Aaron Leonard has made a career documenting the US government’s war against domestic radicals.

His first two books – Heavy Radicals: The FBI’s Secret War on America’s Maoists and A Threat of the First Magnitude, FBI Counterintelligence & Infiltration – focus on the Maoist Revolutionary Communist Party (RCPUSA), of which Leonard was a member.

His next two – The Folk Singers and the Bureau and Whole World in an Uproar: Music, Rebellion & Repression – tell the story of FBI surveillance of American musicians and cultural figures.

Leonard’s latest book – Menace of Our Time: The Long War Against

American Communism – documents US government attacks on the oldest US communist organization, CPUSA.

Although no American communist organization today has anywhere near the numbers or influence that CPUSA gained in the 1940s, while the US was aligned with the Soviet Union against Nazi Germany, recent political developments suggest that we could learn some lessons about the danger of government surveillance from the past.

Leonard’s books, then, should be required reading for members of any progressive organization that seeks to challenge the Trump regime.

Basing his revelations on public information requests from the US government, Leonard offers an inside look at the tactics used by the government to attack – not just the CPUSA – but many anti-fascist and anti-war organizations.

In his newest book, Leonard outlines the practical means used to attack communists and progressives:

• Federal laws – the Hatch Act, the Smith Act, the McCarran Act – that defined “anti-American” actions in very broad terms that gave the government free rein to prosecute anyone they wanted;

• Use of federal agents to infiltrate the CPUSA and other organizations.

• Entrapment of US civilians so as to force them into becoming informers;

• Incitement of mob violence against communists and their progressive allies.

The spies and informers employed by the US government often reported only the vaguest charges against the subjects of their investigations. And without revealing their own identities so their reports could never be questioned. For example, Leonard reproduces this section from an FBI document:

“Edward G. Robinson has been identified as a Communist by Informant REDACTED. Charles Chaplin, according to REDACTED, may or may not be a member of the Communist Party. However REDACTED has stated that Chaplin has financed the West Coast Communist newspaper People’s World…John Garfield, according to the informant REDACTED has been affiliated with the Actors Laboratory, the Young Communist League, the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League, the Hollywood Democratic Committee, and the Hollywood Independent Citizens Committee for the Arts, Sciences and Professions.”

Sound familiar? Is Antifa a terrorist organization? Is Zohran Mamdani a communist?

On the basis of allegations like these, public figures were pressured to renounce their affiliations with communist or communist-adjacent groups, and to inform on their former colleagues. Hollywood director Elia Kazan is perhaps the most notorious example, but there were many others.

Leonard shows how the FBI also manipulated ordinary people into becoming informers. Take for example the case of John Lautner, a Hungarian-born American communist who was suspected by Hungarian communists of being a US spy. The FBI threatened to deport him to Hungary – where he assumed he’d be shot – unless he gave them the names of all the communists he knew.

“Among those he identified were the writers Lillian Hellman, Dashiell Hammett, Mark Blitzstein, and Howard Fast,” Leonard writes. “He also named the folk singer Woody Guthrie as well as actors James Cagney, John Garfield, Will Geer, and Jose Ferrer; and the scholar W.E.B. DuBois.”

Leonard also reveals that Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were fingered by Ethel’s brother, David Greenglass. Greenglass’ wife, Ruth, recruited him to steal information from his job at the Los Alamos nuclear lab, and give

it to the USSR. To protect his wife from federal prosecution, Greenglass offered the FBI his sister and brother-in-law, the Rosenbergs.

Leonard continues his narrative through the collapse of the USSR in 1991, carefully documenting the COINTELPRO offensive against radical and anti-war groups in the 1960s.

Leonard's book stands as a timely warning of the lengths the govern- ment will go to to maintain "the social order." Anyone who organizes for social change should read it.