This is the story of two men — Joseph Hansen and George Novack, both leaders of the Socialist Workers Party of the United States.
They belonged to the Communist League of America, the party founded by James P. Cannon, Max Shachtman and Martin Abern in 1928, after their expulsion from the Communist Party of USA. The expulsions were carried out because they supported the policies of Leon Trotsky, the co-leader with Lenin of the Russian Revolution, and his Left Opposition to Stalinism. It marked the founding of the Trotskyist movement in the United States.
Hansen refers to Novack as a ‘great philosopher’; Novack reciprocates by saying that Hansen is a ‘great political analyst’. The International Committee of the Fourth International, which today embodies the historic continuity of Trotsky’s struggle for Marxism and Leninism, declares that both Hansen and Novack are accomplices of the GPU, the secret police of the Soviet bureaucracy. Both have conducted a 35-year masquerade as ‘Trotskyists’ living off the legend of their association with the exiled Trotsky in the 1930s until his assassination in Mexico on August 20, 1940.
We are fully conscious of the extremely grave charge we are presenting. But an examination of the historical record impels us to take no other course. Both Hansen and Novack know this material exists and that we have gathered much of it. They say that they are being ‘framed’. This is not the case. We repeatedly called during 1975 for a parity commission to be set up with joint representation from the International Committee and the United Secretariat of which Ernest Mandel is a member. This invoked no response.
After painstaking research in Europe and America, the International Committee presents an irrefutable indictment of both men and calls for a public inquiry along the lines of the Dewey Commission of 1937 with a tribunal including worldwide representatives of the Trotskyist movement.
International Committee of the Fourth International, January 1, 1976
We accuse Joseph Hansen and leaders of the Socialist Workers Party (USA) of deliberately covering up GPU murder and penetration of the Trotskyist movement for the purposes of spying and disruption. This cover-up, conducted over 35 years, has directly aided the GPU. It reveals that in practice Hansen, whilst masquerading as a Trotskyist and a one-time secretary to Trotsky, has acted as an accomplice of the GPU. Based on historical records and writings, as well as extensive interviews with early members of the Trotskyist movement, the International Committee of the Fourth International presents this irrefutable indictment of Hansen’s guilt:
1. That for 37 years Joseph Hansen has suppressed from the Trotskyist movement details of his personal contacts with a GPU agent known as ‘John’ in New York in 1938.
His contact with the GPU agent ‘John’ only emerged in August 1975 when the International Committee of the Fourth International uncovered hitherto unpublished State Department archives in Washington, DC. They proved Hansen gave details of his contact with the GPU agent to US consul Robert G. McGregor during a secret visit to the American Embassy in Mexico City on August 31, 1940, eleven days after Trotsky’s assassination. McGregor reported to his superiors in the US State Department on September 1, 1940:
‘Hansen stated that when in New York in 1938 he was himself approached by an agent of the GPU and asked to desert the Fourth International and join the Third. He referred the matter to Trotsky who asked him to go as far with the matter as possible. For three months Hansen had relations with a man who merely identified himself as “John”, and did not otherwise reveal his real identity.’
(Report by Robert G. McGregor, American Consulate General, Mexico, September 1, 1940.)
Hansen has now admitted the secret conversation with US consul McGregor, although no one in the Trotskyist movement or Trotsky’s household knew anything about it before today. He remains absolutely silent about his three-month connivance with the GPU agent ‘John’. We know why. ‘John’ was one of the many aliases of Dr Gregory Rabinowitz, head of the Russian Red Cross in the United States between 1936 and 1939.
Rabinowitz played the central role for the GPU in the United States in planting agents in the Trotskyist movement to set up the assassination of Trotsky. His GPU network included Ruby Weil, who was instructed by Rabinowitz to accompany SWP member Sylvia Ageloff to Europe in 1938 where Miss Ageloff was duped into a relationship with Trotsky’s assassin, Ramon Mercader, alias Jacques Mornard; Sylvia Franklin, alias Sylvia Caldwell, who was planted in the SWP in New York and rose to become the most personal of private secretaries to the late James P. Cannon before she was unmasked in 1950; Thomas L. Black, American Communist Party member who was planted in the SWP in 1936 and subsequently instructed by the GPU to get to Trotsky’s household at Coyoacan ‘to arrange the assassination of Trotsky.’
