In February 1975, the Sunday Observer, a weekly bourgeois newspaper in Melbourne, Australia, began serialization of the memoirs of a state spy.

It sparked alarm in the Pabloite revisionist circles since the police agent, one Max Wechsler, had been a member of the executive of their Australian organization, the Socialist Workers League.

Throughout his term on the executive, he had also been the minutes secretary.

In the newspaper articles, Wechsler gave a complete account of his spying mission on behalf of the Australian Security Intelligence Organization (ASIO), the equivalent of the British MI5 or the FBI.

His first job for the ASIO was to penetrate the Communist Party apparatus in the State of Victoria, where the Stalnists occupy leading bureaucratic positions in the trade union movement. He earned a reputation as the “best seller” of Tribune, the Stalinists’ weekly newspaper, and was given a job in the party’s offices.

He then moved to the Pabloite revisionists’ Socialist Workers League, where he became something of a “glamor” figure. Once again, he proved himself as a top paper seller and was rewarded with a position on the group’s executive.

As minutes secretary he was responsible for minuting all the executive meetings and preparing the agendas. Wechsler’s paymasters in the ASIO were delighted with his progress. He graduated from receiving $12 per month—mere pocket money—to $100 per week plus a sickness benefit paid into a bank account held in his name by his ASIO contact man.

Every Sunday night after the SWL meeting, Wechsler would telephone his contact with a complete report on proceedings. He gave details of demonstrations, dates, times and places as well as background information on those involved. The Sunday Observer said that Wechsler’s activities included “eavesdropping, stealing documents, committing sabotage, manipulating finances and obtaining sets of duplicate keys to allow ASIO agents to do a Watergate-type break-in at the SWL headquarters in Melbourne and Adelaide.”

From information supplied by Wechsler, ASIO agents filmed demonstrations from pre-arranged vantage points. They made peepholes in adjoining buildings to spy and film SWL meetings and Wechsler would then assist the ASIO to identify those who were present from mug shots.

The Observer said:

ASIO agents using mini-cameras, movie cameras and cameras with telephoto lenses mingled with demonstrators, and set up spy-holes in buildings to film the organization’s activities. Wechsler was regularly in demand to attend meetings in cars around various city parks with ASIO chiefs anxious to identify mug shots of people they photographed.

The biggest single operation he conducted for the secret police was telephone tapping. The newspaper reported: “Wechsler helped ASIO organize a major phone tapping operation of the SWL. It had the approval of the then Attorney General, Senator Murphy.”

The fact that Murphy was behind the SWL surveillance is fraught with ironies. Senator Lionel Murphy, QC, now a High Court judge in New South Wales, was a leading “left” in the Labor government headed by Gough Whitlam. He won his phony reputation as a defender of “civil rights.”

When he personally led a bizarre raid on the ASIO’s Melbourne headquarters to get hold of secret intelligence files, the revisionists joined the Stalinists in boosting him as the “left” champion of “people’s rights.”

It now emerges that while the revisionists were mesmerized by Murphy’s headline-grabbing gestures, he was in fact deeply involved in authorizing the police penetration of their group. Murphy received all of Wechsler’s reports on his desk and actually initiated some of the agent’s activities. For example, it was Murphy’s office which specifically asked Wechsler a series of questions about the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) activities in Australia, how many groups spoke to the SWL, how long they spoke on the telephone, etc.

Neither the Wechsler affair nor the complicity of the Australian Labor government came as any surprise to the Socialist Labour League, the Australian section of the International Committee of the Fourth International. The SLL and its weekly newspaper, Workers News, have played the leading role in the labor and trade union movement highlighting the threat to basic democratic rights from the police and its spy agencies.

How did Joseph Hansen, head of the Pabloite revisionist Socialist Workers Party, react to the appalling spy penetration of his foundling group in Australia? (By reactionary US laws, the SWP in the United States is prevented from affiliation with overseas organizations with which it is in political sympathy.)

