Aaron Leonard Presents - Heavy Radicals: The FBI's Secret War on America's Maoists
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Heavy Radicals: The FBI's Secret War on America's Maoists is a history of the Revolutionary Union/Revolutionary Communist Party — the largest Maoist organization to arise in the US — from its origins in the explosive year of 1968, its expansion into a national organization in the early seventies, its extension into major industry throughout early part of that decade, the devastating schism in the aftermath of the death of Mao Tse-tung, and its ultimate decline as the 1970s turned into the 1980s. From its beginnings the grouping was the focus of J. Edgar Hoover and other top FBI officials for an unrelenting array of operations: Informant penetration, setting organizations against each other, setting up phony communist collectives for infiltration and disruption, planting of phone taps and microphones in apartments, break-ins to steal membership lists, the use of FBI ‘friendly journalists’ such as Victor Riesel and Ed Montgomery to undermine the group, and much more. It is the story of a sizable section of the radicalized youth of whose radicalism did not disappear at the end of the sixties, and of the FBI’s largest — and up to now, untold — campaign against it. "Based on impeccable research... Leonard and Gallagher help us to understand how the RCP's revolutionary ideology resonated with a small group of young people in post-1968 America, took inspiration from the People's Republic of China, and brought down the wrath of the FBI." —David Farber, The Age of Great Dreams: America in the 1960s. "Leonard and Gallagher break new ground in revealing the extent to which law enforcement will go to infiltrate, destabilize and ultimately destroy domestic political organizations that espouse a philosophy counter to the status quo." —T.J. English, The Savage City and Havana Nocturne