Source: https://www9.wsws.org/en/articles/2016/12/09/secu-d09.html
Timestamp: 2019-04-18 16:17:47+00:00

Document:
Seventy-five years ago, on December 8, 1941, 18 Trotskyists were sentenced to prison for advocating the overthrow of the US government. Below is the second part of a two-part article based on information gathered from the valuable book Trotskyists on Trial: Free Speech and Political Persecution Since the Age of FDR, by Donna T. Haverty-Stacke. In addition, the article draws from the World Socialist Web Site’s independent investigation of thousands of pages of trial transcripts, SWP archive material, and previously unavailable FBI records brought to light by Haverty-Stacke.
The first part of the article was posted on December 8.
In her recently published book Trotskyists on Trial, Professor Donna Haverty-Stacke makes use of trial records and newly available FBI records to investigate how the FBI prepared for the prosecution of 29 members of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in the Smith Act trial of 1941.
The material presented by Haverty-Stacke provides a much clearer picture of this key period in the history of the socialist movement. It lends enormous weight to documents uncovered by the International Committee of the Fourth International in 1975 as part of its “Security and the Fourth International” investigation, which revealed that the State Department and FBI held meetings, beginning in September 1940, with a leading figure in the SWP, Joseph Hansen. In the context of the new material published by Haverty-Stacke, one central question arises: Why was Joseph Hansen absent from the list of defendants in the Smith Act trial?
The documents published in the initial Security and the Fourth International investigation show that Joseph Hansen established communication with the US government after Trotsky’s assassination. Between 1975 and 1978, the investigation raised the question: why would Hansen have been interested in contacting the government, and why did he do so without notifying the SWP leadership? Hansen claimed in Healy’s Big Lie that he met with the FBI “just once.”  This was proven to be untrue.
Hansen had spent three years as Trotsky’s personal assistant in Coyoacan, Mexico. Of the small handful of Americans residing at Trotsky’s compound, Hansen was the most politically involved and had the closest connections with the leadership of the SWP in the US. Ten days after Trotsky’s death on August 21, 1940, Hansen contacted the US Embassy in Mexico City with the hope of opening up a confidential relationship with the US government.
Hansen’s meetings were carefully followed by the highest levels of the American government. Figures such as George P. Shaw, Robert McGregor and B.E. Sackett were assigned to lead and follow the investigation. Shaw, a high-ranking State Department diplomat, had worked at the US consulate in Tegucigalpa, Honduras; San Luis Potosi, Mexico; and Ciudad Juarez, Mexico and was later to serve as ambassador to Nicaragua, El Salvador and Paraguay.  McGregor served as secretary of the US consulate in Mexico, and Sackett was the special agent in charge of the New York division of the FBI. Within weeks of Hansen’s first contact, J. Edgar Hoover was personally monitoring the meetings between Hansen and government officials.
Other officials following Hansen’s case included Raymond E. Murphy of the State Department and H.H. Clegg of the FBI. Murphy was a well-connected State Department officer who was later to champion prosecution of suspected spy J. Alger Hiss. Murphy was the State Department official who first made information about Whittaker Chambers available to Congressman Richard M. Nixon of the House Un-American Activities Committee.  Clegg was a veteran FBI agent who later served as assistant director of the FBI.  Government officials handled the matter with great delicacy and interest.
During this first meeting, Hansen provided the government with information surrounding the assassination. At this time, Hansen communicated to the US government that he had met for three months in 1938 with agents of Stalin’s secret police, the GPU. McGregor’s report from the August 31 meeting notes that Hansen said “he was himself approached by an agent of the GPU and asked to desert the Fourth International and join the Third.” The report states that Hansen met with a GPU handler named “John” for three months.  Hansen’s astonishing admission brought heightened attention to these meetings.
