Former Socialist Workers Party leader Edward Heisler took the stand in the SWP’s $40 million lawsuit against the FBI on June 17.

Heisler voluntarily exposed himself as an FBI agent in a letter sent to the Socialist Workers Party’s headquarters in June 1980. At that time he had been a member of the SWP for 20 years, rising to become one of its most prominent public spokesmen and a member of the National Committee.

In a report to the SWP’s New York City membership shortly after Heisler’s self-exposure, Political Committee member Larry Seigle claimed that the Heisler confession would play a major role in the trial of the SWP’s lawsuit against the FBI, and in particular would be used to show that the government was withholding evidence.

Seigle said the government:

“withheld information on Heisler, illegally suppressing vital material, conspiring to prevent us and Judge Griesa from having access to crucially important documents about the crimes the FBI has committed. We are absolutely convinced that there is similarly explosive material contained in other documents that they have been refusing to turn over. We intend to press as hard as we can, and to mobilize all the pressure we can, to get this information produced quickly, and without further delay. This is essential so that we can proceed as rapidly as possible to the trial.”

(Party Organizer, July 1980, p.10)

Seigle added, “The plans we are developing for the trial are quite exciting.”

But when the trial came around, 10 months later, Heisler was not even on the list of witnesses called by the SWP, which numbered 70. Witnesses were called to describe such instances of FBI harassment as visiting the landlords of SWP members, informing their employers and sending anonymous letters. But the penetration of a 20-year veteran informant into the highest leadership bodies of the SWP went unmentioned.

SWP members were told that Heisler could not be forced to testify because he lived outside a 100-mile radius of New York City. They were not told he had privately agreed in a letter to SWP National Secretary Jack Barnes and SWP attorney Margaret Winter to cooperate with the lawsuit.

But then Heisler was called to the stand anyway by the government attorneys. He showed no reluctance to testify and in fact gave new information about his role in the SWP leadership. He said that he had been elected to the Political Committee in August 1977 and served on the Administrative Secretariat, a key sub-committee of the Political Committee unknown to most members of the SWP.

Heisler testified, “The Administrative Secretariat prepared the agendas for Political Committee meetings, frequently would prepare reports for presentation to members of the Political Committee, would discuss possible assignments or reassignments of personnel in various departments or branches of the SWP.”

This devastating admission was ignored by SWP attorney Margaret Winter in her cross-examination and was deliberately suppressed in the account of Heisler’s testimony in The Militant.

The failure to call Heisler as a witness and then the refusal to seriously cross-examine him once he appeared on the stand provide further confirmation of the findings of the investigation of the International Committee of the Fourth International into Security and the Fourth International. This investigation has uncovered indisputable evidence that the SWP is controlled by a network of FBI agents in the leadership, centered on the 12 graduates of the elite Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota.

The Carleton SWP-FBI agents include Jack Barnes, national secretary of the SWP, Mary-Alice Waters, editor of Intercontinental Press, Cindy Jaquith, editor of The Militant, Larry Seigle, PC member in charge of the FBI suit, and other top leaders.

But there may be another and even more sinister reason—which demands the most serious investigation—why Heisler was not called to testify and was not seriously cross-examined.

It is now possible to trace the role of the FBI, through the confessed agent Edward Heisler, in the actions of the SWP during the period when Tom Henehan’s murder was prepared, executed, and then covered up by the revisionists, Stalinists, the capitalist press, and the New York City Police Department.

In 1977, Heisler was the SWP’s most prominent public spokesman. He had served as the trade union chairman of the 1976 presidential election campaign, and was one of three SWP leaders, the other two being the candidates Peter Camejo and Willie Mae Reid, to tour the country publicizing their campaign.

From the fall of 1976, Heisler is referred to in the pages of The Militant as the party’s national trade union chairperson. On December 10, 1976, he was the subject of a full-page interview in The Militant, written by Doug Jenness (Carleton ’64).

He wrote major statements for The Militant on the United Steelworkers election challenge of opposition leader Ed Sadlowski, on a United Parcel Service strike, on the coal miners’ union election and on the railway workers.

His pamphlet, “A Struggle for Union Democracy,” was published in February 1977.

His contribution at the SWP’s National Committee meeting in February was prominently featured in The Militant, and he later topped the list of 11 SWP leaders sent on speaking tours coast-to-coast on “Prospects of Socialism in America.”

