Inquiry Conducted by the International Committee of the Fourth International
The murder of Tom Henehan, 26 years old, member of the Political Committee of the Workers League, took place after 12:30 a.m. Sunday morning, October 16, 1977.
He was shot dead by an assailant who appeared only a few minutes earlier at the door of the Young Socialists dance where Tom Henehan was acting as a steward. The place was the Ponce Social Club in the Bushwick district of Brooklyn, New York City; address 554 Central Avenue at the corner with Weirfield.
Neither Tom Henehan nor any other member of the Workers League or Young Socialists knew or had ever before seen the gunman who fired the five shots which killed Comrade Henehan.
Jacques Vielot, another leading member of the Workers League, also a steward at the dance, was shot twice in the stomach and seriously wounded by a second assailant.
This man, who had been at the scene of the dance earlier the same evening, is known as Edwin (E). Besides these two at least four other men were involved in the attack.
Comrade Henehan was killed by five bullets from a .38 revolver to the neck, the lungs and next to the heart. The bullets wounding Comrade Vielot were of a slightly smaller caliber (not exactly ascertainable because the police will not release details at this point).
The room in which the dance was held has two entrances: one leading out directly into Weirfield, the other, at which the murder took place, is from a pool room which itself has an entrance directly on to Central Avenue.
This account of the killing, the events leading up to it and those following it, is based on the eyewitness evidence, documented in sworn statements of eight people who were present on the night.
The dance began towards 9:30. On more than one occasion the man E, who was to shoot Comrade Jacques Vielot, tried to start disputes at the door by trying to enter without paying.
Apart from this the dance was orderly, with no abnormal events or atmosphere.
At this point, the evidence of AS, a leading YS member corroborated by all the other witnesses, describes what happened.
“I was standing in the room when the disco was going on, over by the door that goes into the back part of the club where they usually hold the dance.
“And all of a sudden I heard a scuffle going on in the back room, in the pool room.
“And I looked over and I saw Jacques being jerked. I couldn’t really see what was happening. I thought he was fighting with somebody and he was right by the door.
“And the next thing I saw Tom run real fast from the dance floor toward the entrance …
“I guess he turned around the same time I did and he saw Jacques. So he ran into the pool room. He had to leap over a table because there was a table blocking the door. And then I started hearing shots go.”
The actual sequence of events in the pool room itself can be established from the statement of Comrade Jacques Vielot. The owner of the club and her son (Mrs. Ponce and Louis Ponce) had, in the half hour previously, intervened to pacify a group of three (ES, 23 years old, on weekend parole from prison, the man who eventually shot Jacques Vielot; AR, 17 years old, and a 15-year-old youth).
Louis Ponce had taken a large stick from one of these men, and E had slapped Tom Henehan in the course of an argument about entry to the dance. Jacques had held ES against the wall and told him he could not enter the dance.
At about 12:30 these three came back in the pool room and Jacques was sitting leaning on the table which divided the two rooms, facing the pool room. ES and AR stood at the side of him and the 15-year-old leant on the far pool table.
Then three entirely new persons, unknown, entered and stood at the side of the tables. They did not play and they did not attempt to enter the dance. Nor did they address themselves to Jacques or anyone else.
Stewards
At this point, Jacques asked Tom, who remained on the dance floor, to give him two extra stewards.
Almost immediately afterwards, a man entered, alone, the man who was to be the assassin. According to a statement made by AR the man was known as “T.”
“T” walked toward Jacques and looked past him into the dance. As “T” was looking into the dance hall, Jacques heard Edwin S and AR refer to “el blanco” (the white man). At that moment Comrade Henehan was standing toward the front of the hall, close to the doorway, and would have been easily spotted by “T” as he looked into the dance.
Then “T” walked back to the middle of the room. Edwin S and AR had now moved closer to Jacques, and Edwin said, pointing at Jacques, “This is the guy who grabbed me.”
“T” approached Jacques, said something in Spanish, and as he feigned to turn away hit Jacques with a punch to the head. As Jacques tried to get “T”, he was grabbed from behind by Edwin S and then attacked with a stick by AR.
Jacques’ statement goes on: “So I blocked it (the stick) like this and the stick cracked. It broke. As I picked him up, I heard two shots and I turned around. And this guy was between the tables, shooting at the door … So this is when I turned the kid (AR) towards the gun. And he was still shooting.”
