As we have seen in the course of this work, the SWP has been unable to analyze or refute any of the evidence against Curtis. The two pamphlets produced by the SWP on the case, The Frame-Up of Mark Curtis, by Margaret Jayko, and The Stakes in the Worldwide Political Campaign to Defend Mark Curtis, written by John Gaige, contain not a single citation from the 450-page transcript of the trial. Neither Jayko nor Gaige attempt to answer the devastating testimony of Demetria and Jason Morris, the principal witnesses in the case. Both pamphlets are concerned primarily with a retelling in tedious detail of Curtis’s political activities in the period before his arrest on March 4, 1988, and the subsequent work of the Mark Curtis Defense Committee.

Jayko’s 71-page pamphlet, a reprint of a series run in 12 parts in the Militant, devotes exactly one paragraph to the trial, and only two pages to the events of the night of Curtis’s arrest. Jayko’s series made the astonishing declaration in its final part, “No one can ‘prove’ with 100 percent certainty that Mark Curtis did not attempt a rape on a Des Moines porch March 4, 1988.” In the series, this damaging admission was followed by invoking Barnes’s “you are innocent” statement as the justification for defending Curtis even though he might be guilty. In the pamphlet version, this passage has simply been deleted.

Both pamphlets paint a picture of Curtis as a political leader who was a major figure in the class struggle in Des Moines. According to the SWP, Curtis was a thorn in the side of the ruling class due to his involvement in the United Food and Commercial Workers union, in the defense of immigrant workers at Swift, and in protests against police racism. Gaige, for instance, writes, “this case is not about rape, but about the fact that Mark Curtis speaks Spanish, can communicate with immigrant workers, and is therefore a dangerous man as far as the employers are concerned.” He adds, “That’s why framing up Mark is valuable to the class enemy. If they are successful, they can use this to punish vanguard workers; and it helps silence and intimidate other fighters and discredit union and political activists.”

Curtis’s apologists seem to feel that they are on safer ground if they ignore the facts of the case and concentrate instead on describing the SWP’s political activities in Des Moines. However, any serious examination of the political side of the case reveals a fatal contradiction. The SWP’s claim to be the victim of ruling class persecution is in direct conflict with its actual relations to the capitalist state and big business.

At the very time that the SWP suggests that the federal government was involved in preparing the frame-up of Mark Curtis, top officials of the Justice Department were engaged in high-level discussions which resulted in the approval of a huge financial payoff to the SWP. During the months that Curtis was arrested, charged and tried for rape and burglary, the federal government handed over nearly three quarters of a million dollars to the Socialist Workers Party. The money was paid in two installments, $264,000 directly to the SWP and $415,000 in fees to SWP attorneys, most of whom are party members. The payments were personally approved by then-Attorney General Edwin Meese, the chief antilabor gangster of the Reagan administration.

The SWP publicly maintained that these payments were the result of a legal victory over the government in its lawsuit against FBI spying, which was filed in 1973 and dragged out in the court of Federal Judge Thomas Griesa over the next decade. This claim would be farcical if it were not so sinister.

The Griesa suit went to trial in 1981 after lengthy delays, produced mainly by the refusal of the federal government to release any information about its agents inside the SWP. This reached the point, under the Carter administration in 1978, that then-Attorney General Griffin Bell was cited for contempt of court when he refused to hand over any SWP informer files, claiming this would endanger national security. The SWP offered to guarantee that no agents would be named in return for a cash settlement of $5 million, but the final settlement was for a much smaller sum. The result was that the lawsuit against government spying was settled without a single one of the hundreds of government spies inside the SWP being exposed.

