THE FBI'S COMMUNIST BRIGADE
Wechsler, James A.
the FBI's Communist Brigade by JAMES A. WECHSLER The question of what would happen to the Communist Party of the United States and other left-wing sects if FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover abruptly...
...Q. Those are the only facts upon which you base that opinion...
...Thompson to offer proof that the Communists were plotting a violent seizure of power, she could offer only a tame answer: Mrs...
...it will lend substance to the charge that the MusLanguage and the Negro Child by PEGGIE BEBIE THOMSON covite Communists have become a pretty soft cell...
...On December 30, 1950, he married Lulu Mae, (then age thirty-five) who identifies herself presently as "housewife and seamstress...
...Q. Would you tell us what Leila No-land had to say to you when she came to the trailer...
...She would give me instructions in Marxism-Leninism and she went out to her trailer and returned with books...
...In seeking to explain the nature of the case presented against them at their trial, Mrs...
...Whether she knew the conspiratorial nature of his life before accompanying him to the altar is another point lamentably undisclosed in this book of alleged revelation...
...Thompson, we would like you to tell us the circumstances relating to your induction in June of 1953 as a member of the San Joaquin County Club of the Communist Party...
...Hoover's efforts to preserve the legend of a major domestic menace...
...Unlike some more celebrated FBI performers, neither Howard nor Lulu Mae Thompson was a defector from Communism who turned to the FBI in a surge of disenchantment...
...Thompson's official entry into the Communist world obviously created a certain awkwardness...
...This admiring portrait of Thompson's activism is hardly consistent with the view that he did nothing to advance the cause of Marxism-Leninism, Moscow variety, while giving his all for the FBI...
...It is hard to avoid the speculation that at least some FBI "Communists" served on the trial court that exonerated the Thompsons and condemned their persecutors...
...Then the next day Leila Noland approached me and told me that I had been proposed for membership in the Party and would I be interested in joining them in their work...
...Thompson, who now earns his living as a millwright, began his FBI duties in 1948—he was then thirty-nine years old—and achieved membership in the JAMES A. WECHSLER is the editor of the editorial page of The New York Post...
...She rose to the rank of secretary-treasurer of their group, conscientiously collected dues from the assembled comrades, and served as hostess at numerous meetings held in their home...
...Thompson's account of this episode casts some parenthetical light on the folly of the loyalty oath machinery...
...by June, 1953, she was a Communist Party member and, like her husband, an agent of the FBI...
...The thirty-month interim between the nuptial night and Mrs...
...It can hardly be considered a large addition to our national knowledge to learn that these California Communists promoted the unionization of agricultural workers and—amid the heckling of Pekingites and Trotskyites—preached the Moscow (and Washington) line of "coexistence...
...Mrs...
...Thompson: Leila did not say anything to me this night...
...We also felt Mr...
...Thompson a passive bystander...
...It is something that they never mentioned...
...Whatever the amount, they were overpaid...
...They are overly cautious...
...What national dividends are we deriving from this investment...
...Presumably with the assent of his FBI mentors, Thompson resolutely fought for reinstatement in the Communist ranks...
...Finally, a meeting was held at our home and I was not able to attend the meeting because I was not yet a Communist Party member...
...The total impact of the volume is one of soap opera rather than spy thriller...
...No further light is thrown on the origins and motivations of Thompson's "Communist" career...
...We only had two or three lessons and again it just tapered off and we never completed our studies of Marxism-Leninism...
...Thompson: That was i tockton, sir...
...How many other FBI men pay financial tribute to the Communist treasury is a matter that, to my knowledge, has never been cleared up...
...Thompson's account of how she finally gained her way into the inner circle: Q. Now, Mrs...
...This document is modestly entitled Communist Activities in the Central California Area and records the political double-life led by a couple named Howard and Lulu Mae Thompson who, in the service of the FBI, masqueraded as Communists for many long years...
...Thompson: That is correct...
...and I saic 'es...
...But such questions did not occur to any member of the HUAC panel...
...They are very, very careful about it...
...One reverts to the question suggested at the start...
...It has been inadvertently raised anew in a 283-page volume of testimony recently published by the House Un-American Activities Committee...
...rnipson...
...Accusations of "white chauvinism" were leveled against Mrs...
...Finally there was a "trial" at a Communist's home in San Francisco...
...After two seemingly uneventful years as a member of the FBI's Communist contingent, love introduced a complexity into the Thompson saga...
...Thompson: I believe that the leadership of the Communist Party, if they ever feel that they are strong enough or think they are strong enough to take over the country, that they would try...
...In the course of the interrogation he makes it plain that the Party chieftains have no principled resistance to false swearing...
...How large a percentage of Communist activity in the United States is provided by the FBI undercover brigade...
...Thompson: Yes...
...So he held back and left it up to others to do...
...Thompson: That is correct...
...Thompson was summoned to testify against a union official being prosecuted under a provision of the Landrum-Griffin law barring Communists from holding union office...
...since HUAC's questioners are singularly lacking in literary curiosity, no clear picture is offered of how they came to be selected for this type of what might be called private public service...
...But HUAC's capacity for non sequitur was demonstrated long ago...
...One is tempted to wonder whether a Communist infiltrator in the FBI turned him in...
...I returned home after the meeting and served refreshments to the persons who had attended the meeting, and after everybody had gone my husband told me I had been proposed for membership...
...When will some member of some Congressional committee acquire the courage to demand that J. Edgar Hoover explain these preposterous frolics...
...Why did it take so long for Lulu Mae to obtain her Communist credentials...
...Q. In other words, if it was not for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, you would not have participated in the Communist organization in California...
...Their tedious testimony is probably more valuable to the Peking-oriented wing of U.S...
