Agents: The FBI and GPU Infiltration of the Trotskyist Movement, by Eric London, tells the story of how the Stalinist secret police infiltrated the Fourth International and assassinated Leon Trotsky in August 1940 in Coyoacan, Mexico. Trotsky’s assassination robbed the world working class of the greatest living representative of the 1917 Russian Revolution.

However, the story does not end with Trotsky’s assassination. The US government and the Stalinist bureaucracy feared the continued existence of the Fourth International and flooded the movement with agents, including former Stalinist spies, who continued to wreak havoc organizationally and politically, until the International Committee of the Fourth International launched its Security and the Fourth International investigation in 1975.

The investigation exposed Sylvia Callen, Socialist Workers Party (SWP) leader James P. Cannon’s personal secretary, as an agent of the GPU and published information establishing Joseph Hansen, Trotsky’s secretary in Mexico and longtime SWP leader, imparted “confidential information” to the FBI after Trotsky’s assassination in exchange for “impunity.”

Agents brings together material from many sources – trial transcripts, grand jury testimony, archival material, and FBI records surrounding the US government’s 1941 prosecution of 29 members of the Socialist Workers Party on charges of sedition. The book also draws from a recent book by historian Donna T. Haverty-Stacke on the trial of the Trotskyists.

The author, Eric London, is a regular writer for the World Socialist Web Site and a member of the Political Committee of the Socialist Equality Party (US).

This is the last week to buy Agents for the 50 percent-off price of $8.48! Take advantage of the last week of our big sale on Mehring publications. The sale ends at midnight (EST) Sunday, January 5, 2020.