We charge Joseph Hansen, one of Trotsky’s ex-secretaries, and the Socialist Workers Party to which he belongs, with criminal negligence in relation to the security implications of the death of Trotsky and the tasks of revolutionary security in relation to the defense of the Fourth International. They have covered up the circumstances surrounding the assassination of Trotsky; they have remained silent about the Stalinist agents who penetrated their own ranks. This has not been an oversight. It is conscious and deliberate policy.

Hansen is very familiar with the material that the International Committee has published in this book, Security and the Fourth International. But he has so far chosen to remain silent. Whose purpose does this serve? Not the Trotskyist movement. Not the cadres of the future, who have to be trained. Silence is tantamount to cover-up, which in essence amounts to capitulation to Stalinism. Hansen does not permit the movement to be schooled in the life-and-death struggle to build the Fourth International in the face of the murderous assaults of the Stalinist terror machine.

This was never Trotsky’s practice. The last years of his life were devoted to the founding of the Fourth International as the implacable enemy of Stalinism and the only revolutionary force which could lead the working class to power in every capitalist country. In the Dewey Commission and his last great writings, Trotsky set unshakeable principles in relation to the fight against Stalinism. Those principles have been betrayed by Hansen and the SWP.

The silence and cover-up dates from Trotsky’s murder on August 20, 1940. Until the International Committee discovered the existence of a statement he gave to the FBI agent at the US Embassy in Mexico on August 31, the movement knew nothing of it. Why? Is it possible that Hansen “forgot” about this meeting? We don’t believe so. On the contrary, Hansen evinces a remarkable memory and eye for detail. His article “With Trotsky to the End” shows this. He recalls the arrival of the assassin Jacques Mornard, alias Frank Jacson, at Coyoacan on August 20: “Jacson wore a raincoat across his arm. It was the rainy season, and although the sun was shining, heavy clouds massed over the mountains to the south-west threatened a downpour.”

Here is a mind of considerable agility. In a flash, he takes in the fact that Jacson has a raincoat but is not wearing it; that it is the rainy season, though it’s not raining; but, look, clouds are building up in the south-west for a downpour. By this account, Hansen is a regular Sherlock Holmes. But slip-ups do occur. And they have been drawn to our attention by Harold Robins, chief of the guards at Coyoacan. On August 24, 1975, he wrote saying:

Comrade Editor:
A correction is in order regarding a mixing together of two parts from two quotations which were combined in a quote from a talk by me. Your article on the matter was correct in attaching Joe Hansen for his inercusabale policy and practice re the security of L.D. Trotsky. The Political Committee had assigned supervision of Trotsky’s guard (in Mexico) to Hansen for a number of years.

When I arrived in Mexico in October 1939, as a member of the guard I found that none of the members of the guard had even fired their weapons in more than a year’s time. For my part, I had never fired a gun in my life. After a few months the members of the guard tested their ability in this matter and began intensive training, and within a few months became quite expert marksmen. Until then Hansen’s supervision permitted an absolutely inexcusable violation of elementary security for L.D. Trotsky—in this and in other so-called “security” arrangements by the guard.

In your mixing together of parts of two separate—but related—statements by me you quoted one statement I had made observing that Hansen proved to be a crack shot on the pistol range of the Mexican police—scoring a 92 at 30 meters—and this high score we were told was achieved without recent practice, a most amazing phenomenon, if true. The other part of the quotation you used in this mix-up of quotes is related to Hansen’s account of the events immediately following the mortal wounding of Comrade Trotsky by the Stalinist assassin. According to Joe’s account he and I both arrived at the doorway of Trotsky’s office at the same time. Hansen wrote that while he went to help L.D., Robins went into the office to take care of the assassin. Since the assassin held a 45-caliber “Star” pistol in his hand at that time, I posed the question when recounting the events of August 20, 1940, that Hansen did not reach the door with me because he would then have gone into the office to subdue and disarm the assassin. That action fell to me since I was first on the scene.