On September 14, embassy official McGregor sent another “strictly confidential” letter to the State Department noting that Hansen had returned to the consulate that day to turn over confidential information to the US government. The report begins: “Mr. Joseph Hansen, Secretary to the late Leon Trotsky, called this morning and exhibited a memorandum, a photo stat of which is attached.”  This was the “W Memorandum”—a list of names of GPU agents the SWP had received from Whittaker Chambers, a former member of the Communist Party who later aided the US government in the anti-communist witch-hunt of the late 1940s and early 1950s.
The letter from American Consul to Mexico, George P. Shaw, to top State Department official Raymond E. Murphy informing him that Joseph Hansen “wants to be put in touch with someone” in order to pass on “confidential information” “with impunity.” Dated September 25, 1940.
News that Hansen sought to “impart information” with “impunity” soon made its way to J. Edgar Hoover, who became personally involved in overseeing the government’s meetings with Hansen and the management of his status as an informant.
Joseph Hansen writes to George P. Shaw, the US Consul in Mexico City, thanking him “respectfully” for arranging his confidential contact with the FBI. Dated October 23, 1940.
On October 23, Hansen replied to George P. Shaw. “I received your letter concerning Mr. Sackett in good condition and shall visit him shortly,” Hansen wrote in response to Shaw’s September 30 letter.  Hansen was notifying the government that no members of the SWP had intercepted the letter.
Hansen carried out his meetings with the US government behind the backs of the leadership of the SWP. Several leading figures of the SWP denied having any knowledge of Hansen’s communications with the government and insisted that the leadership did not consider approaching the FBI after Trotsky’s death.
On June 2, 1977, David North, the national secretary of the Workers League, the predecessor of the Socialist Equality Party, interviewed Felix Morrow, a Smith Act defendant who served on the SWP Political Committee in 1940.
Q: I was wondering whether or not you had any recollection about the steps taken by the Socialist Workers Party at the time to learn more about the assassination, how it was carried out. Particularly whether it received any assistance from the American government in any way.
Q: Well, what was the attitude of the FBI, in your opinion, toward the assassination?
Morrow: They weren’t involved in any way.
Q: Well, did the SWP to your knowledge have any policy of trying to obtain the assistance of the FBI?
Morrow: There would be no reason. It was an open and shut case. Jacson had done it. The only problem was to establish that Jacson was a GPU agent.
Q: I see. Then to your knowledge the SWP made no initiative at any time toward establishing contact with the FBI?
Morrow: I’m sure of that.
Q: You’re sure of that?
Q: Let me ask you something. Who was more or less in charge in the party with investigating the death of Trotsky? I know that Goldman wrote a book on the assassination.
Morrow: Well, all involved—you know, the whole Pol-Com (Political Committee).
Q: I see. How about Joseph Hansen?
Morrow: He was down in Mexico.
Q: And when he came back in late September 1940?
Morrow: He was not a member of the Pol-Com.
Q: And therefore he would not have been given a special responsibility?
Q: Does the name Sackett mean anything to you?
Q: It means nothing to you?
Q: Politically speaking, in that period of time, as I recall there was some serious problem in terms of repression against the SWP and the labor movement by the FBI. This was before the war.
Q: In 1940, around the period of August, had the repression already started, building up toward the Minneapolis case?
Morrow: I would say so.
Q: In what particular way?
Q: The heat was on?
Morrow: Yes, the heat was on.
Q: And by the beginning of 1941, it probably became quite serious?
Morrow: There was no reliance on the FBI.
Morrow: It just didn’t exist.
Q: … for someone to suggest that be done?
Q: I’m asking this because the question has come up in documentation, but to you that would be complete news.
Q: I see, and you’re quite sure that there was never any authorization.
Morrow’s statements were supported by the depositions taken of SWP Political Committee members Farrell Dobbs and Morris Lewit, and of Morrow, during the Gelfand Case.  Each of these leading SWP officials testified that he had no knowledge of Hansen’s secret meetings with the FBI.
