In 1969, evidence was produced to show that Bala Tampoe, head of the Pabloite revisionist organization in Sri Lanka (Ceylon), had associated with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

The information was uncovered by the Pabloite revisionists themselves during a “Unified Secretariat” commission of inquiry into Tampoe’s free-wheeling political activities.

The documents on the Tampoe affair were suppressed in Hansen’s New York office and Mandel’s bureau for three years until they were “leaked” to the “Spartacist” group in the United States.

They showed a situation without parallel in bringing the name of Trotskyism into disrepute. In spite of the mountain of evidence presented, Tampoe, general secretary of the Ceylon Mercantile Union (CMU), remains Hansen’s man in Sri Lanka.

The most damning evidence is that he travelled to the United States in the summer of 1967 as a guest of the Asia Foundation, a notorious organization created, financed and staffed by the CIA. The evidence was accepted by all members of the Control Commission and openly admitted by Tampoe himself.

Is it possible Tampoe did not know the foundation was CIA-controlled? No. There can be no question that Tampoe knew exactly who was paying his fare and expenses. More importantly, Hansen and the leadership of the Socialist Workers Party and the Unified Secretariat knew as well... because they gave him the OK to make the visit.

Throughout South-East Asia the foundation was a widely acknowledged front for US intelligence. It began in 1951 under the title of the Committee for a Free Asia with the declared aim of launching “a people’s movement for freedom by combatting rampant Communist aggression in Asia.” Its first chairman, George Green, said, “We are selling the democratic system of free enterprise.”

In 1954, the committee was transformed into the Asia Foundation under the chairmanship of Robert Blum, a top CIA operative who had been a leading figure in the OSS, forerunner of the CIA, during World War Two. It concentrated on collecting onto its payroll Asian intellectuals, politicians, and student and labor leaders.

In 1957 the foundation entertained Ngo Dinh Diem, its future puppet in Saigon, at a conference in San Francisco; it poured tens of thousands of dollars into the China-watching Union Research International of Hong Kong; it played a key role in the propaganda war against China by intriguing with the Dalai Lama.

In 1958, President Sukarno threw the foundation out of Indonesia and Ne Win kicked it out of Burma in 1962. Its cover was belatedly blown by The New York Times on February 26, 1967, in an article headlined: “Asia Foundation got CIA funds.”

In 1968 the foundation staff were declared persona non grata in India and when the Sri Lanka coalition government came to office in 1970, one of the first decisions of the government was to oust the US Peace Corps and the Asia Foundation. Tampoe was sitting on the sidelines cheering the coalition’s “anti-imperialist” measures, but very silent about the fact that he had been on a junket only three years earlier paid for by the very same foundation.

Not only did Tampoe accept the free air ticket, the expenses and the dubious hospitality of Harvard University in Boston, he also took the opportunity to visit Washington to hold a private meeting with the then US Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, the US warlord in Vietnam. What they discussed as the bombs and napalm rained down on the workers and peasants of Vietnam has never been revealed.

In 1968, McNamara became president of the World Bank, the imperialist agency for the economic slavery of the colonial world. Reporting a visit he made to Sri Lanka in 1972, Hansen wrote, “Mr. Robert McNamara, president of the World Bank, appeared to be very well briefed on the Ceylon situation.” He had indeed—by, among others, one Bala Tampoe, Hansen’s man on the island.

In the spirit of complete impartiality, we reproduce excerpts from the revisionists’ Ceylon Commission so that the extent of Tampoe’s grave and dangerous exploits can be fully understood. The commission stated in its findings:

(a) A series of incidents which together constitute compromising close relations between Comrade Bala and the Ceylonese embassies or missions of the imperialist countries.

(1) A trip to the US in the summer of 1967, financed by the Asia Foundation.

(2) His acceptance of a small private luncheon invitation at the residence of the British High Commission, during the 1966 plantation workers’ strike—a luncheon that was also attended by Thondaman, a trade union leader who was playing an open strikebreaking role against the plantation workers.

(3) His attendance at a small dinner party at the West German embassy for visiting Chancellor Kiesinger.

(b) A letter sent to the Ceylonese Prime Minister on January 22, 1966 by Comrade Bala in his capacity as union general secretary, concerning the state of emergency in which he implied support for the imposition of a curfew in response to the “violence” that occurred in Colombo. (This letter is included in bulletin March 17, 1969.)

(c) Comrade Bala’s policy in regard to the struggle against devaluation of the rupee in November-December 1967. The CMU did not support the strike that took place at that time in the private sector. Serious questions are raised concerning why the LSSP(R) did not take the lead in fighting for united action by all the trade unions and working class parties against devaluation.

During the course of the Ceylon Commission, the Indian member of the commission submitted a minority report. It throws further light on Tampoe’s activities.

...The commission cannot but take a dim view of the manner in which Comrade Bala got himself invited to the USA ostensibly under a project sponsored by the Harvard University. Although Comrade Bala maintains that he had kept the Unified Secretariat and SWP informed about his trip, some of his activities in Washington, like his interview with McNamara have not been fully explained.

Also the unusually friendly relations he maintains with the diplomatic missions of West Germany (he was invited to a dinner by West German Chancellor Kiesinger) and UK (he and his wife were invited to a luncheon by the British High Commissioner in the midst of a strike of plantation workers)—all these do not befit a militant trade unionist and a revolutionary Marxist belonging to the Fourth International. More important, however, is the fact that the political position adopted by the LSSP(R) leadership on a number of questions during the last two or three years and the trade union tactics pursued by Comrade Bala as leader of the CMU also give scope for a great deal of misunderstanding.

