Wrp Frames Hansen

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The police raid on the rbyshire education centre the Workers Revolutionary ity and the subsequent newalling by the Home Fice and police authorities, derline the increase in Ice attention and harassnt directed at organisations the revolutionary left. The same point was highlighted a right wing Labour MP in pember, who spoke in a Lamentary debate on the public ading cuts, congratulating ton on his mutilation of the jal services, but pleading that ading on police forces should be intained to the full.

And indeed the two go hand in *d. As the Labour leaders are ted by the economic crisis to ach an all-out assault on the is of the working class pement, the state apparatus bers itself up for disruption, assment and frame-ups of blutionaries and left wingers. At the same time the economic I political crisis thoroughly tests every 'revolutionary' anisation - its cadre, its gramme and policies, its defence principle, and its ability to fight I build within the workers moveit. Any 'party' which is prepared, in which routine has aced the ferment dutionary politics, in which the • has become an everyday dement of polemic, must vitably be thrown into a severe mal crisis.

Thus it is with the Workers salutionary Party, which a year i set the seal to its political -meration by expelling wholesale I opposition tendency (later to • the Workers Socialist League) lich was fighting for a return to munist methods and to the ¡stitional Programme of the furth International.

It is against this background that i must assess the long series of sides published by its General aretary, Gerry Healy together th the WRP leadership on purity and the Fourth ternational (Workers Press: 7 adles April 19th-26th, 1975, and ! articles August 14th-September 1, 1975).

PURPOSE The prime purpose of these ties is very simple, as is made tar in the concluding articles. It is frame Joseph Hansen, along with er members - alive and dead - of = world Trotskyist movement. Hansen, who is now a leading fure of the American Socialist orkers Party (sympathising ganisation of the «United *retariat of the Fourth ternational') was in charge of the edyguards at Coyoacan, Mexico, • August 20th, 1940 when potsky was murdered by Stalin's Tat. The articles in Workers Press use him (in assertions thinly Fled as questions, or in sinuations) of being, since before 40, an agent of the FBi, or of the talinist GPU, or both!

The preceding articles - which taw almost entirely on materials at are published and have been ven for some time - are all designed. to lead up to this aclusion: that for forty years the 7P has had a police spy in its ialitical leadership, and that the truggle, since the split of 1963, *ween Healy and Hansen has ren, in reality, a struggle against police provocations.

As the WRP leadership say, their porsations (if true) raise very grave Toblems for the SWP and the Ford Trotskyist movement. But it worth noticing • that these acusations also seek to solve some *oblems for Healy and the WRP Fadership - they relieve them of he need to carry out a political truggle!

For what is the point of mobilising and convincing the world Trotskyist movement - if your principal adversaries are not genuine political opponents but police spies?

Evidently, none! And that is why, hand-in-hand with the WRP's political degeneration and paralysis, has come a rich harvest of such accusations.

But what of the specific charges against Hansen? Hansen himself (Intercontinental Press, 24th November) easily demolishes the main points as simple lies and rigging of the evidence. We take just one example from the mountain of circumstancial titbits under which the WRP "investigators' seek to bury him: a report from Robert G. McGregor, a US diplomatic official in Mexico City, of his conversation with Hansen on Saturday, August 31st, 1940 - 10 11 days after Trotsky's murder.

To this report (in the form of a memorandum forwarded to the State Department by the US Consul) Healy's investigators' add evidence or qualification, as "fact') that McGregor was an FBI agent (at this time the FBI had not been replaced by the CIA on overseas work), and draw the following inferences: 1. That Hansen was familiar with an FBI official and met with him probably "clandestinely', and certainly out of office hours (ie on a Saturday). 2. That Hansen deliberately attempted to direct the search for the GPU network which planned Trotsky's assassination away from Europe (where it was mainly based) towards the USA.

In order to steer towards these conclusions Healy's journalists -unfortunately for them - are obliged to twist the facts in the most barefaced way:

1. They deliberately disguise the fact that Hansen was only one of at least four members of the Trotskyist movement - the others being two Americans, Charles Cornell and Walter O'Rourke, and Trotsky himself - who had private discussions with McGregor both before and after Trotsky's death.

These conversations were all, no doubt, reported equally swiftly to the State Department, especially after the failure of the May attempt by the Stalinists on Trotsky's life and the kidnapping (and later Laim Amariran Hansen their own main insinuation that Hansen was an FBI agent - that Hansen was both misleading the FBI and, is implied, the Trotskyist movement by guiding the search for those who planned Trotsky's murder • towards the United States, instead of France.

This is then used to boister the additional accusation that Hansen deliberately covered up the role of the most important Stalinist agent in the Fourth International, Mark ('Etienne') who Trolskyisds in Paris in the 1930°$ murder spied on the Trotskyist movement there.

In fact (as Hansen's reply makes clear there were excellent reasons for the Trotskyist movement to try and protect itself by using the resources of the capitalist states anc (in particular in this case) to try and persuade the FBI to probe clandestine Stalinist activity in the USA (the country where the FBI was in charge) for clues as to the murder of Trotsky. In August 1940 this required concentrating attention of the State Department on anti-Trotskyist conspiracies by the GPU inside the USA.

The ideas that Hansen could both be an agent of the FBI and deliberately misleading them are one glaring loose end in the WRP frame-up - there are many others.