The gun was a “bluish .38” with a brown or burgundy butt. Jacques pushed the youth AR in front of him until he reached the gunman. On his way, “I saw Tom hit through the neck.”
As Jacques moved, he was jumped on from behind by Edwin S who fired two shots from another gun into his stomach.
When Jacques reached the gunman “T” he seized his arm, trying to pull him down. “T” turned the .38 to Jacques’ left temple and pulled the trigger; there was only a “click,” the gun was now empty. Moments later, as he rushed the exit to the street, he turned, pointed the gun and shouted: “Anyone want any more?” Outside the door he stopped to reload his gun.
Two other pieces of information are necessary to complete the account up to the time of the shooting.
Firstly, at the same time as the entry to the pool room by the three men who preceded “T”, an attempt was made to break open the main door into the dance from Weirfield. The door had to be locked and held by Carl in order to prevent this. Secondly, AR, in his later conversation with a Workers League member said that Edwin S, after their final failure to get into the dance had telephoned “T” who had earlier in the evening been at a family party with Edwin S.
As the dance emptied Jacques Vielot lifted Tom Henehan, who was losing large amounts of blood from the neck and mouth, out to his car and drove him to Wyckoff Heights Hospital. Tom Henehan was still alive.
He spoke during the journey but was unable to do so on arrival because of the blood in his mouth. By 2:50 A.M. despite massive transfusions Tom Henehan was dead.
Jacques Vielot was operated on and kept in the hospital for two-and-a-half weeks.
At this stage, the autopsy report has not been released and we quote the testimony of Comrade David North, who was at the hospital.
“I asked him (the doctor) to describe Tom’s wounds. He replied that Tom had been hit in the neck and the chest and the shoulder. He said that the neck wound would not necessarily have been fatal, but the shoulder and chest wounds had destroyed major arteries and that had made life impossible.
“He said that he had inserted a tube into Tom’s chest to assist his breathing. When that was done a huge amount of blood poured out of his chest cavity. While this eased the pressure on his lungs and temporarily improved his breathing, it revealed terrible hemorrhaging. All the blood transfusions proved futile because the arterial system had been shattered.
“The death certificate filed by the medical examiner listed the cause of Comrade Henehan’s death as ‘gunshot wounds of neck, chest, wrist, hyoid bone, lung, massive internal hemorrhage’.”
The police were on the scene of the murder almost immediately after Jacques Vielot’s car left for the hospital. Comrade AS left the dance hall to look for a telephone and hailed a patrol car with two police officers.
The shooting itself took place between 12:45 and 12:50. The police were in the room before 1 o’clock, when AS’s telephone call reached Dave North, secretary of the Workers League, at his apartment.
When AS returned to the club—a matter of minutes—a number of the YS members had returned, and by now several police officers were present.
Police and detectives were also present at Wyckoff Heights Hospital by the time Comrade North arrived there at approximately 1:50 A.M. Detective John Mohl, of the 90th Precinct in Brooklyn and subsequently in charge of its investigations, intimated that the police would quickly round up the suspects.
By 3:00 A.M. as YS members who had remained at the club following the shooting were beginning to leave for home, the police were bringing back one of the youth who had been causing trouble with E outside the dance.
The police interviewed Jacques Vielot in the hours following the shooting and again on several occasions while he was in the hospital. They consistently rejected at that time his information that he himself had been shot by a second gun fired by Edwin S., even though he had been told by the doctor that the bullet extracted from him was 1-1/2 centimeters by 9 millimeters, i.e., smaller caliber than the “.38 copper-jacketed, high velocity bullet … which were more powerful than those the police use,” (statement by police to AS) which killed Tom Henehan.
The police told Jacques that they knew the identity of the killer but had not been able to apprehend him. Comrades were later informed that this would not be considered until the date (November 15) had passed for his reporting in as a convicted man on parole (he is on parole from a sentence for two previous murders).
(Immediately after the murder, however, the detective called Mohl had told Comrade Dave North that the police knew the killer and his name was Edwin, “and that finding him would be no problem.” He also said that there was nothing political about the shooting.)