All three GPU agents were members of the Communist Party told by Rabinowitz to break all connections with the CP and worm their way high up into the Trotskyist movement. Miss Weil knew Rabinowitz as ‘John Rich’; Miss Franklin knew him as ‘Roberts’; and Black knew him as ‘Dr Schwartz’.
We state categorically that Hansen is lying when he says that Trotsky told him to consort with the GPU agent ‘John’ Rabinowitz. It is inconceivable that the Bolshevik leader would instruct the head of his security arrangements at Coyoacan to meet a GPU agent over a period of three months. If Trotsky knew that Hansen had been approached by ‘John’, he would have exposed it at once. He would have unmasked the GPU’s attempt to suborn one of his secretaries as a warning to the New York organisation as well as the Trotskyist movement elsewhere. Trotsky’s custom and practice would have led him to take a statement from Hansen about the GPU encounter and publish it along the lines of ‘Stalin Seeks My Death’.
As Trotsky wrote on November 2, 1937:
‘We must tirelessly gather printed material, documents, testimonials of witnesses (our emphasis) concerning the criminal work of the agents of the GPU-Comintern. We must periodically publish in the Press rigorously substantiated conclusions drawn from these materials.’
(‘It Is High Time to Launch a World Offensive against Stalinism — An Open Letter to all Workers’ Organisations’, Writings of Leon Trotsky, 1937–1938, Pathfinder Press.)
Although this was Trotsky’s firmly-held policy, there is not a solitary mention of Hansen’s meeting with ‘John’ in Trotsky’s writings or in the published correspondence of the period. For this reason we are convinced that Hansen never told Trotsky anything about it.
If Hansen had told Trotsky about his contact with the GPU agent, Trotsky’s attention would have immediately been drawn to attempted penetration of the SWP at the national level in New York. He would have instituted the most extreme precautions regarding the selection of his guard. It could have led to the earlier unmasking of Sylvia Franklin and prevented the sending of the inexperienced and politically suspect Robert Sheldon Harte as a guard. Hansen’s deliberate concealment of his meetings with the GPU agent ‘John’ until the International Committee unearthed official documents in 1975 sabotaged the security vigilance of the Trotskyist movement in the days leading up to Trotsky’s assassination and until the present day.
Suppressed testimony of SWP member in assassination plot
2. Joseph Hansen and George Novack have deliberately created diversions and slander campaigns to prevent a full-scale inquiry into the security flaw at Coyoacan where Trotsky was murdered on August 20, 1940.
Hansen was delegated by the SWP Political Committee to be in charge of security in Mexico; Novack was assigned ‘to safeguard Trotsky in every way possible against the death warrant issued against him by Stalin’s henchmen.’ (Intercontinental Press, December 8, 1975.) They have completely betrayed these responsibilities by suppressing vital evidence of Stalinist GPU penetration of Trotsky’s household itself. This is revealed in sworn testimony given by Thomas L. Black before the United States Senate judiciary committee on May 17, 1956.
Black, a chemist from Newark, New Jersey, had a political career which traversed the Communist Party and Hansen’s Socialist Workers Party and finally ended up an FBI informer. The Stalinists persuaded him to leave the CP in 1936 and infiltrate the SWP ‘to ingratiate myself with the leadership of the party.’ His GPU controller was Dr Gregory Rabinowitz, head of the Russian Red Cross.
This is an excerpt from the official 1956 Senate transcript:
Q: Did he give you an assignment?
Black: Yes, sir. When I was released from the hospital he told me that he wanted me to quit my job and make arrangements to go to Coyoacan.
Q : Did he state for what purpose?
Black: Not specifically. He said that he wanted me to go down and join Trotsky’s household.
Q: In other words, he wanted you to join the household itself?
Black: That is correct.
Q: And keep in contact with him?
Black: That is right.
Q: Did you learn what Rabinowitz’s plan was at that particular time?
Black: No, not at that time. I asked some questions, and he told me that the questions the nature of which I was asking did not need to concern me then. I would get instructions later. First I was to go to Coyocan, and there would be other Soviet agents in Trotsky’s household, and I asked him who they would be. He said I would find out that when the time came. I asked him what I was supposed to do, and he said I would be told when the time came. He refused to answer any question about what the nature of the work was.
Q: Did you subsequently find out what the nature of that assignment was?
Black: Yes, sir.
Q: What was the nature of that assignment?
