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2025 RELEASE UNDER THE PRESIDENT JOHN F. KENNEDY ASSASSINATION RECORDS ACT OF 1992 HOUSE SELECT COTHILL ON ASSASSINATIONS STAFF M.S FILE TITLE/NIPIRER/VOLILNE: ISAACS, HACID. 201-18446

INCLUSIVE DATES: CUSTODIAL UNIT/LOCATION: ROOM: DELETIONS, IF ANY: THIRD AGENCY DOCUMENTS DATE DATE RECEIVED FRUTURNED 10:A SANG28 AACS HAROLD SIGNATURE OF REVIEWING OFFICIAL REVIEWED BY (PRINT NAME) BETSY WOLE Betay Hilf

NO DOCUMENTS MAY BE COPIED OR REMOVED FROM THIS FILE. LE トロコ IS IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDE MATERIAL FILED IN THIS FOLDE

201 No.18446 1400000 C-O-N-F-FORE-T-I-A-L When Pired In (date) : Review of 201 File on U.S. Citizen

In accordance with the DDO's notice of 9 December 1974, I have reviewed the 201 file on ISAACS (201 number indicated below), and most accurately be categorized as indicated below: have determined that it can (surname) should be closed. witting collaborator. OI Code Al. : potential witting collaborator; date opened OI Code A2. former witting collaborator (relationship terminated). OI. Code A3. potential witting collaborator never contacted (security reasons, derogatory information). OI Code A4. counterintelligence case (i.e., involving a foreign intelligence or security service). OI Code A5... all others. ΟΙ Code A6. Signed Balkan Beeth (name) CH/FCCI (title) (component) This assignment of category has been entered into STAR. Signed KAM (initials), (date) This document is a permanent part of this file. SECRET When coop In C-O-N-F-1-0-1-A-L 241 AN 197 201-18476 E2 IMPDET CL BY 054979 14-00000 SECRET 4 October 1974 ΧΑΑΖ-35686 MEMORANDUM FOR THE RECORD 0 SUBJECT: Former Records of Ray Murphy 1. The attached documents are part of a large collection of records held by Ray Murphy during his tenure as an official of the Department of State. He transferred all of his records to CIA upon his retirement in the mid-1960's. The documents of that collection which did not meet the retention criteria of the DDO or the Office of Security were destroyed. While those which were of utility have been retained and accessioned as appropriate to the DDO records system. 2. The attached records concern Harold ISAACS who is the subject of 201-0018446 be classified to that file. : and should : Attachment M. Gaiel Hartman M. Paul Hartman C/CIRA/RS PIN P of att H/W RECORD COPY SECRET 4.Oct 74 201-18446 E2. IMPDET CL BY 006593 14-00000 Copy: ARISS CBD: SOURCE: NET FASSES, New York City, Cotober 22, 1936 - Page 12 EUROPE'S CRISIS; JAPAN PRAPARES By Bensu Chan There are numerous American journalists of different political color and shades of opinion who are "cooperating" in this way with Japanese imperialion, but whoever has followed the writings of Harold Isaaca, Alexander Buchman, Frank Class and Wilbur Burton in The China Press, The China Weekly Review, Asia, Pacific Affairs, New International, etc., realizes that these American Trotskyist journalists are the most vicious and most dan gerous of the whole lot of reactionery journalists. Hiding behind a barrage of Marxist parasoology (which noue of them has yet learned to manipulate with facility), those people are energetically conducting a campaign of lice against the Communist International, the Chinese Communist Party, the Soviet Union, the Chinese Soviets and the Chinese Red Army, a campaign which aims to under- mine the confidence of the outside world in the Chinese Soviet movement and the Red Army, : RECORD COPY Harold Sonnes 201-18446. H/W ATT CI To XAAZ-35786 201-15446 14-00000 SUR COLEIUNISI ACTIVITIES FILES Oct 23.1957 Date SOURCE: File No. DAILY WORKER 9100 se X 4202 China. TROTZKYITE BOOK MOURNS OVER CHINESE REVOLUTION THE TRAGEDY OF THE CIII of devious Trotskyite.. NESE REVOLUTION. By Isaacs book, has been reissued, polemics, Harold D. Issacs. Stanford Uni- partly to cash in on the hate-China Versity Press. 352 pp: $5. racket, arid partly because any By ROBERT FRIEDMAN stick is useful to Big Business The presses are spewing forth against the liberation bound anti-Chinese books these devs at Isaacs now says he no longer a pace which biels to match the loves Trotsky, whose introduction anti-Soviet tonal All the old has been dropped as a liability. In- China hands who served Western stead, he is an open defender of imperialism as banker, soldier, spy, imperialist intervention against the for whatever in the Orient are now people of the Far East. busy at the typewriter, engaged in profitable vilification of 450,- weaseling is Isaacs attack on the But typical of his Trotskyite 000,000 people because they de Chinese Communists of the 1920's, cided to take their fate in their first because they supported own hands and build for them- Chiang Kai-shek despite the fact selves. that he was to become the butcher of the Chinese revolution, and sec One book which deserves, even and because they allegedly cringed under the cynical and opportunist before Chiang when he turned on reign of capitalism, some special the workers in 1927. prize for adaptability is Harold D. Isaacs Tragedy. of the Chinese Revolution

