From Trotsky To Tito : Spies and Agents in the Labour Movement

FROM TROTSKY TO TITO . James Klugmann 1951

Chapter Three: Spies and Agents in the Labour Movement

‘But this is monstrous’, storms the capitalist press. ‘Do you expect us to believe in such plots? These are the inventions of the secret police of the totalitarian states, pretexts for eliminating all obstacles in their paths.’

‘Impossible!’, echo the right-wing Labour leaders; ‘it is unbelievable that such conspiracies could be hatched in the Western democracies.’

It is part of the role of Social-Democracy in the capitalist countries to blunt the class-consciousness of the workers. The Social-Democratic theory of the neutrality of the state is aimed at disarming the working class and its allies. And as part of this theory of moral and political disarmament, the right-wing Labour leaders try to teach, and above all in Britain, that spies, agents, provocateurs in the labour movement are something far from and foreign to ‘British democratic traditions’. Perhaps such things might happen in the East, but not in the Western democracies.

But what is the truth? It was British capitalism that first used labour spies and agents provocateurs in the labour movement on a large scale. The British capitalist state has never ceased to use them, though it has learned greater subtlety and elasticity, hypocrisy and cunning in their employment. And today it is above all in the USA that they are used. It is above all American imperialism that has become the main employer of all the filthy methods of labour espionage, not only against its own progressive organisations, but against working-class and progressive movements throughout the world. All that was most cunning in British imperialist methods and most ruthless in the methods of the Gestapo has been taken over by the American state.

The truth is that the use of spies and ‘agents provocateurs’ by capitalism to penetrate, disrupt and provoke the labour movement is as old as the struggle of capital versus labour. It is as wide as the frontiers of capitalism. The truth is that all the open, overt methods of capitalist oppression – police, army, reactionary press, fascist thugs and vigilantes – are complemented by the secret, covert efforts of the capitalists to penetrate, spy on and disrupt the organisations of the working-class and progressive movement from inside, through spies and agents.

The great Tito plot is nothing but a continuation of a development of the ignoble traditions of the class war of capital against labour, reaching a new depth of cunning and deception and a new scale of organisation in this present period of deepening general crisis of capitalism.

I: Labour Spies – A British Capitalist Tradition

The early use of spies and provocateurs inside the British labour movement is treated in detail in the works of the liberal historians JL and Barbara Hammond, above all in The Town Labourer, 1760-1832 and in The Skilled Labourer, 1760-1832:

There was one danger from which the trade unionists of the industrial districts were rarely free, the danger of the serpent in their councils... The use of spies was common in all times of popular excitement or upper-class panic, and in some districts in the North and Midlands they became part of the normal machinery of law. (The Town Labourer, Chapter XII)

GDH Cole in his Short History of the British Working-Class Movement also demonstrates how the use of spies and provocateurs became one of the main weapons of the British government against the radical movement and the developing working-class movement at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth. After the French Revolution, he writes:

A great campaign of espionage was set on foot [in Britain], and informers and police agents were planted in most of the Radical bodies. This method was practised most extensively in Scotland; but it soon spread over England as well. (A Short History of the British Working-Class Movement, Chapter III)

He explains how spies and agents were used to complement the more overt means of working-class repression:

Pitt’s measures for carrying through this policy of repression were skilfully designed. We have seen how he rooted out the Corresponding Societies and killed for a generation even the middle-class movement for reform. Legal persecution, backed up by the evidence of spies and informers and by counter-propaganda subsidised by the state, was adequate for this purpose. The factory and mining districts had to be held down by more vigorous methods. In addition to sending into every working-class body that could be found spies, informers and even provocative agents, and so disrupting the early working-class movements, because no man knew whether he could trust his neighbour, the government built up a powerful armed force for dealing with all signs of disturbance. (A Short History of the British Working-Class Movement, Chapter IV)

The Hammonds, researching into Home Office papers that had been made available, found the first mention of anti-labour informers and spies in 1801. Thereafter the Home Office documents (for as long a period as they are open to public scrutiny) are filled with such records.

From these sure sources they were able to see how the Home Office itself, a number of the officers commanding in the industrial districts, and a whole number of magistrates and their clerks, like the notorious Fletcher of Bolton, Lloyd of Stockport or May in Lancashire, made constant use of spies and informers against the workers, and especially against the trade-union organisations.

These spies were recruited from the dregs of humanity. Many were ex-convicts, men over whom by one means or another the police had got a grip. Their uncorroborated statements were accepted as valid evidence. In 1813, five workers were transported for life on the unsupported evidence of a spy with a peculiarly unsavoury past. They were, already at that time, well paid. Here is a bill sent in for labour spies by Fletcher of Bolton for 8 July – 21 December 1805, taken by the Hammonds from the Home Office documents (HO 42.83), looking exactly like the type of documents that were extracted from the labour spy organisations by the American La Follette Commission some 130 years later:

B Time £9 05s 00d 

Expenses £17 02s 11d 

£26 07s 11d

C £4 11s 00d

T Time £4 12s 00d 

Expenses £4 08s 06d 

£9 00s 06d

LF Time £18 08s 00d 

Expenses £4 18s 00d 

£23 06s 00d

£63 05s 05d

By 1816 the half-yearly bill for labour spies and agents in the same area had gone up to £226 (HO 42.160).

