CHARGE TWO:

“Joseph Hansen and George Novack have deliberately created diversions and slander campaigns to prevent a full-scale inquiry into the security at Coyoacan where Trotsky was murdered on August 20, 1940.”

Hansen and Novack dismiss completely the sworn testimony of Thomas L. Black, an American Stalinist who was planted in Hansen’s SWP by the GPU in 1936.

On May 17, 1956, Black told a sub-committee of the US Senate Judiciary Committee that his GPU controller, Dr. Gregory Rabinowitz, told him to go to Coyoacan.

He was told “there would be other Soviet agents in Trotsky’s household” and his job would be “to arrange for the assassination of Trotsky.” (US Senate Judiciary Committee on “Scope of Soviet Activity in the United States,” May 17, 1956, Library of Congress.)

Hansen and Novack knew in 1956 that Black gave this sworn, public testimony. But they said absolutely nothing about it.

They kept it buried for almost 20 years until the International Committee dug it out of the Congressional records in 1975. Left to Hansen and Novack this material would never have been published and discussed in the Trotskyist movement.

Hansen refers sneeringly to the International Committee’s “singular confidence” in Black’s testimony.

The issue here is not confidence.

We have simply brought this evidence to light. The question is now raised: Were GPU agents functioning inside Coyoacan?

Far from seeking an answer to this question, Hansen and Novack have sought to suppress what Black had to say about the GPU machinations leading up to the murder of the founder of the Fourth International.

There is only one way to test Black’s testimony and that is to investigate everyone in Trotsky’s household to clear their names of the Senate record stigma.

This is the procedure recommended by the International Committee in its indictment of January 1, 1976.

It is the procedure supported by Harold Robins, captain of the guard at Coyoacan.

But it is the procedure which Hansen and Novack desperately reject.

Confronted with publication of the testimony that they suppressed, Hansen and Novack say it is “the lies of an FBI stool pigeon.” (Intercontinental Press, August 9, 1976.)

Trotsky anticipated the cretinous arguments of this description when he wrote The Comintern and the GPU, published on August 17, three days before his murder.

To prove the links between the GPU and the worldwide Stalinist parties, Trotsky quoted Benjamin Gitlow, a founding member of the American Communist Party who broke from Stalinism and became an anti-communist:

“B. Gitlow broke with the Comintern, otherwise he would not have come forward with his revelations. Gitlow’s present political tendencies do not interest me. Suffice it that the factual side of his book is based on incontestable facts. . .I cite Gitlow’s book not as a literary work but as the testimony of a witness; first, because Gitlow gave the same testimony under oath before a Congressional investigating committee; secondly, because he is ready to answer under oath any questions of the Mexican court.”

(Writings of Leon Trotsky, 1939–40, pp. 103–104, Merit Publishers.)

Hansen’s attack on Black’s testimony takes another curious turn. He cites the Senate transcript at the point where Black states that he learned from his GPU overseer that the assassination of the anarchist Carlo Tresca in New York in 1943 had been carried out by the GPU.

Suspicions are confirmed

Black’s testimony confirmed suspicions that had existed in the Trotskyist movement at the time of the murder.

Tresca had served on the Dewey Commission, enjoyed the admiration of Leon Trotsky, and was a determined enemy of Stalinism. Shortly before his death he had received a warm letter from James P. Cannon (December 8, 1942).

Hansen, however, gratuitously absolves the GPU and asserts that the assassination was carried out by local Italian fascists. He writes:

“Black’s assertion that a Soviet spy had admitted that the job was done by gunmen of the GPU was well calculated to help the New York police, who were under fire from civil libertarians and the left for their resistance to following up the known leads pointing to local ultra-rightists as the killers of Carlo Tresca.”

Hansen does not explain why Black’s testimony in 1956 was “well calculated” to extricate New York police from criticism in 1943.

Nor does he explain why he absolves the GPU while his own SWP staff still maintains to this day that the most likely authors of the assassination were the Stalinists.