This nonsense, which would rule! Published first in 1938 as an tory on the chance that today's out every political alliance in as- avowedly Trotskyite tract (com- ally might be tomorrow's enemy. plete with introduction by Trotsky) is ironic in view of the fact that calling the defeat of the Chinese Chiang sits today on Taiwan, a workers in 1927 a "betraval" by discredited gangster save only in Stalin and the Chinese Commu- the eyes of Isaacs politics men- nists, the same book emerges now, tors. refurbished, to mourn the victory Meanwhile the Chinese people! of the very same Chinese workers will go about their business build- Ja gencration latert ing socialism, unconcerned by Isaacs tears for the tragedy of Filled with the murky intricacies 19 1927 or 1951. RECUD H/W ATT 02 TC XAAZ-35786 201-1544-6

14-00000 COPY: MK:S8 COMP. Enclosure No. 1 To De toh No. 3317 7650-) 175/35 REM sosed 1 Ta Yong Yi Ping Hutung Feiping, China. Oct. 5, 1934. Mг. Т. А. Bisson 136 Claremont Avenue Mount Vernon, N. Y. Dear Mr. Bisson: I have seen the correspondence exchanged between Mr. Olass and yourself regarding the contributions you collected for the China Forum. A draft for the sua in full will be sent to you this week. I do not know in the name of whom or what Miss Smedley speaks of the China Forum. Since she was not in China at the time the Forum Suspended, nor has she corresponded with me on the subject, I consider it necessary to place before you and the other contributors an account of the circumstances in which the Forum ceased publication. Since you apparently gathered the contributors together in a meeting to hear what Miss Smedley had to say, I would appreciate it deeply if you would gather them once mors to hear my account. The enclosed is a copy of a letter, sent by me last May to the Chinese Communist Party. It has been published in China in a Chinese translation and copies have been sent abroad but has not been pub- lished in English as far as I know. I do not know the names of the people who were good enough to contribute to the Forum but their interest in the matter warrants placing before them the story of what happened to the magazine. I trust, out of simple fairness to me, you will be good enough to give them this opportunity. I greatly regret any inconvenience or embarrassment to which you have been put in this matter. I do hope, however, that my letter will enlighten you and your friends and enable you to appreciate the difficulties which have arisen. I know of no project to revive the China Forum at the present time. Should such occur, the resultant publication would be of a considerably different character from the one I edited, as will be obvious from the facts given in my letter to the C. P. I think people who are interested in supporting the revolutionary move- ment here should know these facts. Once again, I appreciate all the trouble you have gone to in this matter. Did you ever, incidentally, receive the article "Fascism in China" and the newsletter which I mailed to July 13 last? Yours sincerely, (Harold R. Isaacs) enol. (Copied by FD) H/A ATT L'S TO XAA2-35636 811 5034 (Chance / Searclight Pub. Co./58 261-18546 14-00000 COPY Letter of H. R. Isaacs to the C.C.P. concern- In the cрада Гогцо To the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party: The two-year period of my extra-organizational col- laboration with the Chinese Communist Party has come to an end and the China Forum which I founded and edited dur- ing that time has been forced to suspend publication. In the interest of our whole movement as well as in my per- sonal interest, I consider it necessary to record here and publish the history of the China Forum and the cir cumstances of its suspension. You refused me the oppor tunity to lay the matter before the membership of the party even when I offered to do so in your own organs and not through the columns of the Forum. when, wrongly, I permitted the Forum to go down in silence, you turned around and in your organs and near organs in China and abroad you proceeded with the usual slanders of "betrayer" and counter-revolutionary". In so doing you didn't have the courage or the simple honesty to state that you pre- sented the China Forum with an ultimatum and forced its suspension because in reply its editor raised questions which are being placed before the whole movement today by the International Left Opposition. Nor did you state that you deliberately smashed the Forum for this reason despite my repeated and extended offers to continue publi- cation as before on a straight anti-Kuomintang, anti- imperialist basie, leaving these various problems to be thrashed out first privately among ourselves. In other worde, you deliberately forced suspension of the China Forum despite the fact, on your own admission, that its loss vas a serious plow to the revolutionary