The Black Book of the American Left. David Horowitz
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sent Sol to Bratislava, along with Tom Hayden and an SDS delegation, to meet Madame Binh and other leaders of the National Liberation Front. For the radicals attending, this was not just a fact-finding mission. The organizers allowed Sol to be present only after Ramparts agreed that he would not report on the “sensitive” political discussions taking place. Long afterwards, Sol told me what these were: “The SDS’ers held a seminar with the Communists on how to conduct their psychological warfare campaign against the United States.” According to Sol, Hayden was particularly vocal in making suggestions on how to sabotage the American war effort. He also tried to get the group to endorse publicly the Communist line on the war, but Sol and the sociologist Christopher Jencks, who was also present, objected and Hayden’s proposal was voted down.
Their dissent had consequences. Following the Bratislava meeting, members of the group were scheduled to go to North Vietnam. Hayden had already been there, publicly proclaiming that he had seen “rice-roots democracy” at work. As a consequence, he enjoyed the confidence of the Communist rulers and had become one of their gatekeepers, screening American radicals for his hosts. To punish Sol and Jencks, Hayden saw to it they were denied permission to go on with the others to Hanoi.
Hundreds, maybe even thousands of similar contacts and arrangements were made with the Communist enemy during the Sixties and after. Yet only a handful of New Leftists have ever written or talked about them. Few had the high-level contacts of Hayden, and only one, Carl Oglesby, was able to tell his story and remain a leftist in good standing. Others, like Phillip Abbott Luce and Larry Grathwohl, made their revelations as “renegades” and were attacked as “government agents,” a stigma that warned others not to follow their example. Even after the collapse of Communism made its evils difficult to ignore, the cover-up by veterans of the New Left continued. Memoirs and historical monographs by New Left historians painted a virginal portrait of radical protesters, rewriting the history of the period on a scale that would have seemed impossible outside the Communist bloc. In his own memoir, Hayden includes pages of excerpts from his FBI file, interspersed with disingenuous presentations of his political career that keep his readers in the dark about many of the far-from-innocent activities in which he actual1y engaged. The effect is to make the FBI’s surveillance gratuitous and malign at the same time.
In the summer of 1972 Hayden paid a visit to the Ramparts offices. He told us he had been to Paris to meet with the National Liberation Front and representatives from Hanoi. He wanted us to publish an article he intended to write on the military situation. It was to be called “The Prospects of the Vietnamese Offensive” and was a detailed account of the battlefront in Vietnam and the political situation in America. In our office, he dictated all 13,000 words of the article into a tape-recorder in one sitting, while only referring to some notes he had brought with him. It was an impressive demonstration. The article concluded: “Vietnam, country of countless My Lais will be liberated. May we speed the time.”
I knew that Hayden’s article was Communist war propaganda. Peace negotiations had begun in Paris and the terms of any treaty would be critical to the war aims of both combatants. If the situation could be stabilized to preserve the regime in the South, the United States would prevail in the war. If conditions facilitated a Communist “liberation,” the other side would win.
The Nixon administration wanted a truce signed before the November election. It had launched a dramatic gambit to pressure the Communists into a stabilizing peace. After more than two decades of quarantine, Nixon had recognized the Communist regime in China and, accompanied by his advisor Henry Kissinger, had made visits to Moscow and Peking. They hoped to persuade the Communist rulers to pressure Hanoi into a settlement on unfavorable terms. Hanoi responded with its own strategy, which was to launch an offensive in South Vietnam to alter the facts on the ground. The role of Hayden and other New Left radicals was to intensify the divisions in America, behind enemy lines.
I listened to Hayden’s request to publish his propaganda piece with an anxious feeling. This was a “gut-check” present whenever Hayden asked for a political favor. One time he had summoned me to his Bateman Street house. When I got there, he asked me if I would hide a Black Panther in the shack behind my house. It occurred to me that the Panther, whose name was “Deacon” and who was later killed in a drug-related incident, might be wanted for an actual crime. But I ignored the thought for the same reason that everyone on the left ignored the crimes that leftists committed—the Panthers were a vanguard of the progressive future and were under attack. Equally important was my desire to impress Hayden with the fact that I was not just an intel1ectual but ready to put myself on the line when the need was there. Like other radicals I wanted to be regarded as an authentic revolutionary when the occasion presented itself.
The same consideration underlay my readiness to serve Hayden’s purposes in placing his revolutionary propaganda before a large audience. Because I had acquired a reputation for being critical of the Communists, I even emphasized the gesture I was making. I told him I admired the way he was willing to offer his pen in the service of the Communists, because it would also serve the Vietnamese people. I did not really believe the Communists had the interests of the Vietnamese people at heart but I believed that the American “imperialists” had to be defeated. At the same time, I stressed to Hayden that my own task was one of remaining independent of any party line. Hayden eyed me with a cynical squint. I felt I had to warn him—since he was working directly with the Communists—that I was going to write an article in the same issue that would be critical of Hanoi’s Communist allies in Moscow and Peking. By welcoming Nixon to their capitals, the Russians and Chinese were playing into his hands. Hayden refused to admit that there might be any conflict of interest between the Communist forces. Whether he actually believed this or was just playing the role he had assigned himself as a spokesman for Hanoi, I didn’t know and never found out.
My piece, much shorter than Hayden’s, was called “Nixon’s Vietnam Strategy: How It Was Launched with the Aid of Brezhnev and Mao and How the Vietnamese Intend to Defeat It.” The Los Angeles Times ran a long article on its editorial page attacking what I wrote under the heading, “Bloodthirsty New Left Wants The War to Continue.” One reader wrote a letter to the editor saying that an NBC reporter, also named David Horowitz, should be fired for expressing such views.
Neither my piece nor Hayden’s was the most explosive feature of the August 1972 issue of Ramparts, however. That honor belonged to an unsigned article by a man who called himself Winslow Peck. It was titled “U.S. Electronic Espionage: A Memoir” and, as we soon discovered, publishing it would violate a section of the Espionage Act of 1918.
The article had literally come over the transom of our Berkeley office. It was passed on to me as Ramparts’ expert on national-security subjects. At first I dismissed it as the work of a crank. The author claimed to know about top-secret military intelligence matters and included capitalized words like COMINT, ELINT, RADINT and SWAMP. I had no way of assessing those claims and was inclined to discard the manuscript without further thought. But before doing so I gave it to Bob Fitch, a writer we had hired after another staffer, Jan Austin, had left our staff to become a full-time member of the Red Family.
After reading the article, Fitch came back looking pale and frightened. It turned out that he was an ex-military man and had served as an intelligence operative in the 82nd Airborne Division during the Cuban Missile Crisis. As a result of his training, he recognized secret military codes in the text of the article—codes that he was under oath never to repeat. If we printed them, he said, we would all go to jail. Unfortunately for our country this turned out not to be the case. Once Fitch had authenticated the document, we arranged a meeting with Peck at a local Berkeley IHOP. We learned that Peck had been employed by a top-secret branch of intelligence called the National Security Agency, which encompassed 80 percent of U.S. intelligence but was unknown at the time. How unknown was indicated by an anecdote Peck told us. He was present at a briefing session with Vice President Hubert Humphrey in 1967 when Humphrey “asked a couple of pretty dumb questions that showed he didn’t have the foggiest notion of what NSA was and what it did.”
Peck’s most sensational claim was that the NSA had cracked the Soviet intelligence code. That meant U.S. intelligence could read Soviet electronic communications at will:
As far as the