Fraternally,
Harold Robins.

Robins’s letter alone calls for a fresh inquiry into the circumstances surrounding Trotsky’s death. Taken together with Hansen’s visit to the US Embassy, it immediately demands a statement from him. In Robins’s letter the glaring contradictions of Hansen’s record emerge: precision-like accuracy on the state of the cloud formations to the south-west of Coyoacan, but deliberate omissions and evasions on the visit to the US Embassy and the immediate events following Trotsky’s assassination.

He continues this sordid practice until this day. Take Hansen’s edition of Documents of the Fourth International (Pathfinder Press), covering the struggle from 1933 to 1940 to found the Fourth International. Stalinist agent Mark Zborowski is mentioned twice in the main text. His name is marked with an asterisk which refers to a footnote published on page 431. It reads:

Etienne was the pseudonym of Mark 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.

Zborowski was not tried for perjury in 1955, it was in 1958. He appealed against the five-year sentence and was retried in 1962. He was sentenced to three years and 11 months but only served a small part of his term. But these inaccuracies are secondary to the deliberate distortions and conscious playing down of Zborowski’s role. Why doesn’t the footnote reveal that he travelled to the United States in 1941 to resume spying in the Fourth International and the Socialist Workers Party? We have shown that SWP meetings were held in Zborowski’s New York apartment and that he formed a wartime relationship with Jean van Heijenoort, then the correspondence secretary of the Fourth International, in charge of communications with all the overseas sections of the Trotskyist movement. How many Trotskyists were fingered to the GPU by Zborowski during the war? Has any security commission ever investigated how Zborowski walked so easily into the US organization and the Fourth International, although NKVD defector General Alexander Orlov had positively identified him as Stalin’s top spy in the Trotskyist movement in Paris?

The Sobolevicius brothers, Jack Soble and Dr. Robert Soblen, are treated to the same cursory attention in another buried footnote in Hansen’s Pathfinder publications. Yet the Soble spy ring was broken in 1956 at the same time as Khrushchev’s 20th Congress speech which first lifted the lid on Stalin’s crimes, particularly the Moscow Trials and the execution of the Bolshevik leaders. This was the most powerful verification of Trotsky’s lifelong struggle and the founding of the Fourth International. This was the hour to strike the most potent blows against Stalinism. Trotsky had unmasked Soble and his brother, Robert, when they acted as GPU agents provocateurs in the German section of the Left Opposition in the early 1930s; at that time their party names were Senin and Roman Well, respectively. Now Jack Soble had surfaced in the US confessing that he had continued his murderous work for Stalinism. But the most favorable conditions for demonstrating Trotsky’s correctness and the need for security vigilance were deliberately allowed to pass by.

Nothing was revealed by Hansen about the infiltration of GPU agent Sylvia Franklin into the New York headquarters of the SWP as James Cannon’s secretary; nothing was disclosed about Floyd Cleveland Miller, party name Michael Cort, who wrote for SWP publications as a military correspondent, and who betrayed to the GPU the names of Trotskyist seamen travelling to the Soviet ports of Murmansk and Archangel. How many seamen died on the high seas or disappeared in the Russian ports because Miller had tipped off the GPU in advance of their arrival? The late Max Schachtman raised questions about Sylvia Franklin before ex-Stalinist Louis Budenz made public her GPU role in Cannon’s office. But although he pressed the leadership to conduct a security commission, his request was pushed aside. Cannon went on with a GPU bug on his phone and a Stalinist agent as his secretarial aide. Was this because Hansen was applying his anti-Trotskyist theory that it is better to have a spy in the organization than to take notice of “personal suspicions”?