movement in China, that it meant the disappearance of an organ which for two years you had considered an extremely valuable instrument in the hands of the movement. Here, as in the broader issues which led to our differences, your blind adherence to false policies was once more demonstrative of your readiness to place your factional interests above the interests of the Chinese Revolution. In going back over the history of the Forum, I think the vicious character of your action becomes even moге evident when I start with the fact that from beginning to end I functioned not as a member of the party but as a wiliing sympathizer who was prepared to throw all his energiás into a job he saw he could do edit and publish an organ in China which could help mobilise the forces of this country for struggle against the Kuomintang and the imperialists by exposing the regime of terror and privation which they have in common imposed upon the masses of the Chinese people. Permit me to recall at this point that I never accepted any personal remunera- tion for time or labor. You gave the Forum financial aid but I never received a dollar from you that was not put into the paper. I refused your offers of compensa- tion and earned my living elsewhere. Your only claim on me was my full-hearted loyalty to the Communist ideal and our 14-00000 -2- our common dedication to the struggle against a regime of hate and misery and oppression. In the end you for- feited this claim by ceasing any longer to be in my eyes honest or.effective leaders of this struggle. Although you helped the Forum financially, the part you played in building it up from the day it started in January, 1932, to the day of its last appearance in Janu- ary 1934, was insignificant. My repeated requests for cooperation in matters of circulation and material for publication went largely unsatisfied throughout that time. You never supplied me with the reports I so frequently and urgently sought, particularly on trade unions, strike struggles, the Red Armies, the Red districts, etc. Every thing thơ Forum did and became was the fruit of the work of a tiny group of devoted collaborators (the most im- portant of whom had no connection with you whatever) and myself who had to depend almost entirely on our own re- sources for everything we did and published. At every crisis in the Forum's existence, when it was banned by the French authorities in Shanghai at the very outset; when it was bounded and persecuted by the American and Chinese authorities in the summer of 1933, when through British police pressure it was thrown out of every avail- able printing ship in the city; when the pseudo-Fascist Blue Shirts again and again threatened the printing plant which I built up partially through personally contracted loane it was invariably through my own initiative, with the help of the little Forum staff, that we pulled our- selves up by the bootstraps every time and carried on to a point in January this year where the Forum was flourish- ing and growing daily in circulation, prestige, and in- fluence despite the many formidable obstacles in its way. The formation of the China Forum Readers Association, which in the brief space of three months spread to eleven cities in five provinces, developing into & mighty poten tial weapon for the revolutionary movement, was the prod- uct of spontaneous action on the part of the Forum's readers, later sponsored and led by the paper itself. All these were the Forum's own achievements, not yours. By your arbitrary and criminal action you shattered then in the full stride of their growth. Because to my bitter disappointment I had not nor could I secure the resources to carry on myself - owing largely to the difficult condi- tions of work and the impossibility of getting revenue from the paper itself - all that had been achieved and was to be achieved was ground into the dust. II. - From almost the very beginning of my active work which I date from the time I began reporting events in China in a Communist way - a number of questions presented themselves to me in increasingly forcible form. These arose originally from my discovery of the gross distor- tions and exaggerations which I found to be characteristic of Communist propaganda in China and abroad. I defino propaganda as the skilful, clear, accurate and wholly truthful reporting of the facts linked to an incisive, purposive 14-00000 3 purposive interpretation and a plan of action for deal- ing with the facts in a revolutionary way. I learned 06:00 sie and work of Lenin and his Bolshevik comrades who taught us that the truth comes from the masees themselves and that only dienster can result from telling them lies. I have never learned to the contrary that it was my revolutionary duty to work in any other way although I soon found that the present day Communist Party press makes a practice of distinguishing between propaganda and truth. Examples of exaggeration and distortion most strik- ing