The following are three articles on the FBI-CIA network of the late Joseph Hansen, double-agent and long-time leader of the United States revisionist Socialist Workers Party.

Hansen died on January 18, 1979 but he left behind him an organization of carefully trained agents placed strategically inside the leadership of the revisionist groups throughout the world.

The headquarters of Hansen’s operation was and remains the weekly magazine Intercontinental Press, set up in 1963 and published in the New York City national offices of the SWP and with a special bureau in Paris.

It has been publicly established that there are more than 100 agents of the FBI presently functioning in the SWP. Wesley Swearingen, a recently retired 25-year veteran of the FBI, has told the press that agents control the “highest offices” of the SWP.

A federal court ruled in March that the government cannot be compelled to release the names of the 18 FBI spies functioning in the leadership of the SWP. But here comes the irrefutable proof that the SWP is stage-managed by the FBI itself. SWP leaders have told the government that they will drop legal efforts to obtain the identities of FBI agents inside the organization in exchange for cash.

Since May 1975 the International Committee of the Fourth International has been conducting an investigation into Hansen’s double-agent career.

Today we publish vital new chapters in the investigation showing the world-wide tentacles of Hansen’s network in Latin America, Australia and Britain:

• Fausto Amador — Hansen’s Latin American Caretaker
• Helen Jarvis — the Sydney-Jakarta Connection
• John Lister — the FBI’s Oxford Attorney

1. Fausto Amador --- Hansen’s Latin American Caretaker

The name Fausto Amador first appeared in Intercontinental Press in its issue of June 27, 1977.

He was the subject of a six-page interview headlined “How I Came to be a Trotskyist,” and the introduction stated that Amador was “a former participant in the guerrilla struggle in Nicaragua.”

Several days later, on July 1, 1977, Livio Maitan — a co-editor of Intercontinental Press and member of the United Secretariat^[1] — sent an indignant letter to editor Joseph Hansen which he insisted be “published immediately.”

This letter, which went unanswered, stated:

“I have read the interview with Fausto Amador that you published in your June 27 issue.

“I think that just reading this document must have raised questions in the minds of more than a few comrades about the kind of character to whom you gave so much space.

“I also think that not very many people would take an indulgent attitude toward a man who left a movement fighting against bloody dictatorship, taking advantage of his family’s ties with the dictator to comfortably return home, and then deliver political sermons before the reporters of a press that is one of the most corrupt in the world.

“I would hope, moreover, that no one thought that the murdered and tortured militants of the Sandinista Front had any lessons to learn from someone who shortly after returning to the bosom of his family became an embassy functionary, so that, as he informs us, he would not have to pay taxes and could ‘live more easily in Brussels.’

“If I wanted to stir up the mud, I would ask you to publish the reports in the Managua press at the time when Amador says they reproduced his statements in part and did not totally falsify them.”

“In his interview, he says, among other things, that although he was repelled by the bureaucratization in Cuba — oh, such an impeccable revolutionist! — he considered Cuba and the countries like it a thousand times preferable to the capitalist ones.

“Unfortunately, he launched foul and slanderous accusations in the press, claiming, for example, that in the USSR they pull workers’ teeth without an anaesthetic.

“The least that might be considered is that such moves were unworthy and contrary to the interests of the people of Nicaragua.

“It is true that at a certain time, Amador had contacts with Trotskyists in France and Belgium. But as soon as it became clear how he had behaved, our comrades took their distance.

“Amador’s claim that he is working in the Fourth International is absolutely false. He is not a member of any section or sympathizing organization. Nobody of the International has ever agreed to admit him. This must be absolutely clear.”

To Maitan’s protest was added an official remonstration by the United Secretariat which, at the conclusion of its meeting on July 21–22, 1977, voted to send the following notice to Hansen:

“1. THAT the publication in the June 27, 1977, issue of IP and the June 20, 1977, issue of Perspectiva Mundial of the interview with F. Amador without prior consultation with the United Secretariat, the Bureau, or even one of the associate editors (E. Mandel, L. Maitan, or P. Frank) represents an initiative that clearly goes against the type of functioning that should prevail for the production of such a document.

“2. THAT in explicitly asserting that Amador is a member of the Fourth International, the interview not only contains a falsification, but goes against the motions adopted by the United Secretariat …”

If the co-editors of Intercontinental Press — Maitan, Ernest Mandel and Pierre Frank — entertained any illusion that their protest would carry some weight in New York, they were in for a big disappointment.

Hansen and his SWP colleagues on the Intercontinental Press editorial board had not made a mistake. They were in the middle of an operation.

Hansen’s international agent-gathering network was moving fast and had just signed up a new recruit.

His name was Fausto Amador — one more among many. But the special importance of this case is that it lays bare the method of work of the Intercontinental Press network of imperialist agents created by Hansen on behalf of the FBI-CIA.

Once potential recruits came to his notice, Hansen would introduce them in Intercontinental Press as new “Trotskyist” leaders. In the United States secret service, this is called “opening doors.”

For the Hansen–Intercontinental Press–SWP network, Amador was a prize catch. In terms of sheer political loathsomeness, he was in a special class of traitors.

He betrayed countless former comrades among the guerrillas in the Sandinista Front — including his own brother, Carlos, who was murdered by the brutal Nicaraguan dictatorship in 1976.

Hated in his native Nicaragua, reviled as a deserter by the guerrillas of the Sandinista Front, renounced by his own brother before his death, Amador came to Hansen with hands already dripping with the blood of heroic fighters he had betrayed to the regime of Anastasio Somoza.