Immense care was taken by the authorities to try and cover up and safeguard their labour spies. They were reluctant to produce them to give evidence in court, for once ‘expended’, the spies became useless. Mr Coldham, Town Clerk of Nottingham in 1814, argued, for instance, against bringing one of his spies to court, since he wished to keep ‘the source of our information pure and uncontaminated’ (HO 42.137, quoted by the Hammonds). Colonel Fletcher of Bolton district wrote on 30 April 1812 of another group of labour spies:

We are shy of bringing these witnesses forward, being desirous to cover over our Intelligence even with a shadow rather than exhibit the sources to open day. (The Skilled Labourer, Chapter X)

Thus it was in Britain that the use of spies, agents, provocateurs, to penetrate, spy on and disrupt the labour movement from inside was first brought by the capitalist class to a fine art:

With local authorities as credulous as Ethelston, as arbitrary as Lloyd or Hay, with a Home Secretary like Sidmouth, to whom every poor man was a Jacobin, a detective system based on spies who had every inducement to spin legends and to promote crime, gave the excitement of peril to the daily life of the workman, and taught him honour and loyalty in the face of the temptations, not only of greed, but also of fear. Every little combination for raising wages or helping comrades lived in something of the atmosphere of a Russian revolutionary society... (The Town Labourer)

Let us glance for a moment at some of the more notorious trials in British labour and progressive history engineered by agents and provocateurs.

In June 1817, James Watson, a prominent member of the Reform Party, was indicted before the court of King’s Bench on a charge of High Treason. Together with the famous ‘Orator’ Hunt and a number of others he had been responsible for the presentation of a monster petition to the Prince Regent. The petition was rejected, and when this was reported a mass meeting was held in Spa Fields, London, on 2 December 1816, where a number of violent speeches were made (though not by Watson) and a certain amount of rioting took place. On the same night, Watson was arrested on a treason charge. The principal witness against Watson was one John Castle, an informer who had wormed himself into the popular movement, and won a reputation through the violence of his speeches. In the course of the trial Castle was exposed as a man of infamous character, tried twice for forgery, a bigamist, etc: this was too much even for the City jurymen and Watson was acquitted.

In the same year, in the so-called Derbyshire rising, there came to light the role of that notorious character the spy Oliver, whose life and nefarious dealings are vividly described by the Hammonds in The Skilled Labourer. The life of Oliver, alias Richards, alias Hobbs, labour spy, provocateur, bigamist and common criminal, forms one of the most infamous chapters in the history of British stoolpigeons.

In 1817 you could find him touring the country, armed with false letters of recommendation from leading Radicals, presenting himself in the circles of the more staid reformers as one of the organisers of the great petition for reform, and to more left-wing and radical circles as a representative of the ‘physical force’ grouping in London, preparing for armed uprising. He carried credentials from Whitehall (HO 42.165) to a very small selected ‘trustworthy’ group of magistrates and men of authority – to the Magistrate at Birmingham, to the Mayor of Leicester, to General Byng and to the Parson Magistrate at Birmingham – but to the majority of magistrates he was known only as an extreme radical agitator. So valuable was he considered to be that the secret was not to be shared even by the most august and respectable. (Yet 130 years later it was alleged that British Intelligence was not morally capable of restricting the secret of the Tito plot to a small and trusted circle!) When a Sheffield justice was about to arrest him there was dismay at the Home Office and Lord Sidmouth, Home Secretary, wrote to the Justice, Mr Parker, on 31 May that:

Oliver is employed by me, that he is travelling under my directions at this time, and that I have reason to confide in his disposition and ability to render himself eminently useful, under present circumstances; I accordingly shall be anxious till I hear again and should be much relieved by hearing that he has not been apprehended.

And ‘useful’, indeed, he was, calling the workers of Derbyshire to armed uprising and denouncing them as he gave his call. Thirty-five working men were brought up to trial on 16 October 1817, charged, as the Hammonds put it, ‘by a grim stroke of irony with having been “moved and seduced by the instigation of the devil” to levy war against the King and to compass to depose him’. Three were hanged; others transported for life or sentenced to long terms of imprisonment. The last words of William Turner (one of the condemned) on the scaffold were: ‘This is the work of Government and Oliver!’

When the town clerk of Nottingham and one of the local magistrates asked the Home Secretary for permission to see Oliver’s reports, Lord Sidmouth replied that it was ‘the wish of His Majesty’s Government to throw a veil on the scenes of turbulence which have passed’.

It is not possible in the course of this chapter to elaborate a detailed history of the use of agents by British capitalism in the following 130 years. This is a task for labour historians, and is a necessary one to combat the white-washing efforts of Tory and right-wing Labour historians. But the use of spies and informers by the capitalist state against the labour and progressive movement is not just an ugly chapter in British history which is now closed.

On the contrary. You will find agents to the fore in the notorious Cato Street ‘conspiracy’ of 1820, when news of a ‘diabolical plot’ to assassinate the Cabinet was released to a startled Britain, and when it transpired that the agent provocateur Edwards was not only the instigator of the plot, but himself provided the weapons which he carefully distributed at the houses of those he was planning to betray. Five were hanged, four transported for life. But the ringleader, informer Edwards, was ‘never found’.

You find the police agent and provocateur actively used against the Chartists. On 4 August 1848, the London police discovered a ‘great Chartist conspiracy’. Raids were made on various Chartist meeting places and arms were found. The chief witnesses were police informers, and one, Powell, admitted that he had ‘encouraged and stimulated these men in order to inform against them’. Five workers were transported for life.

You can see the agent and informer at work in the infamous Wheeldon case towards the end of the First World War, when a family actively opposing the war were saddled with fantastic charges of preparing to poison Lloyd George. It transpired that a government provocateur had wormed his way into the confidence of the family, pretending to be a Socialist, suggesting all manner of violence, which they rejected, and finally managing to involve them in this trumped-up affair – fuel for the chauvinist campaign for men and munitions for imperialist war.

You find police agents and provocateurs used to spy on and disrupt the great militant movement of the unemployed led by the National Unemployed Workers Movement. In Chapter VIII of his Unemployed Struggles ('Police Spies and Agents Provocateurs’) the leader of the unemployed movement, Wal Hannington, tells from his own personal experience of an agent who in 1922 managed to penetrate to the Control Council of the Hunger March. Suspicions were aroused ‘when he repeatedly proclaimed that he was more revolutionary than anybody else’, when he suggested such actions as dropping inflammable material into pillar boxes, thus furnishing the police with just the material they most needed to compromise and prosecute the Hunger Marchers. Throughout all the history of the unemployed struggles and of the Hunger Marches, agents and spies abounded. (See Wal Hannington’s Unemployed Struggles, and Ronald Kidd’s British Liberty in Danger (1940), Chapter V, ‘The Police’.)

