March 22, 1975
An answer to the slanders of Robertson and Wohlforth
Tim Wohlforth, who resigned from the Workers League of the United States on September 29, 1974, has joined hands with the most virulent opponents of Trotskyism and the International Committee of the Fourth International.
He resigned from the Workers League, the fraternal section of the International Committee in the US, one month after he was removed as national secretary of the Workers League.
The decision to replace him as national secretary was taken on August 31, 1974, by the unanimous decision of the League’s Central Committee, including Wohlforth’s own vote.
The vote for his own removal as national secretary expressed Wohlforth’s complete agreement with all the other members of the League’s Central Committee that an urgent and drastic change was necessary in the leadership of the Workers League.
The unanimous decision to replace Wohlforth turned on fundamental principles of the theory and practice of building revolutionary leadership in the working class.
The situation came to a head at the end of August 1974, when information was given to the Workers League Central Committee that Wohlforth’s lieutenant in the League, a certain Nancy Fields, had previous family connections with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
The revelations about Fields’s previous family connection with the CIA came as a complete surprise to the League’s Central Committee and also to the International Committee delegates.
There was some alarm as well. During an important international meeting in London in May 1974, the Workers League delegation had included Wohlforth and Fields. Neither at the meeting nor before it did Wohlforth ask for a security clearance for Fields. To obtain such a clearance is a rudimentary principle of the Marxist movement.
To have got a clearance for Fields was of crucial importance, since she was a completely unknown political quantity to the IC. In such cases, the IC relies on the revolutionary responsibility of the leaders of its member sections to raise the security considerations of the IC.
Wohlforth didn’t. He kept absolutely silent about the fact that she had family connections with the CIA. He concealed this information from the IC because of his personal relations with her. He put these personal relations above the political interests of his own section and the security considerations of the IC.
At a meeting in London on August 18, 1974, Wohlforth was specifically asked whether Fields had any CIA connections and he replied, “No.”
When the facts were related to the Workers League Central Committee 13 days later, Wohlforth changed his position. Now, he admitted knowing of her family connections with the CIA. But he said he did not mention them because he did not consider them important.
The League’s Central Committee thought otherwise. And so, on reflection, did Wohlforth. The committee voted unanimously to implement three decisions:
To remove Wohlforth as national secretary and replace him with Comrade Fred Mazelis.
To set up a commission of inquiry to investigate the security questions involved.
To suspend from membership Nancy Fields, pending the outcome of the inquiry.
On September 29, 1974, one month after voting for these decisions, Wohlforth resigned from the Workers League. In his resignation letter, he completely repudiated the decisions he had voted for. He wrote:
I am completely and utterly opposed to the proceedings and decisions of the Central Committee meeting held on August 31 at our camp at the request of and in conjunction with the International Committee comrades.
I believe this meeting represented a serious setback in the construction of the revolutionary party in the United States and in the construction of the Fourth International on a worldwide basis.
If it was a “serious setback,” no one has noticed. His desertion did not inspire a mass walkout by other members of the Workers League. When he left, he took only one person with him—Nancy Fields—to whom he is perfectly entitled as a political accomplice.
In the months prior to their departure, the Wohlforth-Fields leadership had taken an extremely destructive turn, resulting in nearly 100 members leaving the League’s branches in New York and elsewhere, involving the decimation of forces in some interstate areas.
Work in the trade unions was nonexistent, youth work was reduced to community social work and philanthropic barbecues and “trailblazing” (paper sales drives) became a frenzied substitute for recruiting and training a revolutionary cadre in the working class.
This situation has now been changed. The removal of Wohlforth and Fields has considerably strengthened the Workers League, a fact which is fully recognized throughout the International Committee.
Nor, despite Wohlforth’s claim, has the “serious setback” been noted internationally. In all sections of the International Committee the lessons of the Wohlforth experience are being taken into the theory and practice of building revolutionary parties in the working class.
Only an individual of astonishing conceit could claim to be bigger than the IC or any of its member sections. Wohlforth is such a person.