Interview

Amador’s interview with Intercontinental Press reads like the autobiographical career resume of an applicant for the CIA.

The younger brother of a leading Sandinista fighter, Fausto Amador joined the guerrillas for a period but then fled Nicaragua to escape the repression.

He spent a “traumatic” two years in Cuba, feeling “revulsion at the bureaucratic methods” he witnessed.

Hansen’s interviewer did not object to this attack on the Cuban government, which is remarkable considering the fact that the SWP has been the most uncritical admirer of Castroism.

Amador now decided that he wanted to return to Nicaragua, but not as a fighter. He broke with the Sandinistas as an out-and-out coward.

“When I started to get ready to return to Nicaragua, I realized that I had to be able to come back to some kind of legal existence in order to find new political alternatives and to think over and decide more fundamentally what I was going to do, what political course I was going to follow in the future.

“In that period, I was rather strongly inclined to Maoism, but China’s foreign policy gave me serious problems.

“In this situation, I managed to get in touch with my father, and discussed the question with him. He is a personal friend of the dictator and has managed his property for twenty-five years.

“He told me that he could easily get permission for me to return to a legal existence and secure a guarantee of my complete physical safety. It was under these conditions that I returned to Nicaragua.” (Intercontinental Press, June 27, 1977, p. 743)

Once back in Nicaragua in 1969, Amador started spying and informing on the Sandinista Front. He called a press conference in which he denounced Cuba, attacked the Sandinistas, and called upon its fighters to surrender and throw themselves at the mercy of Somoza.

After listening to this disgusting narrative, the Intercontinental Press interviewer — or shall we call him recruiting officer — asked Amador if his interview with the press had turned his former comrades against him. “Make them consider you a traitor or something like that?”

“That, in fact, is what happened,” replied Amador. “Prior to this, I was already in a tiny minority that opposed the guerrilla course, while engaging in the work of the organization. When I made my statements, all my comrades began to consider me a traitor to the Frente Sandinista.

“Carlos, who was jailed around that time in Costa Rica, said that he no longer considered me his brother. But at the same time, he called on me to return to the organization, which shows, obviously, that he did not consider me a traitor, since you could hardly call on a traitor to come back into the Frente.

“Nonetheless, in the general context, the results of the interview were disastrous.

“The consequences of this political error continued to affect me throughout that period, and still do. Many layers that have radicalized or come into left activity in the last two to four years don’t know exactly how this incident came about.

“The only thing they know about is the old tale of betrayal. They don’t really know what it was all about. And so this story continues to cause me a certain amount of trouble.” (Intercontinental Press, June 27, 1977, p. 744)

In other words, Intercontinental Press was for Amador the last refuge of a political and moral leper. But we have not yet completed the chronology of Amador’s adventures. His long odyssey to the eventual rendezvous with Hansen now took Amador from Nicaragua to London.

Striving hard to cleanse his reputation, Amador turned up at a Christmas party given by the Nicaraguan Embassy in London.

His next stop was on the European continent, arriving in Belgium in 1972.

“In Belgium, I got into direct contact with members of the Fourth International, but at the same time another thing happened that caused me quite a few problems.

“My family offered to buy me a car. In order to avoid paying taxes on it, and without knowing for certain what they were doing, they had me named cultural attaché at the Nicaraguan Embassy in Belgium.

“This appointment was a pure formality. My name was mud in the embassy and it still is to this day.

“The whole purpose of it was to be able to live more easily in Belgium — more peacefully and with guarantees of a certain type. And so I accepted this diplomatic post, when I was appointed to it.

“I thought that this was not a very important matter. I was not a member of any political party. I was a totally isolated individual. And so I thought taking this purely honorary post would not have any repercussions. This was a second big error, but it was one that could be rectified more easily.” (Intercontinental Press, June 27, 1977, p. 74)

Eventually, in 1973, Amador resigned from the embassy in order to return to Nicaragua.

“Later on, my father told me I had been an idiot — which he repeats every time I see him — because he had managed to arrange it so I could come back to Nicaragua again.

“I had great difficulty in getting the papers for going back. It was only through my father’s close friendship with Somoza that I was able to get a passport. So, normally I can enter Nicaragua without a lot of problems.” (Intercontinental Press, June 27, 1977, p. 74)

Problems

Having introduced Amador as the new leader of the United Secretariat in Central America, Hansen now had to have him accepted by his “comrades” in the leadership of the international Pabloite organization.

It looked at first as though there were going to be serious problems. On March 24, 1977, the United Secretariat moved a resolution which declared that it:

“considers that the actions of Amador in 1969–1973 objectively aided the Nicaraguan dictatorship in its struggle against the Nicaraguan people. Such actions are incompatible with the defense of the interests of the working class and therefore incompatible with membership of the Fourth International.”

The resolution insisted that:

“only after a clear public rejection made by Amador himself (specifically for the Central American public, and among other things, to be published in the paper of the OST, Que Hacer?) could the United Secretariat rediscuss the modalities of his integration in the Fourth International.”

As Amador refused to respond to this demand, the United Secretariat wrote to his associate — a comrade Rodrigo — on June 29, 1977, just after the publication of the Intercontinental Press interview. The letter stated:

“We remind you that the resolution adopted by the United Secretariat asks for a declaration signed by F. Amador, and published in a Central American press organ.

“While taking security problems into account, it is up to F. Amador to choose the Central American publication that is the most adequate for publishing such a declaration on a broad scale.