We quote from a footnote which appears in the appendix of the 1975 Pathfinder (SWP) edition of James P. Cannon, Writings and Speeches, 1940–43, p. 431:

“Carlo Tresca, former leader of the IWW, a close associate of Sacco and Vanzetti, and editor of the New York Italian anarchist newspaper Il Martello (The Hammer), had long been a friend of Cannon and they collaborated together on many civil liberties and labor defense cases. He was assassinated on a New York street corner a few weeks after this letter (from Cannon), on January 11, 1943. It has never been conclusively established whether the murder was committed by Italian gangsters as a favor to Mussolini or by agents of Stalin’s GPU in reprisal for Tresca’s uncompromising criticism of the repression of workers’ rights in the Soviet Union.”

Will Hansen now claim that the editor of the Pathfinder volume—Les Evans—authorized this footnote in a “well calculated” attempt to serve the interests of the New York police?

If he does, we will have to take on more than the “stool pigeon” Mr. Evans.

In the days following the murder of Tresca, the Militant, weekly organ of the SWP, charged repeatedly that it was a GPU job. In a series of major articles written in January and February of 1943, Political Committee member Felix Morrow directly accused the GPU of preparing a new “murder drive” against the SWP and those who oppose the policies of Stalinism.

This was not only the opinion of the SWP. The Militant reported that the entire Italian-American labor movement in New York was up in arms against the Stalinists for the murder of Tresca.

Only one paper pushed the Hansen line that Tresca was the victim of the Mafia or the fascists—the Daily Worker, paper of the American Stalinists!

Another puzzling argument

Like Hansen today, they indignantly tried to acquit the Soviet bureaucracy of responsibility.

The very “civil libertarians” who Hansen approvingly refers to as trying to affix blame for the assassination on the fascists, unquestionably included no small number of Kremlin hacks then trying mightily to take the heat off the GPU.

But Hansen introduces still another puzzling argument to challenge Black’s testimony against the GPU. Rejecting the ex-agent’s testimony that he had been told by his controller that Tresca had received a “trial” in Moscow and had been ordered killed on Stalin’s instructions, Hansen expounds on the “unlikelihood that Black’s GPU overseer would ever pass that kind of information on to an agent as insignificant and uncertain in loyalty as Black.”

But it is Hansen who claims that he “chanced to meet” a GPU agent who then trustingly introduced him to the top Kremlin spy in the United States.

Why is Hansen so certain that Black, an admitted agent, would not be taken into the confidence of the GPU when Hansen, who pretends to be a Trotskyist, was initiated into the inner sanctum of the GPU’s New York spy ring after a chance encounter?

Hansen’s attack on Black’s testimony does not refute Black or satisfy the International Committee’s demand that Black’s allegations about GPU spies at Coyocan be investigated. Rather, his extraordinary attack only raises still more questions about Hansen.

The International Committee did not originally raise the matter of Tresca’s death. Hansen has raised it by coming forward as an attorney for the GPU.

He has now directly repudiated the long-standing position of the SWP on this crime.

Instead he advances exactly the same arguments used by the Stalinists in 1943 to get the GPU off the hook.

The International Committee believes that the case of Carlo Tresca should be reopened. To the best of our abilities and limited resources we promise to investigate his assassination and determine why Hansen has once again taken the floor for the GPU.

Now, we ask this question: Had Trotsky survived, had he heard Thomas Black’s evidence of GPU agents in Coyoacan, would he have dismissed Black as an “FBI stool pigeon” and suppressed his testimony from the movement? Of course not! The people who do things like that aren’t Trotskyists at all; they are accomplices of the GPU. Trotsky would have treated Black’s testimony the same way he treated Gitlow’s.

The evidence to support Charge Two is ready for submission to the committee of inquiry.

CHARGE THREE:

“Joseph Hansen and George Novack have protected and covered up for Sylvia Franklin, the GPU agent in the Socialist Workers Party who became personal secretary to the late James P. Cannon throughout the 1940s.”