By late Sunday afternoon (October 16) the same detective Mohl told DN that “all three suspects” in the shooting were known, and that two had been picked up (i.e., “Edwin” and AR were picked up, but not “T”). The two in police hands had agreed to be police witnesses.
At this stage comrades reported that the attitude of the police was deliberately giving the impression that they would investigate the murder regardless of Tom Henehan’s political connections – “the US is a democracy.”
Later, however, in a telephone conversation on October 25, Detective Mohl said: “He was just a commie and his death would be of interest only to other commies. We know you. You publish a red newspaper.”
The marked change in the attitude of the police towards the investigation into Comrade Henehan’s death coincided with the silence of the capitalist Press in New York City on the killing. Not one of the three capitalist dailies – the Times, the News or the Post – published as much as a sentence on the homicide.
It was not until the following Wednesday that the Post carried on one of its back pages an article reporting the presence of Comrade Vanessa Redgrave at the funeral home where Comrade Tom Henehan’s body lay in state.
Although reporters from two other capitalist newspapers were outside the funeral home, the stories they filed were not published.
On October 23, 1977, the News published a lengthy feature on “25 senseless killings” in New York City between October 14 and October 21. Comrade Henehan’s murder was listed among these “senseless killings.”
In the two paragraphs mentioning his death, there were not only gross factual errors (misspelling of his name, wrong age, wrong address of the club, etc.) but also no reference to Comrade Henehan’s political affiliations.
The dance itself was reported as a “private” affair, not as a function sponsored by the Young Socialists. The News could only have obtained its information from the Police Department.
On November 1 the Workers League phoned the police to ask for Mohl and was informed that he was on a week’s vacation. Mohl remained unavailable for virtually the entire month, ostensibly on account of a broken toe.
Two other items are available at the time of this interim report in relation to the police. The youth AR (companion of Edwin S on that night) gave the following information recorded by a Workers League member in an interview on November 5.
“I started hearing these shots. I didn’t see who this guy ‘T’ was shooting at. But I got very scared. I was scared, man. Then, when the black guy (Jacques) let go of me, I started to run.”
“About a minute later, A says that he was picked up by ‘T’ and Edwin. And they started driving over to this house on Linden Boulevard. When A got there ‘T’ and Edwin started to talk and he slipped out the door. He went back to the Ponce Social Club where the police were. He went up to the police and spoke to Lieutenant Mohl. A says that he told Lieutenant Mohl where Edwin and ‘T’ were. The police let him go after they found he lived on the third floor ...
“A told me that the police spoke to him on Sunday (16) and had him down at the police precinct. He identified Edwin to the police but ‘T’ was not arrested. He says he gave a description of this guy ‘I’ to the police.”
In conversation with Jacques Vielot in the hospital the police said that they had established that the gunman “T” had called at his place of work on the morning of Monday, October 17, to collect his wages.
Dances
Mrs. Ponce of the Ponce Social Club stated that she has had no serious trouble at any previous dances or parties at the club. The Young Socialists regularly hold dances in the Brooklyn area. The only previous one at this club was some two years ago. On no occasion had there been any serious trouble.
CITY OF NEW YORK
BUREAU OF VITAL RECORDS
DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH
OCT 19 1977
COMP. I. E. P.B.H.
(THOMAS HENEHAN)
CERTIFICATE OF DEATH
Certificate No. 56-77-316045
1. NAME OF DECEASED (Type or Print)
Thomas Henehan
2. MEDICAL CERTIFICATE OF DEATH (To be filled in by the Physician)
3. PLACE OF DEATH
New York City – Borough of Death: BROOKLYN – [Hospital:] HEIGHTS HOSPITAL
4. DATE AND HOUR OF DEATH
October 16 1977 2:50 AM SEX: MALE Approximate Age: 26 Yrs.
5. I HEREBY CERTIFY that I assumed charge of the dead body in KINGS COUNTY MORTUARY on the 16 day of OCTOBER ’77. I hereby certify that the decedent came to his death by violence, and that the cause of death was as follows:
PART I
GUNSHOT WOUNDS OF NECK, CHEST, WRIST, HYOID BONE, LARYNX; MASSIVE INTERNAL HEMORRHAGE
HOMICIDE
PART II
[blank / not applicable]
Monique A. Byers, M.D.
