A Threat of the First Magnitude: FBI Counterintelligence & Infiltration From the Communist Party to the Revolutionary Union - 1962-1974

Positioning statement: The untold story of the FBI informants who penetrated the upper reaches of organizations such as the Communist Party, USA, the Black Panther Party, the Revolutionary Union and other groups labeled threats to the internal security of the United States. Sales points: Tells the story of FBI informants in Communist groups in America in the 60s and 70s Uses newly released FBI documents to uncover significant information about various suspected FBI informants The follow up to their groundbreaking 2015 book, Heavy Radicals. Topical in light of recent US Government leaks and FBI cover-ups Synopsis: Sometime in the late fall/early winter of 1962, a document began circulating among members of the Communist Party USA based in the Chicago area, titled “Whither the Party of Lenin.” It was signed “The Ad Hoc Committee for Scientific Socialist Line.” This was not the work of factionally inclined CP comrades, but rather something springing from the counter-intelligence imagination of the FBI. A Threat of the First Magnitude tells the story of the FBI’s fake Maoist organization, The Ad Hoc Committee for a Scientific Socialist Line, and the informants the FBI used to penetrate the highest levels of the Communist Party USA, the Black Panther Party, the Revolutionary Union and other groups labelled threats to the internal security of the United States in the 1960s and 1970s. As once again the FBI is thrust into the spotlight of US politics, A Threat of a First Magnitude offers a view of the historic inner-workings of the Bureau’s counterintelligence operations - from generating “‘'fake news”“ and the utilization of ”“sensitive intelligence methods”“ to the handling of ”“reliable sources”“ - that matches or exceeds the sophistication of any contenders.