Today in 1950, MI5 and all the various agencies of secret police and intelligence are as active as ever, working to penetrate, spy on and disrupt from within the militant labour movement, and especially the Communist Party.

It is true, indeed, that over long periods British imperialism has been able to hold back the British labour movement from revolutionary struggle by using the super-profits of its foreign trade monopoly and then of its colonial capital investments to win over an upper section of the workers; that it has used Social-Democracy as a principal weapon to hold back the workers from militant struggle. But this never meant that it disbanded its organisation of labour espionage and provocation. On the contrary, when British workers were held back for a time by the sops drawn from the fruits of colonial exploitation, all the weapons of espionage, provocation, penetration, were strengthened tenfold and used against the national liberation movements of the colonial peoples. Very long and very ugly is the story of espionage and provocation carried out by the British authorities against the workers and people of Ireland, India, Burma, Ceylon, Africa, etc. In the whole ‘art’ of colonial repression, developed to its highest (or lowest) level by British imperialism, besides the weapons of bribery and of open repression, the weapons of espionage and provocation have always played a principal role.

And in Britain itself the state has never disarmed. On the contrary, it has developed and perfected its weapons for use against the working class even under Labour governments. In times of lull in the class struggle the agents and spies carry out their work ‘quietly’. Telephones are tapped, letters opened, meetings reported, names filed, activities listed. Efforts are made to falsify revolutionary theory, to develop factional opposition groupings, to stir up personal intrigues, to organise disruption from within. In times of radical action and stiff class battles the state organs of espionage and provocation swing more openly into action.

In the recent period, as the mass movement for peace and the trade-union struggle on living standards have begun to swing into action, the activities of MI5 and other such organisations have developed on an even wider scale. These activities are reported not only inside the Communist Party, but inside the Labour Party and the trade unions. At the end of 1950 the creation of a special squad of Scotland Yard to investigate the actions of militant trade unionists was widely commented on in the British press. They have been especially prominent amongst the dockers and wherever the militant mood of the workers has led to unofficial strikes.

Sections of the reactionary press have gone so far as public campaigning for stepping up the use of spies and agents provocateurs inside the Communist Party. Thus ‘Maxim’, writing in the Observer (5 March 1950) on ‘Watching the Communists’, calls for the recruitment for such police work of ‘ex’ or vacillating party members:

Some of the ex-members have, prior to their resignation or expulsion, held prominent positions in the party. The man who can be of most help to the security authorities is the Communist who has almost made up his mind to quit but has not yet taken the final step. If he could be given some encouragement might he not be willing to postpone that step?

Very large sums of money, never publicly accounted for, continue to be allotted year by year to the Secret Service. The Civil Estimates for the year ending 31 March 1952, under the heading of Central Government and Finance, carry an unexplained item no 21 ‘for HM foreign and other Secret Services’ – £4 million – an increase of £1 million over the previous year. It is no secret that the main target of the British Secret Service today, whether ‘foreign’ or ‘other’, is the movement of the working class and the working people for Socialism and peace.

Far from being foreign to British traditions, the use of spies and provocateurs against the labour movement is part of the long tradition of the British capitalists, and has been brought by them to a fine but very ugly art.

II: USA – Stoolpigeon State

But if it was in Britain that the employment of spies and provocateurs against the labour movement was first developed on a large scale; if such activity was taken a stage further by the fascist Ovra and Gestapo; it is American imperialism that has now inherited and carries forward all that is worst and most disgusting in this ugly art. The use of spies, provocateurs, informers has become an integral part of the ‘American way of life’.

In 1798 Edward Livingston, friend of Thomas Jefferson, denounced in these prophetic words the Alien and Sedition Acts about to be enacted by the Federalist Administration of President John Adams:

The country will swarm with informers, spies, debaters and all the odious reptile tribe that breed in the sunshine of domestic power... The home of the most unsuspected confidence, the intimacies of friendships, or the recesses of domestic retirement afford no security. The companion whom you most trust, the friend in whom you confide, the domestic who waits in your chamber, are all tempted to betray your imprudent, unguarded follies; to misrepresent your words, to convey them, distorted by calumny, to the secret tribunal where jealousy presides, where fear officiates as accuser, and suspicion is the only evidence that is heard.

And yet how mild and moderate are these stern words of warning when compared to the actual conduct of the corrupt and reactionary American police state in the last thirty years. The ‘reptile tribe’ of spies and stoolpigeons, complemented by a corrupt and brutal police, has become part of the daily life of contemporary America. And we are dealing here with actions and activities – not in ‘Eastern’ countries – but against ordinary, progressive, decent citizens of the United States itself.

It is in the hysterical witch-hunting campaign that followed the First World War that we first make acquaintance with America’s stool-pigeon king, J Edgar Hoover, present head of the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). In October 1918, the US Congress, on the crest of a witch-hunting wave, passed the Deportation Act, ostensibly to be used against aliens. In the following year was created the infamous ‘Radical Division’ of the Department of Justice’s Bureau of Investigation, under the direction of J Edgar Hoover.

Soon we see the division in action. In the words of Attorney-General Palmer himself, we see the establishment of ‘a card index system, numbering over 200,000 cards, giving detailed data not only upon individual agitators connected with the ultra-radical movement, but also upon organisations, associations, societies, publications and special conditions existing in certain localities.

