The murderous blows struck at the young Fourth International during the 1930s and 1940s confirmed in blood the warnings that Trotsky had consistently made on security.

Right up until the GPU assassin killed him in Mexico on August 20, 1940, Trotsky wrote passionately about the dangers from the GPU.

After the abortive raid on his Coyoacan headquarters in May 1940 led by the Stalinist artist Siqueiros, Trotsky wrote:

The GPU must rehabilitate itself with Stalin. A repetition of the attempt is inevitable. (“Stalin Seeks My Death,” June 8, 1940, Writings of Leon Trotsky, Pathfinder Press.)

For making this correct and fatal analysis, the Stalinist and social democratic press slandered Trotsky for his alleged “persecution mania.”

There is no essential political difference between their slander of Trotsky and what leading Pabloite revisionist Joseph Hansen and the renegade Tim Wohlforth today say about Gerry Healy, general secretary of the Workers Revolutionary Party.

In place of “persecution mania,” read “paranoid.”

The terrible “crime” of the Workers League Central Committee and the International Committee is that Wohforth, ex-national secretary of the Workers League, was asked why he had not revealed that the second in command of his organization, Nancy Fields, had previous family connections with the CIA.

When these questions were asked, an explosion occurred. Wohlforth and Fields resigned from the League and began distributing the most slanderous attacks on the Workers League and the IC. And Hansen began publishing them, avidly.

But the whole history of the movement shows that Wohlforth was under revolutionary obligation to obtain a security clearance for Fields and the Workers League was under revolutionary obligation to ask why he hadn’t done it.

Instead, Wohlforth put his personal relations with Fields before the security requirements of the party. In effect, he said, “You can’t ask any questions about Nancy Fields. I vouch for her. That is enough. And if you override my personal judgment, I will resign and blackguard your organization wherever I can. So you had better leave Nancy and me alone.”

This form of political blackmail was rejected. It could not be otherwise. The Workers League Central Committee voted unanimously on August 31, 1974, (Wohlforth’s vote included) for Wohlforth to be replaced as national secretary. And it produced this slander by Wohlforth, reprinted by Hansen: “He (Gerry Healy, general secretary of the Workers Revolutionary Party) becomes convinced that he is surrounded by CIA agents and proceeds on that basis.”

What lessons and experiences has the movement made when questions of security have clashed with personal friendships and relationships? In every single documented case, mistakes were made when the benefit of the doubt was not given to the security requirements of the party. In these matters, the party must come first, second and third.

Mark Zborowski, party name Etienne, was the closest political collaborator in Paris of Leon Sedov, Trotsky’s son. He was also a GPU agent.

First doubts about Etienne were raised by Henricus Sneevliet, who broke from Stalinism and worked for a period in close relations with the Le Opposition. When secret arrangements were made for Ignace Reiss to defect from the GPU and declare himself for the Fourth International, Sneevliet warned Reiss against going to Paris where Etienne was based. This was ignored. Six weeks later, after he had made his courageous stand against Stalinism, Reiss’s bullet-riddled body was found by a roadside in Switzerland.

When suspicion turned on Etienne, Leon Sedov would not countenance it and called him his “best and most reliable comrade.”

He continued to hold a key to Sedov’s letter box, collected and delivered mail for him and was placed in charge of the most priceless sections of Trotsky’s archives.

Shortly after Reiss’s murder, another senior GPU agent, Walter Krivitsky, defected in Paris.

He confirmed the warning that Reiss had given before his assassination, that the GPU planned a series of murders of Trotskyists. Krivitsky’s other information was a bombshell. He said that the GPU had their “eyes and ears” inside the Paris office, although he was not able to identify the agent by name.

Krivitsky unnerved a private meeting of French and Dutch Trotskyists when he said that his defection letter, sent anonymously to Ignace Reiss’s wife, had been shown to him by a GPU agent just before he defected. Stalin’s secret police were puzzled by the contents of the letter and the mystery signature, “Krusia.” This meant that the letter had been copied in Trotsky’s Paris office and sent to the Russian Embassy.

This was enough for Sneevliet. He exploded and told his colleagues: “There is an agent and it is that little Polish Jew, Etienne.” On another occasion he said, “I say and I repeat that this secretary and right-hand man of Sedov’s is an NKVD agent.” (Quoted in Our Own People by Elisabeth K. Poretsky, Oxford University Press, 1969.)

Sneevliet himself was captured and murdered by the Gestapo in 1942.

On February 16, 1938, Leon Sedov, at the age of 32, died in a Paris clinic after a relatively minor operation. The GPU had struck down the most inspirational figure in the Trotskyist movement notwithstanding Trotsky himself.

Only Sedov’s wife and Etienne knew the arrangements for his hospitalization. He later confessed that after calling the ambulance to take Sedov to the hospital, he tipped off the GPU.

With Sedov dead, Etienne became the central figure in the Paris organization, publishing the newspaper, the Russian Bulletin of the Left Opposition, and corresponding with Trotsky.

He began to sow discord in the ranks by writing to Trotsky to attack Sneevliet and added fuel to the feud between Jeanne (Sedov’s widow) and Trotsky to such a point that Trotsky refused to support her demand for a new inquiry into the circumstances of his son’s death.

