In January 1962, at the Second Annual Conference of the Young Socialist Alliance, Barry Sheppard was elected national chairman and Peter Camejo was elected national secretary.

Jack Barnes and his wife Elizabeth, having just graduated the previous June from Carleton College, had already moved from Northfield, Minnesota, to Chicago. He was attending Northwestern University on a fellowship obtained from the prestigious Woodrow Wilson Foundation.

However, the work of recruiting agents from Carleton was not abandoned. Barnes had a list of potential recruits who were still attending the college as students. In April 1962, the campus was visited by first Sheppard and then, to follow up his work, by Hansen.

These two visits certainly included interviews with contacts left behind by Barnes and with other specially selected students whose backgrounds and records recommended them for spy work inside the Trotskyist movement.

Sheppard and Hansen, visiting Carleton just two weeks apart, finalized the arrangements for “plugging in” a new batch of Carletonians into the SWP.

Their first assignment was to assume responsibility for the Fair Play for Cuba Committee chapter at Carleton that had been set up by Barnes. The students who took up this assignment were Charles (“Dan”) Styron (1963), his girlfriend Mary-Alice Waters (1963), John Benson (1963) and Doug Jenness (1964).

Under the guidance of Joseph Hansen, the building of Fair Play for Cuba chapters had become the central activity of the YSA.

This orientation, which was politically based on the cynical abandonment of fundamental Trotskyist principles, had an extraordinary effect on the development of the organization.

Virtually the entire present day leadership of the SWP was either recruited or first emerged into prominence in the course of the Fair Play for Cuba campaign.

No other political event or subsequent campaign by the SWP was to have a comparable effect on the formation of its leadership.

Taken in the context of the political development of the United States, the Cuban Revolution had an impact on the SWP that bore no objective relation to its actual effect on the political consciousness of American workers, students and youth in that period.

There exists no historical evidence that would sustain the claim that the Cuban Revolution represented an historical landmark in the political development of wide layers of workers, youth or middle-class intellectuals.

In the early 1960s, the most powerful political social movement to sweep the United States was the struggle of black workers and youth against racial discrimination.

Despite its reformist leadership, this movement was, in essence, a struggle of the working class against capitalism. It had deep historical roots and revolutionary implications.

Important sections of working class and middle-class youth were politically awakened by these struggles and some — like Goodman, Schwerner and Cheney — lost their lives in Mississippi.

But this was not the social layer which was represented by the Fair Play for Cuba Committee.

The SWP was not seeking to politically intervene in the real mass struggle of that period. It was not fighting to win black workers and youth out of the experiences of the civil rights struggles away from the petty-bourgeois leadership of that movement.

Nor were they fighting to win those sections of middle-class youth who could be broken from the reformist perspective with which they initially participated in such struggles as the voter registration drives.

Rather, the SWP was engaged in an operation which had a totally artificial character. The Fair Play for Cuba campaign was not related to the real process of the class struggle and its reflection in the development of political consciousness of the working class. Rather the Fair Play for Cuba campaign was an “inhouse” operation, serving ends which had nothing to do with the organization of the working class for the struggle for power and the building of the revolutionary party.

The Fair Play for Cuba Committee — set up under completely dubious circumstances by an unknown New Jersey builder, Mr. Alan Sagner, and a CBS journalist-adventurer, Mr. Robert Taber — brought around it the most suspect political elements.

With uncommon frequency, the Fair Play for Cuba Committee attracted individuals with definite anti-communist backgrounds who, for no apparent reason, turned 180 degrees on their axis and joined the FPCC and the SWP.

The most outstanding examples of this lightning conversion are to be found in the biographies of the Carleton students.

Dan Styron travelled through the Soviet Union in 1960 and returned to Carleton to write anti-communist articles in the campus newspaper against “totalitarianism.”

Elizabeth Stone specifically recalled in an autobiographical essay that she considered it a great privilege to have been in Austria when the Soviet troops ended their post-war occupation of that country.

An exceptionally large number of those who experienced these sudden conversions to the cause of the Cuban Revolution had — like Dan Styron — either travelled to the USSR or were engaged in Russian studies.