With the aid of provocateurs and police stooges, a terror campaign was launched against the labour and progressive movement. Towards the end of 1919 (see Albert E Kahn’s High Treason, Lear, New York, 1950), the Assistant Chief of the Justice Department’s Bureau of Investigation, Frank Burke, dispatched a highly confidential directive to Federal Agents throughout America, informing them that the department was about to carry out a series of raids in an all-in roundup of ‘Communists’ and ‘Radicals’. They were ordered to mobilise all their stoolpigeons ‘within Communist groups’ to make every effort to arrange for these organisations to hold meetings on the designated night. As Burke put it:

If possible you should arrange with your undercover informants to have meetings of the Communist Party and the Communist Labour Party on the night set... This, of course, will facilitate in making the arrests. (Quoted in Albert E Kahn’s High Treason, p 11)

Throughout the whole preceding spring and summer plans had been worked out for this anti-labour ‘offensive’. Hundreds of spies, special agents and stoolpigeons had been sent into labour and progressive organisations. Justice Department spies were ordered not only to watch out for ‘subversive’ literature but in a number of cases printed it themselves and then had it seized in police raids.

The offensive culminated in the great raids of June 1920, when in one swoop, on 2 June, more than 10,000 arrests were made in seventy cities. Agents played a major role in the preparation of the ‘offensive’:

The action, though it came with dramatic suddenness, had been carefully mapped out, studied and systematised... For months, Department of Justice men, dropping all their work, had concentrated on the Reds. Agents quietly infiltrated into the radical ranks... and went to work, sometimes as cooks in remote mining colonies, again as steelworkers, and when the opportunity presented itself, as agitators of the wildest type... Several of the agents, ‘undercover’ men, managed to rise in the radical movement and became, in at least one instance, the recognised leader of the district. (New York Times, 3 January 1920)

During this whole period the Bureau of Investigation of the Department of Justice worked in the closest collaboration with the labour espionage organisations of the great American corporations – two weapons of the same class against the same class enemy. The Commission of Inquiry of the Inter-Church World Movement stated in its report of the steel strike of 1919:

Federal immigration authorities testified to the commission that raids and arrests, for ‘radicalism’, etc, were made especially in the Pittsburgh District on the denunciations and secret reports of steel company ‘undercover’ men, and the prisoners turned over to the Department of Justice. (Quoted in High Treason, p 37)

A Federal Agent in the Pittsburgh area, giving evidence to this commission, declared that ‘ninety per cent of all the radicals arrested and taken into custody were reported by one of the large corporations, either of the steel or the coal industry’.

When subsequent enquiry, brought about by public protest and outcry, forced those responsible for these outrageous acts to testify before the people, it became clear that both the laws allegedly enacted against foreign spies and the hysteria organised by reaction and its press, had been used and manufactured solely for the purpose of attack on the militant trade-union and labour movement. Even Attorney-General Palmer, testifying before the Rules Committee of the US House of Representatives, had to admit that this was the real aim behind the smokescreen of deporting undesirable aliens:

For I say to you frankly, Mr Chairman, that I have looked upon this deportation statute not as a mere matter of punishing by sending out of the country a few criminals or mistaken ultra-radicals who preach dangerous doctrines but rather a campaign against... a growing revolutionary movement.

The agents and provocateurs organised by the imperialist state to develop a spy scare and a witch-hunt against ‘the Reds’ were used for the attack on all militant trade unionists, and indeed on all liberals, democrats, lovers and defenders of democracy and peace. Such is the capitalist way of life.

The American state, true to the capitalist tradition, combined its covert penetration of and spying on the labour movement from inside with open police repression from outside. The Gestapo did not have to go beyond the confines of Western democracy to learn its methods. In 1929, President Hoover appointed a National Commission on Law Enforcement and Observance, headed by George W Wickersham, former Attorney-General and Wall Street partner of another Republican President. This is how Mr EJ Hopkins, veteran police reporter and investigator for the Wickersham Commission, summed up in his book Our Lawless Policethe findings of this authoritative commission:

In various cases which occurred between 1920 and 1930, the Wickersham Commission found that suspected persons had been starved, kept awake many days and nights, confined in pitch-dark and airless cells; had been beaten with fists, clubs, black-jacks, rubber hose, telephone books, straps, whips; beaten on the shins, under the knee cap (at the point of the patellar reflex), across the abdomen, the throat, the face, the head, the shoulders, above the kidneys, on the buttocks and legs; kicked on the shins, the torso and in the crutch; had had their arms twisted, their testicles twisted and squeezed; had been given tear gas, scopolamine injections and chloroform; had been made to touch corpses and hold the hands of murdered persons in morgues; that women had been lifted by their hair; in one case, a man had been lain flat upon the floor and lifted repeatedly by his organs of sex.

This in modern America between 1920 and 1930, in the fifteenth decade of the constitution and for the purpose of obtaining a ‘voluntary’ confession of guilt.

In 1937 there took place in the USA the famous hearings on the question of civil liberties and labour espionage before the subcommittee of the Committee on Education and Labour of the United States Senate, popularly known as the La Follette Civil Liberties Committee. The complete text in some thirty or so volumes was published by the American government (not at a popular price).

Amongst the witnesses called was Mr Heber Blankerhorn, industrial economist in the National Labour Relations Board, who for twenty years had studied the question of labour espionage. This gentleman furnished the committee with a list of agencies whose profitable business it was to supply stoolpigeons to capitalist employers to spy on, disrupt, corrupt and compromise the trade unions in their plants and factories. As of April 1936, there were 230 such agencies employing something like half a million stoolpigeons and spies at the average price of 175 dollars per spy per month. Three of the biggest agencies, Pinkerton’s, Burns and Thiel, hired out between them 40,000 to 135,000 agents. During the hearings, General Motors officials, for instance, testified that between January 1934 and July 1936 alone they had paid out 994,856 dollars (and 68 cents) to Pinkerton’s Agency alone. One labour leader reported to the investigating committee that he never ‘knew of a gathering large enough to be called a meeting and small enough to exclude a spy’. ‘The known total of business firms receiving spy services from these agencies’, reported the commission, ‘is approximately 2500. The list as a whole reads like a bluebook of American industry.’

Unwilling employers and embarrassed agency heads were forced to produce to the committee records, catalogues, tariffs of their agents and informers. All the craft and craftiness of US advertising had been employed in boosting their own particular brands of spies. ‘You have a union – we'll bust it. You want spies we have the best.’ Here is a typical letter from the Foster service to a prospective client:

Your letter of 28 July is received.

