Enemies of the Left
The FBI has historically served as a political police force, tasked not just with monitoring dissent but actively destroying it. Nowhere is that clearer than in their infiltration of the Left in the 1960s and ’70s.
Law enforcement officers walk out of the J. Edgar Hoover FBI Building on January 28, 2019 in Washington, D.C.Mark Wilson / Getty
It was spring 1968 when Gerald Kirk and “Herb” met one evening at the Hyde Park Theatre on the South Side of Chicago. Kirk was a young student and Communist Party (CP) member. Herb was several decades his senior. He argued to Kirk that the time had come to break with the party.
The CP had become “anti-revolutionary” and “revisionist.” Herb was part of the “Ad Hoc Committee for a Marxist-Leninist Party” and was seeking to recruit true revolutionaries out of the CP’s cadres. Kirk declined, but not merely out of party loyalty. He was a paid informant tasked with keeping tabs on the CP for the FBI.
Unbeknownst to Kirk, Herb was also an informant. In fact, the entity Herb was supposedly part of, the “Ad Hoc Committee for a Marxist-Leninist Party,” was almost certainly a creation of the FBI. Kirk was tasked with spying on the CP; Herb was tasked with disrupting it. Neither were aware of the other’s efforts.
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