The Sixth International Congress of the International Committee of the Fourth International (May 19-24, 1975) voted unanimously to continue the investigation into Security and the Fourth International. The material in this book is the interim result of that decision. We have brought to the attention of the working class hitherto unpublished material relating to the murder of Leon Trotsky, the founder of the Fourth International and the early leaders of the Trotskyist movement. We have shown how the Stalinist GPU conducted its murderous, counterrevolutionary work inside the Trotskyist movement and the protection that its agents received from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in the United States. Our investigations have shed new light on the role of Stalinism and imperialism in their ruthless campaign to penetrate, disrupt, and destroy the revolutionary movement.

In publishing these interim findings we have ended the secrecy and cover-up which had been consciously and deliberately created by Joseph Hansen and the other leaders of Pabloite revisionism in the Socialist Workers Party of the United States. Security and the Fourth International breaks the wall of silence that Hansen and company have insidiously built up surrounding the circumstances of the murder of Trotsky and subsequent security breaches. It brings to an end the political fraud and the cultivated myth by which they claimed to be the continuators of the struggle for Trotskyism after Trotsky’s death. Our investigation has proved that Hansen and senior SWP leaders have been responsible for the systematic cover-up of the circumstances surrounding the murder of Trotsky, his son Leon Sedov, the Zborowski affair, the Sobolevicus brothers (Jack Soble and Dr. Robert Soblen), the case of Floyd Cleveland Miller, the Stalinist agent Sylvia Franklin, who acted as the late James Cannon’s secretary, and other serious attacks that have been made on the movement. If commissions of inquiry into any of these incidents exist, we have not seen them. They have not been published. Now, will they condescend to publish them if they exist!

How is it possible to educate and train a revolutionary cadre in the working class without thorough commissions of inquiry and the publication of the results? But instead of revealing the full facts of these security experiences, in which the movement suffered terrible blows, Hansen, consciously and deliberately evades them. Not only that. He sets out to prevent anyone else from taking seriously the question of revolutionary security. He denounces them as being “paranoid.” The International Committee of the Fourth International gathered material for this book from testimony and archives publicly available in the United States. A check through the SWP’s Militant shows that Hansen penned one article on Stalinist agent Mark Zborowski—on April 9, 1956. And that drew heavily from The New Leader article written by David Dallin, the author-husband of Lola Estrine. Apart from that article, a deafening silence.

On March 31, 1975, Hansen charged the International Committee of the Fourth International with being “paranoid” on the question of security (See Intercontinental Press, “The Secret of Healy’s ‘Dialectics’,” March 31, 1975.) What sparked Hansen’s hysterical attack was the decision by the Central Committee of the Workers League of the United States to replace Tim Wohlforth as its national secretary on August 31, 1974. The Workers League has fraternal relations with the International Committee of the Fourth International, although it is forbidden by the reactionary Voorhis Act to be an affiliate. The central issue that touched off the Wohlforth affair was revolutionary security. It raised the responsibility of the leadership to selflessly guard the revolutionary party by training a cadre on the strictest security vigilance. Everything published in this book testifies to the necessity for these revolutionary standards of leadership and discipline. Had this been done, the tragedies might never have happened or, at least, they could have been held longer at bay.

Wohlforth completely rejected this Marxist approach. In doing so, he immediately acquired the political friendship of Hansen. Hansen agreed to publish Wohlforth’s slanderous and lying documents on the International Committee. He then wrote an article praising Wohlforth’s “sincerity.” When Hansen pronounced his political benediction on Wohlforth’s break with Trotskyism, it was with the full knowledge of the security questions involved. From August 18 to 22, 1975, Wohlforth and his political accomplice, Nancy Fields, attended the national convention of the Socialist Workers Party in Ohio as Hansen’s invited guests. They have not made a principled political statement to explain how their political merger has overcome the ten to fifteen years in which Wohlforth led the Workers League in implacable struggle against the political degeneracy of Pabloite revisionism. The issue of Pabloite revisionism did not come up in Wohlforth’s replacement as national secretary and his subsequent desertion. Security did. And this is the question on which he and Hansen find common ground.

After Hansen’s statement that the International Committee is “paranoid” about security, the Political Committee of the Workers Revolutionary Party published a seven-part series of articles in which we began our inquiries into Security and the Fourth International. (Workers Press, April 19, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, and 26, 1975.) In these articles the security issues surrounding Wohlforth’s replacement as national secretary and his desertion were fully documented and explained:

It concerns a certain Nancy Fields who had previous family connections with the CIA. She was on the Central Committee and Political Committee of the Workers League without these previous family connections being made known to other leading comrades. In May 1974 she attended an important international meeting in London without Wohlforth first obtaining a security clearance for her. Throughout that year she, with Wohlforth’s collusion, acted as a hatchet-woman in closing down Workers League branches, driving out members and expelling others, some of whom were of long standing in the movement. These actions caused grave disquiet. She had a brutal attitude towards members summed up by one comrade who said, “She treated us like dogs.”