First, I will say that if we are employed before any union or organisation is formed by the employees, there will be no strike and no disturbance. This does not say there will be no unions formed, but it does say that we will control the activities of the union and direct its policies, provided we are allowed a free hand by our clients.

Second, if a union is already formed and no strike is on or expected to be declared within thirty or sixty days, although we are not in the same position as we would be in the above case, we could – and I believe with success – carry on an intrigue which would result in factions, disagreements, resignations of officers, and general decrease in membership.

Posing as active trade unionists hundreds of these stoolpigeons wormed their way into leading positions in the CIO, AF of L and the Railroad Brotherhoods – the three main US trade-union organisations. And once they had won those positions they used them for disruption. An agent elected secretary of an AF of L Typewriter Workers’ Branch in Hartford, Connecticut, ‘succeeded’ in reducing its membership from 2500 to 75 in one year. Here is a short extract from the testimony of a Pinkerton agent – Barker.

Senator La Follette: Mr Barker, as a result of your experience as an undercover operator, informant and spy, what is your impression about the effectiveness, or lack of effectiveness, of this labour espionage work in breaking up or preventing unions, genuine labour unions, from organising?

Mr Barker: It is very effective, especially in the local to which I belonged... One time at Lansing-Fisher they were almost 100 per cent organised. And finally it went down to where, as I said, there were only five officers left.

Senator La Follette: You attribute that to undercover operations?

Mr Barker: Yes; I do.

The training given by the agencies to their agents is very revealing. Here are a few extracts from a twenty-four-page Correspondence Course of Training for an Industrial Operative from the National Manufacturers’ Syndicate.

From the First Instruction Sheet:

Our work is most honourable, humanitarian and very important, and must be recognised as such.

From the Second Instruction Sheet:

It is very plain that in order for us to be successful we must conduct our work in an invisible manner, as the ordinary worker, in his ignorance, is apt to misunderstand our motives if he knows of our presence and identity in the plant.

From the Third Instruction Sheet:

The rules and regulations of our organisation exclude even one’s close friends and families from any knowledge as to details of any assignment a representative may receive.

From the Fourth Instruction Sheet:

Remember we are unalterably opposed to all cliques, radicalists and disturbing elements who try to create discontentment, suspicion and unfriendliness on the part of the workers towards the employers...

As our representative you must find out first of all who are the dissatisfied ones; then cultivate their friendship and win their confidence.

You must be prepared to throw overboard your moral scruples. You must be hard. You must lie easily and often... you must be slippery, shrewd, sharp, sneaky...

Is it a far step from the work of these agencies and agents, outlined in such detail in the La Follette Report, to the work of sending agents and spies into the working-class organisations of other countries? Here is the training-ground for Intelligence operations against the working people of other countries, especially in the lands where the workers rule. It is no long distance from Pinkerton’s stoolpigeons to – Tito, Kostov and Rajk.

Nor is it a long step to the witch-hunts, spy scares, purges, developing fascism – to the USA of 1950. Take, for example, the trial of the eleven Communist leaders. Of the thirteen witnesses for the prosecution, two were ‘regular’ FBI agents, ten FBI undercover agents or embittered renegade Communists. There were no other witnesses. This is how Albert E Kahn sums up some of the main witnesses for prosecution:

Louis F Budenz: a former managing editor of the Daily Worker who quit his post in October 1945, joined the Catholic Church, wrote a lurid red-baiting book entitled This is My Story and appeared as an ‘expert witness’ on Communism before the Un-American Activities Committee and in various federal deportation cases...

William O Nowell: a renegade Communist who had been accused by auto workers of being a Ford labour spy employed by Harry Bennett in the Ford Service Department. On leaving his job at the Ford Motor Company, Nowell acted as confidential advisee on ‘race relations’ for the notorious fascist, Gerald LK Smith, ex-Silver Shirter no 3223. At the war’s end, Nowell became an FBI informer, appearing as a government witness in a number of cases involving Communists and left-wing trade unions...

Charles W Nicodemus: a former factory worker who was expelled from the Communist Party in 1946 for anti-Negro agitation. Arrested and indicted in Pittsburgh in the spring of 1948 on charges of carrying concealed weapons ‘with intent unlawfully to do injury’ to unnamed persons, Nicodemus was permitted to withdraw this plea, and the indictment against him was quashed; at approximately the same time he became an informer for the FBI.

William Cummings: a former labour spy and FBI informer within the Communist Party. Among other activities as a ‘Communist’, Cummings recruited three of his own relatives into the party and then turned their names over to the FBI.

John Victor Blanc: a stoolpigeon within the Communist Party who recruited workers into the party, paid their dues himself, and then denounced them to the FBI. Included among the names turned over by Blanc to the FBI was that of his own brother-in-law, who had actually never joined the Communist Party but whose name had been signed to a Communist application form by Blanc. (High Treason, pp 335-36)

The trial revealed that not only the Communist Party of the USA but all progressive organisations – trade unions, youth organisations, the ‘Progressive Party’ (formerly led by Mr Wallace) – were continuously subjected to penetration by FBI informers and provocateurs. The spies were highly paid, not only for regular services, but with special fees (sometimes 25 dollars a day) for anti-labour evidence at trials as ‘expert government witnesses’.

You find the same government concern at ‘expending’ agents by bringing them before the people as witnesses as you found in Britain already 130 years before. The US News and World Report wrote on 8 July 1949:

It [the FBI] finds that it is winning its lawsuit at the expense of its underworld contacts. It sacrificed seven of its agents inside the Communist Party when it brought them to the witness stand in the trial of eleven Communists in New York. And it is losing more as a result of showing its files in the Coplon case.

American capitalism day by day is moving towards fascism. All the repressive apparatus of the state is now being strengthened, and with it the apparatus for labour espionage, now directed against every section of the progressive movement in its widest possible definition. Forms have changed; methods have been streamlined; the stoolpigeons go on! Under President Roosevelt the work of the labour spy agencies was restricted, but today the work of spying on the labour movement has been taken over by the state. Labour espionage is the first industry to be ‘nationalised’ by the government of the USA!

