The following article from Virginia union organizer Chris Townsend comes to us courtesy of MLToday.
Everyone has heard of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, the “CIA”. But do we know what it is, and what it does? And what of its track record? Apparently, some in our movement have not heard. Possibly they are young, or new to the movement. Or it may be that our internal education processes have decayed so badly that we can no longer assume that communists, socialists, labor organizers, union members, and the broad left reflexively understand the real nature and record of the CIA. Maybe we even have some leaders and functionaries in our movement today who do not know these things? Or perhaps they do know something, but sidestep this problematic question, either out of ignorance or for political convenience.
A GIGANTIC, DEADLY, REPRESSIVE MACHINERY
I live in the state of Virginia. The CIA headquarters is located here. Along with the other nearly two dozen “intelligence” agencies it is an omnipresent force, growing larger, richer and more sophisticated with each passing year. Don’t take my word for it, visit a web site which exists solely to funnel eager job-seekers into this enormous web:
The True Scale of U.S. National Security: Inside the Defense and Intelligence Community
In recent years it has even been revealed that these assorted agencies now own numerous private sector companies and operations both domestically and globally. Among other things, this has released them from many of the constraints and limits of the Congressional funding pipeline. The U.S. military and “intelligence” world is now most certainly guided by its own impulses and priorities, not those of any civilian body such as Congress.This massive deadly machinery also exists independent of any functioning elected or civilian oversight. Sitting atop this bewildering and near trillion-dollar operation is the CIA, one of the key coordinating agencies in this vast operation. See the CIA Wiki page if you are not familiar with this agency. Remember that this matter-of-fact report is not written by leftists either:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Intelligence_Agency
And please be aware that none of this would include the employment numbers, budgets, or activities of the vast, even larger U.S. police state apparatus, all of which functions as a highly politicized arm of the state.
Primary among that group would be our Federal Bureau of Investigation, the notorious FBI. Numerous court cases in the early history of the FBI revealed over and over again that the FBI routinely had more field agents investigating, harassing, and persecuting the legal activities of our Communist Party than they did chasing known criminal gangs and mafioso. All law enforcement in the U.S. serves the political state that sponsors it, as we are all witness to today at the widespread round-up of immigrant working people by the Trump regime. The United States today is awash in a myriad of military, intelligence, police, and surveillance agencies to an extent that no country in history has ever experienced.
CIA, THE PREEMINENT MALIGNANCY
The balance sheet of CIA activities is well documented. This agency exists in one form or another as a means to legally and illegally surveille working people both domestically and internationally; to interfere in the political processes of countries world-wide, including the U.S.; to conduct overt and covert operations aimed at subverting and overthrowing governments worldwide; to install U.S. client regimes; to wage wars and conduct unlimited military operations, genocide, murder, assassination, torture, and repression of labor and working class movements. Communists, socialists, and legitimate labor unions have always been at the top of their priority hit list. In sum, the CIA agency acts as the tip of the spear, an enforcer for U.S. imperialism, its corporate sponsors, its political enablers, and its expanding and murderous military apparatus.
So breathtaking have been the crimes in the CIA realm that over the decades older readers will recall some high-profile personalities who abandoned the agency and revealed some of its sordid secrets. Victor Marchetti, Philip Agee, and in recent decades John Kiriakou have all spoken out against CIA crimes, among others.
But the name of Abigail Spanberger is not among these truth-tellers however.
THE CURIOUS CASE OF ABIGAIL SPANBERGER
As a Virginia voter, and lifelong labor organizer and communist, I carefully follow state level politics. Abigail Spanberger first appeared on the radar of the Virginia Democratic Party in 2017 when they recruited her to run for a Congressional seat. She went on to win the seat, as higher-ups in the Party increasingly recruited former and retired military and intelligence operatives as part of their election strategy. Her three terms in the U.S. House were marked by little of note, other than a leaked conference call transcript after her razor-thin 2020 re-election win. Spanberger blamed her difficulties on the Democrats progressive wing, blaming “socialists” and “socialism” for various problems in the organization. It’s not a surprise that she would grab at such nonexistent elements as the excuse for her poor showing, as the base ideology of the CIA is pathological anti-communism.