The role of the LSSP(R) during some of the recent strikes in Ceylon like the government employees’ strike and workers’ strike action against devaluation measures of the UNP government, and its consistent refusal to have joint action with other working class parties has been such as to place the party in the camp of the enemy as opposed to workers in action. It has been alleged that during a recent strike some of the CMU units on specific instructions from the leadership resorted to strike-breaking activities—not a complimentary development for the Fourth International movement.

Further, the letter written by Comrade Bala to the Prime Minister of the UNP government during the anti-devaluation strike and the privileged treatment given to him to hold a public meeting when meetings by others were banned in Colombo—along with some other incident—have made Comrade Bala a suspect in the eyes of the militant working class movement in Ceylon.

There are several charges against the LSSP(R) which could not be verified on the basis of the documents placed before the commission. But there are enough grounds to feel that there is something rotten about the functioning of the Ceylon section as it stands.

Even in the politically degenerate circles of revisionism, there had been nothing like this before: CIA-financed trips; private discussions with McNamara, director of US imperialism’s war machine in Vietnam; wining and dining with Christian Democrat Chancellor Kiesinger, an ex-Nazi, and the British ambassador; strikebreaking; and supporting a government-imposed curfew against the working class.

In the International Committee of the Fourth International such actions are completely indefensible. They are grounds for immediate expulsion. But not in the so-called “Unified Secretariat.” Not only were Tampoe’s activities condoned and covered up for three years, but Tampoe himself was reelected unanimously to their International Executive Committee at the very meeting the Ceylon Commission was discussed. Only one restriction was made on him. It was recommended that “the double function of Comrade Bala as secretary of both the CMU and the section be terminated as rapidly as possible.” This has been completely ignored. Tampoe remains head of the CMU and general secretary of the “Revolutionary Marxist Party” with the full backing of his Pabloite accomplices.

It marks the continuation, on a more treacherous scale, of the corrupt and unprincipled relationship which the Pabloite revisionists had with the opportunist leadership of the Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP). By suppressing discussion on the policies of the LSSP leaders, in December 1963, Hansen and company prepared the way for N.M. Perera, Colvin de Silva and others to betray the working class and enter a capitalist coalition with Mrs. Bandaranaike’s Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) and the Stalinists in June 1964.

This is the hangman’s coalition which led to the slaughter of more than 10,000 youth during the 1971 JVP uprising and continues, on behalf of the international bankers and imperialism, to oppress and starve the urban and rural working class and the peasantry.

In the midst of their cover-up for the politically corrupt LSSP leaders, the SWP under the signature of Farrell Dobbs and with the approval of Joseph Hansen, sent a telegram to Mrs. Jackie Kennedy bereaving the death of J.F. Kennedy, an assassination which is currently under investigation to discern whether or not it was carried out by the CIA.

Picture, for a moment, a situation in which a leading member of the Workers Revolutionary Party went to Washington at the expense of the CIA to spend an afternoon with Defense Secretary James Schlesinger, former director of the CIA. Imagine that this same leading member had dinner with the French ambassador during the miners’ strike, consorted with West German demagogue Herr Strauss and led his union in strikebreaking.

No matter how “big” he was, he would be expelled. He would have betrayed the working class and gone over to the class enemy—actions which would automatically put him outside our movement.

In building the International Committee of the Fourth International on these basic Bolshevik traditions and principles, Hansen and the Pabloite revisionists label us as “paranoids.”

When Workers Press published an account of the Ceylon Commission on Tampoe on October 18, 19, 20 and 21, 1972, Hansen went into a paroxysm of rage. Intercontinental Press (October 29, 1972) carried a statement from the “Unified Secretariat” headed “Healyites Smear Bala Tampoe.” It was definitely a very strange “smear” since we had only reproduced documents and reports that had been drawn up by the revisionists themselves.

Their own commission referred to the incidents as “undisputed facts.” The facts which were found proven by their own Ceylon Commission became “slanders” and a “bucket of mud” when they are published in Workers Press.

As Workers Press said on December 7, 1972:

We say unequivocally that if a leading trade unionist, let alone one who claims to be a Trotskyist, accepts a trip to the United States financed by an organization known to be in receipt of CIA funds, then this man has associated with the CIA. Any novice in politics knows this. And every member of every section of the United Secretariat must know it as well. For Mandel and Hansen to deny it simply reveals the depth of corruption and political dishonesty to which they have sunk.

These “leaders” are reduced to pathetic, desperate lying to their own members.

The worst culprits of the affair were not Tampoe and his associates in Sri Lanka. Real responsibility for Tampoe’s activities and their subsequent cover-up rests with Hansen and Mandel of the “Unified Secretariat.” (Hansen himself is not permitted by reactionary US laws to be a member of the secretariat. Hansen, however, supported the secretariat.)

They covered up for a member of their International Executive Committee who, without a shadow of a doubt, associated with the CIA and committed other crimes against the oppressed workers and peasants of Ceylon.

They had cast-iron evidence to pull the rug from under Tampoe and denounce him to the Ceylonese working class as a political con-man. But when a dispute arose over which revisionist grouping would get the Unified Secretariat’s “franchise” on the island, they gave it to Tampoe. And he parades to this day as “the leading Ceylonese Trotskyist” in all their wretched publications.