“In the opinion of some comrades, the monthly magazine Diagolo Social, published in Panama, could be used for this purpose.

“We hope for a speedy application of the United Secretariat’s recommendation.”

Following its deliberations on July 21–22, 1977, the United Secretariat plucked up its courage and sent Hansen the following note (date July 25, 1977):

“Dear Joe,

“We enclose for your information:

Two resolutions passed by the United Secretariat on July 22nd, 1977, concerning the publication in Intercontinental Press of the interview with Amador; and

A copy of the letter, dated June 29th, 1977, from the United Secretariat Bureau to Comrade Rodrigo.”

What was now to happen? The United Secretariat had branded Amador’s actions as “incompatible with membership in the FI” while Intercontinental Press promoted him as a “leading Central American Trotskyist.”

A clash would have seemed inevitable. But by the next meeting in late October, the “summer lions” of the United Secretariat had been transformed into “autumn sheep.”

On October 31, 1977, during the last session of a three-day meeting of the United Secretariat, Comrade Aubin introduced the discussion on Costa Rica by reading a statement which had just been received from Fausto Amador:

“Although I have already stated publicly — in what I thought were clear terms — that I made two very grave political errors before becoming a Trotskyist, the charge has been made that in the context of my explanations of how I came to make the errors, my specification of the errors themselves was ambiguous.”

Note the arrogance of Amador in the remark “in what I thought were clear terms.” As far as he’s concerned, the United Secretariat has no business sticking its nose into his affairs.

After all, he’s been signed aboard by Intercontinental Press station-chief Hansen; and if anyone’s got any complaints, they should take them up with New York!

However, “to clear this up” Amador deigned to “specify what the errors were”:

“1. GRANTING a press conference in Managua on August 21, 1969 which the Somoza regime exploited;
2. ACCEPTING the formal post of cultural attaché at the Nicaraguan embassy in Brussels in 1972.”

This statement did not even meet the requirements of the March 24 resolution of the United Secretariat. It was not a public statement for publication in a Central American newspaper. It was nothing more than a contemptuous sop to the Pabloite members attending the meeting of the United Secretariat.

Nevertheless, the minutes of the October 29–31 session of the United Secretariat meeting show that Aubin then introduced the following resolution.

“The statement of Comrade Amador of October 30, 1977 meets the conditions of the United Secretariat motion of March 24, 1977 (sic).

His status is now the same as that of all members of organizations that have entered into fraternal relations with the Fourth International pending recognition by the next world congress, except for the probationary limitation recommended below.

The United Secretariat recommends that for a probationary period of twelve months or until the eve of the next world congress, whichever is less, Comrade Amador function as a militant of the organization in the country in which he is residing, without accepting any national leadership posts.”

Votes

In July, Aubin’s vote was cast against the publicizing of Amador as a leader of the United Secretariat in Latin America. Now he had introduced the resolution aimed at whitewashing the whole affair.

A counter-motion was introduced by Claudio of the Colombia PST (Partido Socialista de Trabajadores) led by N. Moreno. It read:

“The United Secretariat decides that the position it adopted at its March 24, 1977 meeting on the Amador case should be made public in the countries where a public polemic has occurred; finds the self-criticism of Amador insufficient because it does not recognize the error of having abandoned the struggle against a bloody dictatorship for a period of several years; decides that after he has made public his self-criticism, Amador will work with an organization of the Fourth International for a period of two years.

After this period, if the organization with which Amador has worked is in agreement, he will be readmitted as a member of the Fourth International with full rights.”

The vote was then taken, and the majority supported the cover-up of the agent Fausto Amador.

Aubin’s motion was passed by a vote of 14 to 4, with one abstention. Those recorded as voting for the motion in the minutes of the October 29–31, 1977 meeting were: Adair, Aubin, Brewster, Celso, Duret, Frej, Hovis, Jones, Juan, Manuel, Riel, Roman, Susan, and Walter.

Those voting against were: Claudio, Enrique, Fourier and Romero. Abstaining was Sylvain.

Claudio’s motion was rejected 15 to 1. Voting against that motion were: Adair, Aubin, Brewster, Celso, Duret, Frej, Hovis, Jones, Juan, Manuel, Riel, Roman, Susan, Sylvain, and Walter. Voting for the motion was Claudio.

The three abstentions were Fourier, Enrique and Romero.

What happened between July 21–22 and October 29–31 to swing the vote around in support of Amador, Hansen’s new agent in the United Secretariat?

The answer to this question lies not in the facts relating to Amador’s case, but rather in new facts dealing with Hansen himself uncovered during that period by the International Committee of the Fourth International.

In the summer of 1977, the investigation conducted by the International Committee into the history of “Security and the Fourth International” had reached a crucial turning point.

The International Committee was able to arrive at two irrefutable conclusions about Hansen’s role in the Fourth International:

The first conclusion was that Hansen had systematically lied about the extent of penetration by the Stalinist secret police (GPU) into the Fourth International and had deliberately covered up for agents like Sylvia Franklin, the private secretary of SWP founder James P. Cannon. She had been involved in the conspiracy to assassinate Trotsky.

The second conclusion was that Hansen himself had joined the FBI in September 1940 as an informer working inside the Trotskyist movement.

Before the assassination of Trotsky on August 20, 1940, Hansen had been in association with members of the Stalinist GPU killer squad planning the murder — including the assassin himself, Ramon Mercader.

Opportunists

As crass opportunists, the majority of the United Secretariat were determined to prevent the eruption of a scandal that would blow the lid off the spy ring working through Hansen inside the Pabloite ranks.

