The present leadership of the revisionist Socialist Workers Party is the product of a political conspiracy engineered by the late Joseph Hansen, long-time FBI double agent, and the intelligence agencies of the United States.
The aim of this conspiracy was to infiltrate agents into the SWP, effect a takeover of that organization, and transform it into a staging ground for attacks against the genuine Trotskyists of the International Committee of the Fourth International and all revolutionary movements of the oppressed throughout the world striving to overthrow imperialism.
The manpower for this operation was selected mainly from the student body of the Midwestern campus of Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota. Its admissions policy (requiring among other things, examination of an applicant’s psychological profile) and educational programs were tailored to provide an exceptionally large pool of highly motivated and qualified recruits for patriotic service in the ruling class’s global “war against communism.”
The cover for this operation, begun in 1960, was provided by Joseph Hansen. He cynically exploited the grave political weaknesses of the SWP and both generated and utilized confusion over the political significance of events in Cuba in order to open the door for the massive influx of police agents. Sponsored and protected by Hansen, these agents were rapidly promoted into leadership.
They replaced the older generation of leaders associated with SWP founder James P. Cannon — “without,” as one of these ex-leaders recently remarked, “any detour into the class struggle.” A more direct route was found: from Carleton College to the SWP national headquarters via the Fair Play for Cuba Committee.
For Hansen, the events in Cuba were never considered as an issue requiring political clarification, but rather a means of organizing a provocation against Trotskyism. The uncritical adulation of Castro suddenly initiated by Hansen more than a year after the Cuban Revolution was guided by the requirements of this provocation.
Of course, he was aware that the deepening political crisis of the SWP as it entered the 1960s provided him with considerable room to maneuver. The fact that Hansen’s unprincipled fawning on Castro received support within the leadership of the SWP reflected the far advanced degeneration of the organization and the older generation of leaders such as Cannon, Dobbs and Lewitt.
The failure to deepen their understanding of the fundamental theoretical and political lessons of the 1953 split with Pablo and Mandel now led them to adopt the very same revisionist conceptions they had fought just a few years earlier. The political crisis within the leadership of the SWP reflected the difficult objective situation within the United States.
The problems of theoretical development and cadre training were intensified by the McCarthyite climate of the 1950s which deepened the isolation of the SWP from the American working class. The sudden death of one of the most politically outstanding leaders of the SWP, John G. Wright (Joseph Vanzler), further weakened the leadership.
The British comrades of the Socialist Labour League (forerunner of the Workers Revolutionary Party), who had fought shoulder-to-shoulder with Cannon and the SWP against Pabloite revisionism in the founding of the International Committee in 1953, sought to help the SWP overcome its serious difficulties.
But these principled and patient efforts to discuss and obtain agreement on the world perspectives of the International Committee were desperately opposed by Hansen. His instructions from the State Department were to break up the International Committee, liquidate the SWP as a Trotskyist party and destroy the Fourth International.
Determining Hansen’s policies was the objective crisis of American imperialism and its agents in the Stalinist bureaucracies. The crisis of Stalinism manifested in Khrushchev’s secret speech of February 1956, and then the Hungarian Revolution in October of that year had vast historical implications.
While Khrushchev’s secret speech vindicated Trotsky’s indictment of the Stalinist bureaucracy’s crimes, the events in Hungary verified Trotsky’s scientific perspective of the inevitability of the political revolution.
The State Department drew the sober and correct conclusion that the battered Stalinist bureaucracy of the Kremlin could not be relied upon to strangle the proletarian revolution as it had in the 1930s and the 1940s. In the United States, the Communist Party had been shattered by the continued impact of Khrushchev’s secret speech and the Soviet invasion of Hungary.
The State Department’s greatest fear was that Trotskyism, as embodied in the International Committee, would emerge as the revolutionary alternative to the Stalinist bureaucracies in the eyes of the masses.
The eagerness with which Hansen undertook this State Department assignment reflected his unique preparation for the job. He hated Trotskyism with the double passion and vindictiveness of an old employee of the GPU, who had been involved in the assassination plot which led to Trotsky’s murder, and a veteran double agent of the FBI, from 1940 on.
Capitalizing on the political weakness and demoralization of the old leadership grouped around Cannon in the SWP, Hansen thrust himself into the forefront of the struggle against the International Committee, especially the comrades of the Socialist Labour League who were opposed to plans for unprincipled reunification with the Pabloites.
