced a sharp right-wing turn. The objective conditions within the United States were certainly difficult.
Anti-communist witch-hunting and the conservative mood affecting the industrial working class isolated the SWP. But revolutionary organizations are called upon to swim not only with the stream, but also against it when necessary. The SWP was unable to do this, even though certain developments, above all the eruption of the Stalinist crisis in 1956 following Khrushchev’s “Secret Speech” and the suppression of the Hungarian Revolution, provided historic opportunities for political clarification and growth. The ignoring of Trotsky’s warning to the SWP leadership, made in 1940, that it occupy itself with a sustained struggle against pragmatism and for the development of dialectical materialism, was now producing its politically disastrous results.
It was precisely within this atmosphere of political and theoretical degeneration that the agent Hansen was able to take command of the SWP, both encouraging and exploiting its abandonment of Trotskyism and descent into the political squalor of revisionism.
However, this revisionist degeneration of the SWP was relentlessly fought by the International Committee, above all its British section, and this laid the basis for the ultimate exposure and destruction of Hansen. The exposure of Hansen did not begin with Security and the Fourth International. Rather, the Security investigation arose out of the uncompromising defense of Marxist and Trotskyist principles against Pabloite revisionism from 1953 on. The International Committee was founded to wage war against this revisionist trend which reflected the pressures of world imperialism upon the Fourth International, advanced the reactionary theory of the Stalinist bureaucracy’s “self-reform,” preached liquidation into the counterrevolutionary Stalinist parties, and thus repudiated all the fundamental principles upon which the Fourth International was based.
The stand taken by the International Committee in 1963 against the unprincipled reunification between the SWP and Pabloite revisionism was decisive in completing the exposure of Hansen as a politically criminal opportunist and pragmatist. It was in this protracted political and theoretical struggle against all forms of revisionist capitulation to Stalinism that the weapons were forged for the destruction of its agents inside the Trotskyist movement.
Here it is only necessary to deal briefly with the immediate issue which led to the beginning of the campaign on Security and the Fourth International. The documents which appear at the beginning of this volume deal with the violations by Tim Wohlforth, former national secretary of the Workers League, of revolutionary security: his deliberate concealment of the fact that his personal companion Nancy Fields had close personal connections with leading personnel of the Central Intelligence Agency. Wohlforth had not only elevated Fields into the top leadership of the Workers League but also brought her to an important international conference in the spring of 1974, attended by delegates working, in some cases, under illegal conditions.
While in the leadership of the Workers League, Fields carried out acts of wanton political destruction, closing down branches in different parts of the country and driving devoted comrades out of the movement.
Alerted by reports of Field’s activities, the International Committee specifically asked Wohlforth in August 1974 whether he had any information that linked Fields with the CIA. Wohlforth emphatically said no. Just a few days later when the Central Committee discovered for the first time that Fields’s uncle, Albert Morris, was head of the CIA’s computer division in Washington, Wohlforth admitted that had known of this connection but had not considered it important. The Workers League rejected his explanation. Its Central Committee unanimously voted on August 31, 1974 to remove Wohlforth as national secretary and suspend Fields from membership, pending the establishment of a Commission of Inquiry to investigate this grave violation of the movement’s security. The unanimous vote included Wohforth’s and Fields’s. One month later, shortly before the commission was to begin its work, Wohlforth deserted the Workers League with an hysterical letter denouncing the decisions for which he himself had voted. Both he and Fields then rushed to Hansen, who published in Intercontinental Press Wohlforth’s thoroughly slanderous account of the events leading up to his desertion. Hansen followed Wohlforth’s article with a diatribe published in Intercontinental Press against the International Committee and Comrade Healy of the Workers Revolutionary Party, totally endorsing Wohlforth’s violation of security. This was a sinister political intervention.
That the International Committee could not permit Wohlforth to disregard the security of the Trotskyist movement and place his reactionary personnel considerations above the defense of the Party against state infiltration was politically unchallengeable.
Hansen knew this. He himself had been present when Trotsky was murdered in 1940, was totally familiar with the history of infiltration and, moreover, was presiding at that time over a party that was known to contain within it hundreds of FBI informers.
Given the fact that the Fourth International had a long and traumatic history of infiltration by agents, leading to the murders of important leaders and the sabotage of its political work, it might have appeared totally reckless for Hansen to have sprung to Wohlforth’s defense. But political struggle is a clash of class forces. Hansen reacted not as an individual but as the conscious agent of imperialist counterrevolution. He immediately recognized in the security measures taken by the International Committee an action of revolutionary defense against the state. By acting swiftly against Wohlforth’s violation of security and insisting upon the unconditional subordination of the individual to the Party, the International Committee dealt a blow to the whole apparatus of police agents that had been built up against the Trotskyist movement over decades.
Hansen recognized that at once, and saw it as a dangerous development. For 40 years, Hansen had fought to undermine the security of the Trotskyist movement and leave it open to the unlimited penetration of imperialist and Stalinist agents.