Dismissing all talk of foul play, Etienne put Sedov’s death to his “weak constitution.”

At the climax of the preparations for the founding conference of the Fourth International, the International’s secretary, Rudolf Klement, disappeared (July 13, 1938). Two weeks later his body was found in the River Seine with the head, hands and legs cut off.

When the Fourth International held its founding conference in 1938, Etienne was there to represent the Russian section, in Trotsky’s absence.

After hearing the international reports, the delegates proceeded to elect an executive committee. In the minutes of the conference, it is reported that Etienne interrupted:

In the suggested partition of places on the EC no place is given to the Russian section. The Russian section, however, ought to have representation on the EC.

The delegates decided to appoint Trotsky as “secret” and honorary member of the executive with Etienne, Stalin’s man, to go on representing the Soviet Union.

Having been the architect of the purge of the European leadership of the Fourth International, Etienne’s remaining duty was to assist in setting up Trotsky’s assassination itself.

He used his inside knowledge of the organization to plant the assassin Mercader among Trotsky’s followers.

The penetration by the GPU was not confined to the European sections. In the United States, Louis Budenz, leading American Stalinist and one-time editor of the Daily Worker, infiltrated the ranks of the Trotskyists. He subsequently testified before the Committee on Un-American Activities that he planted a secretary in the office of James Cannon, leader of the American Trotskyists, and founding secretary of the Socialist Workers Party.

Budenz said:

She had the full run of the Trotskyite offices, became Cannon’s secretary, and made available to the Soviet secret police all the correspondence with Trotsky in Mexico City and with other Trotskyites throughout the world.

Other GPU accomplices were infiltrated into the ranks of the SWP. The Editorial Board of The Newsletter, forerunner of the Workers Press, published a statement on October 26, 1962, which contained the following information:

During the war years he (Dr. Robert Soblen, alias Roman Well) worked with a Mr. Floyd Cleveland Miller who was instructed by the GPU to associate with the American Trotskyists. This man adopted the pen name of Michael Cort and edited a journal for the Seafarers International Union.

While working for the GPU he participated in the seamen’s Trotskyist group and at that time a number of young members of the SWP were torpedoed and lost their lives on the way to Murmansk.

Miller ultimately gave evidence against Robert Soblen in a US Federal Court and explained that during the war Moscow was worried about Trotskyists shipping to Murmansk and Archangel as crewmen on American vessels. (“Soblen, the GPU and the Fourth International,” Editorial Board statement, The Newsletter, October 27, 1962.)

During the second World War (1941), Miller, alias Cort, wrote for the Socialist Workers Party monthly magazine Fourth International on military affairs.

From our investigation there is no evidence to show that the SWP published a statement on Cort’s activities when it was established he was a GPU agent.

If any SWP statements or minutes do exist, we demand that they be published at once.

Not only was the Trotskyist movement penetrated before and during the war, but after it as well. A secret preconference of the Fourth International was called in Paris in 1946 with delegates from the European sections and the United States. The very first session was interrupted by the arrival of the police armed to the teeth. The conference broke up and held its final session to wind up its affairs in the Paris headquarters of the police.

Hansen’s Pathfinder Press has produced a volume entitled Documents of the Fourth International. It covers the formative years of the organization from 1933 to 1940. The index contains two references to Etienne; once when he gave the Russian report to the founding conference in 1938 and again when he succeeded in having himself made the de facto Russian representative on the executive committee.

Etienne receives a footnote on page 431; the editors make no mention of his penetration of the Fourth International in their foreword.

The footnote says:

Etienne was the pseudonym of Marc Zborowski, a Polish-Ukrainian who was a member of the Russian section and helped publish the Bulletin of the Opposition. It later came to light that the whole time Etienne was Leon Sedov’s most trusted co-worker, and later de facto leader of the Russian section and publisher of the Bulletin, he was actually a GPU agent. Zborowski admitted this in his December 1955 perjury trial in the United States, after which he was sentenced to five years in prison.

Only the most determined reader would even find this minuscule announcement. What they would make of it, is anybody’s guess.

A Stalinist agent helps to organize the founding conference of the Fourth International, attends every session and gets himself nominated as the co-Russian delegate (with Trotsky) and the Pabloites think this is worth seven and a half lines at the back end of the book!

Such people cannot be serious about the struggle for revolutionary Marxism or the future of the working class. They have certainly betrayed everything that Trotsky stood and fought for.

Is it to be concealed that the Stalinist GPU penetrated so deeply into the founding conference of our movement? Is it a crime to mention it? Is it to be “paranoid” to raise these questions?

The crime is committed by those who deliberately set out to bury these facts and minimize the security dangers which continuously present themselves inside and outside the revolutionary movement.

Trotsky would not have wanted these facts to be buried in obscure footnotes. Nor would Leon Sedov or his mother, Natalia.

Nor would any of the old Bolsheviks who were framed and executed by firing squads on the orders of Stalin.

By their own murder at the hands of Stalinism, they commanded the future generations of Trotskyists to bring to light all the crimes and all the dangers to temper the new revolutionary cadres against the pitfalls of the past.

At the precise hour that the International Committee takes steps to raise these life and death questions in the training and building of revolutionary parties in all its sections, Hansen and Wohlforth are spurred into hysteria to denounce us as “paranoids.” Why?