This position was openly stated by several members as they sought to explain their votes in favor of the whitewash of accepting Amador’s activities. A statement by Walter and Manuel declared:

“We consider the motion insufficient because it does not repeat the judgment of the commission of inquiry, to wit, that the acts committed by Comrade Amador before he became a Trotskyist did grave harm to the revolutionary and anti-imperialist movement.”

“However, we vote for the motion to avoid an explosive public conflict which could be very damaging to the Fourth International.”

The “Walter” who is so anxious to prevent the “explosive public conflict” that could result from a refusal to admit an agent into the leadership of the United Secretariat is none other than Ernest Mandel.

A similar position was stressed by Adair, who happens to be Alan Harris — an English Canadian who now lives in London and was trained by Hansen to be the SWP apparatchik in the United Secretariat.

“For the United Secretariat to demand from Comrade Amador more than his statement is unjustified and sets a dangerous precedent in our movement.”

What is the dangerous precedent? That agents may be uncovered in the course of an investigation? Is it that Adair was frightened the setting of this “dangerous precedent” might produce a mass exodus from the SWP that would cut off the income of the organization’s representatives overseas?

More likely, Adair was expressing a strongly held belief among those in attendance at the United Secretariat meeting: “Let’s not start talking about agents because Hansen himself is implicated and the International Committee will be proven right.”

This was precisely the position advanced by Maitain on July 1, 1977, when he wrote to Hansen:

“None of us wanted a public polemic over this whole distressing story. This could only discredit us and be exploited by our opponents.”

In the final analysis, it was the rotten opportunism of the Pabloite leaders which played into Hansen’s hands. They would rather live with Hansen’s network of agents than subordinate themselves to the historic principles of Trotskyism.

They would betray their own members in Latin America rather than admit the truth about Hansen. And so the “delegates” moved onto the following motion:

“To instruct the Bureau to send a letter immediately to the PRT of Costa Rica — and any other Fourth International organization that wrote public polemics against Amador or the OST — telling them to cease and desist all such attacks and to co-operate in the defense of Amador, the OST, and the Fourth International against the Stalinists’ slander campaign.”

Fourteen voted in favor of the motion: Adair, Aubin, Celso, Duret, Fourier, Hovis, Jones, Manuel, Riel, Roman, Susan, Sylvain and Walter. No one voted against the motion and there were no abstentions.

Enrique and Romero are listed as “not voting,” but it is not clear what the difference is between abstaining and not voting.

Among themselves, behind the backs of their membership in the different sections of the United Secretariat, the delegates admitted that they had voted to whitewash the Amador affair to head off a devastating scandal arising from the massive infiltration of FBI-CIA into their organization.

But they nevertheless passed a resolution which committed them to denounce any exposure of Amador as a Stalinist “slander campaign.”

This position merely mirrors the method employed under Hansen’s direction against the International Committee.

Privately, those who worked with Hansen and the Intercontinental Press network of agents knew they were dealing with a gang of police spies.

But publicly, the official position was that charges against Hansen were a “shameless frame-up.” They all joined in a slander campaign orchestrated by Hansen against Comrade G. Healy of the Workers Revolutionary Party.

And among those who signed the fraudulent “Verdict” of September 1976 which denounced the campaign on Security and the Fourth International and which set out to frame Comrade Healy, was none other than Fausto Amador.

By the end of October 1977, the case on Fausto Amador was virtually closed. From having initially held that Amador’s actions were incompatible with the Fourth International, the United Secretariat had arrived at a 14 to 0 vote imposing a gag rule on “Stalinist slanders” against Amador.

But Hansen ran into opposition from the Central Committee of the PST of Colombia, whose resolution on the Amador case was reported to the January 27–29, 1978 meeting of the United Secretariat.

Whereas:

The activities of Fausto Amador, which were the object of an investigation by the Fourth International, constituted acts of collaboration with the Somoza dictatorship.

These acts disqualified Fausto Amador from exercising leadership posts in the Fourth International until a long period of testing demonstrated that he was morally capable of exercising them.

The question of Fausto Amador is of enormous political importance in Central America, an importance that is multiplied by the present crisis shaking the region and particularly Nicaragua, so that any support given by the Fourth International to Fausto Amador places in danger the very existence of the Fourth International in Central America.

The United Secretariat at its meeting of October 29–31, 1977, admitted Fausto Amador into our International with a status “the same as that of all members of organizations that have entered into fraternal relations with the Fourth International pending recognition by the next world congress,” which means that in actuality he has been converted into a full member of our International.

The same resolution accepts Fausto Amador’s residing in Costa Rica.

The only limitation established in said resolution is the “recommendation” that “for a probationary period of twelve months or until the eve of the next world congress ... Comrade Amador function as a member … without accepting any national leadership posts.*

This final ‘recommendation’ is absolutely formal, since Fausto Amador has ample recourse to the mass media of Costa Rica where he is well-known as a sympathizer of the OST, and Intercontinental Press is trying to promote him on an international level by publishing articles bearing his signature.

The CC of the PST resolves:

To categorically reject the resolution of the United Secretariat with respect to Fausto Amador.

To demand that the United Secretariat rectify the cited resolution and replace it with a different one along the following lines:

To repudiate IP’s (Intercontinental Press) policy of promoting the figure of Fausto Amador as a Nicaraguan and Central American Trotskyist leader.

To call on USec to censure any attempt similar to that of IP and require all publications of the Fourth International to refrain from promoting in any way the figure of Fausto Amador as a Trotskyist leader.