The “Cuban question” was introduced and distorted by Hansen to create a provocation against the International Committee. Its aim was to encourage and deepen the right-wing political course upon which the SWP had already embarked, whip up a factional frenzy against the SLL and its leader, Comrade G. Healy, and in accordance with carefully laid plans, open the floodgates for the inundation of the SWP with police agents. They were to provide Hansen with the manpower he needed for his war against Trotskyism.
The Fair Play for Cuba Committee was the key instrument in Hansen’s operation. The International Committee is now able to document conclusively how it was used by Hansen to set up and carry out the transfer of young agents recruited at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, directly into the leadership of the SWP.
Before introducing this evidence, let us point out that for all its organizational sophistication, this operation was incredibly crude and heavy-handed from the standpoint of its politics. Though this may come as a surprise to present day members of the SWP who have been raised on the reactionary Hansenite folklore of “anti-Healyism” Hansen’s discovery of a supposed “workers’ state” in Cuba took virtually everyone in the SWP by surprise.
Not only had the SWP maintained a consistently critical line towards Castro as a bourgeois national leader, it also always insisted that the victory of the socialist revolution required the leadership of a conscious revolutionary vanguard. Until Hansen proclaimed Castro an “unconscious Marxist,” no one in the SWP had ever suggested that such a species of political animal existed. It unconditionally subscribed to the position affirmed by Cannon in 1954:
We alone are unconditional adherents of the Lenin-Trotsky theory of the party of the conscious vanguard and its role as leader of the revolutionary struggle. This theory acquires burning actuality and dominates all others in the present epoch.
The problem of leadership now is not limited to spontaneous manifestations of the class struggle in a long drawn-out process, nor even to the conquest of power in this or that country where capitalism is especially weak. It is a question of the development of the international revolution and the socialist transformation of society.
To admit that this can happen automatically is, in effect, to abandon Marxism altogether. No, it can only be a conscious operation, and it imperatively requires the leadership of the Marxist party which represents the conscious element in the historic process.
No other party will do. No other tendency in the labor movement can be recognized as a satisfactory substitute. For that reason, our attitude toward all other parties and tendencies is irreconcilably hostile.(Trotskyism Versus Revisionism, Vol.2, New Park pp.65-66).
It was this position which originally determined the attitude of the SWP towards the events in Cuba, as is shown by a study of the historical record.
On New Year’s Eve, 1958 — while businessmen, mobsters, government officials and other toadies of American imperialism celebrated one last drunken bash in Havana — dictator Fulgencio Batista slipped out a side door of the Presidential Palace, raced to a nearby airfield and fled the island.
Several days later, Fidel Castro led his victorious forces into Havana and soon assumed leadership of the new government; the temporary figurehead was the liberal, Manuel Urrutia.
During the months that followed, the Militant paid scant attention to Cuba. There was not the slightest suggestion that anyone in the SWP believed that “the first workers’ state in the Western Hemisphere” — as it was later to be proclaimed by Hansen — was emerging out of Castro’s seizure of power.
Nor was there any sign that the editor of the Militant — who happened to be Hansen — viewed the Cuban revolution as “the touchstone today of revolutionary politics for all socialist militants.” There was no indication whatsoever that the SWP considered Cuban developments in any way more significant than the great revolutionary national struggles then in progress in Algeria, Iraq, Egypt and other parts of the Middle East, Africa and Asia.
Far from insisting that glorification of Castro constituted the “acid objective test” of all revolutionary tendencies, the SWP and editor Hansen were decidedly cool toward Castro during his first year in power.
The SWP’s first reaction to the fall of Batista was published in the January 12, 1959 edition of the Militant. Entitled “Cubans Oust Batista Dictatorship,” the article by Lillian Kiezel stated:
Castro’s movement is largely middle class. He is a plantation owner himself. By and large the leadership of this movement, as personified by Provisional President Urrutia, seeks a democratic reform government. It doesn’t want a fundamental social and economic change.
On February 2, 1959, the Militant carried another article by Lillian Kiezel which stated: “Castro is consciously resisting the tendency of the revolution to continue in a socialist direction. But his colleagues are concerned that due to inexperience he will not be able to control the Cuban people.”
Kiezel wrote in the issue of February 16, 1959:
Cuban workers and poor peasants are attempting to cash in on Castro’s promises of reforms. They want them now; while Castro seeks delay. Strikes are flaring up, therefore, throughout Cuba over demands for wage increases, better working conditions and a six-hour day.
Attacking Castro’s appeals for patience, Kiezel added:
Through such doubletalk Castro seeks to restrain the Cuban revolution. To Castro more time offers more opportunities for holding back the revolutionary aspirations of the workers and poor peasants to free themselves from the stranglehold of the US financial interests.