On August 18, 1974, at a meeting in London, Wohlforth was asked point blank whether she had anything to do with the CIA. Wohlforth replied, “No.” Later that same month, Wohlfort was found to be telling lies. He now admitted he knew that she had previous family connections with the CIA, but said that these were “unimportant.” They may have been “unimportant” to Wohlforth, but not to the other members of the Workers League Central Committee. They voted to replace him. Wohlforth also voted for his own removal. So did Fields. The Workers League Central Committee then voted unanimously to set up an inquiry commission to look into the security questions that had been raised and to suspend Fields from membership pending its findings. Her previous family connections with the CIA were proved beyond doubt. The commission reported: “The inquiry established that from the age of 12 until the completion of her university education, Nancy Fields was brought up, educated and financially supported by her aunt and uncle, Albert and Gigs Morris. Albert Morris is head of the CIA’s IBM computer operation in Washington as well as being a large stockholder in IBM. He was a member of the OSS, a forerunner of the CIA, and worked in Poland as an agent of imperialism. During the 1960s a frequent house guest at their home in Maine was Richard Helms, ex-director of the CIA and now US ambassador in Iran.”

In refusing to report Fields’s previous family connections to the IC prior to the May 1974 meeting in London, in failing to tell his own comrades in the leadership of the Workers League, Wohlforth was placing his own personal relations with Fields above the security considerations of the revolutionary movement. In the revolutionary party this is not possible. Until the security issue is decided one way or the other, the benefit of the doubt rests with the Party and the revolutionary requirements of the working class. Wohlforth and Fields refused to take part in the inquiry commission that they had voted to set up. Indeed, his resignation came only five days after the arrangements were made for the commission to start its inquiries in New York. Both of them refused to give verbal or written testimony. When it reported, Wohlforth rejected the findings out of hand. He refused to return to his place in the Workers League and to take up his responsibilities as a leader in the movement. Fields, who had been cleared of having any links with the CIA, took the same reactionary position.

The May 1975 international conference of the International Committee of the Fourth International unanimously decided to reopen the commission of inquiry into Wohlforth and Fields. This follows their political evolution after they refused to participate in the inquiry and, simultaneously, walked out of the Workers League. Fields, strongly supported by Wohlforth, now claims that Hansen is the greatest revolutionary thinker since Trotsky! The transformation of “reds into rats” is not new, but the speed of these quick-changers has been phenomenal.

The actions taken by the Workers League Central Committee were in keeping with the revolutionary traditions of the Trotskyist movement. But not according to Wohlforth. He claimed the right to conceal from the movement the fact that his closest political collaborator had family connections with the CIA. Hansen agreed with him.

As these chapters have shown, political cover-up is nothing new to Hansen. The book positively brims with questions about the role of the leadership of the Socialist Workers Party. Much of the material that was used to compile our interim findings is publicly available in the United States, from government archives and the Library of Congress. But the SWP leaders have never paid any attention to these documents, nor published them for the political education of the Trotskyist movement and the working class. They have consciously and deliberately concealed them because to bring them into the open would be to reveal their own carelessness on security which in its own tragic way, in our opinion, contributed to Trotsky’s untimely death.

One document in particular raises questions about Hansen himself. It is a statement that he made to an FBI agent who was operating under diplomatic cover at the American Embassy in Mexico City. Hansen made a statement to him on August 31, 1940, eleven days after Trotsky had been killed by the GPU agent Ramon Mercader. Until now, nothing had been known of Hansen’s visit to the US Embassy. In all the florid and dramatic writings he published after Trotsky’s death, he did not mention it. But it must have been an important conversation since it took place on a Saturday when embassies are normally closed. At the embassy, Hansen met FBI man Robert G. McGregor who had been closely following events at the Trotsky household since the abortive shooting raid led by Stalinist painter, David Siqueiros. The American consul, George P. Shaw, sent a record of the conversation to the US State Department in Washington on September 1. Hansen’s statement to the embassy came to light when the International Committee of the Fourth International examined official government records which are now available for public inspection in Washington. The full text of McGregor’s conversation with Hansen reads:

Mr. Joseph Hansen, secretary to the late Mr. Trotsky came in on Saturday morning in order to discuss matters connected with the assassination of Mr. Trotsky. I told him of my desire to be in possession of as much information as possible regarding the relationship of the assassin and Miss Sylvia Ageloff with the United States. Hansen repeated his assertions that this crime was engineered from the United States. He pointed to the fact that Mornard (the assassin) had made a journey to the United States between the dates of the first attempt upon Trotsky’s life and the second successful one. He declared that undoubtedly the desk clerk at the Hotel Pierpont in Brooklyn could give some information and seemed to attach considerable importance to the packages that Sylvia states Mornard kept in the safe at the hotel. Hansen likewise believes that the Ageloff family could furnish some valuable information as to who Mornard saw while on his last trip to New York. It is Hansen’s opinion that Mornard himself will be unable to give much more authentic information concerning names of persons acting as his principals in this matter. For, while Hansen is convinced that the murder is a GPU job, that very fact makes it hard to unravel. Hansen stated that when in New York in 1938 he was himself approached by an agent of the GPU and asked to desert the Fourth International and join the Third. He referred the matter to Trotsky who asked him to go as far with the matter as possible. For three months Hansen had relations with a man who merely identified himself as “John,” and did not otherwise reveal his real identity.