The proceedings before Judge Griesa became a blatant cover-up of the extent of government penetration of the SWP leadership. In 1979, Griesa appointed a “special master,” retired judge Charles Breitel, to make a confidential review of government informer files on the SWP and give his findings to the court. Breitel’s report whitewashed the SWP leadership. He said that hundreds of FBI agents had infiltrated the organization, but only one agent had ever served on the national committee of the SWP, and none in any higher capacity, such as the political committee or central leadership. One year later, 20-year SWP veteran Edward Heisler, who had served as national SWP campaign chairman, political committee member, and member of the top-level administrative secretariat which set PC agendas, admitted he had been working for years as an FBI informer.

The Griesa suit degenerated into a legal dispute over the price the federal government was to pay in return for the SWP’s agreement that no agents would be named. After Griesa issued his award of $264,000 in August 1986, there were further delays while the Reagan administration prepared to appeal the decision, filing official notice of intent to appeal as late as January 1988. Only two months later, the Justice Department dropped the appeal and agreed to make the payment to the SWP.

Throughout the spring and summer of 1988, while the SWP leadership was publicly maintaining that the federal government was the main instigator of the Curtis case, they were privately finalizing the details on a huge cash payment from the government to the SWP. There is no precedent in US history for such a subsidy from the capitalist state for a party claiming to be socialist.

The initial $264,000 payment to the SWP was approved by the Justice Department on March 7, 1988 — three days after the arrest of Mark Curtis, supposedly as the result of a massive government conspiracy against the SWP! The second payment, of $415,000 to the SWP’s lawyers, went through in August 1988, just at the point where the Curtis case was going to trial and the SWP was appealing publicly for funds for his defense. This appeal was ignored by the workers’ movement, but it was certainly answered by the capitalist state!

The SWP’s claim that Curtis was the target of a vendetta by local authorities and corporate bosses in Des Moines is no more credible than its claim of federal persecution. There is, first of all, no reason to believe that anything published by the SWP on Curtis’s political activities before his arrest on rape charges is true. According to one study of the Curtis case, prepared entirely independently of the Workers League, the account given by the SWP of Curtis’s role at the Swift meat packing plant is a lie from beginning to end.

In early 1989, a San Francisco member of the Socialist Action group, Charles Adams, began to question that organization’s all-out defense of Mark Curtis. He rejected the insistence of the Socialist Action leadership that Curtis had to be presumed innocent no matter what the evidence, including the fact that a black working class girl had accused him of sexual assault and testified against him at the trial. Adams suspected that the attitude of the Socialist Action leadership had more to do with political convenience than with any consideration of the facts of the case or the rights of the victim and her family, and he decided to make his own inquiries.

Adams conducted his investigation along different lines than the Workers League. He looked into the political alibi presented by the SWP in its account of Curtis’s activities at the Swift plant, making a series of phone calls to Des Moines and speaking to Curtis’s lawyer, to the prosecutor, to officials of the United Food and Commercial Workers and to Hispanic activists involved in the defense of the immigrant workers arrested at Swift.

Adams summarized his findings in a 20-page mimeographed document, “Labor Defense and the Mark Curtis Case,” which he submitted to the Socialist Action Political Committee on July 15, 1989, and later mailed to many socialist and middle class radical organizations.

According to this document, Bill Jewett, a UFCW shop steward at the Swift plant, described Curtis as a good union member who attended meetings regularly, never made radical or socialist proposals and kept his mouth shut.

He was very quiet at meetings with only an occasional opinion concerning the topics on the agenda, Jewett told Adams.

Adams asked whether Curtis caused trouble for Swift management.

No. He’s a quiet kind of guy who kept to himself, was Jewett’s reply.

Adams asked Jewett about the reaction of rank-and-file workers at Swift to the Curtis defense campaign:

I asked him if the Mark Curtis Defense Committee had come to Swift with a petition and literature on Mark’s behalf?

‘Yes they did but on Mark’s shift and section nobody signed it.’
(Adams’s emphasis.)

Adams draws the obvious conclusion:

For his union activities at least, Mark Curtis was a complete non-entity to the ruling class and Swift and Co. in particular.