Now especially in the aftermath of the defeat of imperialism in Vietnam, confronting the rising tide of World Socialist Revolution, imperialism could not tolerate any weakening of this counterrevolutionary network inside the Trotskyist movement. It could not stand by as leaders of the International Committee sought to educate Trotskyist cadre on the decisive importance of security within the revolutionary organization. This is why Hansen not only supported Wohforth’s violation of security, but also immediately set out to frame Comrade G. Healy of the Workers Revolutionary Party and prepare the grounds for assassinations of leaders of the International Committee. His denunciation of Comrade Healy as “paranoid” for defending the security of the International Committee simply repeated the exact same charges made by the Stalinists against Trotsky, who, in his time, spoke with revolutionary contempt of “the political agents of the GPU (who) speak of my ‘persecution mania.’” (Stalin's Gangsters, p. 78.)
Precisely because the essence of the Security investigation is the mobilization of the masses against imperialism and Stalinism, every revisionist organization has rushed to the defense of its endangered agents. The more documents the International Committee uncovered, right out of the National Archives of the United States, establishing and verifying Hansen’s secret relations with both the GPU and the FBI, the more frenzied became the revisionists’ denunciation of the International Committee. Not one of them would question, let alone object to, Hansen's secret meetings with the GPU agent “John” in 1938 or his visits to the American Embassy in Mexico City and discussions with its station chief Robert McGregor, which led to Hansen’s request for “confidential” contacts with the government through which he could “impart information with impunity.” Even after the International Committee published Hansen’s infamous letter to American Consul George P. Shaw, “respectfully” thanking him for setting up his contact with FBI Special Agent B.E. Sackett, J. Edgar Hoover’s top man in New York City, not a single revisionist renounced his support for Hansen.
The same steadfast devotion to the counterrevolutionary enemies of the Fourth International and accomplices in the murder of Trotsky has been exhibited by revisionists all over the world in relation to Sylvia Caldwell, Stalin’s spy in the SWP national headquarters. The documentation of her criminal role is irrefutable. After the initial allegations made by Budenz were published, she was allowed to quietly leave the SWP. Several years later, Cannon referred to a Control Commission which supposedly cleared her. But the findings of this rigged Commission–if it was ever held–were never published. When the US government named her as a co-conspirator of KGB spy Robert Soblen in 1960, publishing her name and identifying her as a Soviet courier in front-page newspaper stories all over the United States, the SWP remained totally silent.
Only when the International Committee initially published what were in 1975 the known facts of her GPU role inside the SWP national office between 1938 and 1947 did Hansen come rushing to her defense. He glorified her as an “exemplary” comrade. His wife, Reba Hansen, wrote a lengthy tribute to “Sylvia,” lauding her as “a warm human being,” who “knew how to do everything that was necessary to keep a one-person office running smoothly. Her devotion to the movement and her readiness to put in long hours of hard work inspired us all.” (James P. Cannon As We Know Him, Pathfinder, pp. 232-233.)
When the International Committee located Caldwell outside Chicago in 1977—now with an entirely new midwestern housewife’s identity—she claimed complete amnesia. She could recall nothing about the “pretty terrible” accusations made against her. She hardly remembered Cannon or, for that matter, Stalin. But others with better memories, like the GPU agent Lucy Booker, who still lives in New York, identified Caldwell as the woman who brought her documents from the SWP which were turned over to Jack Soble.
As in the case of Hansen’s GPU and FBI contacts, the more the International Committee exposed his lying defense of co-agent Caldwell, the more his revisionist associates were compelled to defend him and Caldwell.
On January 14, 1977, the revisionists called a special meeting in London to denounce Comrade Healy and defend the police agencies of imperialism and Stalinism. Not since the period of the Moscow Trials, when the GPU staged anti-Trotsky rallies aimed at preparing public opinion for attacks on the Fourth International, had a meeting like this been seen. For two hours, GPU accomplices and revisionist reprobates like George Novack, Tim Wohlforth, Ernest Mandel, and Pierre Lambert engaged in an orgy of slander against Comrade Healy.
But when he raised his hand to speak after having sat silently in the audience, they would not permit him to address the meeting and pose the issues raised by Security and the Fourth International. The meeting collapsed when an outcry from the audience compelled the chair — held by Tariq Ali of the British revisionist IMG, a group especially set up by Hansen as a provocation against the International Committee—to call for a vote on whether Healy would be permitted to speak. Though this right was denied by a slender vote, the fact is that Hansen’s defenders were incapable of replying to the evidence assembled by Security and the Fourth International.
On that night, all those who sat on the “Platform of Shame” consciously declared themselves for the counterrevolution and its agents. Of particular significance was the appearance of the leaders of the French revisionist Organisation Communiste Internationaliste, Pierre Lambert, Pierre Broué, and Francois de Massot. They knew then that Caldwell was a GPU agent. In private discussions among their associates, they freely admit it. But publicly they defend Hansen. They are driven by the same class forces which motivated those who defended Stalin’s frame-ups even though they knew that the Old Bolsheviks were entirely innocent of all the charges.