Burton: Did you know that in 1940 Mr. Hansen had face-to-face meetings with the FBI in New York City?
Q: Did you ever talk to Mr. Hansen about his meetings with the FBI?
Morris Lewit led the SWP while Cannon, Morrow, Dobbs and others were imprisoned. He was deposed on April 13, 1982 and gave similar testimony.
Burton: At that time did you know whether or not Hansen had met with the FBI in New York City following Trotsky’s assassination?
Lewit: I might have known it from the Healyites’ statements, the documents. I don’t know.
Q: Did you consider at that time that allegation to be a lie?
The internal US government reports indicate that Hansen evinced no “reluctance” to talk to government officials in private. It was only when confronted by the FBI in the presence of James P. Cannon that Hansen kept silent.
In Trotskyists on Trial, Donna Haverty-Stacke lays out evidence that the FBI’s infiltration of the SWP underwent a fundamental change in the autumn of 1940, at precisely the time Hansen established contact with the FBI. FBI Agent Roy T. Noonan testified at trial that the agency developed specific files on key SWP leaders “in the latter part of 1940.”  (Emphasis added).
Goldman: And how long before that did the investigation start, as far as you know?
Noonan: I know that the investigation was being conducted in February and March , and I know that we have had information regarding some of the defendants long before that.
G: How long before that?
Hansen wrote to George P. Shaw on October 23, 1940 that he “shall visit [FBI Agent B.E. Sackett] shortly” at his office in New York. Hansen had requested the meeting earlier for the express purpose of “imparting information” with “impunity” to the government.
Hansen returned to New York City in the “fall of 1940,” and Agent Noonan placed emphasis on “November 1940” as the date the infiltration reached a higher stage. Such a date strongly correlates with Hansen’s return to the US and the fact that he promised on October 23 that he would visit with B.E. Sackett shortly, i.e., at the end of October or early November 1940.
The public record of the communications between Hansen and the FBI stops after the October 23, 1940 note. This indicates that after Hansen returned to New York, the relationship took on a higher level of confidentiality and was subject to more stringent classification rules, which have hidden the communications from public view.
Haverty-Stacke’s book provides a context for the peculiar language included in the agreement Hansen sought, in which he would receive “impunity” in return for sharing information with the government. According to Black’s Law Dictionary, “impunity” means: “Exemption from punishment; immunity from the detrimental effects of one’s actions. Cf. Immunity.”  Hansen’s request for personal legal protection had a purely individual character. He would not have made such a request if he had been contacting the FBI with the approval of the SWP.
There are two likely reasons why Hansen would have sought exemption from punishment by the government.
The first related to the disappearance of George Mink. J. Edgar Hoover stated specifically that Hansen was to be questioned concerning the disappearance of Mink, a Stalinist agent who vanished in the early part of 1940 and was presumed murdered. Hansen’s admitted ties to the GPU gave the FBI reason to believe he was linked to Mink’s disappearance.
In his October 1, 1940 letter to B.E. Sackett, J. Edgar Hoover provided his agent with background information surrounding Hansen’s ties to the GPU and his possible knowledge of Mink’s disappearance.
The FBI was interested in Mink because he was a well known GPU agent and a US citizen. Mink, a former Philadelphia taxi driver, had traveled back and forth to Moscow and throughout Europe, where he was imprisoned in Denmark in 1935 as a Stalinist spy. Upon his release, Mink worked for the GPU in Spain during the Civil War. The Anarchist Carlo Tresca accused Mink of murdering the anarchist professor Camillo Berneri on behalf of the GPU in Barcelona.  His whereabouts and disappearance were of high importance to the FBI.