M.B. Case No. 7-5873
PERSONAL PARTICULARS (To be filled in by Funeral Director)
1. State: New York
2. County: New York
3. City or Town: New York
――――――――――――――――――――――――
Tom Henehan’s death certificate
Young Socialists political work is carried out regularly in this area. Two weeks before the killing Comrade AS and Paul (national secretary of the YS) had called at the premises directly across the road, accompanied by a real estate agent, inquiring about the possibility of renting them as Young Socialists permanent offices.
The Workers League and the Young Socialists have a long history of political work and considerable support among trade unionists and youth in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn. Hundreds of dollars are donated each month by Bushwick workers towards the fund for the Bulletin, twice-weekly organ of the Workers League.
In both 1974 and 1976 the Workers League collected thousands of signed petitions legally required to field a congressional candidate for the national elections in the Bushwick district.
In 1976, Comrade Henehan served as campaign manager for the Workers League candidate in Bushwick. He spoke at numerous public meetings and rallies, and the candidate polled nearly 1,000 votes.
Since the founding of the Young Socialists in December 1971, it has held scores of youth dances in Bushwick and weekly meetings. On no occasion has a member of either the Workers League or the Young Socialists been physically attacked or injured in the course of his/her political work.
Tom Henehan’s own political work in the Workers League is the other relevant matter for this interim inquiry. For four years he worked in the Brooklyn Branch of the League.
He concentrated on Young Socialists work in the area until his election to the Political Committee of the League in January 1977, by which time his leadership responsibilities particularly in the League’s press were occupying most of his time.
He began to take responsibility for work in the trade unions and particularly for political work in the Brooklyn Navy Yard.
Responsibility
He also had responsibility for work with new recruits and continued to be directly involved in politically assisting the Young Socialists’ work in the area. In the spring of 1977 he assumed responsibilities as New York area organizer.
The Brooklyn Navy Yard, in the Fort Greene area of Brooklyn near the bridge to Manhattan, has a union notoriously under mobster influence. The Workers League has a record of intervention there particularly against the closure nearly three years ago.
In recent months Tom Henehan was in close contact with workers who were mounting a challenge to the union bureaucracy and the contract. On Friday (October 14) before the meeting, Tom sold the Bulletin at the yard accompanied in this work by Jacques Vielot and Comrade JM.
Tom was also visiting workers from the yard on the Thursday and Friday evening. This work was meeting with very positive results. One of the sellers was threatened on the Friday morning by a man at the yard entrance.
The other aspect of Tom H’s recent work was his growing responsibility for defense and security. He had become especially involved with the precautions taken in defense of leading members and in particular was constantly in the company of the Workers League National Secretary.
The investigation by the International Committee of the Fourth International into Comrade Tom Henehan’s murder and the circumstances surrounding it continues.
This interim record established the details of the assassination itself and the immediate factual background.
It is based entirely on the direct statement of individuals immediately concerned with the incidents which took place on the night of October 15 and the early morning of October 16 as well as with the political work of Tom Henehan.
All this evidence produces a picture of planned and premeditated murder by a professional killer on parole who worked as part of a team which descended on the Young Socialists in Bushwick immediately following 12:30 a.m. on Sunday, October 16.
A second gunman, also on parole, shot Jacques Vielot. These facts and the evidence here presented on the policy of the New York police after they had evidence within a few hours of the identity of the killer and his associates must be taken in direct conjunction with the political documentation contained in the Open Letter to all Trotskyists by the International Committee which accompanied this interim report. Detailed investigation must continue and a full report will follow.
December 4, 1977
***
Open Letter to the World Trotskyist Movement
Statement of the International Committee of the Fourth International
The Murder of Comrade Tom Henehan
At 12:30 a.m. on Sunday, October 16, 1977, two leading American Trotskyists were shot at pointblank range at a Young Socialists dance held in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn, New York.
Comrade Tom Henehan, a member of the Political Committee of the Workers League, was killed when he received four gunshot wounds from a .38 caliber high velocity service pistol.
A second gunman seriously wounded Comrade Jacques Vielot, another leading member of the Workers League, by pushing a gun into his abdomen and firing two shots.
The killing of Comrade Henehan was a ruthlessly executed political murder. Those who fired the shots were contract killers acting in the service of the combined agencies of American imperialism.