In the summer he headed a five-man subscription team sent to West Virginia to circulate the revisionist newspaper among the coal miners.

This culminated at the SWP’s National Convention in Oberlin, Ohio where Heisler was elected to the Political Committee, the party’s highest body.

The SWP convention took place under conditions of unprecedented crisis. In May of 1977, the International Committee of the Fourth International succeeded in locating and interviewing Sylvia Franklin, the Stalinist GPU agent who infiltrated the SWP and served as the personal secretary for party leader James P. Cannon from 1938 to 1947. The interview and the testimony of other witnesses demolished the coverup by SWP leader Joseph Hansen, who declared Franklin to be “an exemplary comrade.”

Hansen replied in an article in which he warned that the International Committee faced “deadly consequences” because of its campaign on Security and the Fourth International. A series of articles appeared in The Militant fabricating incidents of violence against SWP members by the Workers League.

On July 29, 1977 the International Committee published indisputable evidence that Hansen had passed over from service to the GPU in the assassination of Leon Trotsky to recruitment to the FBI as their most important agent inside the Trotskyist movement.

Included in the evidence was a letter from Hansen on October 23, 1940, to George P. Shaw, the American Consul in Mexico City, “respectfully” thanking him for setting up a confidential contact with the agent-in-charge of the FBI’s New York City office, B.E. Sackett.

The noose was tightening around the FBI-controlled SWP leadership, since the exposure of Hansen as an FBI man would cast suspicion on the network of agents he recruited and trained and advanced into their top positions.

In behind-the-scenes meetings at Oberlin, in August 1977, the FBI agents made their decisions. One of them involved a major change in the assignment for agent Edward Heisler.

As soon as the Oberlin convention adjourned, SWP members began to move from all over the United States into jobs at the Brooklyn Navy Yard in New York City.

This was the workplace for which Tom Henehan held political responsibility, and where he was well-known to the workers for selling the Bulletin there for the previous three years, visiting them in their homes, fighting to recruit them to the party, issuing leaflets over questions that arose in their union, and bringing to them all the campaigns of the party. As campaign manager for the Workers League’s election campaign in the local congressional district, Tom had organized a highly successful rally at the Navy Yard in the fall of 1976.

SWP members quickly found numerous jobs at the Navy Yard, despite the fact that the yard was in continual financial crisis with frequent layoffs. This has been the case throughout the FBI-SWP’s “turn to industry,” as SWP members have found an open door in key plants throughout the country, regardless of economic conditions, layoffs, or waiting lists of other applicants for jobs.

One SWP member moved all the way from Tacoma, Washington to become a leader of the new SWP faction in the Navy Yard.

The man in charge of this operation was Heisler, both in his capacity as national trade union chairman, where he led all SWP work in the unions, and his powerful new position on the Administrative Secretariat of the Political Committee.

As he testified June 18, the Administrative Secretariat “would discuss possible assignments or reassignments of personnel in various departments or branches of the SWP.”

This would have included this massive transfer of SWP members into the Brooklyn Navy Yard. One of those moved into the Navy Yard was Paul Eidsvik, a class of ’64 member of the Carleton Twelve.

The SWP had never previously evinced any interest in the Brooklyn Navy Yard or conducted any regular campaign among the workers there. In view of the massive FBI infiltration of the SWP and the particular role of Heisler in its leadership, the following question must be answered: Was the purpose of the SWP’s penetration of the Navy Yard to gather information on the political work of the Workers League, follow the movements of Tom Henehan, and to prepare his assassination? Tom Henehan was murdered only six weeks after the SWP began infiltrating the major area of his political work at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. At a dance organized by the Young Socialists as a benefit for the case of Gary Tyler, which was advertised at the Navy Yard through leaflets passed out to workers there, Tom was shot five times at point blank range. A second leading member of the Workers League, Jacques Vielot, was shot and critically wounded when he came to Tom’s assistance.

The Socialist Workers Party responded to this political murder with complete silence. Such a policy would have required a decision at the highest level of the SWP, its Political Committee. Sitting on the Administrative Secretariat of the SWP which controlled the agenda for the Political Committee was the confessed FBI agent Edward Heisler.

Can there be any doubt about the role this FBI agent played in the decision to keep silent on the murder of a leading member of the Workers League, the party which was fighting to expose the infiltration of the FBI into the SWP?

