A Threat of the First Magnitude Quotes

“The FBI had established an elegant stealth vehicle for undermining the Communist Party and its Maoist counterparts and all the evidence points to it having done its job well.”
― Aaron Leonard, A Threat of the First Magnitude: FBI Counterintelligence & Infiltration From the Communist Party to the Revolutionary Union 1962-1974

“Their absence of political principal, of course, was undergirded by the fact that they were an FBI initiative. Put another way, whatever they wrote needed to be understood from the standpoint of what would advance the aims of the FBI,”
― Aaron Leonard, A Threat of the First Magnitude: FBI Counterintelligence & Infiltration From the Communist Party to the Revolutionary Union 1962-1974

“In the course of his informant career Morris Childs would come to be on a first-name basis with Nikita Khrushchev, Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov, Mikhail Suslov (head of the Ideological Department of the Soviet Central Committee), and Boris Ponomarev (head of the International Department of the Soviet Central Committee), as well as meeting with MAO Zedong and Chou En Lai.19”
― Aaron Leonard, A Threat of the First Magnitude: FBI Counterintelligence & Infiltration From the Communist Party to the Revolutionary Union 1962-1974

“One thing of interest in this regard is that in order to cover their tracks, specifically to explain where the money came from to cover Morris Childs’s considerable medical expenses, Jack concocted a fiction, which he spread among his former comrades. He told them that his brother’s treatment was paid for by the contributions of Party members. As he confided to his FBI handlers and Barron, “Almost none of these assholes will contribute a dime. But no one will ever say he didn’t contribute.”16 The subterfuge was apparently successful.”
― Aaron Leonard, A Threat of the First Magnitude: FBI Counterintelligence & Infiltration From the Communist Party to the Revolutionary Union 1962-1974

“As for the groups that were the FBI targets, their response is instructive. Beyond the combination of disbelief, denial, and even acceptance of the Bureau’s assaults, was a mistaken view that a correct political line, the supremacy of their ideals, was sufficient to withstand the attacks – if not in the short run, then in the long. How that worked in practice is a lesson in repeated failure, one with historic precedent.”
― Aaron Leonard, A Threat of the First Magnitude: FBI Counterintelligence & Infiltration From the Communist Party to the Revolutionary Union 1962-1974

“As long as it was not fundamentally challenging US power or its global interests there was a level of tolerance of its existence. If it did challenge those interests all bets were off.”
― Aaron Leonard, A Threat of the First Magnitude: FBI Counterintelligence & Infiltration From the Communist Party to the Revolutionary Union 1962-1974

“Their ability to carry out a proper counterintelligence operation aimed at disrupting, if not destroying, a group largely hinged on the kind of intelligence only an informant could supply. And here we came to understand it was not just any informant – of which there were scores, or in the case of the CPUSA, hundreds.”
― Aaron Leonard, A Threat of the First Magnitude: FBI Counterintelligence & Infiltration From the Communist Party to the Revolutionary Union 1962-1974