Black: To arrange the assassination of Trotsky.
(US Senate judiciary committee, Scope of Soviet Activity in the United States, May 17, 1956, Library of Congress.)
In the event, Black did not carry out the assignment which Rabinowitz ordered him to conduct in the SWP. But his testimony contains the disclosure that there were ‘other Soviet agents in Trotsky’s household’.
Hansen and Novack have kept their mouths shut about this critical testimony for almost 20 years. We say, every single member of Trotsky’s household who is still alive should be investigated to clear the stains of suspicion in the Senate record and to unmask the GPU agents Rabinowitz referred to. It also means investigating from top-to-bottom the procedure for selecting members of the household at the SWP’s New York office where Sylvia Franklin held court.
Sylvia Franklin: Stalinist agent
3. 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.
She was a GPU agent planted at the top of the SWP’s national headquarters in New York with access to all of Cannon’s correspondence as well as National Committee and Political Committee minutes. Her reports were filed to the GPU network run by Gregory Rabinowitz and subsequently by Soviet master spy, Jack Soble. Sworn testimony was given 25 years ago to the fact that Sylvia Franklin was a GPU agent. Louis Budenz, managing editor of the Stalinist ‘Daily Worker’ who became a FBI informer, presented a sworn and notarised affidavit to the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) on November 11, 1950. He testified:
‘Another person whom I introduced to Roberts [Rabinowitz] was Sylvia Franklin also known as Sylvia Caulwell [sic] and whose maiden name was something like Sylvia Kallen. In Chicago, Roberts gave Sylvia Franklin $300 as an initial expense account to make the trip to New York where he had arranged her employment with a woman doctor, who was connected with the Soviet secret police. By first volunteering to do secretarial work in the national Trotskyite offices in New York, Sylvia Franklin under the direction of Roberts-Rabinowitz, gradually made herself indispensable to James Cannon, then head of the American Trotskites. She became his secretary and served in that capacity for some time. Roberts-Rabinowitz advised me that she had proved to be invaluable.’
(See ‘American Aspects of Assassination of Leon Trotsky’, HUAC, Library of Congress.)
Indicted along with Lavrenti Beria
James Cannon denounced Budenz saying that Miss Franklin was ‘an honest comrade who gave years of valued service to the cause’. (An Answer to Budenz’s Latest Frame-up’, ‘The Militant’, August 28, 1950.) Hansen and Novack swear by Miss Franklin to this day; she was ‘an exemplary comrade’ (Joseph Hansen in ‘International Press’, November 24, 1975.) They defend her completely by, conversely, accusing the International Committee of the Fourth International of ‘repeating the fabrications circulated by Budenz’. (Ibid.)
On November 29, 1960, a New York Federal grand jury indicted Sylvia Franklin in her maiden name, Sylvia Callen, on Soviet espionage charges. Her co-defendants included Lavrenti Beria, head of the GPU, Vasily Zubilin, wartime GPU chief in the US, Dr Robert Soblen, brother of the convicted GPU spy Jack Soblen, Floyd Cleveland Miller, another Stalinist plant in the SWP, and two GPU couriers, Lucy Booker and Esther Rand. The indictment charged Miss Callen (Franklin) with being a co-conspirator on charges ‘to violate subsections (a) and (c) of Section 793, Title 18, United States Code, in that they did, for the purpose of obtaining information important to the national defence of the United States, unlawfully, willfully and knowingly conspire to obtain information concerning US national defence.’
When the whole historical record shrieks that Sylvia Franklin was ‘its most poisonous GPU hatchet woman, Hansen and Novack both say, ‘No’.
4. Joseph Hansen has contrived to present an inquiry into the role of Robert Sheldon Harte, the guard sent to the SWP’s New York headquarters to Trotsky’s household in April 1940.
Trotsky, Natalia and their grandson, Seva, had the narrowest escape from death on the night of May 24, 1940, after Harte broke the guards’ regulations and let in intruders who turned out to be a Stalinist raiding party armed with machine guns and bombs. Hansen has gone on covering up for Harte’s role, although a mountain of new evidence has been gathered casting the gravest suspicion on him.
Julian Gorkin, authority on Stalin’s crimes, has written: ‘If it were admitted that Sheldon was a spy, that would place the question of responsibility in the chief Trotskyists in New York, who had sent him to Mexico. We do no more than mention this aspect of the question. Let each one draw his own conclusions.’ (‘Murder in Mexico’ by General Sanchez Salazar in collaboration with Julian Gorkin. Secker & Warburg, 1950.)