The FBI apparatus has grown to huge proportions. From an arm of the Department of Justice it is being transformed into a special branch of government. In 1950 its budget was raised to $57 million and J Edgar Hoover’s salary was raised to $20,000 per year. When FBI representatives appeared recently before a Congressional Committee they reported that it had over 10,000 full-time operatives, that it needed a large extension, that it was working on over 20,000 cases of ‘subversives’, that its network of informers was returning 20 to 200 reports on individuals every day.

The US Communist leader Gilbert Green, one of the eleven, speaking at the Plenum of the National Committee of the American Communist Party on 23-25 March 1950, declared: ‘Presidents and Congresses come and go, but J Edgar Hoover and his police-state network become more powerful and ominous from year to year.’

III: Marshall Aid in Spies

The history of the use by capitalism of spies and provocateurs inside the labour movement is as old as the struggle of capital versus labour. And wherever there is capitalism there have been its agents.

This brief interlude could be infinitely extended. It could show how Tsarism built up around its secret police, the Okhrana, its secret group of agents to penetrate the Russian revolutionary movements, its men like Azef, Tsarist agent for twenty years, who as a member of the Central Committee of the Social Revolutionaries (SRs) both organised acts of terrorism and denounced their perpetrators; like the priest Gapon, who organised the workers’ petition to the Tsar on that bloody Sunday of 9 January 1905, when the blood of the workers was shed in the streets and squares of St Petersburg; like the agents who worked for the Okhrana chief Zubatov; like Malinovsky, who became a member of the Central Committee of the Bolsheviks and an editor of Pravda, and who was only unmasked after the October Revolution, when the police archives came into the hands of the workers.

It could be extended to show the very great use made of agents, informers and provocateurs by the dictatorial governments and their secret police and intelligence services in the countries of Eastern Europe between the wars. In Poland the secret police, the Sanacja, specialised in training agents to penetrate the Communist Party, the peasant and radical-democratic organisations. Ten agents were sent by it into the Polish Battalion of the International Brigade. In Yugoslavia, where not only the illegality of the party but the widespread factionalism aided the work of capitalist agents – this factionalism was in turn developed and promoted by them – both the early Communist leader Sima Marković and the party General Secretary who preceded Tito, Gorkić, were finally revealed as spies in the party. The French working-class movement has had its Doriots and its Gittons.

Rákosi, speaking to the functionaries of the Hungarian Working People’s Party of Greater Budapest at the end of September 1949 on the question of vigilance, told them how at an early stage of the labour movement in Germany the followers of the Social-Democrat Lassalle were led by a spy named Schweitzer, who was one of the first German Socialists to be elected to the Reichstag. Bebel, veteran Socialist leader, always felt that Schweitzer was a spy, but he could not prove it. When at the end of the 1860s Schweitzer died he was given a magnificent funeral. Bebel declared: ‘While I have no material proof, I am certain this man is a spy. I am sure also that, sooner or later, proof of this will be found. Possibly it will be after my death, but my ashes will be glad that I was right.’ Bebel died in 1913. And in 1918, when the Kaiser’s archives were opened by the workers after the German Revolution, the receipts were found for all the payments that Schweitzer used to receive – as Bismarck’s agent.

But the point of this chapter is not to write the history of labour espionage, but to demonstrate that there is nothing unusual, strange, fantastic, in the revelations of the Rajk and Kostov trials. The use of agents to penetrate the working-class movement and disrupt it from within is as old as capitalism itself. The methods of espionage and provocation exposed at the trials, far from being ‘un-British’ or ‘un-American’, were methods that were first developed on a wide scale by British capitalism and have been developed to their fullest extent by the stoolpigeon state of America.

Between the First and Second World Wars, it became the regular habit of the Intelligence services of the great capitalist powers to infiltrate spies, not only into the working-class and progressive movements of their own countries, but also into those of the smaller capitalist states. The secret services of the weaker capitalist states, including the states of Eastern Europe, were trained by, and often came under the indirect supervision of, the Intelligence of the great powers. Now MI5, now the Gestapo, now American Intelligence, and now the French Deuxième Bureau, would issue its orders and receive its reports. Some of the stoolpigeons and even police chiefs of the smaller powers would often take orders (and money) from several great powers at the same time. In any case, whilst all the great powers were busy spying on each other, they all had an equal interest in perfecting the machinery to disrupt and spy on the working-class and progressive movements of all countries.

And if they were ready to play their part in spying on and disrupting the working-class and progressive movement of the world when it was fighting in opposition to capitalism and reaction, how much more did the Intelligence services of the great powers endeavour to penetrate and disrupt the working-class movement in the country where the workers ruled – the USSR! From October 1917 to spy on the Soviet Union became the central task of every capitalist Intelligence service throughout the world – to penetrate into the CPSU(B) its highest aim. Hundreds of White Russians were employed by political and military Intelligence in Britain, France, Germany, America. Anti-Soviet hatred became the motor force of capitalist Intelligence.

It was from this that flowed the immense interest of all the capitalist Intelligence services in the Trotskyist and other factional currents in the world Communist movement in the 1920s and 1930s. Wherever groups could be discovered in Communist parties that were secretly covering up their existence, that were deviating from Marxism-Leninism, that were nursing personal grudges and grievances and hiding them from the party, imperialist Intelligence became interested:

The history of the revolutionary movement has shown that an especially advantageous atmosphere and favourable ground for the penetration in the movement of police-espionage diversion and political provocation, has been factional activity on the basis of deviation from the Marxist-Leninist line of the party. (Bołeslaw Bierut, speech at Third Plenary Session of Central Committee of Polish United Workers’ Party, 11 November 1949)

In the early days of the Russian labour movement the Trotskyites had represented a definite trend in the working class, that is to say, they formed a group with their own political platform and programme for which they publicly fought. It is true that their programme was against the interest of the workers, that it was a radically false programme. Right up to the October Revolution in 1917, and the years that followed, they opposed the Bolsheviks on every vital measure, on every vital decision that confronted the Russian working class and working people.

