At the height of the Cold War in the 1950s, the American Communist Party was a pale shadow of what it had been two decades earlier. Thanks to the FBI, the McCarthy hearings in the Senate and the Un-American Activities Committee in the House of Representatives, blacklists, firings and generalised fear, the Party's ranks had been radically thinned. And still it lived. That it survived was in no small measure due to the membership of FBI informers who, creatures of bureaucratic routine, continued to attend Party meetings and pay their dues: it was, after all, their job. Without the FBI's backing the Party might have vanished altogether.

LRB 9 October 2008 | PDF Download