The April 27, 1959 issue of the Militant carried a lengthy May Day statement which devoted no more than one paragraph to events in Cuba, correctly describing developments there as “a victorious democratic revolution” but in no way suggesting that the working class had taken power. As for Castro, he was not even mentioned.
The July 13, 1959 issue of the Militant carried a front page report on the 18th National Convention of the SWP, giving extensive coverage to the speeches of then national secretary Farrell Dobbs and national chairman Cannon. Neither speaker mentioned Cuba, according to the news account, even though Cannon spoke on “The Struggle for Socialist Internationalism.”
In the January 11, 1960, issue of the Militant, one year after Castro’s coming to power, Dobbs noted that Castro “has taken some steps under the pressures of the working people which threaten the superprofits of the imperialist exploiters of Cuban labor and resources.”
But while acknowledging certain progressive measures adopted by Castro under the pressure of the masses, the SWP remained sharply critical of his limited program as a bourgeois national leader.
In an editorial published in the January 18, 1960, issue of the Militant, the SWP stated:
The main danger to the Cuban revolution is in its own leadership. The class background of the Castro forces is petty bourgeois.
From university circles these revolutionaries moved into rural areas where they gathered strength as guerrilla fighters dedicated to agrarian reform...
Their aims were nationalist and egalitarian — independence from foreign domination, an end to government corruption, reduction of special privileges, improvements for the poor.
Yet another editorial, published in the February 22, 1960 edition of the Militant, stated:
The Cuban Revolution still has a long way to go before it can be said to have become firmly consolidated, but the social and economic upheaval is proving to be of great depth and power.
Where the revolution is weakest is in program and political leadership.
The editor of the Militant at the time these articles were written was Joseph Hansen. Under his editorial supervision, the attitude taken toward Cuba for more than a year after the revolution was exceptionally critical.
While supporting the revolution, the SWP in no way suggested that Castro could be associated with Marxism, let alone presented as an alternative to Trotskyism and the Fourth International.
But within a few weeks of publishing these editorials, the political line of the SWP began to undergo a sudden and extraordinary transformation.
First, criticism of Castro was shelved and he became the object of increasingly unrestrained adulation.
Second, support of the Cuban revolution was placed at the center of the political line of the SWP. Important campaigns that had been initiated in the growing civil rights struggles receded into the background.
The first sign of a change came in the April 11, 1960, issue of the Militant, which reported that Farrell Dobbs and Joseph Hansen were in Cuba “to gain better understanding of the policies of the new Cuban government.”
Though devoted veteran members of the SWP could not have known it at the time, this trip — later described as a “fact-finding” tour — marked the beginning of an elaborate operation aimed at breaking up the Trotskyist party. The very timing of the trip was not without significance.
Only a few members of the SWP probably noticed an advertisement carried in the New York Times on Wednesday, April 6, 1960 — just as Hansen and Dobbs were on their tour. Covering the entire page, it carried a banner headline which read: “WHAT IS REALLY HAPPENING IN CUBA?” The text began:
From Havana come charges of sabotage, economic aggression, counterrevolutionary intrigue, air raids on Cuban cane fields, sugar mills, homes. Against this background, the great news agencies and a powerful section of the US press raise a barrage of equally grave accusations. What can we believe in this welter of conflicting reports?
Presenting itself as a moderate and sympathetic defense of the Cuban people, the ad listed 24 signatories and concluded with a request that inquiries be addressed to the “Fair Play for Cuba Committee.”
As one might expect from an organization which was eventually to spawn the police agents who presently run the SWP, its origins were appropriately dubious and its first spokesmen predictably disreputable.
Listed as chairman and co-chairman were Waldo Frank and Carleton Beals. Their credentials as advocates of “fair play” consisted of having been long and faithful servants of the Soviet bureaucracy.
Frank demonstrated his concern for “fair play” by rejecting an invitation to serve on the Dewey Commission set up to investigate the Moscow Trial in 1937.
As for Beals, he established an international reputation for “fair play” by staging, on instructions from Stalin’s GPU, a crude provocation in the midst of the Dewey Commission hearings aimed at forcing Trotsky’s expulsion from Mexico.
Referring to his false accusations, errors and falsifications, Trotsky wrote:
I do not say that Mr. Beals, former correspondent of Tass, is now a paid agent of Moscow. I can admit that he is a half-conscious instrument of the GPU. But this changes nothing. He applies the same methods as the professional agents of the GPU. For his part he adds only a certain amount of disinterested confusion. (Writings of Leon Trotsky 1936-37, Pathfinder, pp. 296-97.)