Their aim was clear: to smash the growing independent movement of the international working class against capitalism by eliminating its conscious revolutionary leadership.
The political character of the murder of Comrade Henehan is blatantly revealed in the response of the organs of the capitalist class.
It is more than three weeks since the murder, yet the New York City Police Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) have not yet been able to apprehend the two gunmen.
This is extraordinary. The police have the name of the murderer and his accomplice. Detailed descriptions of the two men were given by eye-witnesses within an hour of the brutal murder. But up until now, the police have not even issued a warrant for their arrest.
The police spokesman at Homicide Division, Brooklyn, merely says that they are looking for one man “for questioning in connection with the alleged murder.”
Without making a single arrest for a crime which left one leader of the Workers League dead and another seriously wounded, the police insist that the murderous assault “isn’t political.” They have pushed this story from the moment they appeared on the scene of the crime, although they have yet to arrest the gunmen, interview them and check their political or underworld associations.
The inactivity of the police is aided by a virtual news blackout on the murder of Comrade Henehan by the capitalist press. The New York Times which claims to be the “newspaper of record” has to this day not published one line on the murder.
The first — and only — story on the murder appeared four days after the shooting in the New York Post, buried deep inside the newspaper. The Daily News, notorious for its coverage of city crime, made no mention of Comrade Henehan’s death for a full week. Then, it ran a three-page feature article in which it listed all 25 murders committed in New York City between October 14 and October 21. (Daily News, October 23, 1977).
The entire point of this article was to catalogue the “senseless” murders of New York and to suggest that the city’s murder rate comprises crimes of passion which have no motive or meaning. Comrade Henehan’s murder was listed in these “senseless” slayings, so that it can be conveniently absorbed and forgotten. No mention was made of his membership of the Workers League or the fact that his shooting occurred at a political function organized by the Young Socialists.
The purpose of this article — which, significantly, had no byline — was to deliberately coverup the political character of Tom Henehan’s murder.
But there is another political quarter in which total silence on the murder of Tom Henehan is being observed. The revisionist United Secretariat of Professor Ernest Mandel, its offshoots and the innumerable renegade groups all over the world have not published one word on this political murder in their press.
In the United States, the leadership of the Socialist Workers Party has taken a deliberate decision to write nothing about the murder of a 26-year-old Trotskyist leader in their weekly organ, The Militant.
This has confused some SWP members and angered others. Even those with an elementary political knowledge know that the Fourth International has always expressed its deep-felt solidarity with all working class groups and parties when such crimes have been committed in the past. No matter how bitter the political differences, we make no exceptions.
In the United States, the Workers League has always defended the SWP whenever it came under attack by the capitalist state and its provocateurs. All attacks on the SWP have been promptly reported and condemned in The Bulletin, twice-weekly newspaper of the Workers League.
Several months ago, when a bullet was fired through the window of the Manhattan home of Catarino Garza, a leader of the SWP, the Bulletin immediately denounced this provocation.
This has always been the policy of the Trotskyist movement. It has defended reformists, Stalinists and trade-union bureaucrats with whom it has unbridgeable political differences. We have always been and are today for a united front against the common class enemy. A movement which has suffered as much persecution as the Trotskyists from imperialists and Stalinists alike knows how to share and endure grief as a matter of political principle, of working-class solidarity.
Only the Stalinists oppose this fundamental policy of class solidarity. They have always supported and condoned the murder of Trotskyists. Having murdered Trotsky and hundreds of thousands of his followers in the Soviet Union and all over the world, the Stalinists applaud every crime committed against the Fourth International.
Now, in 1977, the silence of the Socialist Workers Party’s Militant on the political murder of Comrade Henehan joins the silence of the Daily World, organ of the American Communist Party.
Meanwhile, behind the scenes, the leaders of the SWP — the very people who sent a message of condolence to Mrs. Jacqueline Kennedy after her “Bay of Pigs” butcher-husband was killed — are vainly trying to justify their silence. They are spreading lying allegations that the Workers League, and the International Committee of the Fourth International with which it is in political solidarity, consists of “violent men.”
These lies were not conjured up overnight. For several months prior to Comrade Henehan’s murder the SWP leaders have been steadily feeding to their members totally unsubstantiated and increasingly lurid stories about Workers League “violence.”