There is nothing to suggest that Hoover thought the Trotskyists were responsible for Mink’s death. Hoover’s use of the term “Hansen and his associates” is a reference to the GPU, which Hoover suspected of killing Mink. The Trotskyists did not engage in assassination of opponents as a matter of political principle and could not have been responsible. Moreover, they had neither the manpower nor the skill to carry out the assassination of a skilled GPU killer. The breach of Trotsky’s residence in Coyoacan by the Stalinist assassination team in May 1940 and the failure of the guards to return fire give an indication of the inexperienced character of Trotsky’s defense guard.
A second reason for Hansen to seek exemption from punishment stemmed from the possibility that the government would prosecute the SWP. Hansen used Trotsky’s assassination as a pretext to establish ties with the government. At this point, the FBI was already active in monitoring the SWP and was considering the possibility of prosecution. By requesting legal “impunity,” Hansen sought to ensure that neither his past actions nor the information he provided would be used against him as grounds for indictment or prosecution. The fact that he did not appear as a defendant or even as a witness in the trial indicates that he did, in fact, receive impunity.
During the trial of the 29 members of the Socialist Workers Party, the prosecution’s theory of the case was based on showing a connection between the chief conspirator, Leon Trotsky, and the Socialist Workers Party. This required a detailed showing of each and every connection between Trotsky, who was living in exile in Mexico City, and the Socialist Workers Party.
A reference in Cannon’s memorial address after Trotsky’s assassination in which he notes visiting Mexico to help strengthen Trotsky’s guard.
One name emerges as an obvious evidentiary keystone to the prosecution’s case: Joseph Hansen. Hansen lived with Trotsky in the latter’s compound in Coyoacan and served as his political secretary from 1937 until Trotsky’s assassination by a Stalinist agent on August 20, 1940. He participated in daily political discussions with Trotsky and was chiefly responsible for overseeing communication between the SWP and Coyoacan. Many of Trotsky’s communications to the SWP dating from this period were signed “J. Hansen” for security purposes.
Hansen personified the connection between the SWP and Trotsky, the precise legal issue the prosecution sought to prove. He was intimately familiar with the discussions between the SWP leadership and Trotsky regarding the split with the Burnham-Shachtman faction of the SWP in 1939-40, the development of the party’s policy toward conscription in World War Two, and the development of the policy for the establishment of union defense guards. Each of these issues, and, in particular, the latter two, were repeatedly used by the prosecution to show that the SWP and Trotsky were engaging in a conspiratorial plan to overthrow the US government.
The US attorneys were aware of Hansen’s position as Trotsky’s secretary and Hansen’s name is referenced multiple times in the course of the trial. From a prosecutorial standpoint, the fact that Hansen was not even subpoenaed to testify defies explanation.
Had the SWP leadership known of Hansen’s visits with the FBI, the SWP’s defense attorneys would have made heavy use of this key fact at trial.
First, it would have been a major political embarrassment for the Roosevelt administration if it became known that it had held secret meetings with a group it was now prosecuting for conspiracy to overthrow the government.
Second, the fact that the FBI had infiltrated the SWP leadership in advance of the trial would have served as evidence of the anti-democratic, frame-up character of the trial. The defense attorneys could have moved for a mistrial on the grounds that the secret meetings made it impossible to differentiate between the genuine plans of the SWP and suggestions made by government agents and FBI officials. Proof of Hansen’s meetings could have been used to show that the FBI sought to entrap the SWP into advancing conspiratorial demands, rendering the whole trial illegitimate.
The most common form of such an “affirmative act” in American criminal law is to inform on other members of the conspiracy.
Even with the SWP’s main leadership in jail, the FBI remained concerned that the party was a significant revolutionary force. The infiltration that began with the preparation for the 1941 prosecution was greatly expanded. Based on the acquisition of new information in the autumn of 1940, the FBI began to lay the foundation for a network of informants that gave the government a clear view into the inner workings of the SWP and the Fourth International.
During the Second World War, Hoover believed the SWP remained a significant political force. His nervousness is exemplified by a letter he sent to Assistant Attorney General Wendell Berge in May 1943 in which he notes that the SWP picketed a showing of the pro-Stalinist propaganda film Mission to Moscow.
