Know Your Enemies

“A Threat of the First Magnitude – FBI Counter-Intelligence and Infiltration from the Communist Party to the Revolutionary Union 1962-1974,” by Aaron Leonard & Conor Gallagher, 2017

This book is a follow-up to the authors' prior book, “Heavy Radicals,” which focused on the Maoist Revolutionary Union (RU) in the 1960s and 1970s.  This expands to include more on the RU; the Communist Party (CP) and a key informer in their leadership, Morris Childs; an Asian activist in the Bay Area, Richard Aoki, who was a member of the Black Panthers and the Socialist Workers Party; and efforts directed against James Forman of the Black Workers Congress.  The main point the authors want to make is that ‘human intelligence’ – i.e. infiltrated agents – are the top form of intelligence, and can even be used for internal sabotage on a large scale.  This book, while historically relevant to those many cadre who went through the communist movement or are still in it, is not merely a history.  It shows the limitations of human or electronic surveillance that the Church Committee only focused on.  The issue of deep agents was never exposed by them and is not irrelevant to any progressive organization, even today.  That is the real value of this book.

The Title is the FBI's description of RU

There seem to be four kinds of infiltrators and tactics.  The first are politically unsophisticated people that take pictures, gather information, give rides and bake cookies.   The second are the obvious provocateurs who are always advocating violence – bombs, guns, what-have-you.  The third are the most dangerous.  They are highly-sophisticated agents who master leftist rhetoric and insinuate themselves into leadership positions.  The fourth are actual fake organizations – in this case an ostensible Maoist faction in the Chicago CP called the “The Ad Hoc Committee for a Marxist-Leninist Party.”  This group was run by the Chicago FBI, put ads in the National Guardian newspaper and issued Maoist bulletins attacking the CP from the left. Anyone contacting them was put under surveillance.  These latter two tactics are the focus of this book.

Other groups that were targets of police infiltration at the time  – Socialist Workers Party, Progressive Labor Party (PL), Black Workers Congress (BWC), League of Revolutionary Black Workers, Black Panther Party and other leftist, mostly Maoist or Trotskyist groups, are mentioned but not focused on extensively.  Their infiltration history is yet to be written.

As I pointed out in the prior review of “Heavy Radicals,” the FBI had a deep interest in breaking up any unification of left-wing organizations.  Early on an internal FBI agent, Darrell Grover, urged the Maoist RU to attack the Maoist PL in RU’s “Red Papers #1.” The FBI then pushed for a split in Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) against PL in 1969. This split slowly destroyed SDS, the left’s largest mass organization.  Later Don Wright, in the leadership of RU, worked to break up a promising 1973 unification of a number of Maoist organizations in the U.S. that were working together in the ‘National Liaison Committee.’  The NLC fell apart.  The same Wright worked to sideline James Forman of the BWC and LRBW, an influential leader who came out of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and had moved towards Marxism.  The BWC and the LRBW were heavily involved in the workers movement in the Detroit auto plants.  Their dispersal was a key goal of the FBI. 

The authors show the many splits in the Maoist movement, which should give that old tired joke about '3 Trotskyists in a room' the final heave-ho.

Through Morris Childs' top position in the CP, the FBI (and CIA) got the latest intelligence on the split between the USSR and China, as Childs traveled and met leaders from the USSR.  Childs was part of a large operation against the CP, as the FBI had 400 informants in the CP even after it began hemorrhaging members.  The split between the two largest bureaucrat-run workers' states was made definitive in 1972 when Nixon visited Mao in China, making a bloc with China.  Later the Chinese CP came out with the ‘Three World’s Theory,’ which maintained that the USSR was the ‘main enemy’ of the world’s workers, not the U.S.  This theory and the hardening of a more right-wing bureaucratic caste in China after 1976 ultimately ended China’s role as an immediate revolutionary ‘beacon.’  This unfortunate break was the ultimate split on one side in the global class war…

The infiltrators listed by the authors – Childs, Aoki, Wright, Darrell Grover, Larry & Betty Goff – all had personal issues that might be a tip-off that they were not on the ‘up and up.  Morris Childs had been expelled from the CP for being a ‘Browderist” and was angry about it.  He also had expensive health problems that the FBI helped pay for.  Aoki was an egoist who gloried in interviews and being a ‘leader’ of the left.  The backgrounds of the Goffs were in evangelical Christianity, an odd jump to Maoism.  Larry Goff was from a working-class background and had ‘gun-smithing’ skills, so RU cut him some slack, as RU’s workerism was pronounced.  Don Wright was a quarrelsome black man who pushed his way into positions, hoping the white members of the RU would not object.  His background was in U.S. military intelligence, which should have been some kind of flag.  Grover was part of an internal RU group that ‘prepared members for armed struggle’ – which might suggest that not only were RU’s politics leaning to ultra-leftism but these politics left an opening for the FBI.

Leonard is a former member of the Revolutionary Communist Party, which came out of the RU, so he is both critical and fond of that organization, as you would expect.  He and Gallagher have done deep research into redacted FBI files and files from the National Archives.  Many times the redacting of the FBI left something to be desired, exposing their informants to the authors' careful eyes and research. To prevent infiltration, the authors discount the role of having more democracy in an organization to prevent it.  Most of these groups were internally top-down, secretive and not run democratically.  These groups' versions of “Leninism” seemed to be that of a purely military organization.  However, the authors caution that no one is immune from infiltration.  The FBI are not all a bunch of 'crew-cut dimwits' as the stereotype goes, but can use sophisticated human tactics to infiltrate any organization – even non-Marxist ones.  The Bolsheviks themselves were fooled by Roman Malinovsky, who was a Czarist agent within the Party and sent many to prison or worse.  Lenin himself did not deal with the issue very deeply, according to the authors.

But if the U.S. left EVER forms a large mass organization or left front, and gets rid of certain sectarian and anti-democratic habits, Leonard and Gallagher will certainly be nominated to lead that organization’s ‘counter-intelligence’ group.  This detailed history is sterling and includes photo-copies of many of the original documents they cite, as this work is based not on conjecture but on primary sources.  Many of their information requests have still not been issued by the government, which might clear up further issues about FBI infiltration.

Other posts on this topic reviewed below, use blog search box, upper left: “Heavy Radicals,” “Revolution in the Air,” “FBI Secrets,” “Finks,” “The Terror Factory,” “FBI Virus,” “American Assassination,” “Selma,” “Green is the New Red,” “On the Trial of the Assassins,” “The Meta-Meaning of Ridiculous Cop Shows,” “The Devil’s Chessboard,” “They Killed Our President,” “Orders to Kill,” "CIA Fly Boy."

And I bought it at May Day Books after Leonard’s book talk!

Red Frog

July 29, 2018