In 1940, the Stalinists raised their lies about “violent Trotskyite factionalists and wreckers” to an hysterical pitch — and then, after the August 20 assassination in Mexico City, said that Trotsky brought his death upon himself.
Now, beneath the smokescreen of lies about “violence” spread by the SWP and its leader Joseph Hansen, real violence has been done and Tom Henehan has been shot dead in Brooklyn at 26. The years go by but the methods of the counterrevolution remain the same.
Those who have been screaming loudest about so-called “violence” of the International Committee of the Fourth International and the Workers League do not utter a word of protest when real counter-revolutionary violence is done against the Trotskyist movement in a blatant political murder.
The relation between counterrevolutionary violence against the Trotskyist movement on the one hand, and Stalinist politics on the other, is not a chance matter. It is determined by the profoundest objective forces in the international class struggle.
When the Stalinists turned in 1935–39 to their Popular Front with the so-called “democratic” forces preaching peace and social order, Stalin’s lie machine and the bloody terror of the GPU, inside and outside the Soviet Union, reached their climax.
The Fourth International was the prime target and the first victim. The Stalinists and centrists of all kinds excused and justified these killings by appealing to bourgeois “democratic” public opinion against the “extremist” Trotskyists who were denounced as “violent conspirators” and “Fifth Columnists.”
Today, in 1977, the revisionists who falsely called themselves Trotskyists have joined this historical tradition of counterrevolutionary Stalinism. They advocate support of the reactionary “Euro-communism” tendency through which the West European Stalinists seek to guarantee the stability of the capitalist state against the working class.
The revisionists advocate a “unity” with Stalinists and centrist forces in order to make a last-ditch defense for the reformist bureaucracy as it loses its grip on the working class in Britain, Western Europe and the United States.
The other side of this reformist and “democratic” orientation by Mandel’s “United Secretariat” and Hansen’s SWP is their vile denunciations of the International Committee of the Fourth International, the Workers Revolutionary Party of Britain and the Workers League in the US, and their personal vilification of individual leading comrades such as Comrade Gerry Healy of the Workers Revolutionary Party.
In this way they create a smokescreen behind which unknown assailants gun down Comrade Henehan while other killings by these unknown forces about whom they remain silent are prepared. All their fire is concentrated against the supposed “violence” of the revolutionaries when the real counterrevolutionary violence of the capitalist state is unfolding against the Trotskyist movement. Tom Henehan is the first victim.
The key to all these developments is to be found in the world objective situation. Because the working class in the major capitalist countries is summoning up its strength to fight back against the runaway inflation and rising unemployment of the slump, the struggle for state power is posed.
Particularly in Britain, only the reformists could find a temporary formula — Labour government’s social contract with the TUC — to stem the forces which overthrew the Tory government in February 1974. Now, in 1977, the miners and other sections of the trade union movement are openly challenging the union bureaucracy, the Lib-Lab coalition government and, by this token, the state power itself.
In the United States, the deepening slump and the continuing slide of the dollar have brought down in ruins the temporary political equilibrium achieved through President Carter’s winning of the black and working class vote in November 1976. But, only nine months since his inauguration, those who he made promises to are breaking away and preparing epic battles over wages and jobs.
It is this stage reached in the objective relationship of class forces that determines the actual political role of the revisionists, their attacks on the International Committee of the Fourth International and their criminal silence on the political murder of Tom Henehan.
The first and overriding necessity imposed on the capitalist class and its state by the developing political and economic crisis is to politically behead the working class to prevent the development of Marxist revolutionary leadership in its ranks. These class necessities find out, select and set in motion, every weakness, every capitulation to bourgeois democracy, every revision of fundamental Marxist theory, every refusal to face up to the history of the revolutionary movement and its struggle against Stalinism.
The revisionists are the first to be felt out by the ruling class and turned into the handmaidens of counter-revolution. Together with their friends in the New Left and the Stalinist parties, they are coming around to openly rejecting the Marxist theory of the capitalist state. They want to replace the theory of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky that the state is bodies of armed men to insure the rule of capital. Their new “theory” is that capital rules through ideological hegemony or consensus.