He brought Fields to an important international meeting in May 1974 under conditions which completely overrode the security considerations of the IC. This demonstrated the most feckless middle-class attitude to the security of the IC, his own section, and its whole membership.
Yet in his resignation letter (September 29, 1974) Wohlforth wrote:
I oppose the decision of the Central Committee, taken only because of the intervention of the International Committee comrades, to suspend Nancy Fields from membership on the basis of the unsubstantiated, ludicrous, and absurd charge that she may be an agent of the CIA.
It is a complete lie that the decision was taken “only because of” the IC’s intervention. It was taken by the Workers League Central Committee—unanimously, with the support of both Wohlforth and Fields.
Secondly, there was no “unsubstantiated, ludicrous, and absurd charge” made against Fields. The question was asked—Why hadn’t Wohlforth informed the IC and the leadership of his own organization that Fields had family connections with the CIA?
Her connections were certainly “substantiated” by the inquiry commission. In its report, dated November 9, 1974, the two-man inquiry stated:
The inquiry established that from the age of 12 until the completion of her university education, Nancy Fields was brought up, educated, and financially supported by her aunt and uncle, Albert and Gigs Morris. Albert Morris is head of the CIA’s IBM computer operation in Washington as well as being a large stockholder in IBM. He was a member of the OSS, forerunner of the CIA, and worked in Poland as an agent of imperialism. During the 1960s a frequent house guest at their home in Maine was Richard Helms, ex-director of the CIA and now US ambassador in Iran.
It can now be added that the CIA’s computer section was not only collecting worldwide data on the left for its counterrevolutionary conspiracies, coups, and assassinations, but it was also building up a computerized bank of American citizens.
These revelations were published in The New York Times on December 22, 1974, by reporter Seymour Hersh, who said that mail tampering, electronic surveillance, and the use of informants against US dissidents had been conducted for at least 10 years—“all completely illegal.”
In a follow-up article on January 19, 1974, Hersh wrote that “former high-level members” of the CIA told him that “there were a number of CIA-directed wiretaps and break-ins in the United States in the last 10 years aimed at radicals and other dissenting groups. Some of these activities, they said, were conducted by outside ‘contract’ operatives who were paid in cash and provided with no records or papers to indicate that they were working on behalf of the CIA.”
Was it “ludicrous” and “absurd” for the Workers League Central Committee, whose members had been deliberately kept in the dark about Fields’s previous family history, to ask for her suspension until the commission of inquiry had investigated the matter?
Wohlforth now thinks so. In fact, he is enraged by it. “The procedure in this matter is monstrous,” he says in his resignation letter.
If he, Wohlforth, is satisfied that Fields is not a security risk, then that should satisfy the whole of the Workers League and the IC. And if anyone questions his divine right to arbitrate on such matters, he, Wohlforth, will resign and go howling into the revisionist press. And this is what the pair of them did.
The timing of their joint walkout was curious. It followed only days on the heels of a letter sent to Wohlforth by the IC which stated that the inquiry commission was on its way to conduct its work with a view to clearing the air as quickly as possible. Wohlforth’s reply came in the form of his resignation letter. Fields never bothered to write at all.
When the commission began its work in New York on October 24, 1974, Wohlforth refused to collaborate with it, although he voted to set it up. As an ex-member he was invited to submit verbal or written evidence, but he declined to do so. So did Fields.
Between October 24 and November 2, 1974, the commission took statements from a total of 22 members and ex-members of the Workers League. Apart from establishing her hitherto hushed-up family connections with the CIA, the inquiry uncovered her history of political activity, all of which had little in common with the struggle for Marxism.
She was associated with the SDS during the Columbia sit-in in New York in 1968 and later flirted with the Maoist-influenced Peace and Freedom Party in Boston. One witness said that Fields had once claimed that she knew “all the big guys in the Panthers.”
It was clear from the witnesses’ statements that although Fields talked recklessly about her alleged activities in left-wing circles, she was less forthcoming about her uncle, Albert Morris, her “foster father.”