5. Joseph Hansen has suppressed the fact that in 1941 it was the Socialist Workers Party who helped bring Stalin’s No. 1 anti-Trotskyist agent, Mark Zborowski, into the United States from France.
Hansen knew at the time that leading European Trotskyists were convinced that Zborowski was a GPU agent. He had read the anonymous letter (written by NKVD defector General Alexander Orlov) to Trotsky in 1938 which pinpointed ‘Mark’, the Polish Jew in the French Left Opposition, as the GPU’s top agent in Paris. Zborowski masterminded the theft of Trotsky’s Russian archives and the murder of Trotsky’s son, Leon Sedov, and his secretaries, Rudolf Klement and Erwin Wolf. As Trotsky’s secretary at Coyoacan Hansen knew that Trotsky had instructed a security inquiry into Zborowski.
But Hansen says that investigations into the role of Zborowski are ‘a very well’ (‘Intercontinental Press’, November 24, 1975). He claims the right to give no explanation at all of how Zborowski arrived in the US and re-integrated into the Fourth International by courtesy of the SWP.
After a deafening silence of 35 years George Novack now admits, after prompting from the International Committee, that he and Mrs David Dallin (Lola Estrine) brought Zborowski into the USA and inducted him back into the top echelons of the Fourth International. ‘Unknown to us at that time was the presence of one single émigré agent whom we brought to safety. That was Mark Zborowski (Etienne) — for whom Healy has raised his hell and cried decades later.’ (‘Intercontinental Press’, December 8, 1975.)
6. We accuse George Novack and Mrs David Dallin (Lola Estrine) of admitting the GPU spy Mark Zborowski into the USA and re-integrating him into the top levels of the Fourth International although he was a gravely suspect, and then suppressing this fact for 35 years.
Mrs Dallin knew the GPU suspicions which surrounded Zborowski. She, like Hansen, had read the Orlov letter tipping off Trotsky about the Stalinist agent ‘Mark’ who worked in Paris with his son, Leon Sedov. She also knew that Trotsky had instructed a commission of inquiry to investigate charges that Zborowski was a GPU agent. She was his closest friend and political collaborator throughout the latter part of the 1930s when he carried out the theft of Trotsky’s archives, set up the murder of Leon Sedov and disrupted Trotsky’s campaign to defend himself against the Moscow Trials frame-up. But she travelled to France in 1941, fraudulently obtained travel documents for him, met him off the boat in Philadelphia, found him accommodation and so on.
Within a year Zborowski was working as a close confidante of Sam Gordon, party name J.B. Stuart, and Jean van Heijenoort, leading members in the international work of the Fourth International; SWP meetings were held in his Manhattan apartment. When Zborowski was publicly unmasked as late as 1956, Novack, who was in charge of security of overseas Trotskyists as well as Trotsky’s security in Mexico, said nothing about his role in bringing Zborowski into the Trotskyist movement in New York.
Hansen covers for the agent Miller
7. Joseph Hansen has deliberately covered up the GPU 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 organising Trotskyist seamen.
Miller took over from Sam Gordon, alias J.B. Stuart, as editor of the Seafarers’ International Union newspaper. When Sam Gordon became responsible for the work of the International Secretariat of the Fourth International in New York, he worked closely with Mark Zborowski who arrived from occupied France in 1941. As a seaman, Hansen was in contact with overseas sections providing regular information which was discussed with Zborowski.
Hansen treacherously dismisses Miller’s role in tipping off the GPU about sea-going Trotskyists as insignificant. Miller could not have been all that insignificant since the SWP leadership sent him to Mexico in 1944 to see Natalia with the final proofs of Trotsky’s book on Stalin — a task of serious responsibility.
8. George Novack accuses Leon Trotsky and his son Leon Sedov of responsibility for their own deaths.
Novack writes: ‘Healy likewise does not see that Hansen and the others are only secondary figures in the drama. The principal actors were Trotsky and Sedov themselves who trusted Etienne (Zborowski) and allowed Jacson (Ramon Mercader) entry into the household. (‘Intercontinental Press’, December 8, 1975.)