There is ample evidence produced by the International Committee proving that Sylvia Franklin, born Sylvia Franklin, alias Sylvia Caldwell, was a GPU agent. This includes:

• The sworn affidavit of ex-Stalinist Louis Budenz submitted to the House Un-American Activities Committee on November 11, 1950, during an investigation into “American Aspects of the Assassination of Leon Trotsky.” He gave the name of the agent who recruited Franklin for Trotskyist penetration, how much she was paid, details of her GPU work in the SWP head office and its success rating.
• The book The Mind of an Assassin by Isaac Don Levine which Hansen says he read and checked in advance of its publication in 1960.
• The Federal grand jury indictment of the Dr. Robert Soblen spy ring handed down on November 29, 1960, in New York. It named Franklin in her maiden name, Sylvia Callen, as an unindicted co-conspirator along with Lavrenti Beria, the notorious killer who headed the GPU.
• The sworn testimony of master spy Jack Soble at the trial of his brother, Dr. Robert Soblen, at the US District Court in New York in 1962.
• The interview with Jean Van Heijenoort, Trotsky’s secretary, tape-recorded by the International Committee on September 10, 1975.
• The interview with Grace Carlson, former member of the SWP’s national committee, tape-recorded by the International Committee on October 13, 1975.

Now further evidence has come to hand proving that Franklin worked for the GPU all the time she was in the SWP’s New York headquarters. It is contained in a 78-page brief prepared by the US prosecutor for the New York Court of Appeals when Soblen was planning to contest his conviction and sentence. (In fact he jumped bail and committed suicide in London in September 1962.)

Lying arguments answered

Page Six of this document is headed, “Statement of Facts — The Conspirators.” It lists Dr. Soblen; his brother Jack Soble; Floyd Cleveland Miller, another GPU agent in Hansen’s SWP; and then a group of agents, including Lucy Booker, Mark Zbokowski, Sylvia Callen, Esther Rand, Ilya Wolston (Soble’s nephew), Jane Zlatovski, Beatrice Spitz, Alfred K. Smith, Martha Dodd Stern and Rebecca Getzoff. The documents describe them as “various persons who worked with appellant, Jack Soble and Floyd Miller on behalf of the Soviets.”

On December 8, 1975, Novack attacked the International Committee for making “indiscriminate allegations” against Franklin while providing “no new probative evidence”. Both his lying arguments are adequately answered above.

The question is why Hansen and Novack indiscriminately give security clearances to GPU agents like Franklin when mountains of unassailable evidence are staring them in the face?

There is a further point. Franklin was an unindicted co-conspirator in the Soblen-Soble spy ring and was therefore never brought to court. Charges were dropped because she refused to cooperate with the FBI.

In other words she became a double agent. The question is raised: Why are Hansen and Novack so determined to protect this GPU agent who did such serious damage at the top of their own party and then went over to the FBI?

On page 29 of the Appeals Court document Sylvia Franklin (born Callen) is mentioned again in a review of our testimony during Soblen’s trial. It states:

“Other persons assigned to work with Jack Soble were a Miss Getzoff, a woman named Sylvia who was a secretary in the Trotsky organization; and one Esther Rand, whose work was among the Zionists.” (Emphasis added.)

Now let us turn to what Novack has to say in his first reply to Security and the Fourth International (Intercontinental Press, November 26, 1975), Hansen wrote:

“Sylvia Caldwell (that was her party name) worked very hard in her rather difficult assignment of managing the office of the Socialist Workers Party, which included helping Cannon in a secretarial capacity. In fact all the comrades who shared these often irksome chores with her regarded her as exemplary. They burned as much as she did over the foul slander spread by Budenz.”

Hansen then dramatically referred to the 1950 SWP Control Commission which “investigated” Budenz’s testimony and found that she was a “comrade whose integrity and devotion is unassailable.”

A rubber stamp body

That Control Commission report was fixed. There was no investigation.

The Control Commission was in fact a rubber stamp body set up for one reason only, and that was to clear Sylvia Franklin.

The question is, why?

Franklin was a GPU agent.

She left the SWP around 1950 without explanation and shortly after the Commission’s work was completed. That was the last anyone heard of her until she turned up in the 1960 indictment against Robert Soblen.

Hansen and Novack are defending an agent who was strategically placed by the GPU in the SWP’s headquarters well before Trotsky’s assassination, and therefore would have been well positioned to assist the murderous preparations of the Stalinist killers. That Sylvia Caldwell was already a trusted office worker inside the SWP by the late 1930s can be proven.