FBI agents and informers are trained as cold-blooded killers. We have only to recall the case of Gary Thomas Rowe, the FBI agent inside the Ku Klux Klan. He was given full authority to beat, shoot and kill as needed to fulfill his role in the KKK. As an FBI agent, he participated in the murder of civil rights worker Mrs. Viola Liuzzo, the beating of Freedom Riders at the Birmingham bus depot, and other crimes.

It is an incontrovertible fact that at least one such trained FBI agent, Edward Heisler, was among those responsible for the SWP’s flooding the Brooklyn Navy Yard with its members in the weeks before the murder of Tom Henehan, on October 16, 1977, and then played a leading role in the decision to keep silent on the killing.

This alone is enough to warrant a full-scale investigation of the entire SWP leadership for complicity in the murder of Tom Henehan.

But there are further pieces of evidence that require investigation of Heisler and the SWP leadership.

The first is that during the period the Henehan murder was prepared and carried out, Heisler was relieved of all his previous duties as the SWP’s main public spokesman and main writer on trade union questions. He was assigned entirely to behind-the-scenes work, beginning with his selection on the secret Administrative Secretariat.

After July 29, 1977, the last issue of The Militant before the Oberlin convention, Heisler’s name disappears from The Militant abruptly. He writes no more articles; he addresses no more public meetings.

The period from August to December 1977 was one of enormous trade union struggles. The iron miners walked out August 1 and stayed out over five months, dealing a powerful blow against the no-strike policy of the USWA bureaucracy. On October 1, the East Coast longshoremen struck ports from Maine to Texas. On December 6, the United Mine Workers launched their historic 111-day strike in which they defied the Taft-Hartley Law and their own union bureaucracy.

Any politically-serious movement in the working class would have called on its most experienced leaders to organize the intervention in these great struggles.

But Heisler, the national trade union chairman of the SWP, who covered the 1973 United Mine Workers convention for The Militant and addressed UMW locals in Illinois as an SWP candidate, was not heard from.

This is politically inexplicable, unless he was assigned to something which in the eyes of the SWP’s FBI leadership took precedence over “normal” political considerations. Was it organizing the “deadly consequences” which Joseph Hansen had threatened as the answer to the investigation of the International Committee, supported by the Workers League?

Just as damning is the fact that within two months of the assassination of Tom Henehan, Heisler left New York City and moved to Los Angeles, a city where he had never resided before.

In Los Angeles, he continued to play a behind-the-scenes role. He is mentioned only twice more in The Militant, as a speaker at an SWP rally in San Diego July 7, 1979, where he was described as a member of the SWP National Committee, and as a participant in a labor party discussion organized by the California State AFL-CIO in Los Angeles in December 1979, where he is described as a member of USWA Local 6700 at Martin-Marietta corporation’s aluminum factory.

Expenses Incurred 3/15/69 to 4/15/69

Sect. Dues and Sustainer Fund ............ $32.00
YSA Dues and Pledge ........................ $16.00
Friday Night Forums .......................... $2.50
Literature ..................................... $1.25
Transportation and Postage ............... $23.00
—————————————————————
Total ..................................... $74.75

signed Edward C. Heisler

One of Heisler’s FBI expense sheets

But he was by no means a “political dead fish,” as SWP Political Committee member Larry Seigle claimed. He served on the Nominations Committee at the SWP’s 1978 Convention, and was reelected to the National Committee at the 1979 convention.

This characterization of Heisler as politically “dead” is contradicted by another extraordinary fact: FBI agent Heisler received large loans from the SWP National Office in 1978 and 1979, long after he had left New York City and while he was working at a high-paying union job at Martin-Marietta aluminum.

According to Heisler’s testimony June 17–18 in the SWP suit — which was accepted as fact by SWP attorney Margaret Winter — he still owed the SWP more than $2,500! What’s more, the FBI agent said he intended to pay!

The court transcript reads in part:

Q: (From Edward Williams, government attorney questioning Heisler) Now, Mr. Heisler, while you were working in New York City on the National Office staff, were you paid volunteer expense money?
A: Are you referring to the Presidential campaign committee, or 1977, when I worked on the Trade Union Steering Committee?
Q: Let’s take the Presidential Committee first.
A: Yes, I received volunteer expense money.
Q: Did you also receive volunteer expense money when you worked with the Trade Committee, Trade Union Committee?
A: Yes.
Q: It is true that you received volunteer expense money from approximately October 1976 through January 1978?
A: That is correct.
…
Q: Do you recall when you received loans from the SWP, approximately when?
A: In 1978 and I believe early 1979.
Q: Do you recall how much you received by way of loans?