But in the course of the 1920s and particularly in the late 1920s and early 1930s, when the Trotskyite line had been overwhelmingly defeated inside the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, they ceased to be a political trend. Those who remained in the Soviet Union pretended in public to accept the line of the party, but secretly began to work against the party, against the revolution. They degenerated into secret agents of capitalism, began to work for the various capitalist Intelligence services, plotted the restoration of capitalism in the USSR and the defeat of the Soviet Union in the course of the aggression which was being prepared by the great capitalist powers, organised the sabotage of Soviet industry and agriculture and the assassination of leading Communists. Trotsky himself, in exile, maintained close contact with the secret groups inside the CPSU(B), and became the centre of a world-wide network of anti-Soviet sabotage and espionage, attempting to organise similar secret groupings inside the Communist parties and militant labour, progressive and national liberation organisations all over the world. Stalin wrote in 1937:

Present-day Trotskyism is not a political trend in the working class, but a gang without principle and without ideas, of wreckers, diversionists, Intelligence service agents, spies, murderers, a gang of sworn enemies of the working class, working in the pay of the Intelligence services of foreign states.

Such is the difference between Trotskyism in the past and the last seven or eight years.

Such is the difference between Trotskyism in the past and Trotskyism at the present time. (Stalin, Speech at the Plenum of the Central Committee of the CPSU(B), 3 March 1937)

Thus the imperialists’ Intelligence services went all out to recruit the Trotskyites and other secret groupings like Bukharinites and Zinovievites into their ranks, swelled these factions with their own specially trained agents, and above all in the 1930s Trotskyism became a type of police Marxism, a platform for agents in the labour movement. In Germany and Poland, as well as in the West, police agents specialising in the labour movement were given special courses in Trotskyism.

The contradictions of capitalism, deepening between the wars, did not allow the dreams of the imperialists, the dreams of a world-wide united capitalist crusade against the Soviet Union, to come to fruition. The Second World War was not the war they had dreamed of. The Intelligence services of Germany, Britain, France and America found themselves technically at war with each other. But Western Intelligence, trained on anti-Sovietism, could not lightly give up its aims. Though British and American Intelligence personnel were technically at war with the Gestapo, with the Abwehr, for the most part the real enemy remained the Soviet Union and the Communist parties, the working-class and progressive movements of all countries.

The war forced them to enlarge their organisations, to recruit patriotic young officers and soldiers intent on fighting fascism. So there were wheels within wheels. The old anti-Soviet, anti-Communist groupings remained the pivotal inner groupings carrying on the deeper long-term war against the working class.

The British capitalists have kept their libel laws and Official Secrets Act to prevent the publication of data exposing the anti-Soviet direction of British Intelligence throughout the war period. American laws are somewhat laxer and more material has become available. The Office of Strategic Services (OSS – American Intelligence) in the course of the war recruited its senior staff from the pillars of US reaction. Its head was General Donovan, partner in a big New York legal concern. Lieutenant-Colonel Corey Ford and Major Alistair MacBain, former OSS officers, wrote in their book Cloak and Dagger:

For his key personnel he [General Donovan] recruited prominent bankers and industrialists – names like Vanderbilt, Du Pont, Morgan... He enlisted noted diplomats like Hugh Wilson, our last ambassador to Germany, John Wiley, former minister to Lithuania, and Allen Dulles, key figure in the secret negotiations with SS General Wolff and the German High Command in Italy.

Annabelle Bucar, who worked for a time for the OSS, wrote in The Truth About American Diplomats:

Working in the OSS, I very soon discovered that the main Intelligence activities of the organisation were directed not only against Germany but also against the Soviet Union... The anti-Soviet direction of the activities of the American Intelligence organisations is confirmed by the fact that during the war which the United States fought in alliance with the Soviet Union against fascist Germany, the Russian subdivision was the largest in the OSS.

Whilst Churchill, delaying the Second Front, was agitating for an invasion of Eastern Europe, which would put the old fascist forces back in power, US and British Intelligence were busy trying to ‘penetrate’ the Resistance forces and the left, especially the Communist parties. And it was here that they found a special weapon – in the Tito group in Yugoslavia.

Already in the course of the war it became apparent that anti-labour espionage possessed a certain international character. All weapons were good enough against the working class. Spies and informers who had been handed over to the Gestapo by the secret police of occupied Eastern Europe, were kept on the Gestapo payroll to continue their dirty work. And British and American Intelligence used every available opportunity to learn of the stoolpigeons employed by the Gestapo and by the Italian and Japanese secret police, and to take them on in their turn. This was particularly true of the Titoites.

Take the classic example of László Rajk. Recruited by the Hungarian secret police as a stoolpigeon, his name was given by them to the Gestapo. In the French concentration camps he was visited by representatives of the French Deuxième Bureau, the American OSS and the Gestapo. During the war the Gestapo returned him to Hungary and at the end of the war it was the old Hungarian police chief Sombor-Schweinitzer, then in Western Germany, who connected him with American Intelligence. From 1947 the Titoite group in Yugoslavia became his main intermediary with Western imperialism. What better example of the ‘internationalism’ of imperialism?

The war ended. Western imperialism found itself confronted not only with the Socialist Soviet Union but with the rule of the working people in the countries of Eastern Europe. Henceforth to penetrate and spy on the organisations of the working class in these countries became a principal task. And when the old reactionary groupings in these countries were defeated one after the other in their plots and conspiracies, it was the hidden groupings of agents inside the Communist parties of the countries, organised around the Yugoslav Titoites, that became, as we have already seen, the main imperialist weapon for organising counter-revolution and war.

Henceforth the development of bands of agents and stoolpigeons not only inside their own countries but in the working-class and progressive movements of the whole world, became an essential part of the work of British and above all of American Intelligence.