On March 28, 1975, Hansen’s weekly newspaper, The Militant, published a full-page on the Wechsler affair. Wechsler himself is referred to as “a former member of the SWL.” All mention of the fact that he was on the SWL executive is censored. So is the fact that he was the group’s minutes secretary.

To readers of The Militant, he was presented as a rank and file member of little or no importance who had caused a “witch-hunt” in the capitalist press against the SWL. (The headline of The Militant article reads: “Gutter press witch-hunts Australian Trotskyists.”)

The whole incident is treated as little more than a joke. The article starts:

Is Trotskyism spreading at such a rapid pace throughout the world as to now threaten to take over Australia? The answer is an encouraging yes, if the Australian Security Intelligence Organization (ASIO), the country’s secret political police is to be believed.

Thus, Hansen and his accomplices conceal from the SWP membership in the US the true facts about the spy penetration of the SWL, thereby completely undermining the training of their organization in the US (and Australia too) on questions of security.

This same method of deliberate political concealment is evident in the Intercontinental Press, April 7, 1975, when Hansen reproduces a statement on Lord Justice Scarman’s tribunal into the Red Lion Square demonstration by the so-called International Marxist Group in Britain.

The “IMG” political committee, in the name of Mr. R. Pennington, national secretary, placed the statement in Red Weekly on March 13 after the editorial board of Workers Press, daily newspaper of the Workers Revolutionary Party, wrote to ask a series of questions about the IMG’s role in the Scarman tribunal.

Above all, Workers Press demanded to know the name of the unidentified IMG witness who gave secret testimony to Lord Justice Scarman. This evidence enabled Scarman and the police to show gaping contradictions in the verbal evidence given by IMG witnesses and to discredit them. It also gave Scarman the ammunition he needed to find that the IMG had discussed a preconceived plan to mount a confrontation with the police in Red Lion Square during an anti-fascist rally.

The IMG participated in the tribunal to defend its members and make sure that the police were blamed for the violence which occurred resulting in the death of a 21-year-old Warwick university student, Kevin Gately. Instead, because of the secret witness’s testimony, the IMG was landed in the middle of a judicial frame-up in which they were made “morally responsible” for Gately’s killing, while the judge legalized the police violence used on that day.

In printing the IMG statement in The Militant, Hansen is consciously legalizing the actions of the Pennington leadership in covering up the identity of the unnamed witness. The conspiracy to keep the member’s name a secret is endorsed by Hansen.

Pennington’s argument for maintaining the member’s anonymity is a complete fraud. He says: “He had just taken a job in a factory which was unorganized, and he was involved in trying to organize the labor force. Obviously had he been called, and his name blazoned across the press, it would have been very easy for the employers to fire him.”

He added that he had “no guarantee” that Scarman and the Metropolitan Police, who have access to the member’s name and address, “would not notify his employers.”

In other words, Pennington is saying that the IMG can entrust the member’s identity to the ruling-class representatives in the judiciary and the police, but not to the labor and trade union movement.

No other witness to the Scarman tribunal, with the exception of the Special Branch, gave private evidence. In spite of the renewed demands of Workers Press for the IMG to come clean and name the unnamed witness and publish his secret testimony, Hansen has legitimized the cover-up, with the same unabated frenzy that has characterized his cover-up of Bala Tampoe, of the Pabloite revisionist “Revolutionary Marxist Party,” and his adoption of the renegade Tim Wohlforth.

The consistency of Hansen’s campaign of slander of the International Committee and concealment of the crimes of his Pabloite revisionist associates establishes a pattern. When a question of security is raised, Hansen responds with unerring speed and hysteria to try and bottle it up.

In the case of Pennington of the IMG, this is the continuation of a political association which began when Pennington definitively broke from Trotskyism and put himself at the service of those revisionist forces dedicated to “smashing” the International Committee.

On May 24, 1960, Pennington walked out of the Socialist Labour League, forerunner of the Workers Revolutionary Party, to begin an association with the anarchist “Solidarity” group.

