Forwarded from Lenni Brenner

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

(After sending Lenni Brenner a 'bravo' for his Counterpunch article on 
Michael Lerner, I received this.)

Thanks for your note. As you are a Marxist, you might be interested in some 
of the material below, re Norman Thomas.

In any case, please inform your lists that they can get a signed copy of

51 Documents Zionist Collaboration with the Nazis
Edited by Lenni Brenner

with a check made out to me, for $22.00 +$1.84 media mail postage, sent to

Lenni Brenner
Park West Finance Station POB 20598
NY, NY 10025

Be certain that it will be major help in exposing the true nature of Zionism.

Stay well, give 'em hell,

Lenni

BrennerL21@xxxxxxx

==

THOMAS UPHOLDS CIA-AIDED WORK Ex-Socialist Leader Says He Didn't Know 
Agency Role by Steven Roberts, NY Times, 2 22 67

Norman Thomas, the former Socialist Party Leader, defended yesterday a 
program under which Latin-American politicians of the democratic left were 
trained largely at the expense of the Central Intelligence Agency.

Mr. Thomas was chairman of the Institute of International Labor Research, 
which ran schools in Costa Rica and in the Dominican Republic and a 
publishing house in Mexico between 1957 and 1965....

"I'm not ashamed of what we did," Mr. Thomas, now 82 years old, said in a 
telephone interview. "What we did was good work, and no one ever tried to 
tell us what to do. I am ashamed we swallowed this CIA business, though. If 
I had a choice, I would never have accepted CIA support. That would have 
let them crush the project at any minute or made us persona non grata in 
the countries we were working with."

Mr. Thomas said he had "heard rumors" that the money came from the CIA" but 
"they were always denied when I asked Mr. Kaplan [of the Kaplan Foundation 
- LB] about them."

"I ought to have been more curious," he said, "I'm not trying to save 
myself from justified criticism. I ought to have known but didn't."

====

Sidney Hook, "My Running Debate with Einstein", Commentary, July 1982

"I should perhaps state that several years after this letter was written, 
and when I was no longer chairman of the American Committee for Cultural 
Freedom, I learned that when it was unable to pay its rent, Norman Thomas, 
a member of the executive committee, telephoned Allen Dulles of the CIA and 
requested a contribution. Subsequently, when I questioned Thomas about 
this, he said that he and Dulles had been friends and classmates at 
Princeton - both being protégés of Woodrow Wilson - and that he had 
solicited the contribution purely on the basis of his personal friendship. 
Under the circumstances I was quite dubious about the wisdom of the request."

===

In other words, even when the Times exposed him, in 1967,Thomas lied, 
trying to pretend that he was just a dupe of the CIA, when in reality he 
was taking money directly from the hand of the CIA's Director!!!

From 1957 through 1962 Irwin Suall was the National Secretary of the SP. 
Later he became the "chief fact-finder," i.e., the head spy for the ADL. I 
met Suall in 1957, at 20. I was a member of Max Schachtman's Young 
Socialists League, which was merging with the SP. Of course we had no idea 
about Thomas's ties with the CIA. I left the SP in 1959 and was in 
California when the Times broke the Thomas story, and I didn't see it.

I ran into Suall again in the Lion's Head Tavern in Greenwich Village in 
1971. He spotted me at the bar, called out my name, and triumphantly 
announced that I was "with the National Association for Irish Justice," the 
support group for the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association.

He told me that he was the ADL's chief fact-finder and explained that he 
knew all about the NAIJ because he had files on the American tours of Ian 
Paisley, a right-wing Protestant fanatic, who was the most vehement foe of 
civil rights for Catholics. Whenever he came here he associated with our 
own right-wing Protestant screwballs, some of them anti-Semites.

We two old friends drank the night into morning when I suggested that he 
let me see his Paisley file. NAIJ could use it to show the Irish Catholic 
community here where Paisley fit into right-wing politics in this country. 
"I can't do that. You have enemies of Israel in your organization."

At that time I had little interest in Israel. I knew that we had various 
leftists in the NAIJ, who were anti-Zionist, but the topic of Israel never 
came up in our pro-Irish movement. I explained to him that people would 
think it rather odd if we asked prospective members how they stood on 
Israel. That didn't matter. Enemies of Israel are enemies of Israel and 
that was that. Suall then began to rattle off intimate details about NAIJ, 
including the name of a Communist who had just started working for us.

I realized he had a spy in my organization. We knew the British, Irish and 
American governments automatically put agents into our ranks. Therefore we 
were discreet when we did anything illegal under US law. But we had a 
policy of not starting a witchhunt for such spies because that only tends 
to make everyone into paranoids, and that can kill a movement. I figured 
out who Suall's mole was. However, as I couldn't prove my suspect was 
Suall's operative, and the certain presence of more important spies wasn't 
affecting us, I prudently didn't mention this singular conversation to anyone.

Obviously, it was just a hop and a skip for Suall to go from the SP, then a 
CIA front, to the ADL.

If you send me your snailmail address, I'll send you photocopies of the 
above documents, etc.



Louis Proyect, Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org


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