“Information has been received that on the evening of April 30, 1943, members of the subject organization [the SWP] picketed the opening of the film ‘Mission to Moscow’ playing at the Hollywood Theater, Times Square, New York City,” the memo reads.
In 1945, Hoover disobeyed a Justice Department order that no further investigations of the SWP be carried out. It appears that the sources gained in “November 1940” through the spring of 1941 stayed on as long-term assets of the FBI. Hoover successfully shielded his assets from being exposed at trial.
The “well-placed informants” within the leadership of the SWP remained in their positions and were not exposed by giving testimony during the trial.
Reports composed by agents in 1946-48 on branches of the SWP in the US were sometimes 60 to 80 pages long. These reports included detailed, multi-paragraph reports on individual party members, their home addresses, the ages of their children, their places of employment, their places of birth, their citizenship status and details regarding personal relationships and affairs.
Throughout this period, FBI agents prepared detailed reports on the activities of key members. There were long reports regarding Cannon, Vincent Dunne, Grace Carlson and Farrell Dobbs, just some of those who remained subject to close monitoring after their release from prison.
The structure of the FBI’s post-war infiltration was as follows: The highest-level information came from at least 20 “Confidential Informants” who were in personal communication with FBI officials on a regular basis. FBI records indicate that these informants provided information about political meetings, disagreements and the state of the movement internationally. Certain agents, code-named “T-1” through “T-4,” “T-14,” “T-19” and “ND 452,” had intimate knowledge of the leadership of all branches and clearly occupied key roles in the SWP leadership.
So valuable were a certain number of these agents that the FBI notes they were “not in a position to testify” in case the government decided to bring further prosecution. The fact that the FBI received full reports of Political Committee meetings and party plenums from different confidential informant sources shows that the highest levels of leadership were compromised by agents of the state.
A rung below the confidential informants was a network of lower-level sources and agents who were members of the SWP in local areas and reported to their specified handlers on local party activities, political disagreements, and the lives of individual members. The FBI had a ring of agents in place in all areas where the party had a presence.
Yet even as the SWP’s lawsuit dragged on, the party expelled one of its own members, Alan Gelfand, because he asked the SWP to explain the communications between Hansen and the FBI in 1940. The SWP denounced Gelfand, called the Security and the Fourth International investigation a “big lie,” and collaborated with the government to protect known agents of the Soviet secret police—the GPU—from testifying as to the Stalinists’ role in infiltrating the SWP. Hansen himself died in the weeks before the Gelfand Case began.
The proof depends on an intricate web of circumstantial evidence which leads inexorably to the nexus between the infiltration of the SWP by agents of the federal government and the expulsion of plaintiff. The facts of this case are embedded in great historical events. Their ever-widening spiral sweeps back into the past, embracing within its bounds an increasing number of individuals, including Trotsky himself and those closest to him during his last heroic exile. If a more direct and less arduous road to truth were available, plaintiff gladly would have taken it. Nonetheless, when fact is added to fact, and each is evaluated in its proper relationship to the other, the conclusion becomes inescapable that something is very, very wrong with the leadership of the Socialist Workers Party.
While documentary records exist proving the beginning of Hansen’s confidential relationship with the FBI, no documents have yet surfaced showing that this relationship ended.
None of this evidence has been answered by Hansen’s defenders.
 Hansen, Joseph, Healy’s Big Lie: The Slander Campaign Against Joseph Hansen, George Novack, and the Fourth International: Statements and Articles, (New York: National Education Dept., Socialist Workers Party, 1976), Print, p. 14.
 Political Graveyard Entry for George Price Shaw, accessible at http://politicalgraveyard.com/bio/shaw.html; US State Department History Office of the Historian Entry for George Price Shaw, accessible at https://history.state.gov/departmenthistory/people/shaw-george-price?