An examination of the SWP’s weekly newspaper Militant shows Hansen was silent on all these incidents. On April 6, 1956, he wrote an article about Zborowski, but that was a plagiarized version of David Dallin’s New Leader story. Apart from this, silence. Zborowski’s trial, the Soble trial, the Zborowski retrial all went unmentioned in the pages of the Socialist Workers Party press. So did the Senate subcommittee hearings which were taking place simultaneously in Washington. Silence is not a neutral or passive reaction. It is to consciously cover up. That is what we accuse Hansen of. It has been revealed also in relation to dangerous security questions which have since arisen in the Pabloite revisionist groups. We drew attention to them in our first series of Security and the Fourth International articles published in Workers Press on April 19, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, and 26, 1975.

Bala Tampoe, leader of the Pabloite revisionist group in Sri Lanka, made a visit to the United States in the summer of 1967 sponsored by the CIA-backed Asia Foundation. We said in our first articles:

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 was indeed—by, among others, one Bala Tampoe, Hansen’s man on the island.

Gery Lawless, a leading member of the International Marxist Group, went to Scotland Yard on August 19, 1973, to make a statement to Detective Chief Superintendent (now Commander) Roy Habershon about the outbreak of firebombings in London. He gave a statement implicating the Provisional IRA although no evidence existed that the IRA was involved. His statement to the police has never been published. On August 23, 1973, the reactionary Daily Mail published a center-page interview with Lawless’s photograph under the headline: “The Man Who Tipped Off the Yard.” Under pressure from the Workers Revolutionary Party, the IMG set up a security commission. But it was turned into a fraud when Robert Pennington insisted on sitting in at every hearing and defending Lawless whenever embarrassing questions were raised. We wrote in the original series of articles on Security and the Fourth International: “He (Pennington) claimed that Lawless had the right to the ‘Fifth Amendment’ to answer which questions he pleased.” When the United Secretariat was asked to intervene to put an end to this political travesty, Hansen joined Ernest Mandel in refusing an inquiry and covering up for Pennington and Lawless. Hansen doesn’t object to Lawless giving statements to the head of the Bomb Squad, since he himself talked to the FBI representative at the US Embassy in Mexico.

Max Wechsler gave a series of interviews to the Sunday Observer in Melbourne, Australia, in February this year, revealing that while he was a member of the Pabloite revisionist Socialist Workers League he was working for ASIO, the Australian Security Intelligence Organization. He gave details of how he bugged party meetings, broke into party premises and stole documents, assisted the secret police to name members from “mug shots,” and continuously tipped off the police about the League’s membership and activities. When Hansen’s Militant publicized Wechsler’s espionage activities it deliberately left out the most important feature of his spy career—at the time, he was the SWL’s minutes secretary and a member of the group’s executive!

Just as Hansen “leaves out” the fact that Zborowski reentered the Trotskyist movement when he arrived in New York in 1941; that Cannon’s secretary was a GPU agent; that Floyd Miller worked for the GPU as well—so the Wechsler affair is deliberately misrepresented. No mistakes here—this is the continuation of a reactionary and conscious practice which violates every tradition of Trotskyism. This is not only political cowardice; it shows enormous contempt for the SWP membership as well. Silence on the question of GPU penetration and counterrevolution in and around the Trotskyist movement leads to only one conclusion—that someone or other in the SWP is consciously preventing the facts from emerging.

This can only mean that the SWP has Stalinist agents still in its leadership. We are open to be proved wrong in an investigation, which we call for. Hansen and the SWP leadership must provide answers to: the circumstances surrounding Trotsky’s death; the cases of Stalinist agents Sylvia Franklin and Floyd Miller; Mark Zborowski’s entry into the United States and into the circles of the Fourth International and the SWP.

If Hansen doesn’t provide the answers he can be assured that the International Committee of the Fourth International will not rest until it is found. The epoch of the socialist revolution is driving forward with relentless speed. The brightest prospects are raised but so, invariably, are their opposite—the counterrevolutionary conspiracies of imperialism and Stalinism. The International Committee is determined to educate a revolutionary cadre in the working class which is conscious of its historic responsibilities. This means drawing lessons from the past of the revolutionary movement and the terrible price that was paid at the hands of the Stalinists. A revolutionary party that cannot fight police penetration inside its ranks, certainly cannot fight them outside.