Adams then spoke to a series of people involved in the defense of the immigrant workers arrested during an INS raid on the Swift plant on March 1, 1988. These included Ina Placencia, vice president of the local chapter of LULAC, Lorenzo Jasso of the United Mexican American Community Center and another Hispanic activist, Dave Cortez. Curtis claimed to have been actively involved in the defense of the immigrants, including speaking at a well-attended public meeting, covered by the media, held on March 4, a few hours before his arrest on rape charges. But, as Cortez and Placencia told Adams, Curtis did not even attend this meeting, let alone speak at it! Adams reported:

Ms. Placencia had told me the meeting lasted about half an hour. They had been there since 1:30 and were tired. Mr. Cortez told me the same. Curtis claimed that the meeting was at the Mexican American Cultural Center. He didn’t get the name straight. It’s the United Mexican American Community Center. He claimed the meeting lasted 2 hours and he went directly to the bar. He claimed it was a big meeting. It was very small. He claimed the media were there. They weren’t. He claimed he spoke at the meeting. Nobody remembers him even at the meeting.

Mr. Jasso, Ms. Placencia, Mr. Cortez had never heard of Mark Curtis until the trial. These were the activists and none of them were worried about being framed up. Ms. Placencia told me that had he been known to the community or had anything to do with them, they would have defended him voraciously. The facts are pretty clear: until after the attack on Demetria, Mark Curtis neither socialized with nor participated in any activities of the Latino community.

And that complete zero, comrades, is the sum and substance of Mark Curtis’s activities on behalf of the undocumented workers.

In his document submitted to the political committee of Socialist Action, Adams concluded that Curtis was certainly guilty, that the SWP defense campaign was a “tawdry affair,” and that Socialist Action should withdraw its support publicly. He wrote:

When your gut reaction is to sympathize with an accused rapist of a young girl (and black) then you have to investigate not only the facts but such a reaction. When the facts are that the defendant is guilty and that his case is based on fantasy, wild allegations, and lies, you switch sides and fast.

When the Socialist Action leadership dismissed his report without considering the evidence he had uncovered, let alone challenging or answering it, Adams submitted his resignation. The Socialist Action Political Committee rejected his resignation and expelled him instead, charging him with conducting “an unauthorized investigation into the Mark Curtis case,” and one which “jeopardized Socialist Action’s adopted position of full support to the Mark Curtis case.” In other words, Adams was expelled because he uncovered information that proved that Socialist Action was supporting a rapist. After receiving a report which showed that Curtis was guilty, the degenerate middle class radicals in the Socialist Action leadership chose to maintain their unprincipled relations with the SWP and shoot the messenger who brought them the news.

There is additional evidence, this time provided by the pages of the Militant itself, that discredits the theory that Curtis and the Socialist Workers Party were the target of a bosses’ conspiracy in Des Moines. The SWP claims, in Gaige’s pamphlet, that Mark Curtis was “a dangerous man as far as the employers were concerned” and that the purpose of his arrest and prosecution was to “silence and intimidate other fighters” like Curtis.

But this assertion is directly contradicted by the actual conduct of Swift and other major corporations in Des Moines. Instead of persecuting the members of the SWP, Des Moines employers seem to have been more intent on hiring them!

Swift, where Mark Curtis worked, continued to hire SWP members at its meat packing plant in Des Moines long after Curtis was arrested, tried and jailed. Besides the two SWP members who were working at the plant at the time of Curtis’s arrest, Ellen Whitt and Marian Carr, there are four other SWP members reported by the Militant to have joined them in the Swift work force, Bob Miller, Nan Bailey, John Studer and Sara Lobman. Bailey was hired by Swift in February 1989 after running as the SWP candidate for Congress in Des Moines in the November 1988 elections, where she made the defense of Mark Curtis the major focus of her campaign. After getting the job at Swift, Bailey ran again as the SWP’s candidate for a vacant seat on the Des Moines City Council.^[1]