To recommend to Revista de América that it follow a policy of not collaborating with any publication that promotes by any means whatsoever the figure of Fausto Amador as a Trotskyist leader.

To call on the USec to open a public debate regarding this case in the publications of the Fourth International, inviting the Frente Sandinista de Liberación in particular to participate in it.

To demand that the United Secretariat of the Fourth International place at the disposition of the PST all the documents it has on the Amado

Unprincipled

This resolution exposed the completely unprincipled nature of Amador’s readmission into the United Secretariat.

For having taken this stand against the agent-gathering network of Intercontinental Press, Hansen organized a destabilization campaign against the PST equal to anything attempted against the Latin American working class by the CIA.

In December 1977, Hansen led a delegation of the United Secretariat to attend a central committee meeting of the PST in Colombia which, as Moreno described in a letter to the United Secretariat, “attempted to threaten, intimidate, and blackmail us.”

The delegation encouraged the formation of a minority faction against the elected leadership, supported violations of discipline and actively worked to create a split.

In his report to the United Secretariat meeting of January 27–29, which had to be sent in letter form because Hansen and the European Pabloite leaders refused to postpone the conference so that it could be attended by PST delegates, Moreno summed up his charges against the Hansen delegation:

“For all these reasons: for developing a factional policy aimed at liquidating our party; for having been complicit by their silence with slanders against the Argentine comrades, against Comrade Moreno, and against the leaders of the Colombia PST;

for having made an alliance with a bourgeois who tried to destroy a Trotskyist publishing house;

for having been de facto accomplices of a lumpen who is conducting a public chauvinist and police-style campaign in the bourgeois press;

for having encouraged a petty-bourgeois and factional party — for all these reasons, we consider the United Secretariat delegation composed of Comrades Riel, Hansen, and Galarza morally impeached and thus unable to give any kind of report to the United Secretariat on the situation of our party.

For the same reason, we would have liked to be present at the United Secretariat to expose the political and moral decomposition of these comrades before the entire Fourth International.

If the United Secretariat does not want to sink as low as Comrades Riel, Hansen, and Galarza have sunk; if the United Secretariat wants to prove to the International that its present majority is not an unprincipled front against the Bolshevik tendency and against our party; if it wants to make clear that it does not support the alliance which its representatives made with lumpens and bourgeois; if it wants to take its distance from chauvinist, police-style methods which the factional group and the United Secretariat delegates employed, the United Secretariat must accept the proposals made by the PST Executive Committee …”

The United Secretariat was unmoved. Hansen’s man Riel put forward a resolution charging that “the majority of the Central Committee of the PST violated the provisions of the statutes of the Fourth International upholding internal democracy.”

The resolution then went on to endorse the activities of the Hansen-created minority faction working to smash up the PST. The resolution, put to a vote without the PST being present, was passed unanimously — 22 to 0.

The 22 yes-men were: Adair, Aubin, Brewster, Claudio, Dunder, Duret, Enrique, Fourier, Frej, Georges, Holden, Marline, Otto, Pepe, Petersen, Riel, Roman, Stateman, Susan, Sylvain, Therese and Walter.

The United Secretariat voted on one more resolution before adjourning its session of January 27–29, 1978:

“MOTION by Sylvain: To reject the ‘Resolution on Fausto Amador adopted by the Central Committee of the PST,’ since there exist no new elements which would make it necessary for the United Secretariat to reconsider this case.

“This means that the motion concerning Comrade Amador passed at the October 29–31, 1977, meeting of the United Secretariat remains in force. The United Secretariat also rejects the proposal for a public discussion concerning Comrade Amador, which could be harmful to our movement.”

This motion was carried by a vote of 17 to 1, with 3 abstentions. Voting yes were Adair, Aubin, Brewster, Dunder, Duret, Frej, Holden, Otto, Pepe, Petersen, Riel, Roman, Stateman, Susan, Sylvain, Therese and Walter. The one vote against belonged to Romero. The three abstentions were Claudio, Georges and Marline.

Moreno

Moreno was put in his place, though it should be pointed out that even though it is obvious that he knows Hansen was a police agent, he supported this FBI man against the International Committee and lent his name to the chorus of slanders against Comrade Healy of the Workers Revolutionary Party.

The United Secretariat meeting of January 27–29, 1978 closed the books on the case of Fausto Amador. This new recruit into the Hansen–Intercontinental Press–SWP network of State Department agents was now, officially, the undisputed representative of the United Secretariat in Central America.

And, it appears, Fausto Amador is presently riding high in the saddle. The Bureau of the United Secretariat recently received a letter from Amador, dated January 31, 1979 and posted in Costa Rica.

Amador, judging from the letter, now fancies himself a real theoretician and he was displeased with a certain lack of political clarity on the part of the United Secretariat—though what he does find:

“extremely positive is the Bureau’s interest in politically feeding the sections especially in the face of serious and contradictory international events.”

In his letter, Amador states that he is concerned by ambiguities in the position of the United Secretariat toward the Vietnam–China war. The problem he notes in the position of the United Secretariat is that:

“we find not a single explicit reference to the class character of the Cambodian state.”

Amador roundly takes the Bureau to task, for by:

“leaving the question of the Cambodian state unclarified, the basic political foundations escape our perception.”

He asks a series of questions:

“Is it a war between workers’ states and do we then call on those who took the military initiative to cease hostilities immediately?

