Sometime in the late fall of 1962, a document began circulating among members of the Communist Party USA based in the Chicago area, titled “Whither the Party of Lenin.” The document was a broadside against Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, denouncing his “shameful retreat” in the Caribbean during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

The two-page statement closed with a call to action: “Comrades: The time has come to throw off the shackles of revisionism and return to the Revolutionary Principles of Lenin, Stalin and Mao.” The paper was signed “The Ad Hoc Committee for a Scientific Socialist Line.” Anyone receiving the broadside was thus on notice that there was a pole within the pro-Soviet party proclaiming itself “anti-revisionist” and tilting toward China and Maoism.

While polemics passing back and forth within old left formations was nothing novel, there was in this something of note. It was not the work of factionally inclined CP comrades, but rather the counter-intelligence imagination of the FBI.