A: Yes … If you were to include loans made by individual members of the SWP in addition to national office loans, about $2,500.
Q: I am talking now about the national office loans.
A: I think that would be approximately $1,700 or $1,800. I don’t recall the exact amount …
A: Has that money been repaid?
A: It has not yet been repaid.
Q: Have you repaid any?
A: I haven’t been able to repay any of it right now.
Q: Do you intend to repay it?
A: After I have paid my attorney’s fees, yes.

Under cross-examination by SWP attorney Margaret Winter, Heisler repeated the story.

Q: What were the circumstances of your receiving the loans, sir?
A: I had first moved to Chicago, and I needed money to live on until I was able to obtain employment. Later when I moved from Chicago to Los Angeles, it took me a while to find employment again, and I needed some income to survive on until I was able to find a job.

An extraordinary picture emerges of the work of FBI agent and SWP leader Edward Heisler, which underwent a drastic change in the last five months of 1977.

• He was brought onto the Political Committee of the SWP and its highly-secret Administrative Secretariat just after the ties of SWP leader Joseph Hansen to the FBI were exposed by the International Committee.
• He was given responsibility for infiltrating SWP members into the Brooklyn Navy Yard, where Tom Henehan carried out important political work, two months before Tom’s assassination.
• He abruptly abandoned all public writing and speaking for the SWP after a seven-year buildup as their leading national spokesman on the trade unions.
• He sat on the subcommittee of the Political Committee which determines its agenda during the period when the decision was made to say nothing about the murder of Tom Henehan.
• Within two months of the murder, he was shipped 2,500 miles away to Los Angeles.
• He continued to receive large amounts of money from the SWP national office in the form of loans which he never repaid, long after he had left the SWP staff.

These movements cannot be explained on the basis of legitimate political considerations. They cannot be explained either as the activities of an individual agent. Rather they strongly suggest a carefully prepared conspiracy involving Heisler and other top agents in the SWP leadership. The existing evidence warrants the conclusion that a full exposure of Heisler’s role in the SWP might directly implicate him and other leaders of the SWP in the assassination of Tom Henehan.

The Workers League therefore demands that all evidence of this possible involvement of FBI agents inside the SWP in the assassination of Tom Henehan be probed in the current trial of the two men accused of being the triggermen in the murder, Angelo Torres and Edwin Sequinot.

The questions that must be answered are: Who proposed Heisler’s nomination to the SWP Political Committee and Administrative Secretariat in August 1977? Who served with Heisler on the secret Administrative Secretariat that controlled the movements of SWP members and the agenda of the Political Committee? Who was responsible for the decision of the SWP Political Committee that nothing would be said about the murder of Tom Henehan? Who decided that Heisler should be sent to Los Angeles only two months after the murder of Henehan and only four months after Heisler’s elevation to the Political Committee? Who authorized the payment of large sums to Heisler for two years after he left New York City? Who decided that there would be no questioning of Heisler in the SWP’s lawsuit?

At the same time, we urge the entire workers’ movement to be on guard against the activities of the FBI-controlled SWP. In particular, the influx of SWP members into any factory or industry should be taken as a warning that there is imminent danger of provocations, frameups and the assassination of leading trade union militants.

The SWP’s so-called “turn to industry” was the exact opposite of the struggle of Lenin and Trotsky to build revolutionary leadership by recruiting workers to the revolutionary party. The fictitious creation of “worker-Bolsheviks,” ex-students from middle-class backgrounds who disguise themselves as factory workers, provides mountains of information to the FBI.

Edward Heisler alone, in only five years (1966–1971), filed 6,000 pages of reports on trade unionists, civil rights leaders, and student activists as an FBI agent under SWP cover. The SWP’s “turn to industry” is a gigantic exercise in building up the data banks of the secret police.

A full exposure of all the activities of Heisler and all the police agents in the SWP leadership is urgently necessary to fight the capitalist police conspiracy against the working class.

Long-time FBI informant Edward Heisler wielded enormous power inside the revisionist Socialist Workers Party prior to his voluntary self-exposure as an agent in June 1980.

In testimony given last week as a government witness in the current New York trial of the SWP’s suit against the FBI, Heisler revealed that he had been placed in charge of organizing the work of the party’s top leadership body, the Political Committee.