He declared that he had “broken completely from Trotskyism” and that his intention was to “smash” the Socialist Labour League by touring universities to spread slander about its leaders.

In June 1960, Martin Grainger, Pennington’s fellow deserter, wrote to the SLL to confirm Pennington’s political position: “Pennington, it is true, said he rejected Trotskyism. He stated that the classical argument that Russia was a workers’ state was based on a quite fallacious and un-Marxist economic theory.” Grainger added: “Penningtons’ second criticism was that Kassim, Nasser, Castro, Nkrumah were living refutations of part, at least, of the Theory of Permanent Revolution.”

And there was more: “We (Pennington and Grainger) said we thought Trotsky helped to cut his own throat. Being a prisoner of certain organizational conceptions he was forced to substitute maneuvers inside the Russian Communist Party for a real struggle against Stalinism. By his actions at Kronstadt and against the the Workers’ Opposition, he cut himself off from the most advanced sections of the working class and lost what would have been his essential support for his later struggle against the bureaucracy.”

This is the most disreputable, anticommunist, anti-Marxist attack on the struggle for Marxism, for which Trotsky and countless others gave their lives.

Grainger and Pennington then elaborated their reactionary views in a document dated June 10, 1960, which centered on “the ideological bankruptcy of Trotskyism.”

The newly-fledged anarchists said that “official Trotskyism” was “a left cover for Labor and Stalinist bureaucracies” and Grainger became the umpteenth author of the slander that Comrade Gerry Healy, national secretary of the SLL, now general secretary of the Workers Revolutionary Party, was a Stalin.

In his separate letter dated June 10, 1960, Grainger wrote: “I dissociated myself from Comrade Pennington’s statement that he had no loyalty to the League and thought that it had to be destroyed.”

In this final statement lies the key to Hansen’s complete support for the man Pennington.

In left-wing circles in Britain, Pennington is notorious for having no political scruples whatsoever. He has never been called to account for his lying attacks on Trotsky and Trotskyism. What commends him to the Hansen fraternity is his obsessive hatred of the Workers Revolutionary Party and the International Committee of the Fourth International.

The Scarman tribunal cover-ups not the first time that Hansen has rushed to conceal the activities of Pennington. There was similar frenzy during the Lawless affair.

In August, 1973 Gery Lawless, “a leading member” of the IMG, issued a press statement to Fleet Street and gave a series of interviews to the capitalist press and radio in which he alleged that the Provisional IRA was responsible for an outbreak of firebombings in London. (“The Man Who Tipped Off the Yard,” Daily Mail, August 23, 1973).

Lawless’s unsubstantiated claim—Provisional Sinn Fein in Dublin described his statement as “a hoax”—led to police attacks on the basic democratic rights of Irish people living in Britain as well as a ferocious witch-hunt against the IMG itself.

Following demands from Workers Press about the origins of Lawless’s statement, an IMG Control Commission was established to investigate his activities, which included a voluntary statement to Detective Chief Superintendent Roy Habershon, now head of the notorious Scotland Yard Bomb Squad.

Throughout the inquiry Pennington (unconstitutionally) sat in on the Control Commission. He intervened when Lawless was giving evidence to indicate which questions Lawless should answer and which ones he shouldn’t. He claimed that Lawless had the right to the “Fifth Amendment” to answer which questions he pleased.

Under these circumstances, the Control Commission dissolved into a factional squabble. “Factional Hooliganism,” the charge that Hansen lyingly raises against the WRP, was evident when the Control Commission reported to the Central Committee. Recorded in the IMG minutes is the monstrous attempt by one group of Lawless supporters to physically remove copies of the Control Commission report from one of the control commissioners.

Just as he covered up for Lawless, today Pennington covers up for the anonymous witness whose name is being deliberately withheld from the working class at a time when basic democratic rights are under constant attack from the ruling class.

While the Workers Revolutionary Party will not shirk its responsibility in raising the Scarman and Lawless questions with Pennington and the IMG, there are broader political issues at stake, international questions for which Hansen himself has to be called to account.