to we were naturally those which applied to China, bocause here I could check allegations with known facts. I first wrote these down to the ignorance or incapacity of individuals. I felt that Communist editors abroad would publish accurate facts about China if they could get them. Accordingly with a friend I tried to set up. an independent mail news service and sent weekly bulletins to papers all over the world giving brief, sharp, factual accounts of what was going on. This was in the fall of 1931 after my return from the area of the great Central China floods of that summer. I scarcely understood then why this service failed to secure any response from the Communist press abroad. After about three months I had to suspend it for lack of support. It simply didn't get published except in a few organs which were not official, Communist Party papers, including the New York Militant. It wasn't long before I began to perceive, with a deeper study of international events and the history of the Chinese Revolution, that a consistent thread ran through the distortions and exaggerations which I found not only in brief casual reports of current events but in the solemn pronunciamentoes. made by delegates before plenums of the E.C.C.I. I discovered that these departures from the truth were made necessary by the official premise that ever since the catastrophe of 1937 a mighty, upsurg- ing revolutionary movement has been marching forward in China to the very brink of seizure of power under the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party. I discovered that these exaggerations were necessary because the pre- isevas false and along with it all the basic tenets of the policies being pursued by the Communist International and the Communist Party in China. I cannot begin here to give a summary of some of these distortions (which I verbally cited to you by the dozen) ranging from partiou- lar incidents (the wilfully false picture given of the cotton mill strike in Shanghai in January, 1933, even to the point of transposing it to February to heighten the impression given of the workers' role in the Shanghai war) to high flown generalisations like the statement recently made before the Plenum of the S.C.C.I. that the C.C.P. has won over the majority of the Chinese working class and the peasantry. In denying the factual truth of this premise, whence flows the whole policy of the Communist Party in China, I deprecate not a whit the magnificent militancy and courage of Chinese workers, striking again and again and fighting against 14-00000 4 against terrific odds in defense of their very lives; nor the noroio struggles waged by peasants all over the country; nor the fight of the Red Armies against the Kuomintang, I merely respect the cold, indisputable fact that these struggles are defensive, not offensive, that they are isolated, desperate and unorganised. with very few exceptions - a few small strikes here and there and the larger exception of the Red Army - they are without organised revolutionary leadership. Moreover the develop- ment of this leadership, the task of the C.P., 18 proceed- ing at a tragically retarded pace owing to the false policies and inept tactics of the party. In denying the presence of a mighty revolutionary upsurge (1.6., a vast, organised march toward the seizure of power) I respect facts made still clearer perhaps when compared to the facts and figures of the monster mass move- ments of the 1925-27 period. The tragio errors of the Communist leadership in 1987 were primarily responsible for the decapitation of that great movement and because no lessons have been drawn from those evente to this very day, these exrore, monstrously accumulated, are still re- sponsible for the tragedies of today. But for the purpose of our comparison here, let us for examplo take the single fact that in 1936 in Greater Shanghai there were 257 strikes. In 1933 there were 82. Let us remember that on the eve of the workers' seizure of power in Shanghai in March, 1927, there were more than 800,000 workere, handicraftamen and petty traders out on the streets fight- ing with arms in hande for demande of a far-reaching po, litical character. A close check for the entire country in the latter half of 1933 showed me that Icas than one- thirtieth of that number were engaged in strikes and other disputes during any given month and that almost invariably the demands were defensive demands against wage cuts and lockouts. Moreover, the lack of cohesive leadership- often in departments of the same factory or in one or more of a group of factories - or even sometimes lack of even the most elementary organization - has in almost every case led to deadening failure and relatively easy betrayal by the yellow labor leaders" and "mediators of the Kuomintang. In 1985 the shooting of thirteen students by British police in Shanghai was the touch-off for a general strike which paralyzed the city and which was Beconded by vast sympathy