Healy needs a new pair of shoes

In 1975, Gerry Healy's Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP) in Britain and their American co-thinkers, the Workers League, started an international smear campaign against the U.S. Socialist Workers Party (SWP). The bizarre campaign, known as "Security and the Fourth International", claimed that long-time SWP leader Joseph Hansen was a double agent of the Soviet secret police and the FBI, and that he was somehow involved in the murder of Leon Trotsky in Mexico. The exiled Russian revolutionary was struck down in 1940 by a real Soviet agent, one Ramon Mercader, who had managed to infiltrate Trotsky's household. Hansen had been one of Trotsky's guards.

Usually, an absurd conflict of this kind between two Trotskyist groups would be of little interest, but in 1975 both the British WRP and the American SWP were well known and high profile in their respective countries. The SWP had a strong influence in the anti-war movement in the United States, while the WRP was numerically strong (at least on paper) and had recruited famous actress Vanessa Redgrave to its ranks. WRP leader Healy used his contacts in the British media to get maximum publicity for his accusations against Hansen. Of course, claims that Trotsky's guard was infiltrated by Soviet intelligence also have a certain intrinsic interest all by themselves. (For some reason, both the SWP and the WRP anachronistically refer to the Soviet secret service as the "GPU", a name which apparently dropped out of use already in 1923. Not being a scholarly expert on the bewildering number of Soviet spy agencies, I will nevertheless use the term "GPU" in this review, for the sake of consistency with the book under review.)

"Healy's Big Lie" was published by the SWP in 1976. Hansen easily refutes Healy's claims. One of Healy's "proofs" is a report by Roger G McGregor, an aide to the American consul in Mexico, detailing a conversation with Hansen in 1940. McGregor may indeed have been an FBI agent (this was before the creation of the CIA), but unfortunately for Healy, Trotsky himself had contacts with McGregor, something patently obvious from the same document! Both Trotsky and Hansen were feeding McGregor information on suspected Soviet agents in both Mexico and the United States. Was Trotsky an FBI agent? That, of course, was not an inference Healy would have wanted to draw... Note the bizarre similarity between Healy's charges and the Stalinist lie that Trotsky was "killed by his own people", or that Trotsky had indeed been an "imperialist" agent.

McGregor's report also states that Hansen met a GPU agent in New York City and attempted to "take him on", tricking him into revealing secret information. To Healy, this was evidence that the hard-working Hansen had been moon-lightning as an agent for the GPU, too! In response, Hansen pointed to a document in which SWP top leader James P Cannon confirms that Hansen had Trotsky's permission to contact the GPU under false pretences. Was Cannon a GPU agent? Was Trotsky? (There actually was a quirky political sect in New York which *did* claim that Trotsky was a literal GPU agent, the so-called Marlenites. Note the irony that Healy's allegations are similar in kind to the paranoid ravings of this little group!)

Occasionally, the whole affair gets unintentionally funny, as when Healy charged Hansen with protecting Marc Zborowski, an actual GPU agent who had infiltrated the Trotskyist movement and given the GPU information used to murder Trotsky's son Leon Sedov. In "Healy's Big Lie", people who knew Healy in his younger days reveal that Zborowski had stayed at Healy's house in London before the war, and that Healy had even bought him a new pair of shoes! Was *Healy* an agent of the GPU?

While the historical details in "Healy's Big Lie" are interesting, the main item on the agenda is: why? Why did Gerry Healy and his political tendency suddenly launch an unprecedented campaign to frame Hansen and other SWP leaders as "accomplices" of the GPU and the FBI? It turns out that Healy was once a close collaborator of the SWP, including Hansen himself! This was during a serious split in the Trotskyist Fourth International, when the SWP, Healy's group and the French group around Pierre Lambert created the "International Committee of the Fourth International". In its original form, it existed from 1953 to 1963. That year, the SWP abandoned Healy, and in 1971 Lambert left, as well. This left Healy with a rump version of the "International Committee". In 1974, Healy's own party, the British WRP, suffered a serious split, loosing most of its trade union base as hundreds of members defected to form a competing group, the WSL. The leader of Healy's U.S. franchise, Tim Wolhforth of the Workers League, also left the fold. He joined the SWP! (Today, Wohlforth occasionally reviews books on Amazon.) Healy responded to the permanent crisis of his organization by literally beating up his political opponents, while whipping up a paranoid frenzy among his remaining supporters, claiming that the secret services were out to smash the WRP and the International Committee. On a public meeting in London, Healy even claimed that the British state planned to quite literally massacre WRP's members en masse!

It was against this background that "Security and the Fourth International" was launched. Thus, the slander campaign was simply the latest product of an increasingly erratic, violent, paranoid and authoritarian movement, in other words a cult. By claiming that the SWP were harbouring GPU-FBI agents, Healy could refuse to argue with them politically, instead setting them up for thug violence and other provocations. When virtually every Trotskyist group on the planet came to Hansen's defence, Healy could use this fact to "prove" that everyone was out to get the WRP, and that an even more authoritarian internal regime was needed. While Healy's slander campaign is typically "Stalinist", its context is clearly cultist.

The rest of the story, not told in "Healy's Big Lie", is also interesting. In 1985, it was revealed that Healy's WRP had been bankrolled by monetary contributions from a whole string of Mideast regimes: Libya, Iraq, Iran, even Kuwait and the UAE. They had also received money from the PLO. Healy might not have been a double agent of the GPU and the FBI, but he did turn out to be a gun for hire! After the revelations, which were (ironically) engineered by the Workers League (their new leader David North had grown tired of Gerry), the WRP split wide open, with poor Healy being expelled twice, first by the majority faction and later by the minority, too! In 1989, Thomas Gerard Healy died, with his dwindling band of followers (the "Marxist Party") claiming that he had been assassinated by a whole string of Western intelligence agencies, including MI6, Mossad and BOSS. It apparently never occurred to the cultic faithful that the old man might simply have died of frailty...

Thus ended Healy's big lie.