This is the case even though Healy's 'sleuths' include at least one man -Mr Alex Mitchell, editor of Workers Press - with detailed knowledge of police and espionage techniques.

And what they make no attempt to explain is why - if Hansen was the FBI's agent - he should maintain contact with them (as is implied)

by meeting in public with a US official well-known to several other Trotskyists and why a report on this contact should be sent using his real name in the normal correspondence, to later finish up among publically available State Department papers - while Hansen is still a leading SWP member?

Such conduct would contradict every groundrule of clandestine work. It is, of course, logically conceivable that while Hansen's meeting with McGregor was wholly legitimate (and McGregor's report does nothing to suggest otherwise)

he was simultaneously in undisclosed contact with the FBI through quite different channels -but the WRP produce not one shred of evidence to support such a handling facts and evidence carries right through the series Security and the Fourth International. For example, they uncritically accept all aspects of the testimony (before American criminal courts and witch-hunting committees of Congress) of a range of ex-Stalinists stool pigeons and exposed Soviet spies, busy 'singing' to save their skins.

One such is Louis F. Budenz, a notorious Judas throughout the US labour movement, a one-time GPU agent, and subsequently managing editor of the American CP's Daily Worker. In October 1946 Budenz announced his renunciation of communism and his return to the Roman Catholic Church. A month later he was a star witness before the McCarthyite Home Un-American Activities Committee, slinging mud at every brand of 'communist.

For years he made a living from slanders and inventions, mainly against the Stalinists. But this is not all - Budenz played (according to testimony before congressional committees) a big role in driving Trotsky to Mexico from Norway in 1936.

It was Budenz, then New York editor of the Daily Worker, who supplied the 'confidential evidence' of violent plots by Trotsky which was used by Stalin's ambassador in Osio to twist the arm of the Norwegian government into placing Trotsky under house arrest at the height of the Moscow purge trials, and then expelling hill. Press Mr But for Workers Budenz is all good stuff. They are quite content to use iragments from his writings and testimony investigations together cobble together their murder, and to help frame Hansen. Budenz opens his autobiography (This is my Story, 1957) with a prayer to "the Mother of God, Mary of the Magnificat" and rejoices that "but for her amazing assistance" his story could not have been told. Precisely the same can be said of the story told by the WRP's "investigations'!

What makes the matter even more serious is that the slanders to which Hansen replies are by no means an isolated instance. In the last two years or so similar Healy (in front) ,behind WRP CC ba insinuations, in writing or verbally, have been levelled by Healy and the WRP leadership against a number of individuals and tendencies in the labour movement, including:

1. The 'Bulletin' group, sympathising organisation in Britain of the 'Organising Committee for the reconstruction of the Fourth 2. Members of the 1974 opposition within the WRP which, after its unconstitutional expulsion by Healy, fought on to form the WSL.

3.Tim Wohlforth, former leader of the Workers League, sympathising International Committee' in the 4 Members of the 'International Spartacist Tendency' in Australia.

This cascade of mud-slinging -neither substantiated nor and Stalinist agents who undoubtedly operate in the ranks of the Trotskyist movement.

It serves only to divert from political struggle on the life-and-death issues now facing the international working class - of the struggle for revolutionary programme and for resolving the crisis of leadership within the working class and the Trotskyist movement itself.

Healy's calumnies, therefore, run parallel to one of the main pursuits of the police agencies themselves -the circulation of false and disruptive accusations that revolutionaries involved in internal political battles are themselves police provocateurs.

For example, among the FBI files released as a result of Congressional investigations and legal moves taken by the leadership of Hansen's Socialist Workers Party are documents showing that in January 1962 the New York Office of the FBI attempted an elaborate provocation which involved feeding the SWP leadership forged evidence the Jack Arnold, (a member of the minority tendency supported by Healy within the SWP) was an FBI informant.

The aim was to disrupt the political struggle by having Arnold expelled.

In fact, it appears, the FBI's scheme got nowhere because the SWP leadership refused to act on anonymous 'evidence' which they considered fake.

But Healy and the WRP leadership, as we have seen, readily resort themselves to the faking of evidence. This is all the more criminal since the WRP leadership now includes Alex Mitchell who has studied in some detail the methods of British police and intelligance agencies and who must be aware that such frame-ups are a standard technique.

Mitchell, present editor of Workers Press, was previously employed as a journalist on the Sunday Times. And in the late 1960's he acted as research assistant in the writing of a book by members of the Sunday Times inner with Slaughter (right)

staff on the Philby-Burgess-Maclean affair * and its widespread repurcussions in the British intelligance services_ (Philby, the Spy Who Betrayed a Generation, by Page, Leitch and Knightley, 1968).

As the Prefacemakes clear, research for this book involved not only study of publically available material, but extensive off-therecord' contact with those prepared to give an 'inside' account to journalists regarded as reliable.

Presumably Mr Mitchell no longer involves himself in Saturday * Philby was the Soviet agent who, after the war, was put in charge of British intelligence operations against the Soviet Union, and, later, liaison with the CIA. His exposure caused, to put it mildly, a major shake-up in the methods and anaenol of tha Rritich intelligence

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by Paul O'Flinn. PLUTO PRESS 60p. Wednesday, REVIEWED 'age 5