This was the basis of the notorious Project X outlined in the USA in 1948 for world espionage and world provocation. The project was summed up in these words by the US News and World Report:

Under this plan, strong-arm squads would be formed under American guidance. Assassination of key Communists would be encouraged. American agents, parachuted into Eastern Europe, would be used to coordinate anti-Communist action.

From the old OSS the new CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) has been developed. On 20 June 1949, President Truman signed the Central Intelligence Agency Act, commonly known as the ‘Spy Bill’. Amongst its provisions were plans for infiltrating American agents into foreign countries, especially into progressive organisations, and measures to facilitate the recruitment of foreign spies by waiving immigration regulations. So while wholesale deportations are being organised of progressives who have spent thirty or forty years as good American citizens, there is wholesale importation of Nazi and Japanese spies to join as ‘loyal Americans’ the new world stoolpigeon force.

IV: Conclusion

Why include these all too brief and sketchy notes on agents and provocateurs in the labour movements of the world in a book concerned with the role of the Titoites? The reason is clear. Tories and right-wing Labour leaders try to laugh off the evidence of the Rajk and Kostov trials, to teach the workers, and especially the youth, who in this country have not yet seen a period of acute class struggle, that such things do not happen – or that even if there might be agents and informers ‘behind the iron curtain’, such things do not happen in ‘Western democracy’. But history says otherwise.

What conclusions can be drawn from even so cursory a glance as this at the role of spies and provocateurs employed by the capitalists to penetrate, spy on and disrupt from within the labour and progressive movement?

1) The bourgeoisie has used spies, informers, provocateurs against the labour movement as long as there has been a bourgeoisie and a proletariat, as long as there has been a struggle of capital against labour.

2) Far from being something foreign to the British and American way of life, the use of agents and provocateurs to disrupt the labour movement first developed on a wide scale in Britain and is today being intensified, whilst America, today the centre of world imperialism, has become the stoolpigeon state par excellence, developing the use of spies and provocateurs against the labour movement on a scale hitherto known only in Nazi Germany.

3) Ever since the October Revolution of 1917, the great imperialist powers have worked more and more ruthlessly to develop a system of spies and provocateurs, not only in their own countries, not only in their colonial or dependent territories, not only in other weaker capitalist states, but especially to penetrate the USSR, the country where the working people led by the working class first assumed power.

The great imperialist states worked between the wars to develop a system of spies and agents as a fifth column against the first Socialist state. In the Soviet Union the great conspiracy of the imperialists which began with Kolchak and Denikin continued with Trotsky and Bukharin.

4) Today, with a third of the world’s population governed by people’s authorities, with power in the hands of the working people led by the working class, the policy of trying to develop a system of spies and provocateurs in these countries where the people rule, and above all in their vanguard organisation, the Communist Party, has become an integral part of the war preparations of Western imperialism. In this it is American imperialism, American Intelligence, seconded by British, that plays the main role. And the work of Trotsky and Bukharin is continued by the Titoites. The Titoite clique serve Western imperialism abroad as the MI5 and FBI agents serve it at home. They complement each other. To wage aggressive war it is necessary for Anglo-American imperialism to try and divide the working-class and progressive movement at home, to try and divide the working-class and progressive movement in the other capitalist countries, and to try and get a fifth column set up in the rear of the ‘enemy’, that is, in the USSR and the People’s Democracies. And for this object the Titoites have become a principal weapon.

There can be no greater hypocrisy than the propaganda of imperialists who ask: ‘How was it possible for so many traitors to be found in the revolutionary movement?’ Dr Gyula Alapi, the Hungarian People’s Prosecutor, put the question well in his final speech at the Rajk trial:

In connection with this case they ask on certain sides in the Western countries: How did so many traitors get into the ranks of the revolutionary labour movement? It is ironic that the very people ask this who would best be able to answer this question, that these spokesmen of the Intelligence services, of the imperialist trusts, call us to account for these traitors, the very ones who sent them into our ranks for the internal dissolution of the revolutionary movement. It is an old method to send hostile spies and provocateurs into the workers’ parties. How is it that the workers’ parties were not able to expose these traitors immediately? If only we had in our hands the files which contained the lists! As is known, the dossiers of the Hungarian police are not at our disposal but at the disposal of the American Intelligence service. (Verbatim Report of Rajk Trial, p 272)

When, after the October Revolution, it was discovered that Malinovsky, who had penetrated to the Central Committee of the Bolsheviks, was a tsarist spy, the Mensheviks made bitter attacks on the Bolsheviks for permitting this to happen. But Lenin answered thus:

... when, under Kerensky, we demanded the arrest and trial of Rodzianko, the Speaker of the Duma – because he had known even before the war that Malinovsky was an agent provocateur and had not informed the ‘Trudoviki’ and the workers of the Duma of this fact – the Mensheviks and Social-Revolutionaries who were in Kerensky’s Cabinet did not support our demand, and Rodzianko retained his freedom and went off without hindrance to Denikin. (Lenin, ‘Left-Wing’ Communism, footnote at end of Chapter V)

How much greater is the hypocrisy of the right-wing Labour leaders in Britain today, who, maintaining intact and strengthening the capitalist state machine, strengthening the security apparatus that is used against Labour Party and trade-union members as well as against Communists, strengthening the very apparatus of spies and provocateurs which is trying to penetrate and disrupt the lands of People’s Democracy and Socialism, at the same time cry out against the Rajk, Kostov and other traitors’ trials!

5) But there is a fifth and final conclusion. The vigilance of the Soviet government and people led by the CPSU(B) defeated the spying efforts of the Trotskyites and their imperialists masters. With the help and initiative of the CPSU(B) and of Stalin personally, the peoples of Eastern Europe have unmasked the Titoite plots, which succeeded only in Yugoslavia itself, and there only temporarily.

The machinations of spies and provocateurs against the labour and progressive movement at home and abroad can be defeated. But this poses the urgent problem of greater vigilance of the labour and progressive movement.