But the credit for having founded the Fair Play for Cuba Committee did not belong either to Beals or Waldo Frank. They were not in on the original planning; rather, their support for the project had been solicited several weeks before the ad appeared in the New York Times.
Beals had been contacted by Robert Taber, a 40-year-old correspondent for CBS news, a semi-official newsgathering network utilized by the intelligence agencies of the United States.
Taber had covered Cuban developments before Castro came to power, and kept up his contacts after the new regime took over. In January 1960, he wrote an article defending Castro that was published in The Nation, a liberal magazine.
The job of contacting people like Beals who might publicly agree to sign the advertisement with which the Fair Play for Cuba Committee planned to announce its existence was carried out by Taber.
Working with him was a Cuban doctor by the name of Charles Santos-Buch. But the actual proposal for the establishment of the Committee was made by someone else.
On April 29, 1960, only three weeks after the publication of the Times advertisement, the Senate subcommittee on internal security held the first of many hearings on the Fair Play for Cuba Committee.
Its first witness was Carleton Beals, who told the subcommittee that he accepted Taber’s proposal to serve as co-chairman of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee after being assured that he had no association with communism.
Beals also turned over to the subcommittee a letter, dated February 9, 1960, which he had received from Robert Taber. It revealed the identity of the originator of the proposal to establish the Fair Play for Cuba Committee.
“A committee is being formed here in the city, for the express purpose of combatting some of the anti-Cuban (counterrevolutionary, is perhaps the more accurate expression) propaganda with which we are being deluged. The prime mover is a man of whom I know literally nothing, a chap named Alan Sagner who is, I understand, a builder in the Livingston, N.J., area.
“He contacted me after reading my recent article in ‘The Nation’ and said he wanted to bring along Reverend Reed, executive secretary of the Council of Churches in Long Branch, N.J., and could enlist some other people.
“His idea: to form a Fair Play for Cuba Committee, or some such name, to seek some prominent names in the country at large, and to launch a sort of propaganda campaign, perhaps even send a fact finding committee to Cuba, with adequate attendant fanfare, via ads in the ‘Times’ or whatever other means might recommend themselves.”
Beals also told the subcommittee he had been told by Taber that this Alan Sagner “wanted to put up $500 and he was putting up the $500” to have an ad placed in the “New York Times.”
One week later, on May 5, 1960, the Subcommittee on Internal Security took the testimony of Robert Taber. He was questioned closely about the origin of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee.
Taber stated that the first discussion on forming the Committee was held in New York City at a restaurant on Eighth Avenue and 51st Street, attended only by himself and Alan Sagner.
The counsel for the Senate subcommittee, J.G. Sourwine, asked Taber how the first meeting, held in February 1960, had been arranged.
Taber: “Mr. Sagner telephoned me,” Taber recalled, “and told me that he read my article in ‘The Nation’ that he had read these statements of some other people who had written to the ‘New York Times,’ and that he had been very much disturbed by the whole tendency which the press had taken in representing Cuba; and that he had, although he had never been there himself, he felt there were obvious discrepancies, and he felt he would like to talk to me about it with the object of taking some further action.'
At the end of his lengthy interrogation of Taber, Sourwine again turned to the role of Alan Sagner.
Sourwine: “Mr. Chairman, I have two more questions, if I may. They might fill small gaps. Do you know the reason for Alan Sagner’s interest in Cuban affairs?”
Taber: “I presume to know from what he told me that he has a great interest in the cause of fair play and that he feels that the Cubans have not been getting it.”
Sourwine: “Do you know of any connections he has with Cuba?”
Taber: “I am not aware of any connections he has with Cuba.”
In the course of protracted hearings that extended over a period of three years, no more information than this ever emerged about Alan Sagner. His name remained virtually unknown even to those who were associated with the Fair Play for Cuba Committee from early on, including its chairman, Waldo Frank.
When he was questioned by Sourwine on March 8, 1963, Frank couldn’t even remember having heard Sagner’s name. After reminding Frank that Sagner was a builder, Sourwine asked:
Sourwine: “Do you have any memory of the physical appearance of this builder? Can you describe him at all, Mr. Frank?”
Frank: “Very, very vaguely.”
Despite the fact that no one seemed to know anything about Alan Sagner’s role in the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, beyond what Taber wrote in his letter to Beals, the Senate subcommittee on Internal Security never made any effort to contact Sagner himself.