 Morgan, Ted. A Covert Life: Jay Lovestone: Communist, Anti-Communist, and Spymaster, (New York, New York: Random House, 1999), Print, p. 149.
 Historical G-Men: “1930s FBI Biographies and More.” Entry for H. H. Clegg, accessible at http://historicalgmen.squarespace.com/agents-of-the-30s-biographie/.
 Letter from George P. Shaw to US Secretary of State Enclosing Memorandum of Conversation Between Robert G. McGregor and Hansen, September 1, 1940. (Cited in The Gelfand Case: A Legal History of the Exposure of U.S. Government Agents in the Leadership of the Socialist Workers Party. Vol. 1. Detroit, MI: Labor Publications, 1985. Print, p. 7).
 Id. (The Gelfand Case at 8).
 Letter from George P. Shaw to US Secretary of State Enclosing Memorandum for File of Robert G. McGregor, September 4, 1940 (The Gelfand Case at 10).
 Memorandum of Robert G. McGregor of Conversation with Joseph Hansen, September 14, 1940 (The Gelfand Case at 13).
 Id. (The Gelfand Case at 14).
 Letter from George P. Shaw to US Secretary of State, September 25, 1940 (The Gelfand Case at 19).
 Letter from George P. Shaw to Raymond Murphy, US State Department, September 25, 1940 (The Gelfand Case at 21).
 Letter from Raymond E. Murphy to Mr. J.B. Little, Federal Bureau of Investigation, September 28, 1940 (The Gelfand Case at 23).
 Letter from Raymond E. Murphy to George P. Shaw, September 28, 1940 (The Gelfand Case at 24-25).
 Letter from George P. Shaw to Joseph Hansen, September 30, 1940 (The Gelfand Case at 26).
 Letter from J. Edgar Hoover to B.E. Sackett, Special Agent in Charge, October 1, 1949 (The Gelfand Case at 29).
 Id. (The Gelfand Case at 29-30).
 Letter from Joseph Hansen to George P. Shaw, October 23, 1949 (The Gelfan d Case at 31).
 Interview by David North of Felix Morrow, June 2, 1977.
 The Gelfand case was a civil lawsuit brought by Alan Gelfand, a member of the SWP who was expelled for raising questions about Hansen’s communications with the FBI and GPU. Gelfand sued alleging that the US government was violating his First Amendment rights by using its agents in the SWP to expel him from a political organization.
 Deposition of Farrell Dobbs, Gelfand v. Smith et al., 178, 182.
 Deposition of Morris Lewit, Gelfand v. Smith et al., 144.
 Cross Examination of Agent Roy T. Noonan, US v. Dunne et al., 372.
 Cross Examination of Agent Roy T. Noonan, US v. Dunne et al., 371-372.
 Black’s Law Dictionary (9th ed.) at 826.
 Letter from J. Edgar Hoover to B.E. Sackett, Special Agent in Charge, October 1, 1940 (The Gelfand Case at 29-30).
 Dewar, Hugo. “Chapter 7: The Lady Vanishes.” Assassins at Large, Being a Fully Documented and Hitherto Unpublished Account of the Executions Outside Russia Ordered by the GPU, (Boston: Beacon, 1952), Print.
 For further details, see The Labor Spy Racket, by Leo Huberman, U.S. Congress Senate Committee on Education and Labor, Modern Age Books, NY, NY, 1937.
 Closing argument of US Attorney Anderson, US v. Dunne et al., 2492.
 Testimony of James Bartlett, US v. Dunne et al., 228.
 Closing Argument of US Attorney Anderson, US v. Dunne et al., 2457.
 See Boxes 109 and 110, SWP 146-1-10, including, for example, FBI Report 100-4013, New York.
 June 12, 1948 Memorandum For the Attorney General, RE: Socialist Workers Party—Internal Security—SWP, Box 110 SWP 146-1-10.

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