Or is it a war between a workers’ state and a non-workers’ state and do we defend the non-workers’ state against the aggressor workers’ state, asking for the immediate withdrawal of invading troops without any other military or political consideration?

Is it a war in which we have no interest in the class character of the states confronting each other, in which all are guilty, so we can condemn everyone and ask for the withdrawal of any troops which have crossed the other’s frontiers?

If in the opinion of the Bureau Cambodia is a workers’ state, we think it should have been said explicitly and politically explained. If, however, they thought that Cambodia was not a workers’ state, but that even so it was necessary to defend it against an aggressor workers’ state, this should also have been clearly explained. We would have been able to be better oriented.

Do the comrades of the Bureau agree with the analysis made by the OCI, calling it just a war of rapine?”

We quote this letter because it is indelibly stamped with the buffoonish and cynical style of Amador’s mentor, Joseph Hansen. The letter has nothing to do with Cambodia. It is the agent showing his contempt for the United Secretariat which was steamrollered into accepting him as the “Trotskyist leader” in Central America.

Amador wrote the letter just to let the Bureau know that he is well ensconced in Central America.

The case of Fausto Amador is by no means unique. He is the creature of an agent-gathering network that remains in operation.

In recent weeks, the activities of Hansen-trained revisionists returning to Iran have been a continuous source of provocations against the Revolution.

Their disruptive political role has received on-the-scene guidance by correspondents from Intercontinental Press like SWP leaders Cindy Jaquith and Gerry Foley.

It was immediately after the overthrow of the Shah that Jaquith “discovered” the oppression of the veil and worked alongside U.S. feminist Kate Millet in denouncing the Iranian Revolution.

At the present time, it is the multi-lingual Gerry Foley touring Iran — opposing the first democratic election held in more than a quarter century and stoking the flames of Kurdish separatism as preached by the tool of the CIA, the late Barzani.

It was the International Committee of the Fourth International which unmasked Joseph Hansen as an agent of the FBI.

It will leave no stone unturned to unmask his successors and drive them out of the international workers’ movement.

2. Helen Jarvis --- The Sydney-Jakarta Connection

One of the main functions of the late Joseph Hansen’s FBI operation was to recruit a spy network all over the world, and one of his key outposts was Australia.

Control of Hansen’s group in Australia is in the hands of an American named Allen Myers who was trained in the offices of Hansen’s Intercontinental Press in New York for approximately four years (1970–1974).

He runs the Socialist Workers Party, which publishes a weekly called Direct Action and seems to have limitless resources and a steady intake of American graduates as members.

There is absolutely no doubt about Myers’ role in Hansen’s network. When the International Committee of the Fourth International raised the call for an international Commission of Inquiry into Hansen’s activities, Myers was one of the most feverish and hostile opponents.

His policy is to fight off any investigation and to keep the agents at their posts. For Myers himself this is not only carrying out the instructions of the State Department’s branch office at Intercontinental Press, it is an act of self-preservation.

Information has been uncovered in Australia which proves conclusively that Hansen was running an FBI recruiting agency and that Myers remains part of the network he left behind. It concerns Myers’ companion since 1969, a certain Helen Jarvis.

When she ran as a candidate for the Australian Senate in December 1975, the weekly Direct Action gave this potted biography of her:

“Helen Jarvis is 29 and works at Sydney University where she is a post-graduate student. Jarvis was a founding member of the Sydney women’s liberation movement in 1969, and was an activist in the early days of the anti–Vietnam war campaign in Canberra.

“She was in the United States from 1970 to 1974, where she participated actively in the women’s liberation and anti-war movements.

“Jarvis joined the Socialist Workers League (since renamed the SWP) at the end of 1974 and has been an executive member of the Sydney branch SWL and prominent in the Sydney women’s movement and in the Women’s Abortion Action Campaign.”

This is only half of Jarvis’ career. There is another side, a secret side, which is completely concealed. It only became known in January this year when Jarvis applied for a job and became involved in a newspaper controversy.

Jarvis made application to the government to become acquisition officer for the Australian National Library in Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia.

She was turned down, apparently on the grounds of an adverse security report. The issue was raised in the Canberra-published newspaper, the National Times on January 20 and revealed Jarvis in a completely new light.

This was not the traditional story of a left-winger victimized by the sinister vetting procedures of the civil service and the secret police.

On the contrary, it showed that this so-called “Trotskyist” had high-up friends in the Australian government and the Indonesian military dictatorship.

One of those who supported Jarvis for the Jakarta job was the former Australian ambassador to Indonesia, Richard W. Woolcott. He said: “Helen Jarvis is quite well known in Jakarta,” and noted that she was “favorably known” to Adam Malik, the former Foreign Minister and now Vice-President of Indonesia.

Woolcott added a personal recommendation: “I have the impression that, if she gets the job, she would be a good appointment.”

The news that Jarvis was “favorably known” to Dr. Malik came as a bombshell. It fits exactly to the pattern of Hansen’s Latin American recruit, Fausto Amador, who was “favorably known” to the Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua.

Malik played a key role in the 1965 CIA-backed coup in Indonesia which installed Suharto and his junta of generals. More than half a million people, mainly communists and trade unionists, were massacred during the establishment of the military dictatorship.

As Vice-President, Malik is today the right-hand man of the butcher Suharto ... as well as being “favorably known” to Ms. Jarvis, the lady freedom fighter.

Woolcott is not the sort of individual to make “slipups” in the selection of his friends. Before becoming ambassador, he was the official spokesman of the Ministry for External Affairs (Foreign Office) in Canberra, where he advocated Australia’s brutal participation in the Vietnam war.