The hiring of Studer is even more damaging to the contention that Swift management was on the warpath against the SWP. Studer is one of the most prominent national leaders of the SWP, a member of the political committee, whose activities have been publicized in the Militant for more than a decade. He is the former head of the party’s Political Rights Defense Fund, a fund-raising operation which is the direct predecessor of the Mark Curtis Defense Committee. Studer moved to Des Moines to become a top official in the Mark Curtis campaign and immediately was hired by Swift. His last activity before being given a job at the Swift plant was to travel to Paris on behalf of the Mark Curtis defense campaign for rallies organized by the French followers of Ernest Mandel.^[2]

The claim that Des Moines employers were ganging up against the SWP becomes even more ludicrous when one considers the case of Hector Marroquin. A student from Mexico, Marroquin joined the SWP and became the subject of the party’s longest-running defense campaign, as the supposed target of persecution by the Immigration and Naturalization Service. A few weeks before Curtis went on trial in Des Moines, the INS awarded Marroquin his green card, ending an 11-year legal case. The Militant then announced that Marroquin was so moved by the plight of the convicted rapist Mark Curtis that he was taking his family to Des Moines and would spearhead the defense effort there. Within a few months, the Militant carried another report noting that Marroquin was a member of United Rubber Workers Local 310, after being hired at the Firestone Tire plant in Des Moines.^[3]

The significance of this is obvious. According to the SWP, Des Moines was the site of a furious ruling class witchhunt against their organization, centering on the supposed frame-up of Curtis. Yet one of the largest capitalist employers in the city decides to hire a well-publicized SWP leader who had moved to Des Moines for the specific purpose of campaigning for Mark Curtis!

One can only imagine the discussion in the personnel office at Firestone as Marroquin’s job application was looked over: no employment for the previous 12 years, a resident of Des Moines for only a few months, no previous experience in an industrial job, possessor of a green card withheld by the INS for a decade due to supposed “Marxist” affiliations, and an avowed defender of a man convicted of sexually assaulting the 15-year-old daughter of a Firestone worker (Denise Morris, the victim’s mother, is on layoff from the plant).

In an account cited in Jayko’s pamphlet (p. 44) Marroquin described an incident while petitioning for Curtis outside the Swift meat packing plant. He recalled that a company manager approached him and addressed him by name, saying, “How are you doing, Hector?”, thus indicating that his face and identity were well known to local bosses in Des Moines. This makes Firestone’s decision to hire him even more extraordinary.

In his pamphlet cited previously, Gaige tries to make the claim of police setup more credible by observing that after Curtis was arrested, “punching his name in the cop computer would turn up the FBI file that was established on Mark for his antiwar activities. He was one of many people targeted for illegal FBI spying in the government’s campaign against the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES).”

Personnel offices, particularly those at giant corporations like Firestone and Swift, are plugged into the same computer networks, maintained by the state and federal governments and companies like TRW. They did not hire known members of the Socialist Workers Party, including national leaders of the group such as Studer and Marroquin, out of ignorance, especially following the heavy publicity given the Curtis case in the local media. The Des Moines bosses knew they were bringing SWP members into their plants, and had a reason for doing so, as we shall see.

There is a final aspect of the Mark Curtis defense campaign which underscores the fraudulent character of the SWP’s claims of political persecution. That is the political attacks which the SWP has launched against the Workers League for its opposition to the Curtis campaign. The SWP consistently has appealed to the capitalist state and to its agencies in the labor movement, such as the trade union bureaucracy, seeking to make common cause with them against the Workers League.

Typical is the letter from Stu Singer, which accuses the Workers League of “disrupting the defense campaign for Mark Curtis and promoting the cop frame-up.” Singer then launches into a right-wing political attack on the Trotskyist movement:

In the last few years the Workers League has intervened against strikes by copper miners in Arizona, packinghouse workers in Austin, Minnesota, paperworkers in Lock Haven, Pennsylvania, and elsewhere.