(All this, at the very time when the reformists in government in West Germany and Britain reveal in the Baader-Meinhof case their reliance on armed liquidation squads to deal with “enemies of the state”).
Similarly, the revisionists turn today to compromise with Zionism and imperialism against the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and the Arab masses. They spread pernicious lies about the Workers Revolutionary Party being financed by Arab nationalist governments in order to brand us as terrorists.
All the accusations of violence against the International Committee are lies, and we are prepared to go before an International Commission of Inquiry to prove this. In defending unconditionally all those who struggle against imperialism in the colonial and semi-colonial countries, from Vietnam to the Middle East to Ireland, we have always reaffirmed the positions developed and defended by Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky on individual terrorism. There can be no substitute for the mobilization of the mass of the working class to overthrow the capitalist state; and this requires, above all, the building in every day practice against the reformist and Stalinist bureaucracies, of a revolutionary party based on dialectical materialism, on Marxist theory, on Trotskyism. We are at one with Lenin when he emphasizes that the task is to engage in “work that brings closer and merges into a single whole the elemental destructive force of the masses and the conscious destructive force of the organization of revolutionaries” — the revolutionary party. (Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 5)
Neither the “violence” slanders of Hansen and the SWP nor the political murder of Comrade Tom Henehan will stop our determination to train revolutionary cadres schooled in the theory and practice of Marxism.
Trotsky was not intimidated by the GPU terror machine or the hateful calumnies of his political opponents when he founded the Fourth International in 1938. Nor will the International Committee be diverted in carrying forward the struggle he gave his life for.
Information is now in our hands to prove that no matter what the International Committee says and does, one man — the SWP’s Joseph Hansen — is out to frame us.
He is already writing a book of slander dredging his material from the political sewers of anti-communism and various shades of revisionism. We can say in advance what falsifications can be expected to appear.
There is a so-called tape recording supplied by Hansen’s political agents in Britain. It purports to record a meeting in 1951 at which supporters of Mr. Tony Cliff, the arch priest of state capitalism, were expelled from the Trotskyist movement because Cliff had publicly violated the discipline of the section in denouncing North Korea as being no different from South Korea in the war. The expulsion of the state capitalists at that time from the British section was endorsed by the entire organizations of the Fourth International, including its sympathizing section the SWP, and Hansen.
Secondly, Hansen possesses two bogus “affidavits” drawn up by the renegades Blick and Jenkins in Britain which purport to tell of “incidents” at summer camps held during the 1960s by the Socialist Labour League, forerunner of the Workers Revolutionary Party. Copies of the fraudulent documents are in our possession and are available for submission to an International Commission of Inquiry.
These warped lies are on a par with the “terror” stories of the Menshevik scoundrels who found ready jobs with imperialism by attacking the Russian Revolution and the Bolsheviks. No one would touch the reactionary rantings of Blick- Jenkins with a barge pole — except Hansen.
Now he intends to bring it together in one literary garbage pail with the so-called Tate affair, the desertion of Tim Wohlforth from the Workers League and any other morsel of gossip — to frame the International Committee with a McCarthy-style “violence” label. This is Hansen’s deliberate policy: complete silence over the political murder of Comrade Tom Henehan to be followed by an international hue and cry about the “violence” of the International Committee and Comrade Healy of the Workers Revolutionary Party. Thus, the way is prepared for new killings.
There is no mystery about Hansen’s motives for this vile campaign. He desperately needs a diversion because he cannot answer the International Committee’s two and a half year investigation into “Security and the Fourth International.”
Hansen has fallen absolutely silent since the publication of our interview with the GPU undercover agent Sylvia Franklin and the further article exposing his FBI association which was entitled, “Will the real Joseph Hansen please stand up.” (Bulletin, August 5, 1977.)
Does Hansen intend to explain to his members, to the Trotskyist movement and to the international working class how he came to be consorting with a top GPU agent in 1938 and forming a secret and personal liaison with the FBI in New York in 1940, five weeks after Trotsky’s murder?
It seems not. Instead of working on a reply to these fully documented charges – the immediate responsibility of any serious revolutionist – Hansen is preparing his bucket of diversionary slander.
