Ad Hoc Bulletin (Marxist-Leninist) (Three issues of the FBI's COINTELPRO-era fake Maoist newsletter)

Chicago & New York: Ad Hoc Committee for a Marxist-Leninist Party, USA, 1971. Three issues: Vol. 8 Nos. 2 & 3, Vol. 9 No. 1. Bound in publisher's corner stapled sheets. 11; 11; 14 pp. respectively. Very Good, sheets folded in the middle, light toning, creased corners to the issues in Vol. 8. Rare.

Until Aaron Leonard uncovered that the Ad Hoc Committee was an FBI front group designed to attract and surveil radicals as well as damage the Left as part of their infamous COINTELPRO in his 2015 book Heavy Radicals, hardly anyone suspected the group of being anything other than a dogmatic Maoist grouplet with a singularly workmanlike, unhip, and unattractive newsletter. Leonard writes in a summary article, "The FBI's Maoist Faction": "Among the Maoist organizations to arise out of the political tumult of the 1960s was a group known as the Ad Hoc Committee for a Marxist-Leninist Party (initially called the Ad Hoc Committee for a Scientific Socialist Line). The entity, begun in 1962, was said to be a secret faction within the US Communist Party working against the 'revisionism' of Nikita Khrushchev and US party leader Gus Hall. That the entire operation was an FBI construct was a mystery to all but a handful of FBI agents and informants. [...] As hyper-radical as the AHC came across, the force behind the program was an FBI Special Agent named Herbert K. Stallings."

Hindsight being 20/20, these newsletters are highly interesting pieces of disinformation and propaganda against the American Left, snapshots from a quiet war one side of the conflict may not have even realized it was fighting.