Prior to her political career, Spanberger had eagerly and voluntarily enlisted in the CIA in 2002, eventually spending her last eight years as a case officer. She left the agency in 2014 after 12 years. These were the peak years when President George W. Bush and Dick Cheney ran amok, justifying war and lawbreaking all in the name of their “long war on terrorism,” frequently with the support of both Republicans and Democrats in Congress. Her exact political sympathies at the point she signed up for CIA duty remain unknown, but we should assume her support for Bush’s policies were solid. The CIA would require that. There is no evidence that she had ever been involved in any Democratic Party activity prior to being recruited to run for the Virginia House seat, to run as a Democrat.
Her own explanations of what her roles were while in the CIA are virtually nonexistent. Various press reports are minimal, referencing her eventual assignment to Europe, to purportedly track “nuclear proliferation” and “terrorism”. Reports also mention her holding 5 different passports, which would be a routine requirement for case officers with extensive travel assignments likely under assumed identities. Other fragments indicate that she may speak as many as 8 different languages. In 2018, at the start of her first Congressional run, Republican campaign operatives somehow obtained her employment application to the CIA, the highly detailed “Form 86”. A massive and frantic legal campaign ensued by her campaign and the CIA to lock-down access to this information. The material was apparently thoroughly scrubbed from the internet, a feat which requires considerable knowledge and resources. What she did while in the CIA remains a mystery.
VIRGINIA DEMOCRATS RUN SPANBERGER FOR GOVERNOR
By 2024, at the end of her 3 Congressional terms, Spanberger’s Democratic Party sponsors orchestrated an insider movement to launch her run for Virginia Governor. Her Congressional career had ended in 2022 when she declined to run for re-election. In the just-concluded November 2025, elections, she faced an incumbent Trumpist fanatic as her opponent, and Spanberger won handily with a 58% margin. Virginia voters – having experienced nearly a year of Trump’s destructive policies, the firings of tens of thousands of Virginia workers with no cause or notice, his authoritarian direction, and notorious rantings – eagerly threw the lever for Spanberger. All knowledgeable observers of this Virginia gubernatorial election also concede that had the Democrats not selected Spanberger, the Democrats were still sure to win.
Voters in Virginia were nonetheless treated to an expensive yet uneventful Spanberger campaign. Light on details, even lighter on denunciations of the Trump train wreck and its effects on Virginia. Her CIA background was rarely mentioned. Most voters knew little, or nothing about it. Her Trumpist opponent never questioned her CIA time and therefore never raised it. In the end, it became clear to any grown-up observer that Spanberger was placed into the Governor’s race by a Democratic Party regime planning for her to eventually succeed one or the other of the current U.S. Senators, both Democrats. Arch reactionary Mark Warner, or Tim Kaine, who just willingly caved-in to allow Trump to win the government shutdown stalemate.
Limited to one term by Virginia law, Spanberger will dutifully be run as the successor Democrat Senate candidate following either Warner or Kaine, depending only on the timing of who retires first. Her support for further U.S. military interference and aggression abroad is assured once in the Senate. The CIA will continue to count on her as one of their own. She will no doubt support everything they propose, and question nothing. Another Democrat who “understands” the realities of national security.
THE CIA STORY – MISSED, OR IGNORED?
Throughout the Spanberger run for her House seat, and now her successful campaign for Virginia Governor, the CIA “issue” never materialized. Once the rightist forces who were pulling at threads with her Form 86 tempest-in-a-teacup were silenced, the issue never was raised again. Here and there her intelligence or national security “credentials” would be referenced. That was it. Given the shrunken size and corporate domination of today’s mainstream news media this came as no surprise. Her campaign themes repeated her support for abortion rights, her light touch complaints about Trump, the fact that she was a female, and that she had solid connections to the business community. As her Republican opponent flamed out repeatedly focusing mostly on hot button cultural issues, this was all that was needed to carry her to victory.