strikes which broke like a series of tidal waves over the entire country. In Janu- ary, 1932, when the Japanese imperialists used the Shanghai International Settlement as a base for operations which cost the lives of tens of thousands of Chinese, not a single strike interrupted the normal course of the pub lic or other services in that settlement. In the factories there were no strikes but a large scale lockout to which the overwhelming majority of Shanghai's workers submitted without protest. The dogged, persistent struggle carried on by small sections of the rank and file workers in isolated instances in recent years is tribute to the magnificent fibre of Chinese 14-00000 -5- Chinese workero. It is not evidence that a revolutionary seizure of power is on the order of the day. It is evi- dence, along with the heroto sacrifices of thousands who have lost lives and liberty in Chinese revolutionary struggle during the last seven years of Kuomintang re- action, that it is possible to fight the monstrous white terror which Chinese Communists frequently cite as a reason for the insufficiency of their work. Yet, it is largely because this terror has not been fought effectively that the Kuomintang regime, despite the fact that it is rotting and crumbling, can still keep the lid down on the boiling, simmering hatred of the people it rules. Unless the martyrdom of thousands of China's finest workers, peasants and revolutionary intellectuals is to be in vain, we must turn resolutely away from the folly of calling to insurrection when what is needed is painstaking education, organization and the sponsorship of day-to-day struggles of the masses for democratic demands, the slow building up of a party and mass organizations and a movement which will be able to command the forces capable of carrying out an insurrection. In the case of the widespread but isolated and in- dividual cases of peasant uprisings, and this includes the Red Armies in Kiangsi, these struggles await the leadership of a strong working class movement before they can have a successful issue. The Red Armies in their re- stricted and surrounded areas and with their meagre re- sources have fought heroically against the Kuomintang attacks upon them. But until the Kuomintang is shaken from its bulwarks in the imperialist controlled working olass centres, their prospect of revolutionary triumph remains necessarily dim. No revolutionary purpose is served by taking refuge in the fiction that these armies have proletarian leadership because individual workers, -undoubtedly leaders of superior quality and courage, have been torn from their factories and their fellow-workere and sent down to occupy key positions in the Red Army districts and in the Red Armies themselves. Indeed, this common practice of extracting the most conscious and pro- gressive working class elements from their working olass environment and sending them down to the Red districts ie a good index to the oriminal transposition of emphasis which has helped paralyze the working class movement in the cities. If the White Terror doesn't carry off the workers' leaders as they arise, the C.P. does and has done so in hundreds of cases. This helps in no small part to explain why it has also been impossible to mobilize a genuine mass anti-Japanese movement in the fact of mili- tary aggression and why the White Terror of the Kuomin- tang has succeeded, by filling mass graves and innumer- able prisons with the martyred dead and living, in down- ing the anti-imperialist movement or efforts toward the organization of such a movement and paving the way for the ever increasing encroachments of the imperialists. The party has not yet gripped and directed the deep and bitter and often inarticulate hatred of the masses of the people for their oppressors and this includes large s80- tions of the lower netty bourgeoisie who could be won by successful mass pressure from below. This is because the : Party 14-00000 -B- Party has failed to translate the realities of everyday evente into its program and tactics.. I cannot here go into the many-faceted problems and issues which flow from these facts with regard to the policies and tactics of the Chinese revolutionary movement Nor extending to the international scene need I go into the terrific effects of the German catastrophe nor the storm of questions which has been directed at the C.1. leadership whose responsibility in the disaster has be- come nakedly clear to unnumbered Communists and Communist sympathizers the world over. Nor into the whole set of implications which arise from the policies of the C.I., with particular reference to the late developments in Soviet foreign policy, the Litvinov-Roosevelt agreement, the forthcoming mooted entrance of the U.S.S.R. into the League of Nations and in a smaller but equally character- istic way, the forthcoming association of the U.3.8.R. with the Institute of Pacific Relations which hopes to höld ita next talkfest in Mos