Novack becomes an accomplice as well
This is the most monstrous lie of all — a lie which Novack has taken directly from the GPU. Trotsky defended himself indefatigably against this Stalinist lie which was fabricated by the GPU after the unsuccessful assassination attempt of May 24, 1940. The purpose of the GPU’s ‘theory of self-assault’ was to cover the tracks of its agents.
‘The GPU mobilised with great skill its agents in order to kill me. The attempt failed owing to an accident. The friends of the GPU are compromised. They are now compelled to do everything in their power in order to fix upon me the responsibility for the unsuccessful attempt of their chieftain. In accomplishing this they have not a wide choice of means. They are compelled to operate with the crudest of methods, and to guide themselves by Hitler’s aphorism: the bigger the lie the more readily it will be believed.’
The words are those of Trotsky, written in 1940. But 35 years later, Novack revives the old GPU slander to shift attention away from its crimes. This makes Novack the co-conspirator of Hansen. Novack’s GPU lie will not wash. Trotsky and Sedov were the victims of GPU conspiracies which they fought with every breath to expose. It was not Trotsky who ‘trusted’ Etienne. It was none other than Novack’s and Hansen’s ‘colleague’, Lola Dallin.
When Trotsky received the ‘Orlov letter’ which pinpointed Zborowski as a GPU agent and asked Dallin for her opinion of the information, she replied: ‘That is certainly a definitely dirty job of the NKVD, who wants to deprive you of your few collaborators that you have in France.’ (US Senate judiciary committee hearings, March 2, 1956, Library of Congress, Washington.) Despite Mrs Dallin, Trotsky would not let the matter rest there. He placed, as Orlov had advised, an advertisement in the SWP newspaper in New York: ‘I insist, Mr. Stein [Orlov], I insist that you go immediately to the editorial offices of the Socialist Appeal and talk to Comrade Martin.’
Nor had Trotsky ‘trusted’ Jacson. Isaac Deutscher described Trotsky’s reaction to Jacson on August 17, 1940, three days before the assassination: ‘Reluctantly but dutifully, Trotsky invited “Jacson” to come with him to the study. There they remained alone and discussed the article. After only ten minutes Trotsky came out disturbed and worried. His suspicion was suddenly heightened; he told Natalya that he had no wish to see “Jacson” any more … He had the feeling that the man was an imposter. He remarked to Natalya that in his behaviour “Jacson” was quite unlike a Frenchman — yet he presented himself as a Belgian brought up in France. Who was he really? They should find this out … These questions must have been on Trotsky’s mind, for two days later he repeated his observations to Hansen, as if to ascertain whether similar misgivings had occurred to anyone beside himself … it was on the day before the attempt on his life that Trotsky confided his vague suspicions to Hansen.’ (‘The Prophet Outcast’, Oxford University Press, pp 498–499.)
Despite the warnings, Jacson passed through the gates into the villa the next day. Hansen was the guard on duty.
Why does Novack blame Trotsky and Sedov for their own deaths? Trotsky gave the answer to this question in 1940 when the GPU employed the slander initially: ‘It was necessary at the same time to distract, so far as possible, attention away from the GPU, without however tying one’s own hands completely.’ (‘Stalin Seeks My Death’, p. 86.)
Hansen refuses to give answers
On three separate occasions during 1975 the International Committee of the Fourth International demanded that Hansen give answers to questions relating to revolutionary security of the Fourth International. His reply was an outright refusal. It was accompanied by an unparalleled campaign of lies and slander against the International Committee of the Fourth International. The purpose of the slander is undeniable — to create a diversion, to suppress the truth and thereby directly protect the murderous activities of the GPU and the identity of its agents.
Our demand for answers from Hansen was aimed at strengthening the international movement from the counterrevolutionary attacks of its enemies. By refusing to answer, Hansen aids and abets those who killed Trotsky, his children, his secretaries, the Old Bolsheviks and countless revolutionists — the GPU. His actions put paid to a 35-year-old masquerade. This dubious man Hansen has no claim whatsoever to being called a ‘Trotskyist’, let alone a ‘veteran revolutionist’, as the obsequious Novack calls him.