...Again one yearns for unrevealed details but gets only this cryptic account of how it began: Q. Would you explain 1 circumstances under which you /ed the Federal Bureau of Investig >n...
...The result was that we were reinstated in the Party, and those who accused us were reprimanded," Thompson told the Committee without rhetorical flourish...
...although the defendant was convicted, the Supreme Court subsequently declared the law's provision unconstitutional...
...Part of the answer can be found in certain confusing events that occurred in "the early part of 1951" and resulted in Thompson's temporary expulsion from the Communist order...
...the FBI's Communist Brigade by JAMES A. WECHSLER The question of what would happen to the Communist Party of the United States and other left-wing sects if FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover abruptly ordered the withdrawal of all his undercover participants in such groups has long been an intriguing but largely unexplored subject...
...They seem to protest too much, and there is at least one large contradiction in the record...
...Thompson: Yes...
...they simply believe in its selective usage, and Thompson's offense was his failure to clear the matter with the higher-up commissars...
...Q. It is your testimony that the official position of the party in California was that if you took the loyalty oath you were immediately expelled from the party or suspended...
...One committee member inexplicably volunteered the view that Thompson's case proved the value of the oath ritual in combating subversion...
...Thompson: That is the official position unless there was— Q. Sanction from the party...
...So I went out and stayed in a trailer house on our property which belonged to Leila No-land, who lived on our property, while they held the meeting in the house...
...His quest for vindication lasted "seven or eight months...
...We started studying immediately...
...This is just an opinion I have formed from hearing them and talking and from being with them...
...Ironically, her act of revelation—and self-exposure—turned out to be an exercise in futility...
...In somewhat condensed form, this is Mrs...
...I am sorry that I cannot say that I ever heard it said or anything like that, but I did not, truthfully...
...Q. Both you and your wife...
...He is the author of several books, including "Revolt on the Campus," "Labor Baron," and "The Age of Suspicion...
...Some of the FBI agents were also members of the officers reserve, officers in the Naval Reserve, and we went to meetings together and I imagine it was through that that this contact was made...
...Thompson: I joined tli Communist Party and reported on i ctivities...
...Mrs...
...They were hired hands...
...To quote the transcript: Thompson : Neither of us knew anything about the Communist Party, you might say, before we became involved in this...
...Thompson: International Harvester Company...
...It must occur to many to ask at this juncture how many other quiet citizens were first introduced to Marxism-Leninism by the recruiting agents of the FBI—and whether some of them, so lacking in political sophistication, were eventually seduced by the environment they had been assigned to infiltrate...
...Thompson: Well, I was roached by the Federal Bureau of Ir tigation, by an FBI agent, and asked I would care to do that...
...It is just an impression that a person gathers when meeting with them over a period of years...
...But none of the interrogators who eagerly solicited their tale seemed to detect the absurdity of the performance...
...they were left with nothing but each other...
...The question of who was doing what to whom in this underworld of agentry is never convincingly resolved...
...Thus, when Committee members pressed Mrs...
...In obviously protective language, they assert that they scrupulously refrained from direct recruiting of new members...
...At another point Mr...
...Thompson testified that, when Communist chieftain Gus Hall visited San Francisco, "he was shocked to find that in one club they even talked force and violence...
...In the HUAC volume under review, many pages are devoted to the Thompsons' unfolding of what they did and saw and heard during their Communist years (ending in April, 1966...
...In any case, before or after their marriage the moment of truth was inescapable, and the record shows that Lulu Mae became a true partner as well as wife...
...And Mr...
...Neither is there any disclosure in the Thompsons' memoir as to how much government money was expended on their long adventure as underground operatives...
...Their secret existence ended when Mrs...
...Q. Where were you employed at the time the initial contact was made with you by the Federal Bureau of Investigation...
...This was, one might remark, an unusual and apparently serene comradeship...
...It came to the knowledge of someone in the Party" that he had done so and he was thereupon ousted on the charge that he was a government informant...
...Thompson as the inquisition proceeded...
...They have, however, left as a testament—in the record of their appearance before HUAC—both a grotesque description of the FBI's role inside the Communist Party and a glimpse of Party life,that caricatures Mr...
...Communism than to anyone else...
...For the Thompsons the proceedings meant that their underground political romance was over...
...Thompson offered further corroboration: "As I reported earlier, I entered the Party following the Smith Act convictions in California and there was a strict policy of not mentioning force and violence except to say that we are not to mention force and violence...
...They discovered no large secrets...
...After the meeting I went in...
...Q. Where was that, Mr...
...Key-lor was jealous of my husband because my husband had come into the Party and advanced quite rapidly in Party leadership and he had not had too much background in Marxist-Leninist theory, and Howard Reylor felt he was a student of Marxism-Leninism and he had spent a great deal of study and a great deal of money on books, so he felt that he should be the leader in the area rather than my husband...
...Thompson: It was rather unusual...
...In an apparent effort to supplement his FBI income, he took a job as a "production control man" with the Federal government and signed the usual Federal loyalty oath...
...Mrs...
...She said, well, she thought that that could be taken care of...
...I told her, yes, I would except that I did not believe I had a sufficient knowledge of Marxism-Leninism to be accepted as a Party member...
...Thompson abruptly declares : "We never felt they presented any actual testimony...
...Again the narrative cries out for elaboration...
...Nor was Mrs...
...My husband did not feel that he should sponsor me for membership because of his connection with the Federal Bureau of Investigation...
...It was based mostly upon suspicion...
...Q. Will you explain t circumstances of how you undertool is work...
...approval...
...Communist Party in that year...
Vol. 32 • February 1968 • No. 2