As a top permanent civil servant and a man tipped to become head of External Affairs, Woolcott had access to every intelligence file produced by the Australian Security Intelligence Organization (ASIO).

There cannot be the slightest doubt that Woolcott knew Jarvis was a leading member of the SWP and a so-called “Trotskyist.” He could only have given her his personal recommendation if he also knew the other side of her career — as part of Hansen’s secret network.

The National Times article revealed that Jarvis had a lengthy and close connection with the Indonesian rulers.

It stated that she had an expert knowledge of the Indonesian language, a rare and precious achievement in the 1960s when she left school.

Indeed, students who chose Indonesian, Japanese or Chinese during those years were usually hand-picked or specially selected for government service.

The National Times said that “during a stint” in Indonesia Jarvis translated Suharto’s first five-year plan into English. In other words, she served as a direct employee of the Suharto dictatorship at a time when thousands of trade unionists and members of the Communist Party (PKI) were locked away in concentration camps.

To give a simple parallel, it would be like working in Tehran for the Shah and translating his decrees so they could be used for propaganda for his blood-stained dictatorship.

In 1969 she met Allen Myers when he came to Australia as Hansen’s personal emissary to organize a revisionist protest campaign against the Vietnam war. They married and, in 1970, went to live in New York.

Myers went on to the full-time staff of Hansen’s Intercontinental Press and Jarvis worked there as well — but only part-time.

The National Times disclosed that Jarvis shared her time between Hansen’s headquarters and the Indonesian diplomatic missions in Washington, D.C., and New York!

It was not a menial job. She had the highly important post of research assistant and speech-writer for the spokesmen of one of Asia’s most repressive anti-communist regimes.

When she worked at the U.N. mission in New York, her deputy boss was General Yoga Sugama. He is now the head of BAKIN, the Indonesian Intelligence Co-ordinating Agency.

This gave new meaning to Woolcott’s statement that “Helen Jarvis is quite well known in Indonesia.”

Jarvis told the National Times: “Yoga certainly knew I was a lefty of sorts, but he never made any attempt to ease me out of the mission that I could see.”

There was no reason why he should. They were both in the United States for training purposes — Yoga for the Pentagon and the CIA, Jarvis for Hansen’s double-agent network based on Intercontinental Press.

To the outsider, it might seem incredible that a leading member of Hansen’s group should also be employed by the diplomatic service of a CIA-backed military dictatorship. In fact it is all too credible and all too familiar in examining Hansen’s recruitment policies.

With Jarvis he had someone who could read and write fluently in Indonesian, who could translate newspapers, broadcasts and communiques and also keep a close watch upon Indonesian foreign policy and personnel in Washington and at the U.N.

In 1974 Myers and Jarvis returned to Australia to take charge of Hansen’s group, with Myers taking a backroom role as editor of Direct Action.

When she stood for the Senate the following year, the details of the Indonesian connection were dropped from her biography altogether. As far as the electorate and the SWP’s membership were concerned she was an anti-war, pro-abortion feminist, when the truth was that she had only recently stopped working for the Indonesian dictatorship.

The fact that she applied for the Indonesian post late last year demonstrates that she is still active in Indonesian circles. And the fact that Woolcott provided her with a personal recommendation shows she hasn’t lost her connections in the top echelons of the Australian government either.

The question could be asked — what was Jarvis, now a member of the SWP’s national committee in Australia, doing when she applied for the post of “acquisitions officer” for the National Library in Jakarta?

She could only have taken such a step with the sanction of her controllers in New York at Intercontinental Press.

The fact that this job transfer did not take place smoothly can only be put down to inter-agency rivalry and nothing else.

The Jarvis-Myers affair is stunning proof of Hansen’s FBI role and the correctness of the call by the International Committee of the Fourth International for a complete investigation into his activities.

Hansen is dead, but his network is intact and functioning in the United States, Britain, Australia and Latin America.

It is the unyielding pledge of the International Committee and all its sections that the historic task this year — the centenary of Trotsky — is to unmask and drive out the double agents.

3. FBI Discovers an Oxford Attorney

The so-called Socialist Press of the renegade Thornett clique has endorsed the insidious deal between the Socialist Workers Party and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

The essence of this deal is that the revisionist SWP will officially accept and sanction in return for an agreed sum of money the presence of FBI agents within the ranks and leadership of its organization.

Only one point remains to be cleared up: the amount of money which the U.S. government is to pay the Socialist Workers Party for the use of its office space and stationery.

The SWP is publicly asking for $5 million, privately asking for $1 million and willing to settle for much less. The U.S. government, in line with Carter’s anti-inflation program and economic guidelines is driving a hard bargain.

The background of these negotiations is the March 19 ruling by a Federal Appeals Court that U.S. Attorney General Griffin Bell not be held in contempt of court for refusing to release the names of 18 agents working inside the SWP.

This decision, which approved the breaking of the law by the Attorney General, was the culmination of a long series of measures taken by the government to protect its agents inside the SWP.

• In June 1978, Bell was summoned to Camp David where he was instructed by President Carter and top security officials to defy an order to release the files of 18 agents.
• One month later, following the issuing of a contempt citation against Bell by Judge Thomas Griesa, a higher court judge intervened on the Attorney General’s behalf to support the appeal of the contempt ruling.
• In November 1978, while arguing against the contempt citation, U.S. Attorney Robert Fiske Jr. stated that the government was prepared to forfeit $40 million rather than release the contested files. He claimed that to name the 18 agents would cause “incalculable harm to the nation’s ability to protect itself.”