In this context, it is important to examine the development of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee at another campus which was to emerge as a major center of SWP recruitment: the University of Indiana in Bloomington.

The Fair Play for Cuba Committee chapter on that campus received a great deal of publicity in the Militant because three SWP members were charged with sedition by the State of Indiana.

The “Bloomington Three” were Ralph Levitt, Tom Morgan and James Bingham.

Levitt was a Ph.D., a former member of the anti-Soviet YPSL (Young Peoples Socialist League), who had received a 1962 grant from the Russian Institute of the University of Indiana. It should be pointed out that Indiana’s Russian Institute ranks only second to that of Stanford’s Hoover Institute as the major anti-communist think-tank in the United States — though perhaps Princeton University and Harvard would make a strong claim to this “honor.”

Levitt travelled extensively through Europe as well as in Egypt and Israel. He also travelled to Cuba.

Tom Morgan visited the USSR in May 1960 (shortly before Stryon’s trip) as part of an 11-month world tour, including North Africa and Europe.

He left the US as a liberal Republican, but like Paul on the road to Damascus, was transformed by his travels and returned home as a socialist and an opponent of the Soviet bureaucracy.

James Bingham hailed from a conservative Republican family, studied at the University of Florence in 1958 and the University of Perugia in 1959. He became fluent in Italian. His travels took him through Spain, France, England, Switzerland and Mexico. He was then “born again” politically, set up the Fair Play for Cuba chapter at Indiana University and became secretary of the YSA on campus.

(It should be pointed out that a large number of leaders of the SWP first received prominence through legal defense campaigns. They would get a “reputation” by being charged with some offense or another and then receive consistent publicity in the Militant as a “cause celebre.”

Eventually, a defense committee would be set up on their behalf. Later, when the charges would be conveniently and harmlessly dropped, they remained leaders by virtue of their “legal ordeal.” But like the “Bloomington Three,” they always beat the rap. We will return to this “legal defense” phenomenon in the next article.)

These three made odd defendants on a charge of having conspired to overthrow the government of the State of Indiana.

But other odd things were to emerge about the Fair Play chapter at Indiana University when the House Un-American Activities Committee interrogated, on November 18, 1963, one of the FPCC’s most active members — Mr. John R. Glenn.

The importance of his testimony is that it provides a perfect example of the type of “fresh new elements” with whom the SWP sought to make contact through the medium of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee.

We will quote extensively from the transcript and summary of the November 18, 1963 hearing published by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC).

In recalling the career of Mr. John Glenn, as it emerged from his own testimony, we invite the readers of this article to draw their own conclusions about the real political motives behind the SWP’s fixation upon the Fair Play for Cuba Committee.

The first witness called by HUAC that day was a Mr. Harold G. Wilkes, a warehouse supervisor who had rented an apartment in August 1962 to Mr. and Mrs. John Glenn, who had applied in response to an ad placed in the local newspaper.

Wilkes told HUAC that he had been able to overhear conversations held in Glenn’s apartment, located directly below his own, through common heating ducts.

According to the HUAC summary:

The witness testified that the Glenns had received numerous visitors and that by January 1963 regular meetings were held in their apartment. He said he hadn’t become particularly concerned about the nature of the meeting prior to one which was held in mid-March 1963. On that occasion, Mr. Wilkes told the sub-committee, a group referred to as the ‘YSA’ was addressed by an instructor identified only as a ‘comrade from New York.’

Mr. Wilkes recalled that the New Yorker addressed the members of the group as ‘comrades’ and urged them to remain faithful to the YSA, which the witness later learned was the Young Socialist Alliance.

He testified that the speaker called our present form of government an ‘imperialistic, capitalistic system,’ and stated it was only a matter of time before the system would be replaced through the efforts of the YSA and other groups.

Listening with his ears straining against the heating ducts, Wilkes went on:

The witness told the subcommittee that the meetings, held about once a month, continued until the latter part of May 1963.

He said the gatherings in the Glenns’ apartment had been attended by groups of from 7 to 15 persons.

He recalled that, in addition to John and Marcia Glenn, some of the participants had been Ralph Levitt, John Bingham, Tom Morgan, Bill and Paulann Groninger, Jack and Betsy Barnes, and Don and Polly Smith.