This was an inexplicable omission. The subcommittee subpoenaed virtually everyone associated with the Fair Play for Cuba Committee — except Alan Sagner, the man described by Taber as its “prime mover.”
Beyond Taber’s suggestion that Sagner had a highly developed sense of fair play, it was never explained why he took so great an interest in the fate of the Cuban revolution that he proposed the formation of a committee to defend it, thought up its name, and provided it with its first contribution, $500.
Nor was it ever explained why Sagner apparently lost all contact with it immediately afterwards.
Thus the origin and real political purpose for which the Fair Play for Cuba Committee was formed are as dubious and murky as Sagner’s association with it.
There is nothing to be found in the biography of Alan Sagner that suggests sympathy for the fate of revolutions in the Caribbean or anywhere else.
When Sagner contacted Taber in February 1960, he was a 39-year-old businessman. Whatever notion of fair play he may have held had been cultivated as a partner in Levin-Sagner Company, a building and development firm in Livingston, New Jersey, since 1946.
Whatever Sagner’s association with the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, it certainly did not damage either his bank account or his growing reputation as a pillar of the Livingston, N.J., community.
As his net worth passed seven figures, his civic duties multiplied. He became president and charter member of the Livingston Rotary Club and a member of the Executive Committee of the National United Jewish Appeal, a powerful Zionist fundraising organization. (He was certainly not a believer in fair play for Palestinians.)
Toward the end of the 1960s, Sagner became increasingly prominent on the governing bodies of hospitals, universities and medical centers.
Ultimately, Sagner’s sense of fair play found recognition in the field of politics — that of the New Jersey Democratic Party, an organization whose appreciation of fair play is recorded in the innumerable criminal indictments handed down to its representatives.
In 1973, he became treasurer of the Democratic State Committee. A year later, his very good friend, New Jersey Governor Brendan T. Byrne, appointed Sagner to the position of Commissioner of Transportation.
During the hearings in the state legislature to consider the nomination, one senator raised the matter of Sagner’s association with the Fair Play for Cuba Committee.
But the New Jersey legislature — not normally noted for its indulgence of individuals with radical pasts — quickly buried the question.
By 1974, Sagner’s net worth was reported to be $7 million. In 1976 he was selected chairman of the Tri-State Regional Planning Commission serving New Jersey, New York and Connecticut.
Sagner is now 60 years old and has travelled a long way since meeting Taber at the restaurant on Eighth Avenue and 51st Street.
Those who lunch with Sagner today meet him either at his exclusive country club in New Jersey or at his offices in New York’s tallest skyscraper: the World Trade Center.
He presently is serving a six-year term as chairman of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, yet another gift from Brendan Byrne. His annual salary is $80,000.
When President Carter arrived at Newark airport in New Jersey to make his way to the Democratic Party National Convention, Sagner led the official welcoming party.
In recent weeks, Sagner’s name has appeared frequently in the news. He has been exercising his devotion to “fair play” by coordinating the efforts of the Port Authority to break the strike of the workers who run the subways between New York and New Jersey.
There is nothing to be found in the origins of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee to suggest that its founders intended it to defend the Cuban Revolution against American imperialism.
On the other hand, there is an uncanny coincidence between the emergence of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee and the sudden shift in the political line of the SWP toward the Castro leadership.
Only a few weeks after Sagner suggested to Taber that “fact-finding” tours to Cuba be arranged, Hansen and Dobbs were on their way to Havana for a “fact-finding” tour of their own. Less than two weeks after the publication of the ad in the New York Times, a reference to “Fair Play” appears in a Militant article on Cuba.
If anyone knew why Sagner was eager to found the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, it was certainly Joseph Hansen. He immediately steered the SWP toward this fly-by-night operation and made it the central focus of the organization’s activities.
In short, the Fair Play for Cuba Committee had all the hallmarks of an FBI “catchment area.” The real purpose for its existence was to provide intelligence agencies with a cover through which it could penetrate the left and manipulate it in accordance with the needs of the capitalist state.
The SWP was a prime target for agents who entered the Fair Play for Cuba Committee and, with Hansen’s assistance, utilized it to launch their careers as spies within the Trotskyist movement.
The fact that the Fair Play for Cuba Committee was inundated with FBI agents was no secret to anyone.
As radical publisher Lyle Stuart wrote about the Committee in the December 1961 issue of Independent:
Its ranks were swelled by FBI agents and informants, but if the latter were devoted workers, the Committee was happy.