While the court case was in progress, a 25-year veteran of the FBI began talking to the press about the illegal activities of the Bureau. The former agent, Wesley Swearingen, told United Press International:

“I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that everybody controlling the SWP is an FBI agent.”

Determined to maintain the FBI apparatus it has built up inside the SWP, the Federal judiciary — the most class-conscious instrument of the capitalist state — has dismissed the contempt order against Bell.

In turn, the SWP has announced that it is willing to settle its five-year-old lawsuit against government harassment without obtaining the names of the 18 informers — let alone the 1,600 agents who have worked in and around the SWP during the last 20 years.

True to the totally unprincipled anti-Trotskyist politics of the Workers Socialist League (Thornett clique), a Mr. John Lister has assumed the role of attorney and apologist for the SWP’s collaboration with the U.S. government. Writing in the April 25 issue of Socialist Press, Lister blatantly covers up for the SWP’s decision to accept the presence of FBI agents within its organization in exchange for the Judas silver of American imperialism.

He begins by claiming:

“The dramatic five-year struggle by the U.S. Socialist Workers Party to gain access to evidence of illegal activity by FBI informers, including those within the Party’s ranks, now stands at the crossroads.”

This “dramatic” struggle does not stand at the “crossroads.” It has, in fact, limped across the finishing line.

The SWP has explicitly declared that it is anxious and willing to settle the lawsuit without the names of the informers.

In a statement to the press, SWP leader Larry Seigle declared:

“The Court of Appeals has now upheld the government’s right to keep secret the identities of its stool-pigeons … by letting the government off the hook on the question of the identities of the 18 informers, which is a secondary issue in this case, the court’s decision clears the way for a settlement of the central issues.”

Leonard Boudin, the SWP’s lawyer, sent the following message to the Justice Department on March 21, 1979:

“I have been authorized by my clients in the above matter (Socialist Workers Party, et. al. vs. Attorney General, et. al.) to discuss with you a proposed settlement of their lawsuit against the government. It would be useful to discuss this proposal very soon so that we can all avoid, if possible, a third trip to the Supreme Court, as well as the elaborate and expensive (for the government) discovery which would be required under the Court of Appeal’s most recent decision.”

So much for the fate of the SWP’s “dramatic five-year struggle” against the government.

But Lister tries to apologize for the SWP’s sordid deal by suggesting that the suit brought to light numerous cases of government harassment against the SWP.

“To force such information and much more from the files of the secret political police of the U.S. capitalist state,” writes Lister, “is without doubt a major achievement of the SWP lawsuit.”

What does this “major achievement” consist of? Without exposing who the agents are, there can be no real exposure of their activities. And without kicking the agents out of the SWP, there is no stopping their activities.

The SWP lawsuit documented certain instances of “harassment.” But these cases give no real indication of the actual scope of police activity against the revolutionary movement. As The Militant, organ of the SWP, wrote last August 4:

“Bell, on the other hand, is protecting a gang of criminals who disrupt legal political activity, burglarize, and — like Gary Rowe, the FBI’s man in the KKK — beat up and murder people.”

(In the spring of 1978, it was publicly learned that Rowe had murdered a civil rights activist and several black people in the U.S. South while working as an FBI informer inside the racist Ku Klux Klan.)

Lister goes on to praise the SWP’s:

“historic success in putting the forces of repression on the defensive ...”

But what has turned out to be “historic” about this case is the SWP’s sanctioning of the presence of “the forces of repression” within the leadership of the organization.

And this is where we arrive at the essence of the miserable lie upon which Lister’s apology for the criminal activities of the SWP leadership is constructed.

Lister claims that:

“the massive coverup of the 18 informers by the FBI has emerged politically as the main question at stake.”

This is not the case. It is the massive cover-up of FBI agents within the SWP leadership itself which has emerged as the central issue in this case.

Does Lister have any illusions about the capitalist state? Why should it come as a surprise to anyone that the FBI, as an instrument of that state, should seek to conceal its crimes against the workers’ movement? To “demand” that the FBI should expose itself is no less politically ludicrous than to demand that the capitalist state should cease being a state.

But it is something else indeed for the SWP to cover up for FBI agents within its ranks and leadership and to negotiate an agreement with the state that explicitly sanctions the activities of these agents.

Lister seems shocked by the wholly predictable actions of the FBI, but accepts as absolutely natural the functioning of the SWP as the U.S. State Department Party.

The FBI refuses to release the names of its agents inside the SWP and the SWP wants an agreement to shut down the case without the names for one and the same reason:

The agents being protected by the FBI are the leaders of the Socialist Workers Party.

Lister knows this, but he has written this article as a friend and political accomplice of the international network of police agents whose center is located in the SWP Political Committee.

He tries to pose as a “left critic” of the SWP in order to soften the impact of the international exposure of its role as an instrument of the FBI and the U.S. State Department. His main criticism is that it has failed to take its campaign into the trade union movement.

But Lister has no objection at all to the SWP’s willingness to take blood money from the U.S. government.

Just the opposite is the case. He assumes the role of the SWP’s overseas solicitor in Britain.

A question which naturally arises is: Why has Lister decided to assume this role?

Is it because Lister himself and the WSL would be prepared to take this type of ruling class blood money if the occasion should arise?

Or is it, perhaps, because the FBI leaders of the SWP have promised Lister himself a cut of the proceeds if and when the blood money is delivered?

May 4, 1979