The House Un-American Activities Committee summary then notes that “Jack Barnes is or was a student at Northwestern University and is an organizer for the Young Socialist Alliance in the Midwest.”

Following this reference to the presence of Jack and Betsy Barnes at meetings held in the Glenns’ apartment, the summary states:

According to the testimony of Mr. Wilkes, Marcia Glenn was the corresponding secretary for the Young Socialist Alliance.

He said he became aware of this fact in May 1963, when he overheard Mrs. Glenn asking James Bingham whether she should resign as corresponding secretary because of adverse local publicity the YSA was receiving.

At this point the summary notes that Wilkes had delivered to HUAC a number of pamphlets he had found in the Glenns’ apartment.

The titles of some of the sample pamphlets were ‘Trotskyism and the Cuban Revolution’ — ‘An Answer to Hoy,’ ‘In Defense of the Cuban Revolution’; ‘An Answer to the State Department and Theodore Draper, The Theory of the Cuban Revolution,’ and ‘The Socialist Workers Party,’ all written by Joseph Hansen, secretary to Leon Trotsky until the latter was assassinated by Stalinist agents in Mexico in 1940.

Wilkes’ testimony established four things which, in light of the statements made by the next witnesses, deserve special emphasis.

The first thing is that meetings of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee were held in the apartment of John and Marcia Glenn.

Second, among those attending these meetings were Jack Barnes, present day national secretary of the SWP and his wife, Betsy.

Third, Marcia Glenn was an officer of the YSA branch at Indiana University.

Fourth, the bulk of literature found in Glenn’s apartment had been written by Joseph Hansen.

The next witness was John Glenn. Unlike most other witnesses who were called before either HUAC or the Eastland Committee to give testimony on the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, he did not hesitate to name names, dates and places.

Glenn did not make use of the Fifth Amendment. He answered freely all questions put to him — except one, as we shall soon see.

Glenn told the Committee that he had been born in Evanston, Illinois, on July 26, 1929. He then responded to further questions about his background put to him by Mr. Alfred Nittle, counsel for HUAC.

Nittle: Mr. Glenn, would you relate the extent of your formal education, giving the dates, places of attendance at educational institutions and any degrees received?
Glenn: Starting with college?
Nittle: Starting with high school.
Glenn: Huntington High School, Huntington, Indiana, 1943 to 1947. I graduated in 1947. I started college at UCLA, University of California at Los Angeles, in January 1949. I was there for three semesters, then I transferred to Indiana University in September 1950.

Before that semester was out, even though I got full credit for the semester, I went into the Air Force, Air Force Intelligence, where I was a Russian linguist for five years, receiving training in the Russian language at Syracuse University.

When I got out of the Air Force in January 1956, I returned to Indiana University. No, I am sorry. I will go back a little. When I was in the service, the Air Force had a program whereby, if you could complete your degree within six months, that you would be put on temporary duty to do so while in the service, and I had done enough correspondence work and night school work while I was in the service so that I was able to do that.

I went back to Indiana University in June of 1953 and received a degree in general business administration in January of 1954.
Nittle: Were you assisted by the government in offsetting the expenses of your education?
Glenn: Yes, I got my full service pay and housing and food allowance.
Nittle: Did you attend Trinity College at San Antonio, Texas?
Glenn: Yes, I mentioned a couple of night schools. That was one of the night schools I went to shortly after I went into the service in San Antonio. It was just the summer session of 1951. As I say, I took correspondence courses from the United States Armed Forces Institute while I was in the service.
Nittle: Could you speak up, please, so that members of the Committee can hear you?
Glenn: I received full credit for those. When I got out of the service in January of 1956, I returned to Indiana University where I was accepted to do graduate work in economics there.

I went for two semesters and a summer session and I completed all of the work for my masters in economics, except for two papers.