Trotsky has been murdered twice — once by the GPU and a second time by those like Hansen who have conspired to hide the elaborate network of GPU penetration in the Trotskyist movement. Every attempt over many years to establish the truth about GPU murder and penetration in the Fourth International has been blocked. Those responsible have no allegiance to the principled and revolutionary traditions of Trotskyism. They even repudiate the words of James P. Cannon’s speech at the SWP’s Plenum Conference in Chicago on September 28, 1940, five weeks after Trotsky’s assassination. Cannon said:
‘We are proposing that we set up a control commission in the party. We are fully ready for that now. This will be a body of responsible and authoritative comrades who will take things in hand and carry every investigation to a conclusion one way or the other. This will do away with indiscriminate suspicions on the one side and undue laxity on the other. The net result can only be to reassure the party and strengthen its vigilance. We think the whole party now, with the petty bourgeois riff-raff out of our way, is ready for the appointment of such a body.’
In the same speech Cannon said: ‘If we had checked up on such matters a little more carefully we might have prevented some bad things in the days gone by.’
What ‘bad things’? This is an obvious reference to the assassination of Trotsky. Was a control commission set up into Trotsky’s death? What happened to it? What were its findings, if any? Since no report was ever published, we can only assume that it was blocked. By whom?
This is not the first time that questions surrounding the circumstances of Trotsky’s assassination and the security of the Fourth International have been blocked. There are other examples. When Henricus Sneevliet, secretary of the Workers Revolutionary Socialist Party of Holland, and George Vereeken of the Belgian Trotskyist movement, first raised questions about Zborowski’s guilt in the late 1930s, they were framed by GPU slanders.
‘They are not keen on the whole business’
After Zborowski’s GPU role became public knowledge in 1956, Vereeken was ‘genuinely convinced that the leaders of the Fourth International would do everything humanly possible to clarify the membership of the Trotskyist movement and the readers of their publications about this extraordinary case, and draw lessons for the whole revolutionary movement, in an attempt to repair as much of the damage caused as possible and rehabilitate the members, dead or living, who had been victims of these criminal activities.’ But Vereeken was wrong. On March 2, 1956, Pierre Frank, a co-editor today of ‘Intercontinental Press’ with Joseph Hansen, wrote to Vereeken:
‘Zborowski has been questioned by a sub-committee of the American Senate. We can’t expect much more about his activities in our ranks to come out from that direction. The American groups (Cannon, Shachtman …) ought to get together on it and try to make this Etienne speak. Unfortunately we get the impression that they are not very keen on the whole business. Perhaps it’s only an impression. In any case, they are much more pre-occupied with defending themselves against the witch-hunt, and perhaps that explains it.’ (‘The GPU in the Trotskyist Movement’, p. 16. Vereeken, La Presse Universelle, 1975.)
It explains nothing of the kind. The SWP was not facing any witch-hunt; the McCarthyite period had been over for the best part of two years. What was happening to Vereeken’s campaign for an investigation was more straightforward — it was being suppressed.
At a conference of the Belgian revisionist group in 1964, Vereeken was slandered as a ‘sectarian’ when he wanted to read out a document unmasking Zborowski and rehabilitating himself and Sneeveliet. Three times he was interrupted before the conference heard his document in full.
An interview with Comrade Robins
Today the International Committee of the Fourth International is getting the same slanderous treatment that others in the pre-war years in Europe endured. We are accused of being ‘Stalinists’, ‘sectarians’ and ‘paranoids’. A clear method emerges. Touch the question of revolutionary security in the Fourth International and you immediately fall victim to a campaign of the ugliest slander, gossip and lies. It is the language of the GPU and its accomplices Hansen and Novack.
Harold Robins, Trotskyist since 1928 and captain of Trotsky’s guard at Coyoacan, said in an interview on December 10, 1975:
‘Comrade Hansen: In your exposition, in your so-called answer to Comrade Healy and the International Committee, you accuse them of being paranoid, as Stalin accused Trotsky of being paranoid. You cover up the role of the American agencies, the government agencies, the frame-ups of the Mexican police which were broken up by (President) Cardenas’ intervention. Now that’s your role. You hide history, you rewrite history, you defend the Stalinist agents. Whose interest do you serve, Comrade Hansen? The revolution, or the counter-revolution? The question is, which side are you on? Politics is the answer, and your method tells which side you’re on.’
The International Committee of the Fourth International will not be intimated by Hansen’s slanders. It is bigger than Hansen’s and the GPU’s lie machine since it represents the historic continuity of Trotsky’s struggle to build the Fourth International as the world party of socialist revolution.
The GPU and its accomplices like Hansen cannot suppress the truth any longer.