I've always wondered if the FBI (and now it seems like also the CIA?) was behind a disastrous split into deadly competing factions in the Socialist Workers Party. The SWP had been the leadership bar none of the anti-Vietnam war movement, and also a huge force in the mass movement to legalize abortion. Then, sometime after I left in 1975 I saw the SWP self-destruct as various groups cemented into irreconcilable positions of who was more "proletarian," the real Trotskyists, who had the true program. It got to where a large number of the earlier inner leadership were expelled.
If it was the FBI, they succeeded. Today the SWP is a tiny, sectarian party that's gone off the rails on a number of issues, although it still talks revolutionary and supports most workers' struggles here and around the world. It would have taken very, very sophisticated infiltrators to have destroyed the SWP to the extent its membership is paltry compared to in its heyday in the late sixties and early seventies, when I saw how it alone had the mass-action strategy that changed history--for the better.
I do know the FBI was involved because for a while I shared an apartment with a guy, always dressed in a suit, who'd joined the youth movement (I don't think he was there long enough to join the party per se) and had inquired if anyone needed a place to live. I moved up to the Bronx and rented a room from him. Then one morning before he woke up, I came into the kitchen and saw a stack of maybe a dozen FBI magazines on the table.
I remember reading somewhere there were plants in the parties before the Russian Revolution. I've always wondered about this, but when I mentioned my guess to others, nobody took it seriously.
Thanks very much for doing this AMA, your answers are so insightful.
And, last, what do you think about the recent book, Left of Boom, by ex-CIA officer Doug Laux, who also did an AMA. I loved his AMA, but couldn't tell from it quite what he thought of the work of the CIA in terms of its politics, whether it hurt or helped us (aside from incredible operations to take out Bin Laden, for which we're all incredibly grateful).