I have two incomplete courses there, so I never did get my degree. I resumed — I went to law school in September — started law school in September of 1957.
Nittle: At the Indiana University Law School?
Glenn: Yes, Indiana University Law School. I received my degree in January or February 1961. While I was going to law school I taught economics at Indiana University for two years — beginning economics.
Nittle: What years did you teach economics?
Glenn: 1957-1958 and 1958-1959, the first six hours of introductory economics.
Nittle: Did you receive training by the United States Air Force in Germany?
Glenn: Yes, that is another one, I studied some German at night school — University of Maryland extension — when I was stationed in Frankfurt, Germany. Also, I had a one week refresher course in Manheim, Germany, while I was there. It was an Air Force operated school.
Nittle: What is your present occupation?
Glenn: I am a lawyer.
Nittle: Of what bars are you a member?
Glenn: Indiana Bar.
Nittle: I would like to return for a moment to your Air Force career. Would you tell us what your major duties were while serving in Air Force Intelligence?
Glenn: You are not supposed to tell anybody that, and I never have.
Nittle: Were you in intelligence work while serving abroad?
Glenn: Yes.
Nittle: Would you tell us where you were abroad and for how long a period of time?
Glenn: Total time was in Germany, 16 1/2 months; and I was in Frankfurt, Germany, for, I would say, 11 months, and Berlin 5 months.

The questioning then passed onto his employment experience. He told the Committee that between 1947 to 1950, he had held various odd jobs during the summers.

Nittle: Then what was your next employment?
Glenn: As an economics instructor at Indiana University. One other thing. When I was in law school, I wrote a US travel agency here. I saw an advertisement for American citizens to visit the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, and Poland and I wrote them and asked them if they had any need for a guide. They said they did, so I went to those three countries for about 40 days in the summer of 1958 and those three countries plus Yugoslavia and Rumania in 1959.
Nittle: Had you previously visited any of those countries for which you applied for the position of guide?
Glenn: No — No, I didn’t. The reason I hesitated, of course we passed through East Germany when I was stationed in Berlin, but East Germany was not one of the countries visited. Well, that is not true either. The first trip we did come from — back through East Berlin to West Berlin from Czechoslovakia.  Johansen: What was the name of the travel agency?
Glenn: Tom Maupin.
Nittle: Is that M-a-u-p-i-n-
Glenn: Yes, and the second year was some Association for Academic Travel Abroad. I believe that is the name.
Johansen: These tours were not government financed?
Glenn: No, private US travel agencies that arrange with the travel agencies in the Soviet bloc countries to facilitate tourists visiting those countries — American tourists.
Nittle: The Tom Maupintour Associates had their offices in Kansas City, did they not?
Glenn: Yes.
Nittle: How did you establish your contact with them?
Glenn: I saw an ad in the student newspaper of Indiana University to take a tour. I thought with my language competence I might have a chance to see these countries myself.
Johansen: You went as an employee or as a tourist?
Glenn: I was an employee, I guess. I was kind of a liaison between us and the tour guides provided by the various Soviet bloc tour agencies. In other words, when difficulties arose, I was to try to see that these difficulties would be alleviated.

Let us interrupt the HUAC testimony to briefly review Mr. Glenn’s career in the decade preceding his transformation into a host for Fair Play for Cuba meetings, a friend of Jack Barnes and a student of Joseph Hansen’s writings.

From 1950 to 1956, he worked openly in Air Force Intelligence. During that period he was trained as a Russian linguist and also was given the opportunity to obtain a degree in business administration at the University of Indiana.

Between 1954 and 1956, he was assigned overseas by Air Force Intelligence. He worked in Germany, which, during the 1950s, was the center of espionage and counter-espionage by both the United States and the Soviet Union.

While in Germany, he received training in German at a school in Frankfurt under the supervision of the Air Force. He also spent five months in Berlin — then the political center of the Cold War.

During his stay in Germany, Glenn carried out top secret intelligence work. The one question he refused to answer before HUAC concerned the nature of his assignment.

He was ostensibly discharged from the Air Force in January 1956 after reaching the rank of staff sergeant.

Glenn then returned to the University of Indiana to do graduate work in economics and then enrolled in Law School.

While enrolled at the university, Glenn served as a “liaison” and “guide” for “Tom Maupintour Associates” — a travel agency with which the counsel for the House Un-American Activities Committee seemed quite familiar. For two successive summers, this highly trained Air Force Intelligence officer — an expert Russian linguist — travelled “behind the Iron Curtain.”

