CHARGE SEVEN:

“Joseph Hansen has deliberately covered up the spy career of Floyd Cleveland Miller, the US Stalinist who tapped James P. Cannon’s home telephone for a year before joining the SWP to become a leading figure in organizing Trotskyist seamen.”

Hansen’s 23-page “reply” of August 9, 1976, contains not a single reference to the GPU agent Miller.

The International Committee’s evidence has shown that Miller, like Sylvia Franklin, became a double agent.

They were Stalinist agents planted in the SWP where they quickly wormed their way into crucial positions.

Later they co-operated with the FBI and thereby were granted immunity from prosecution when the Dr. Robert Soblen spy ring was rounded up and indicted in November 1960.

Miller took over from Sam Gordon, alias J.B. Stuart, as editor of the Seafarers’ International Union newspaper during the war where he kept surveillance on the movement of Trotskyist seamen for the GPU.

He wrote on military affairs for The Militant under the pseudonym “Michael Cort.”

When Miller was named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Soblen spy network and when he testified in the New York District Court, Hansen and Novack deliberately said nothing about it.

As with Sylvia Franklin, the question is raised: why does Hansen protect the double agents?

Why is he so afraid of a full inquiry into Miller’s role inside the SWP when he ran the seamen’s work in which Hansen himself was a wartime participant?

Why does he not want an investigation into the manner in which Miller rose so quickly in the ranks of the SWP and was entrusted with the responsibility of visiting Mexico to discuss the publication of Trotsky’s biography of Stalin with Natalia Sedov?

Hansen and Novack have systematically worked to bury these questions and now that the International Committee has forced them to give a public account they shout that we are “paranoid.”

Listen again to the transcript of the tape-recorded interview with Trotsky’s secretary, Jean Van Heijenoort:

“A whole book can be written on the GPU agents who were in the Trotskyite ranks at the time, without talking about local agents like Cannon’s secretary in the SWP (note the explicit reference to Sylvia Franklin), but talking just about the people at the top we could fill a whole book. Who they were, where they came from, how they got in, what were their methods once they were in and so forth. So I cannot talk in more detail because the subject is so wide.”

This statement alone by one of Trotsky’s longest-serving secretaries is sufficient grounds to substantiate the call for a commission of inquiry.

The International Committee is confident that the official records and transcripts will be sufficient to substantiate Charge Seven before the commission of inquiry.