We quote from the May 12, 1939 issue of Socialist Appeal which contains the following note:

“To the readers of the Russian Bulletin. The latest issue of the Russian Bulletin, No. 75-76, arrived and can be gotten at 116 University Place, Second Floor. Ask for Sylvia Caldwell.”

The official coverup of the Franklin spy story orchestrated by Hansen and Novack has been blown apart by the investigation of the International Committee.

The roots of this coverup must be probed.

Hansen and Novack must make available all the documents relating to the 1950 Control Commission investigation.

Who was on the Control Commission? Who testified on Franklin’s behalf?

Why was the Control Commission not reopened in 1960 after she was named a co-conspirator in the Soblen trial?

We have proved beyond any shadow of a doubt that Hansen and Novack are shielding the GPU agent Caldwell–Franklin–Callen, who roosted at the top of the SWP, stealing documents, minutes, correspondence, and internal documents for her GPU paymasters.

She supplied volumes of information about the relations between Trotsky’s household and the SWP’s New York headquarters.

She was in a position to influence decisions, particularly the selection of guards. How much of this was used in planning the GPU assassination of Trotsky must be established.

Her controller, Dr. Rabinowitz, was the same GPU chief that Hansen met and he (“John”) was in charge of preparing Trotsky’s murder. He said that her services “had proved to be invaluable.”

The International Committee is completely confident of sustaining Charge Three before the commission of inquiry.

CHARGE FOUR:

“Joseph Hansen has contrived to prevent an inquiry into the role of Robert Sheldon Harte, the guard sent by the SWP’s New York headquarters to Trotsky’s household in April 1940.”

Hansen and Novack have again ruled out any inquiry into the role of Harte, the guard who opened the gate at Coyoacán on the night of May 24, 1940, letting in a Stalinist raiding party which almost killed Trotsky and his family.

This is the continuation of a deliberate 36-year policy of suppressing information about the murder of Trotsky.

In the weeks between the May 24 raid and the fatal attack on August 20, 1940, Trotsky poured over every item of evidence relating to Harte. But once Trotsky was dead, Hansen and Novack put the lid on the Harte affair as if it were a closed chapter.

No serious investigation

They have never taken up a serious investigation of the statements by General Leandro A. Sanchez Salazar, chief of the Mexican secret police, who asserted that Harte was a GPU agent.

Even Trotsky’s biographer Isaac Deutscher noted that “The enigma of Harte’s role was not definitely solved” — and Hansen claims to have read and checked the author’s manuscript prior to publication.

Georges Vereeken, the Belgian workers’ leader, says in his book, The GPU in the Trotskyist Movement, that:

“Although these things have become public knowledge, Hansen continues to defend Sheldon Harte. He explains that he was a member of the Socialist Workers Party, that confidence was placed in him because he himself had asked to carry out difficult tasks. This argument seems very flimsy to me. He is also the only one who accepts the version put out by the Stalinist Toledano paper El Popular of May 25, 1940, according to which Sheldon put up strong resistance. He believes above all that ‘the insistence of the Communist Party on the complicity of Sheldon was the best proof of his loyalty to the Fourth International’. And he naively adds that this was the only organ to put out such a version. A strange way of reasoning: to take what the Stalinists write for good coin.”

In his statement of August 9, Hansen evades all reference to the International Committee’s dossier on the Harte affair. Hansen wants this evidence buried, something that Trotsky would never have tolerated.

By deliberately trying to suppress an inquiry, Hansen and Novack help the GPU if the was an agent.

If he wasn’t, their role is to prevent a proper historical accounting in the Trotskyist movement of the historical conditions leading up to its founder’s death.

Either way, they are guilty of trying to suppress the facts.

These include the conditions under which Harte, an ex-Stalinist, was sent to Mexico as one of Trotsky’s bodyguards.

He was recommended from New York, where according to Hansen and independently verified by the International Committee, Sylvia Franklin “worked very hard in her rather difficult assignment of managing the national office of the Socialist Workers Party.” (Intercontinental Press, November 24, 1975)

All the data to substantiate Charge Four—suppression of an investigation into the role of Sheldon Harte in Coyoacan—is available for the Commission of Inquiry.