Finally, Glenn’s law studies were completed in early 1961 and he was admitted to the bar of the State of Indiana.

It then appears that Glenn’s career took a surprising turn. In the spring of 1961, he participated in a protest demonstration against the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba.

HUAC had in its possession a photograph taken of Glenn on that march. The following exchange took place between Nittle and Glenn:

Nittle: Would you examine that exhibit again, and I ask whether you are acquainted with the person in the center of the photograph carrying a sign and marching on your left?
Glenn: Yes, that is George Shriver.
Nittle: Is not George Shriver the former president of the University of Indiana Fair Play for Cuba Student Council?
Glenn: That is true.
Nittle: Did you ever have contact with him on matters relating to demonstrations, picket lines, letter writing, or any other activity in support of the Indiana University Fair Play for Cuba Student Council?
Glenn: Well, he is a good friend of mine, and I have talked to him about many things, but any letters I have written have been strictly on my own initiative.
Johansen: Mr. Counsel, I suggest the answer is not responsive to the question. Could we have the question repeated and the witness given an opportunity to repeat his answer?  Nittle: Yes. Did you ever have any contact with George Shriver on matters relating to demonstrations, picketing, or any other activity in support of the Indiana Fair Play for Cuba Student Council?  Glenn: Well, at the time of the attempted April invasion, I just knew George more or less by name. It was some time after that that I became better acquainted with him so I don’t think I could have had any contact with him regarding this demonstration or any picketing or any letters.  Johansen: Again, Mr. Counsel, as I understood the question, it was not limited to this particular demonstration.  Nittle: That is correct. Did you have any contact with respect to any of the activities of the Fair Play for Cuba Student Council? (Witness confers with counsel)  Glenn: Yes.  Nittle: When did your contact for that purpose take place?  Glenn: Most of the people who are in the committee are friends of mine, and we talk all the time.  Nittle: How long have you known George Shriver?  Glenn: I think I first met him some time before the April invasion; but, like I say, that was just a speaking acquaintance. I really didn’t know him very well then. It was later that summer, after I had taken the bar exam, that I got to know him better. That was when I first read C. Wright Mills on Cuba — “Listen Yankee” — and got interested in Cuba.

George Shriver who became a good friend of John Glenn, one of the most active members of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, is better known today as George Saunders. He is presently the chief translator of Trotsky’s works for the Pathfinder Press, publishing house of the SWP.

In the period of Saunders’ budding friendship with Glenn, he was a young protege of Hansen — travelling with him in Europe as Hansen was attempting to organize the destruction of the International Committee of the Fourth International.

During this period, Glenn developed an interest in Cuban affairs that soon grew into an almost obsessional determination to visit the island. After a decade of the most rigorous Air Force Intelligence training, with specialized work in linguistics, business administration, economics and law, Glenn appears to have thrown his academic and career interests out of the window, and, along with his wife, devoted himself entirely with organizing a trip to Cuba. Summarizing Glenn’s testimony of November 18, 1963, the House Un-American Activities Committee reported:

On October 23, 1961, at Bloomfield, Ind., he (Glenn) filed a passport application with the Department of State, listing Cuba as a country he intended to visit. In a letter from the State Department, dated November 7, 1961, he was notified that his request for a passport was denied.

On November 14, 1961, Glenn sent a letter to the Cuban embassy in Ottawa, Canada, in which he requested a visa for Cuba. In a reply, dated November 21, 1961, the Charge d’Affaires of the embassy informed him that, as an American citizen, he would have to apply for a Cuban visa at the Czech embassy in Washington, which was handling Cuban business in the United States.

He also advised in the same communication that it would be necessary for him to have passport validation by the US State Department in order to travel to Cuba.

Glenn told the subcommittee he contacted the Czech embassy in Washington, but was informed by an official there that his request for a Cuban visa would have to be forwarded to Cuba, inasmuch as the embassy was not empowered to grant it.

The Czech diplomat told Glenn, however, that he had heard Americans could readily obtain Cuban visas from the Cuban embassy in Mexico City.

The witness confirmed information obtained through an investigation by the Committee on Un-American Activities that he had travelled to Mexico in the spring of 1962 in an unsuccessful attempt to get a Cuban visa.