In the course of the six-year struggle of Security and the Fourth International—which has consisted of hundreds of articles and statements comprising several thousand pages—Hansen, the SWP-CIA agents who succeeded him, and their revisionist accomplices have never refuted a single charge made by the International Committee nor demonstrated a single misrepresentation of the facts. Nor have they tried. Like the GPU and its puppets in the 1930s, the facts are of no interest to them whatsoever. It did not matter to the political accomplices of the GPU in the 1930s whether the Hotel Bristol—where Trotskyists allegedly organized anti-Soviet conspiracies—existed when the alleged crimes were supposedly planned. Even after it had been shown that the Hotel Bristol had been demolished in 1917, the GPU toadies continued to endorse the trials.
The same political, intellectual, and moral depravity finds a no less degenerate expression in the defenders of the present day state conspiracy against the Fourth International. For example, those who signed Hansen's notorious “Verdict” in September 1976 denouncing Security and the Fourth International as a “shameless frame-up,” endorsed a statement which claimed that the International Committee had not produced a single document or in any way substantiated its charges against Hansen or Sylvia Franklin. By that time, dozens of documents had already been produced. Since then, hundreds more have been presented. Their authenticity has never been challenged. Needless to say, not a single signatory has requested that his name be removed from the “Verdict.”
This includes the politically dubious Jean van Heijenoort, who issued a statement against the Security investigation which was published by Hansen in Intercontinental Press. Only a few months later in Paris, on March 8, 1977, van Heijenoort stated at a public meeting that he believed that Sylvia Caldwell had been a GPU agent inside the SWP national office. Despite that, he remains a defender of the SWP agents.
We are not dealing with political confusion. We are dealing with conscious defense of counterrevolution against the Trotskyist movement.
Broué, Lambert, de Massot, and all those who have fought against the uncovering of the crimes committed against the Fourth International stand in the eyes of objective history as accomplices of the CIA and the KGB—unless future findings of the continuing investigation of Security and the Fourth International prove them to be direct agents no less than the late Hansen.
The SWP agents who have replaced the late Hansen and their police associates in revisionist organizations all over the world will not get the opportunity to wreak the havoc caused by their predecessors. The findings of Security and the Fourth International resound throughout the world with each advance of the revolution. The fate of Fausto Amador, Hansen’s chief agent in Central America, crushed beneath the advance of the Nicaraguan masses, awaits the leaders of the SWP. Let us name the main agents here: Jack Barnes, national secretary; Mary-Alice Waters, editor of the Intercontinental Press; Cindy Jaquith, editor of The Militant; and national committee members Larry Seigle, Caroline Lund, Elizabeth Barnes Stone, Doug Jenness, and Peggy Brundy—all of whom are from Carleton College. From among the non-Carleton alumni we can list as agents Barry Sheppard, Joel Britton, and Peter Camejo. There are others. The recent self-exposure of SWP leader Ed Heisler as an FBI agent—an associate and protege of Jack Barnes since 1963—signifies that the Hansen network is in the final stages of its existence.
The record of Heisler’s activity as an agent includes more than 10,000 pages of reports which he prepared for the FBI, using the alias “Sam Stone.” Working in the leadership of the Chicago branch of the SWP where he had been brought through the machinations of Jack Barnes, he provided the FBI with exhaustive information on the working class and the radical movement in the United States.
The reports filed by Heisler place thousands of workers, students, socialists, and youth in the FBI computer bank. Hansen and Barnes promoted him to ever higher positions in the SWP so that he could improve the quality of intelligence he was providing to the FBI. He was nominated to run for public office as an SWP candidate in 1974, and in 1975, was selected to testify before a Congressional committee on violations of constitutional rights by the CIA! No member of the SWP was as close to Heisler as Jack Barnes. When Heisler decided, for reasons which have still to be established, to publicly admit his FBI role, he sent a letter to the SWP addressed to “Dear Jack.” That salutation from an FBI agent to the leader of the SWP best expresses the real relations between the state and Hansen's successors.
It is to complete their destruction that the International Committee begins with this volume the publication of all the documents of Security and the Fourth International. In these volumes, the International Committee is publishing the documents of this struggle as they originally appeared. They comprise the record of revolutionary conflict. The ever deeper penetration by the International Committee into the workings of the counterrevolutionary network led by Hansen, every new exposure and insight into the activities and methods of the agents, is a product of struggle. The revolutionary struggle embodied in the writings of Security and the Fourth International has already claimed martyrs from among the cadres of the International Committee: Comrade Tom Henehan of the Workers League, assassinated by Hansen’s hitmen on October 16, 1977, and Comrade R. Piyadasa of the Sri Lankan Revolutionary Communist League, murdered on July 17, 1979.
The forces now being brought forward by the World Revolution into the ranks of the International Committee will find in these volumes mighty weapons for their revolutionary education.