In each case they tried to divide the strikers from their union and aim fire at the leadership in the midst of the strike.

This charge was further elaborated in an interview given by Hector Marroquin, the principal SWP spokesman on the Curtis defense campaign, to a petty-bourgeois radical French-language newspaper published in New York City, Haiti Progrès. Marroquin said of the Workers League, “When there is a struggle in the workers’ movement, they intervene always to create divisions, to incite the ranks against the leaders, as they did during the strike in the meat packing industry in Austin, in the copper mines in Arizona, and during the paper workers’ strike in Maine. They arrive and they say ‘the bureaucracy will sell you out.’ Rather than trying to win the maximum solidarity for a given conflict, they sow dissension.”

Marroquin added to this charge of spreading dissension during a tour of congressional offices in Washington, DC which was reported in the January 13, 1989 issue of the Militant. The report on his lobbying the Democratic congressmen on behalf of Curtis concludes with the following paragraph:

Marroquin found that many people were aware of the reactionary, divisive activities of the Workers League, a sect which is leading an international slander campaign against the Curtis defense effort. Carlotta Scott, an administrative assistant to Dellums, commented, ‘Those of us who do community work are familiar with how the Workers League operates. They prey on those already depressed and oppressed and seek to sow the seeds of disharmony and disunity.’

This political indictment of the Workers League can thus be summarized as follows: we are accused of trying to split the rank-and-file workers from the trade-union bureaucrats and split the working class as a whole from the Democratic Party politicians. On both “counts” brought by the SWP, the Workers League pleads guilty: we do seek to arm the working class against the betrayals of the trade-union bureaucracy, and we do seek to educate workers as to the class nature of the Democratic Party and the role of all Democratic politicians, including “left”-talking demagogues like Ron Dellums, in defending the capitalist system and the interests of US imperialism. These are the essential tasks of revolutionary Marxists in the American working class.

After a decade of the most monstrous betrayals by the trade-union bureaucrats in every union, and the transformation of the bureaucracy into a corporatist police force which has enforced a massive decline in living standards, jobs and working conditions and accepted the destruction of locals and entire unions, not to warn workers and prepare them to fight the pro-capitalist fifth column in the union leadership would be an outright betrayal.

Similarly, after the collaboration of the congressional Democrats with every crime of the Reagan-Bush administrations, and the attacks on the working class by Democratic Party office-holders at the state and local level, the struggle to break the working class from the straitjacket of the capitalist two-party system and illusions in the Democratic Party is an unpostponable necessity. The very strikes selected by Singer and Marroquin for their attacks on the Workers League — Phelps Dodge, Hormel and International Paper — were struggles in which the union-busting role of the Democratic Party was clearly displayed, as Arizona Governor Bruce Babbitt and Minnesota Governor Rudy Perpich called out the National Guard to break the copper miners and meat-packers strikes, while Pennsylvania Governor Robert Casey cut off unemployment benefits for the striking paper workers.

The SWP attacks the Workers League for our exposure of the phony Curtis campaign by linking this to our opposition to the trade union bureaucracy and the Democratic Party. Conversely, they seek to obtain support for Curtis by offering to defend the bureaucracy and the capitalist politicians against the criticism of the revolutionary party.

Thus an SWP supporter, while hawking Curtis material at a convention of the Ontario Federation of Labour, was heard to denounce the Workers League to union officials as they passed by, calling the Workers League an organization “that tells workers how to run their strikes.” In her speaking tours on behalf of her husband, Kate Kaku attacks the Workers League not only for opposing the Curtis campaign, but for daring to criticize the AFL–CIO bureaucracy’s policy in the Eastern strike, the greatest betrayal of the whole series of sold out and defeated strikes since PATCO. Virtually every issue of the Militant now carries a reference to the Workers League as an “antilabor outfit,” because the Workers League criticizes and exposes the betrayals of the trade union bureaucracy.