He cannot explain why these associations were kept secret from his own party and the international movement until they were uncovered by the International Committee during its investigation. Nor can he explain why he praises Sylvia Franklin, nee Callen, party name Caldwell, as “an exemplary comrade” of the SWP when the International Committee has proved beyond a shadow of doubt that she was a GPU undercover agent in the Trotsky murder team.
She was planted in the SWP headquarters in New York in 1938 where she quickly rose to become personal secretary to the late James P. Cannon until 1947. All the time she was stealing correspondence flowing between Trotsky in Mexico and his comrades in New York, removing correspondence with international sections of the Trotskyist movement and betraying overseas comrades to the GPU, pilfering documents on Trotsky’s security and on political discussion within the party.
Despite this – and perhaps even more yet to be revealed – Hansen and his twisted co-thinkers abroad all maintain that Franklin was a loyal SWP member.
The “Security and the Fourth International” investigation has proved that Hansen and his colleague George Novack have followed a consistent policy of protecting GPU agents from exposure and covered up their crimes against the Trotskyist movement.
For this reason the International Committee, on January 1, 1976, charged both men with being accomplices of the GPU and demanded the immediate formation of an international commission of inquiry.
The inquiry is made even more urgent by virtue of the recent revelations by the International Committee that Hansen sought and obtained a private contact with the FBI in 1940. Hansen was enjoying contacts with Mr. B. E. Sackett, the FBI chief in New York, just as the bureau’s notorious director, J. Edgar Hoover, was engaged in the preparation of a frame-up indictment of the SWP leadership under the Smith Act.
There is an authenticated original copy with Hansen’s own signature available, should he challenge this at an International Commission of Inquiry.
The following year a group of SWP leaders including James P. Cannon, Albert Goldman, Felix Morrow, Farrell Dobbs and Grace Carlson were arrested, convicted and jailed for alleged anti-war offenses. The notable exception was Joseph Hansen who was in New York editing The Militant with the worthy secretarial assistance of Sylvia Franklin.
The demand for an inquiry into all the issues surrounding “Security and the Fourth International” was first made by the International Committee from its Sixth World conference in May 1975.
Now this call has been echoed by the tendency of Michel Pablo. In a letter to the “Unified Secretariat” and the SWP last month, Pablo’s group reflected the growing pressure for such an inquiry.
His letter said: “The campaign unleashed by Healy’s organization continues and new facts are piling up which support this campaign and do real damage to the movement which calls itself, or has come out of, the Fourth International and Trotskyism. We are particularly sensitive to this. We therefore think that in fact it has become necessary to form an International Commission composed of impartial persons, appointed by common agreement of all, to pronounce definitively on the different aspects so far raised.” (October 7, 1977).
The International Committee does not of course share the political positions of Pablo’s organization. But it is essential to acknowledge the overwhelming weight of evidence to which Pablo’s letter draws attention.
It is not the revealing of facts which damages Trotskyism, but the refusal of the “United Secretariat” and the SWP to recognize them and deal with their implications.
The International Committee is for unearthing the conspiracy which surrounded the assassination of Leon Trotsky; our revisionist opponents have shown until now that they are for keeping it buried.
A Parity Commission of Inquiry composed of persons acceptable to both sides must be set up immediately and it must take evidence on all the charges of “violence” as well as every security issue in the history of our movement since the first GPU penetration.
All the questions surrounding the murder of Comrade Tom Henehan and the reasons for the silence of the SWP, their refusal to politically defend the Workers League against the killing, should be considered by the commission.
All those concerned should be entitled to give evidence as well as to answer questions and themselves cross-question others. What political motive can there be for opposing such an inquiry and its findings?
In the meantime, we must emphasize, the “Security and the Fourth International” investigation goes forward. It will not stop its discovery and regular publication of statements until Hansen and Novack and Mandel have agreed to join the inquiry.
The political slaying of Comrade Tom Henehan demands an immediate response from all Trotskyists. Whatever the differences, there can be no justification for failure to solidarize with the Workers League on this question. It is an elementary duty flowing from the revolutionary proletarian internationalism on which our movement is founded.
It is time to close ranks and restore to life these principles. Together with these basic questions of defense against the terror of the class enemy goes the inescapable responsibility of exposing the truth of the Stalinist terror machine which killed Trotsky. These are the great historic questions now facing Trotskyists everywhere.
November 10, 1977