In one of his bulletins, Wohlforth remarks:
They (members of the IC) had “discovered” what had been common knowledge in the movement for years—Comrade Fields’ uncle had worked for the CIA until 1961.
This is a brazen lie. The inquiry established quite the contrary position—the membership of the Workers League did not know, members of the Central Committee and Political Committee did not know, nor did anyone on the International Committee.
While censuring Wohlforth for failing to get a security clearance for Fields, the commission of inquiry stated:
After interviewing and investigating all the available materials, there is no evidence to suggest that Nancy Fields or Tim Wohlforth is in any way connected with the work of the CIA or any other government agency.
We recommend that Tim Wohlforth, once he withdraws his resignation from the Workers League, returns to the leading committees and to his work on the Bulletin and has the right to be nominated in any position, including that of national secretary, at the forthcoming National Conference early in 1975.
We recommend the immediate lifting of the suspension of Nancy Fields, with the condition that she is not permitted to hold any office in the Workers League for two years.
The commission of inquiry conducted its work meticulously and in the most responsible way. There was absolutely no panic associated with it. It was a principled task that had to be carried out and perhaps will have to be carried out again in the future.
Without this sense of responsibility there can be no training of a revolutionary leadership in the working class to take the power.
All leaders in our movement bear tremendous responsibilities in this respect. Wohlforth could not have been an exception. To have allowed him to be, would have been to weaken and miseducate the revolutionary cadre.
The findings of the commission of inquiry were related to him early in November. He rejected them out of hand.
An individual with such contempt for party organization and discipline cannot be a leader in the International Committee. That is why he was replaced by the Workers League Central Committee on a unanimous vote, Wohlforth’s included.
The CIA is not an incidental question for our movement, but a question of indispensable tasks flowing from the principles of the construction of revolutionary parties of the International Committee of the Fourth International. Only someone who fails to take at all seriously the building of the world party of socialist revolution can dismiss the question of security against the CIA, the international center of the counterrevolutionary plans of the imperialists.
Wohlforth is just such a person. He is now howling in protest against having been removed by the Central Committee of the Workers League from the position of secretary. But it is surely absolutely ludicrous to suppose that, having refused to accept responsibility for a basic question of security clearance against CIA connections, he could continue in a position of national leadership.
The IC and the Workers League have never and will never under any circumstances knowingly permit within their ranks anyone with CIA connections, just as we expose the CIA ruthlessly outside our movement.
We insist on immediate and rigorous inquiry into any such connection. It is the future of the revolution that is at stake. It should come as no surprise that Wohlforth is defended and embraced on these questions by the bitterest opponents of Trotskyism, the Socialist Workers Party, and Robertson, who reject the perspectives of world revolution.
It has now been publicly revealed that the FBI infiltrated the SWP over a period of years. Despite this, and despite the fact that the CIA is responsible for the physical destruction of thousands of workers and youth considered enemies of US imperialism, and will plan a similar fate for the sections of the International Committee, Wohlforth and these revisionists come together in unity against the elementary and principled measures taken by the Workers League.
The anti-internationalism of the politics of Wohlforth, and of those who support him, the SWP and Robertson, is all of a piece with Wohlforth’s placing of personal judgments and considerations higher than the fundamental and elementary requirements of the revolutionary movement.
In the commission of inquiry report, Wohlforth was warned that unless he corrected his position immediately, he must find himself outside the revolutionary movement and subject to the pressure of the most reactionary forces.
This is precisely what has happened. He is a temporary celebrity in revisionist circles because he is churning out slanders and lies about the IC, the Workers Revolutionary Party, and the Workers League.
Let him. It does not intimidate the International Committee or any of its sections. On the contrary, Wohlforth’s lineup with the revisionists is most important for the political education of the whole IC. Having abandoned completely the fight for Marxism and his responsibilities as a leader in the revolutionary movement, Wohlforth has found the friends he deserves.
March 22, 1975