There is a final element to this political lineup. In addition to appealing to the trade union bureaucracy and the Democratic politicians to join with the SWP in a common anti-Trotskyist and anti-working class front, supporting Mark Curtis and opposing the Workers League, the SWP has enlisted another ally — the capitalist state itself! The November 18, 1988 issue of the Militant carries a notice of the endorsement of the Mark Curtis defense campaign by one Byron W. Charlton, assistant to the executive director of the African-American Labor Center, the African arm of the AFL–CIO’s notorious International Affairs Department. The December 23, 1988 issue of the Militant noted that Charlton had become an official sponsor of the Mark Curtis Defense Committee, a higher level of commitment to the campaign.

The AALC was founded by Irving Brown, dubbed “Mr. CIA in the labor movement” by the ex-CIA agent John Stockwell, who worked for US imperialism during its intervention in the Angolan civil war. It is the African equivalent of the better-known American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD), which provides a “labor” cover for CIA activities throughout the Western hemisphere. The AALC plays the same role in Africa, with the bulk of its budget coming from two long-established CIA conduits, the Agency for International Development and the National Endowment for Democracy. In the CIA-labor chain of command, Byron W. Charlton stands third. His boss is Patrick O’Farrell, executive director of the AALC, who in turn reports to Tom Kahn, the AFL-CIO’s director of international affairs, who succeeded Irving Brown upon his retirement in 1986. Brown subsequently received the Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award of US imperialism, from President Reagan, in a White House ceremony.

The Labor Network on Central America described Brown’s activities as follows:

During the sixties, Brown’s base of operation shifted to Africa. He set up the AFL-CIO’s African-American Labor Center (AALC) in 1965 and served as its first executive director until 1973. During this time, Brown established the Pan African Trade Union Center, which worked with South African and CIA-backed organizations and other counter-revolutionary forces throughout Africa.
(“The AFL-CIO in Central America,” Oakland, California, 1987)

The obvious question is how the SWP, a nominally “communist” organization, would come into contact with, let alone solicit and receive the support of, a professional anticommunist like Byron W. Charlton. This is not an endorsement from a trade union official, but from a CIA operative. Why would Charlton support a campaign which claims that the federal government has masterminded the frame-up of a leader of the SWP, when Charlton himself is a functionary of the federal government, assisting in the direction of its counterrevolutionary operations on the African continent?

We will return to the question of Byron W. Charlton when we examine the foreign activities of the Socialist Workers Party. But here let us confine the issue to examining what has been revealed about the political basis of the Mark Curtis defense campaign. The Curtis campaign is in staggering contrast to all the major past campaigns in the labor movement to defend genuine victims of government frameups. The defense of frame-up victims from Big Bill Haywood to Gary Tyler is always directed to the movement of the working class against the capitalist system. But the SWP directs the Curtis campaign, not to the insurgent working class, but to the principal enemies of the working class and defenders of the capitalist system, the trade union bureaucracy, the Democratic Party, and the agencies of the capitalist state itself. The SWP openly links the Curtis campaign to defense of the bureaucracy and the Democratic Party against the revolutionary opposition of the working class. The Curtis campaign is, in the fullest sense of the word, the expression of counterrevolutionary politics in the workers’ movement.

The political axis of the Curtis defense campaign provides a further gauge to measure the degeneration of the petty-bourgeois radical tendencies who are the principal apologists for the Socialist Workers Party provocation. Not one of these groups — Socialist Action, Spark, Truth, the Fourth Internationalist Tendency, the Morenoite Internationalist Workers Party, the Revolutionary Workers League, Solidarity, the Spartacist League — has objected to the SWP’s appeal to the trade union bureaucracy and the Democratic Party, on an explicitly right-wing and anti-working-class basis. None of them has objected to joining a united front with an imperialist agent like Byron W. Charlton. None of them has so much as taken note of the fact that the Mark Curtis campaign is the first “labor defense campaign” ever endorsed by the CIA!