CHARGE SIX:
“We accuse George Novack and Mrs. David Dallin (Lola Estrine) of admitting the GPU spy Mark Zborowski into the United States and reintegrating him into the top levels of the Fourth International although he was gravely suspect, and then suppressing this fact for 35 years.”
Unable to refute this charge, Hansen resorts to pathetic diversions and cynicism.
He writes:
“Admitting Zborowski into the United States? Isn’t that charge rather wild? Neither the State Department nor immigration placed Novack in charge of admitting aliens to the United States. That can easily be proven.”
(Intercontinental Press, August 9, 1976).
This is Hansen playing for the cheap laughs of the middle class cynics and anti-communists. But the facts as presented by the International Committee stand unchallenged. Novack wrote last December that:
“Among those we brought to safety … was Mark Zborowski (Etienne) around whom Healey has raised his hue and cry decades later.”
(Intercontinental Press, December 8, 1975).
Mrs. Dallin, then working closely with George Novack, made a perilous journey to war-torn France in 1941 to arrange the rescue of Zborowski.
She obtained fraudulent travel documents for him, met him off the boat in Philadelphia, found him a job and accommodation in New York.
Lola Dallin and Novack knew that a cloud of suspicion hung heavily over Zborowski.
She read the Orlov letter which warned Trotsky in December 1938 that a GPU agent named “Mark” was at the top of his Paris organization. But Dallin told Trotsky not to believe the accusation in the letter in order to deflect Trotsky’s suspicions.
Novack, along with Hansen, and the rest of the SWP leadership, were familiar with the charges levelled by European supporters of Trotsky against Zborowski whom they accused of being a GPU agent.
This was confirmed by Jean Van Heijenoort, secretary to Trotsky from 1932 to 1939, in a tape interview with the International Committee on September 10, 1975, during which the following exchange took place:
Van Heijenoort: Cannon had stayed a long time in Paris in 1938–39 with the international conference and then to try to arrange the conflicts between the various French factions. And it was at that time that there was the Commission. Cannon knew much more about all that going on than I did because I was in Mexico at the time and I had nothing to tell Cannon, nothing that he couldn’t have told me.
Q: So Cannon knew all about this with Zborowski?
Van Heijenoort: Oh yes, of course.
Q: He knew all about it?
Van Heijenoort: Oh yes, he had been in the very midst of it. In the center of it.
Q: Did he speak to Vereeken?
Van Heijenoort: With Sneevliet? Certainly.
Q: Sneevliet probably told him?
Van Heijenoort: Yes, he had been at the very center of that.
Q: So, he knew when Zborowski was in New York that this was the same Etienne?
Van Heijenoort: Yes, yes, yes.
(For our readers’ benefit, let us recall that Henk Sneevliet and Georges Vereeken were European communists who had accused Zborowski of being a GPU agent in fortnight reports.)
Van Heijenoort concluded this exchange in the interview by saying that within the leadership of the SWP “Everybody knew that there had been some stories (about Zborowski) and that these stories popped up several times.”
That Novack brought Zborowski into the United States although he was gravely suspect has been established. However, Hansen attempts to continue his brief for Novack, his fellow accomplice of the GPU.
Hansen and Gordon’s lies
He disputes the second part of the charge:
“As for ‘reintegrating’ Zborowski ‘into the top levels of the Fourth International’, that bit of garbage has been disposed of by Sam Gordon in his article, “Healy’s Smear Against Trotsky’s Last Collaborators” (Intercontinental Press, August 9, 1976).
The only garbage here are the combined lies of Hansen and Gordon. The latter came out of political obscurity to defend Hansen with the astounding claim that he never met Mark Zborowski.
This was a desperate attempt to refute the fact that Zborowski was invited back into the leadership of the Fourth International which was headquartered in New York during the early 1940s.
The fact that Gordon is living was made clear by Jean Van Heijenoort who recalled in the interview with the International Committee that he had introduced Zborowski to Gordon.
We quote from the transcript:
Van Heijenoort: Well, I didn’t have to introduce him to anyone, except perhaps to Sam Gordon. He knew Lola (Mrs. Dallin), he knew Elsa Bernaut, (widow of the assassinated Ignace Reiss).
A sinister pattern of cover-up emerges. Zborowski organized the murder of Leon Sedov, Rudolf Klement, Erwin Wolf and Ignace Reiss.
The total number of Trotskyists who met their deaths through the intrigues of this agent is still to be determined.
Today, Zborowski lives in quiet luxury in San Francisco with a position of honor at the Mount Zion Hospital medical center—to which the International Committee traced him.
But Hansen has nothing to say about Zborowski. Neither has Novack who maintained for 35 years the secret of Zborowski’s entry into the United States. And Sam Gordon, who deserted the Trotskyist movement more than 20 years ago, is suddenly produced as a Hansen “sleeper” to become an “authority” on Zborowski.
But he has never written a word about Zborowski in his life—until he comes to the rescue of Hansen.
In the minds of Hansen, Novack and Gordon, the enemy is not Zborowski, the ruthlessly efficient killer-agent who once admitted to Elsa Bernaut, the woman he made a widow, that the day of Leon Sedov’s death was the “happiest” of his life.
No, their enemy is not Zborowski.
In all their writings you will not find one word that would cause this agent the slightest tribulation.
He owes his present prestige and luxury to their silence.
We repeat the facts: Novack and Mrs. Dallin did admit Zborowski into the United States, they did reintegrate him into the leadership of the Fourth International, and Novack did suppress this information for 35 years. The International Committee has all the evidence to place before the commission of inquiry to support Charge Six.