I had hoped that Hansen might cast some suspicion on persons in the United States but most of his suspicions seemed to attach themselves to persons now in Mexico. In this connection he mentioned a Mr. Frank Jellinek who came to Mexico in November 1937 from France and was at that time writing a book on the French Commune. He represented himself as the correspondent for the Manchester Guardian and had close connections with Mr. Frank Kluckholm, former correspondent for the New York Times in Mexico. Hansen said that Jellinek’s actions led him to believe that he is a GPU agent in Mexico. Hansen declared that he shared the opinion expressed to me personally by the late Mr. Trotsky that Mr. Harry Block, an American citizen residing in the Federal District, is the direct agent here for Mr. Oumansky, Soviet Ambassador in Washington. Oumansky, Hansen said, is a police officer whom Trotsky knew personally when in authority in Russia and that Trotsky always felt comprehensive of Oumansky’s presence in Washington. I asked Hansen what his impression was of President Cardenas’ recent statements condemning the communists. He said that he was afraid this was the “swan song” of the investigation of the assassination of Trotsky. He seems to have little faith in the sincerity of the endeavors of the police to unravel the crime.

Robert G. McGregor
American Consul

The tone of the opening sentence of US Consul McGregor’s report hints at a familiar relationship with Hansen. Perhaps this is why they made a Saturday morning rendezvous. It raises the question whether Hansen had met McGregor before. How many times? What had they discussed? There are other questions as well. Why did Hansen go there in the first place? Did he seriously think that the US State Department could help find the GPU plotters who carried out Trotsky’s murder? In his conversation with McGregor, Hansen tells the State Department things that he has never told the Trotskyist movement. He says, for example, that he was seeing a GPU agent for a period of three months in 1938 under Trotsky’s instructions. This runs completely contrary to Trotsky’s practice. The last years of his life were devoted tirelessly to the public exposure of Stalinism and its counterrevolutionary crimes against the working class. Often against the advice of his own followers, he used the capitalist press to make public exposures of the Stalinist regime. This was the purpose of the Dewey Commission in 1937, to answer publicly the frame-up charges of the infamous Moscow Trials.

Is it seriously suggested that Trotsky, the leader of the Red Army, would ask a relatively inexperienced newcomer from Salt Lake City to infiltrate the most skilled terror machine of the GPU? What could have been the purpose of this infiltration? There are no published records to show that Trotsky evinced an interest in infiltrating the GPU. On the contrary, his whole struggle was to publicly unmask Stalin’s terror network as he successfully did in the Dewey Commission. If Hansen was carrying out unspecified work on behalf of the movement with the GPU agent, surely it would have been brought to light later as further evidence of the devious and sinister attempts at GPU penetration. This could have been publicly stated at any time after 1938 since presumably Hansen was no longer doing this work when he arrived in Mexico. It was not Trotsky’s practice to keep the schemings of the GPU a secret. It was to lay them bare before the Fourth International and the working class. There is no public record of his instructions to Hansen on the GPU agent “John.” (Who is he?) Nor did Trotsky mention it to US Consul McGregor, the FBI man, when he visited Coyoacan on May 24, 1940, hours after the Siqueiros raid and the disappearance of Sheldon Harte.

Trotsky never mentioned it because he never gave such instructions to Hansen. All the indications are that Hansen is lying. If it is true, why tell it to the agents of US imperialism, yet hide it from the Trotskyist movement? The existence of this State Department document and its startling contents alone demand an immediate public statement from Hansen.

But there is more. Hansen makes another puzzling statement to the man from the embassy. He says that he believed that the Stalinist murder plot originated in the United States. But all the evidence demonstrates that the center was in Paris. This was easily seen by even the most amateur observer. It is surprising that is wasn’t deduced by Hansen, who was the head of security in Mexico. Our research has shown conclusively that it was a Paris GPU network which was responsible for organizing the series of murders in France, Switzerland, and Spain which culminated in Trotsky’s assassination. The Stalinist infiltrator in the Fourth International, Mark Zborowski, operated in the Paris office; he provided the inside information on Trotsky’s household in Mexico which aided the assassin’s path to Trotsky’s study on that fateful day; he helped set up the introduction in Paris between the assassin and Sylvia Ageloff.

The American Stalinists played a role, but it was secondary to that of the Paris GPU network. Their job was to plant GPU agent Ruby Weil with Sylvia Ageloff when she sailed from New York to Europe. She facilitated the “chance encounter” between Miss Ageloff and the assassin in Paris. Everyone at Coyoacan knew that Miss Ageloff met Mercader, alias Jacques Mornard, in Paris and it was to Paris that most of them naturally turned their attention. But not Hansen. The chief of Trotsky’s security told McGregor that the operation was conducted from the United States. If Hansen’s wrong advice was followed, it must have pleased Zborowski and every GPU agent. Because in a year’s time, Zborowski was to travel to New York to resume his counterrevolutionary activities in the Fourth International and the Socialist Workers Party.