Glenn said that he learned in Mexico that in order to get a visa, someone then in Cuba would have to recommend to the Cuban State Department that he be given one.

Accordingly, Glenn told the subcommittee, he sent a telegram from Mexico to George Shriver, a friend and a leader of the Indiana University Fair Play for Cuba Student Council. He asked Shriver to write Robert Williams,* who had fled to Cuba to avoid prosecution by US authorities, to see if Williams could initiate action to obtain a visa for Glenn. Glenn testified that Shriver knew Williams, whom Glenn had met only once in Bloomington.

The witness said he received a return wire addressed to ‘Jack Glenn, care of the Cuban embassy to Mexico,’ which said:

‘Letter sent to Williams. Keep in touch. Venceremos.’ (a Cuban revolutionary slogan meaning ‘We shall conquer’). The message was signed ‘G.S.’ making it appear to have been sent by George Shriver.

Glenn said he later found out the telegram had been sent by two other friends, James Bingham and Ralph Levitt, after Shriver procrastinated in contacting Williams.

In any event, Glenn was not successful in getting to Cuba from Mexico in the spring of 1962, according to his testimony. He claimed to have paid his own expenses for the trip to Mexico.

It was not until the next year, 1963, that Glenn and his wife finally made it to Cuba. In June of that year, they flew to Havana with a group of students. In the course of their trip, they were interviewed together on a Radio Havana broadcast in which they declared their support for the Cuban Revolution.

In August, the Glenns left Cuba on a flight to Spain. There, they decided to leave the group of students with whom they had been travelling.

According to the HUAC summary of Glenn’s testimony, 

he left the group and travelled to Morocco. He said that after he and his wife had learned they could stay abroad for a while, they had decided to travel to Algeria to observe the political developments there, which were supposed to be similar to what they had witnessed in Cuba.

But the planned trip did not work out. While hitchhiking across Morocco, Glenn and his wife were picked up by the police and deported out of the country.

There was one final incident before he returned to the United States. We quote the HUAC summary:

On the voyage back to Spain, according to Glenn, he and his wife threw their Spain-to-US flight tickets, which had been purchased by the Cuban government, into the Mediterranean Sea. They decided to do this, he said, because they were being returned to the United States unwillingly and wanted the US, not Cuba, to bear the cost of the transportation under those circumstances.

Though one might have expected the US government — which is not noted for its magnanimity toward those who desert the colors and “disgrace their uniform” — to feel less than obligated to provide transportation for Mr. Glenn and his wife, Uncle Sam did not show any vindictiveness towards its prodigal nephew. The HUAC summary reports:

On October 15, 1963, according to investigation by the Committee on Un-American Activities, Glenn reported to the American Embassy in Madrid, Spain, that he and his wife did not have a ticket for return transportation to the United States. The embassy purchased a ticket for them, and they were flown to the United States on an Iberian Airlines plane.

Considering the reputation of the House Un-American Activities Committee, whose members were notorious for their sadistic delight in brow‑beating witnesses and threatening them with every conceivable punishment for alleged crimes against national security, Glenn was given a rather easy time.

No Committee member seemed especially concerned about possible dangers to security created by the transformation of a highly trained Air Force Intelligence officer into a member of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee and supporter of the Socialist Workers Party.

At one point in the interrogation, the following exchange took place:

Senner: What was the highest rank you attained while you were in the Air Force?
Glenn: Staff sergeant.
Ichord: What was the nature of your security clearance?
Glenn: I had a secret, top secret and cryptographic clearance, which is the highest one granted.

This line of questioning was then dropped. It did not seem to worry the Committee that Glenn might have relayed to the Cubans or to the SWP top secret information concerning the codes employed by the Air Force — though there is absolutely no more carefully guarded secret than military codes. The “cracking” of any of its codes is considered by any military force as something akin to a national calamity.

But the HUAC congressmen, who would not hesitate to denounce as a threat to the nation’s security even an elementary school teacher who might have attended a rally of the Soviet American Friendship Committee during World War II, were remarkably cool about Mr. Glenn.

They simply accepted his statement that he never discussed his intelligence work with anyone.