As for our microscopic left media, and their reporting on the race, the local Virginia “democratic socialist” DSA newsletter mentioned Spanberger’s CIA job several times. But with no additional detail. In These Times, the social democratic online magazine, pointed out in post-election coverage that Spanberger was now Virginia’s first woman governor. Nothing else. Jacobin, the popular online left magazine apparently never mentioned Spanberger anywhere before or after her election by my search. Perhaps somewhere there was a minimal dissection in another progressive or left publication or outlet about the disturbing history of Spanberger, but I never found it.
COMMUNIST PARTY COVERAGE
The People’s World, the online publication of the Communist Party, CPUSA, offered ongoing notice of the race but with scant detail. In a series of 5 articles spanning the 6 month election campaign of Spanberger, the Party publication only went so far as to mention her CIA years matter-of-factly, that she was likely to be the first female governor of Virginia if elected, and little else. The coverage was otherwise infused with hopefulness that by simply electing any Democrat, no matter how little was known about them, that somehow the Trump agenda would be seriously challenged.
Beyond the unwillingness to even briefly detail Spanberger’s suspect CIA career, there was also never any mention of the fact that the Virginia state AFL-CIO – a labor federation historically incapable of independence from the Democrats – was driven to withhold its endorsement of Spanberger. Her shameful refusal to commit to even small modifications to Virginia’s anti-union and racist “right-to-work” law was too much for delegates at their statewide convention in August. In the end, the assorted labor unions in this state all made their own private deals with Spanberger, if they were able to win any promises from her at all.
All signs point forward to another four years where labor and working people in Virginia make little or no progress on any significant issues. This is despite the Democratic Party coming out of the recent election in solid control of the state House and Senate, and now the Governor’s seat. Spanberger will offer nothing which might end up being controversial with the business community, since those corporate forces will be heavily solicited to support her run for Senate in just a few years.
One might have expected more hard-hitting and deeper research and reporting from a communist news outlet. Instead, we got little more than what was offered-up by the social democrats. No mention of her disturbing CIA association and roles. No mention of her despicable anti-socialist ravings while in the House. No mention of Virginia labor’s refusal to endorse her in the recent election or her shameful refusal to address the right-to-work disaster. No mention of the CIA and Democratic Party plan to use the Governor’s race as a stepping stone to a Senate seat. None of that.
SPANBERGER ALREADY MOVING RIGHT
Just weeks after her big Governor’s race win, Spanberger is already trending downhill with announcement of her 95-person Transition Committee.
https://mailchi.mp/033885b302a1/governor-elect-spanberger-announces-transition-committee?e=[UNIQID]
The committee is chock-full of members from the state’s conservative Democratic machine, political consultants, corporations, and non-profit allies of the Democrats. Some nominees will become her inner circle as staff picks. Among them is former Virginia Republican Congresswoman Barbara Comstock, one of the most reactionary personalities in Virginia politics prior to her falling out with Trump forces during his first term. In a purely opportunistic maneuver, Comstock has recently reoriented to the Virginia Democratic Pary and Spanberger, and no doubt she will feature somehow in Spanberger’s term as governor. So much for the absurd and baseless assertion in one of the People’s World articles that Spanberger “moved left while in the U.S. House while her district did the same”. Presumably “moving left” would include her incipient alliance with the far-right Comstock, forged during her time in the U.S. House.
COMMUNIST JOURNALISM REQUIRES FAR BETTER THAN THIS
I expect no more from liberal or social democratic outlets on a question such as Spanberger’s CIA taint, but bonafide communist journalism requires, far, far, more than these minimal and amateur offerings. The CPUSA’s People’s World web site unfortunately today continues to generate this sort of journalism all too often. In many ways, this is what continues to dog the reputation of the Communist Party as being not much more than a left shill for Democrats. To cover the Virginia elections with five articles, and to not one time point out the reprehensible CIA record of Spanberger is beyond the pale. It cannot be excused. It cannot be explained. It cannot be glossed over with the customary excuses. It must be confronted and decisively dealt with.
While the People’s World articles were not explicit endorsements of Spanberger, any reader would have drawn that conclusion from the overall direction of the entire narrative. This sort of journalistic sleight of hand is not communist journalism at all. It is instead political spin, a feelgood political breeze aimed at gently pushing readers towards the Democrats as some sort of safe harbor for working people. The factual reporting in these articles has also been shallow, lacking apparently any serious investigation of the context of the overall Spanberger story. None of the facts or situations that I have reported here regarding Spanberger seem to be known to the People’s World writers. Why? Was there any investigation before these stories were written? Where was the editorial committee monitoring what is published in the name of the Communist Party?