Heisler stated that during the latter half of 1977 he worked on the Administrative Secretariat, a key sub-committee of the Political Committee unknown to most members of the SWP.

According to Heisler, “The Administrative Secretariat prepared the agendas for Political Committee meetings, frequently would prepare reports for presentation to members of the Political Committee, would discuss possible assignments or reassignments of personnel in various departments or branches of the SWP.”

Heisler also reported that during the same period he served as secretary of the SWP’s National Trade Union Steering Committee.

His testimony, given on June 17th and 18th, establishes that SWP members were lied to when they were told last year that Heisler was, in the words of Political Committee member Larry Seigle, “a political dead fish” in the period prior to his self-exposure.

In fact, Heisler’s membership on the Administrative Secretariat placed the FBI in control of discussion inside the SWP Political Committee as well as in charge of the actual movement of party members throughout the country.

Through Heisler the FBI was also able to control all SWP activities inside the trade union movement.

SWP leaders in charge of the suit tried to block the exposure of this devastating information by refusing to call Heisler as a witness when the party presented its case against the government during two whole months in April and May.

From a legal standpoint, the failure to call Heisler was inexplicable as he would have been the SWP’s strongest witness to prove its case against government disruption and harassment.

The fact that the SWP never called on Heisler to testify on his activities as an FBI informer is the most damning evidence that the trial itself is being manipulated by FBI-CIA agents inside the SWP leadership and among the plaintiffs themselves.

Heisler’s absence as an SWP witness was made even more conspicuous by the testimony of SWP leader Mary-Alice Waters that it is the organization’s policy to expose informers “as publicly as possible.”

SWP leaders told rank-and-file members that Heisler lived outside a 100-mile radius of New York City, and therefore could not be legally forced to testify. The implication was that the SWP had asked Heisler to testify, but that he had refused.

But members were not told that Heisler, following his self-exposure last year, privately and in writing assured SWP national secretary Jack Barnes and SWP attorney Margaret Winter that he would cooperate with the party in its legal suit.

It is now apparent that they arrived at the agreement that Heisler not testify as an SWP witness.

This decision was acknowledged by Heisler on June 17 when the government attorney asked him: “The plaintiffs have not requested that you appear here, is that correct?”

Heisler replied: “That is correct.”

The three leading SWP plaintiffs are Barnes, Waters and Seigle — all former students from the elite upper-class Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota.

Heisler was a protege of Jack Barnes. His lucrative career as an FBI informer was made possible through repeated interventions on his behalf by Barnes and other key SWP leaders.

In the course of his testimony, Heisler claimed that he considered himself a socialist despite his work as an FBI informer. This position is thoroughly consistent with the contention of SWP leaders that “agents do good work.”

Heisler’s only demonstration of anger came when he was asked by SWP attorney Winter, under cross-examination, to state his attitude toward the Workers League.

He replied: “Well, the Workers League in my opinion has become or appears to be becoming a right-wing organization similar to a group called the National Caucus of Labor Committees.”

This is exactly the position of the agent-infested SWP leadership: FBI agents make good socialists, but those who fight to expose them are to be denounced as right-wingers!

Heisler’s denunciation of the Workers League raises the question of why he was brought to New York and placed on the Administrative Secretariat of the SWP Political Committee in the latter half of 1977.

It was precisely during this period that the assassination of Workers League leader Tom Henehan was prepared and executed.

The Workers League has maintained that the assassination of Comrade Henehan on October 16, 1977 was prepared by FBI agents inside the top leadership of the Socialist Workers Party.

Heisler’s testimony definitely establishes the presence of an FBI agent in the most powerful leadership group inside the SWP at the time of Henehan’s murder.

The fact that the Socialist Workers Party never issued any statement reporting or condemning Henehan’s assassination, thus joining the capitalist press blackout on news of the murder, must now be reexamined in light of the new information of Heisler’s presence on the Administrative Secretariat.

The question which now assumes enormous importance is who proposed that Heisler be placed on the Political Committee in August 1977, who proposed his nomination to the Administrative Secretariat, and who served with him on that secret body?

Another crucial issue which must be fully examined is the precise nature of Edward Heisler’s relation with the top leaders of the SWP, especially its national secretary Jack Barnes.

The massive FBI-CIA penetration of the SWP leadership is among the greatest dangers confronting the labor movement in the United States and internationally.

A full exposure of Heisler’s activities inside the SWP and his career as an FBI informer is urgently necessary to fight the capitalist police conspiracy against the working class.