As for Glenn’s precise relationship with the SWP, the Committee reported the following:

“He never was a member of the Young Socialist Alliance or the Socialist Workers Party. Nevertheless, he accepted the Trotskyist viewpoint and cooperated with and worked for the benefit of the YSA and the Fair Play for Cuba Student Council.”

The hearing held that day, November 18, 1963, was the last to be held on the Fair Play for Cuba Committee while it remained an active organization.

Four days later, one of its members, Lee Harvey Oswald, assassinated President John Kennedy in Dallas, Texas.

Like others associated with the SWP through the medium of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, Oswald’s conversion to left-wing politics was thoroughly dubious.

It is commonly accepted that he was, in one way or another, tied up with the CIA and other US intelligence agencies.

Like others on the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, he travelled to the Soviet Union. Like Glenn, he had a military background.

Also following Oswald’s decision to end what is now considered to have been a staged “defection” to the USSR, he — like Glenn — had his return ticket paid for by the US government.

In the case of Oswald, the Fair Play for Cuba Committee was utilized to provide a left-wing identity. He was simply following a well-beaten path.

For three years and a half, Hansen had been utilizing the Fair Play for Cuba Committee as a means of feeding CIA agents into the SWP.

One thing is clear: the SWP’s concern with the fate of the Cuban Revolution was an elaborate fraud. The real nature of its so-called “defense” of Cuba against American imperialism was shown on the afternoon of November 22, 1963.

No sooner was Kennedy dead than the SWP rushed a telegram of condolences to the widow of the would-be butcher of the Cuban people and leader of world imperialism.

As for the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, which had been the focus of all its activities over the previous three and a half years, the SWP abandoned it like a honky-tonk being raided by the vice-squad.

In testimony given to the Warren Commission on April 17, 1964, one of the officers of the FPCC, Vincent T. Lee, stated that it was no longer a functioning organization.

“Officially the office went out of existence December 1963,” Lee reported. “Eviction notice was served and the office was closed.” The demise of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee was as ignominious as its origin. At the very least, the fact that the SWP and its new youth leadership immediately abandoned the Fair Play for Cuba Committee because of adverse publicity in the bourgeois press is an example of disgusting cowardice.

Moreover, the fact that the Fair Play for Cuba Committee could simply fold up overnight without anyone giving any thought to defending it against a political witchhunt in the aftermath of the Kennedy assassination proves that it was, from the start, a totally inconsequential and bogus organization.

However, it can be assumed that the shutting down of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee was necessitated for reasons other than cowardice.

After Oswald shot Kennedy, Hansen must have decided that the Fair Play for Cuba had become too “hot” to be of any further use as a recruiting station for agents.

By November 1963, too many intelligence agencies “were getting in on the act,” using the Fair Play for Cuba Committee for operations that interfered with Hansen’s behind-the-scene recruitment of agents.

When Hansen met with his FBI and CIA handlers after Kennedy’s assassination, he probably complained angrily about Oswald’s use of the same cover employed by Barnes, Stone, Waters, Styron and the rest of the Carleton agents.

As the recruitment of agents from Carleton was still an active operation, the quick shutting down of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee was essential.

Considering the potential witchhunting ammunition provided to the bourgeois press by Oswald’s association with FPCC and the Socialist Workers Party, one might have expected the SWP to have come under a savage attack.

But that did not happen. The press was restrained, and when Farrell Dobbs appeared secretly before the Warren Commission on April 17, 1964 — without anything being published in the Militant — he was treated courteously by the investigators.

Just 20 years earlier, the US government had thrown Dobbs into jail on a charge of sedition. Now he was asked a few polite questions about Oswald’s contact with the SWP and then excused.

It is obvious that instructions from the FBI and the CIA to the Warren Commission and the capitalist press were to avoid stirring things up.

In the course of three years and a half, the Fair Play for Cuba Committee had more than served its purpose. By November 1963, the Socialist Workers Party had not only severed all political connections with Trotskyism, it was now safely under the control of police agents recruited by Hansen into the SWP.

*Robert Williams was the Southern civil rights leader who urged blacks to arm themselves against attacks by the KKK. He was witchhunted and fled the US to avoid being framed up.