COMMUNIST JOURNALISM MUST EXPOSE CIA CRIMES
As these articles proceeded month after month to completely ignore Spanberger’s willing participation in the CIA, it became clear that if an issue this gigantic can be skirted, then there is no bottom to the People’s World “spin” barrel. As communists, are we so quick to forget or ignore the monstrous past and present crimes of the CIA? The millions murdered. Imprisoned. Tortured. Countries wrecked as reactionary and military regimes were installed. Is that what it has come to here? Are we ignoring any discussion of this and therefore condemning the new generations now emerging in and around a renewed communist movement to learn by trial and error with such a deadly foe? Do senior communist leaders and journalists not owe it to new and young recruits to inform them of the dangers presented by this grotesque CIA force?
How many fraternal communist parties worldwide would approve of their newspapers, journals, and publications tiptoeing down this slippery slope the same way? A path that would lead not to a principled or even arms-length mention of a noncommunist candidate based on the available facts, but to an uncritical and positive electoral recommendation of an unrepentant CIA agent? A de facto endorsement? There is no indication whatsoever anywhere in the record that Spanberger ever diverged from the George W. Bush policies of manufactured and illegal war, genocide against civilians, torture and political subterfuge on a grand scale. Yet the official publication of the U.S. Communist Party fails to even hint at that record? Let alone investigate and expose it?
CONCLUSION
I am confident that I am not alone in my outrage at this parody of communist journalism. The generations of communist journalists and writers who have come before us would not be so inclined to settle for this cheap spin as a substitute for communist reporting. Of that we can be certain. Real communist journalism would expose this dangerous situation with Spanberger, leaving readers better educated about one of the equally great threats to our remaining democracy – the CIA. To correctly expose and denounce Trump and his incipient fascist course, yet to omit any reference to the cotemporary role played by the CIA unfolding before us, is dangerous and absurd.
A force such as the CIA, so central in world counter revolutionary developments of recent decades, cannot be ignored or minimized in any way. If not addressed and corrected, I would have every reason to expect that in just a few years the People’s World will likely embrace Spanberger’s run for U.S. Senate in the same way, as I have described. Justifying her run as some sort of tool against reaction. Using the same failed political spin as a substitute for a sound and coherent communist journalistic policy. Spanberger will then be elevated to the U.S. Senate where it is preordained that her CIA loyalty will deliver more military and intelligence spending, more war and subversion aimed at installing more U.S. client regimes, more assaults on Cuba, on Venezuela, against people’s China, against every communist party and trade union movement, and against every other foe of U.S. imperialism.
My intention in tracking and documenting this situation affecting the credibility and communist character of some of the People’s World reporting is not malicious. I offer it in a spirit which may someday soon lead to its correction. I look forward to reading a series of well-researched articles exposing the murderous history of the CIA, its real role in the country and world, today and in the past, with all of it aimed at preparing the new generation coming forward for their inevitable encounters with these elements. I volunteer to assist in some way in that task. In the archived pages of The Daily Worker, The Worker, The Daily World, the People’s Daily World, Political Affairs, and in World Marxist Review there are countless articles which might be reprinted in the People’s World with an eye towards exposing the true character of the CIA, going back to its formation. International Publishers, the book publishing arm of the CPUSA, owns the rights to numerous books and pamphlets which documented countless CIA crimes reaching all the way back to the formation of the CIA. Many could be easily reprinted and circulated for the new generation to read and benefit from.
I stand ready to support an improved People’s World, and a return to consistent communist journalism. Others are invited to join in this task.
-Chris Townsend is a 46-year union member and leader. He was most recently the Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) International Union Organizing Director. Previously he was an International Representative and Political Action Director for the United Electrical Workers Union (UE), and he has held local positions in both the SEIU and UFCW. He may be reached at: cwtownsend52@gmail.com
The Virginia Worker 
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