'The legendary last session of the Communist Party of the State of Utah'

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According to a reference in a biography of Stalin I'm reading, said legendary last session is called such because it dawned on the seventeen attendees that they were all in fact FBI agents. Nice story anecdotally, but is it a shaggy dog effort? No reference is listed in the book and haven't found anything about it on the web yet.

― Ned Raggett (Ned), Monday, 2 August 2004 19:15 (twenty-one years ago)

OMG DUDE U R FBI TOO? WE R POXY FULES!

― nickalicious (nickalicious), Monday, 2 August 2004 19:19 (twenty-one years ago)

NED RAGGETT!!!!!

― Typhoon is Coming!!! :O (ex machina), Monday, 2 August 2004 19:21 (twenty-one years ago)

i really want more information

― anthony, Monday, 2 August 2004 21:06 (twenty-one years ago)

I spent about half an hour trolling through Google and came up empty handed.

― Ian c=====8 (orion), Monday, 2 August 2004 23:27 (twenty-one years ago)

two months pass...

G. K. Chesterton to thread.

― caitlin (caitlin), Thursday, 7 October 2004 10:50 (twenty-one years ago)

Ned who was the biog by?

― beanz (beanz), Thursday, 7 October 2004 11:45 (twenty-one years ago)

Er um uh. Hold on for a couple of hours and I'll dig it up.

― Ned Raggett (Ned), Thursday, 7 October 2004 12:05 (twenty-one years ago)

Wait a minute, if you guys are all here, then who's tailing all the commies . . .?

― Hurting (Hurting), Thursday, 7 October 2004 12:59 (twenty-one years ago)

no rush.

It does sound familiar – either I'm remembering reading this thread the first time round or I've come across it in a book/lecture/pub all by myself

xpost

― beanz (beanz), Thursday, 7 October 2004 13:05 (twenty-one years ago)

one year passes...

ned do you have the name of this book? i'm dying to know if this actually happened!

― J.D. (Justyn Dillingham), Sunday, 28 May 2006 07:06 (twenty years ago)

I like to think that ned has in fact been looking for the book since that post.

― lil' merzbow wow (haitch), Sunday, 28 May 2006 07:20 (twenty years ago)

This was The Legendary Last Message By The Real Ned Of Raggett! (the feds replaced him with a double... It's ok, you can tell us now, your game is up, Fed.)

― StanM (StanM), Sunday, 28 May 2006 10:20 (twenty years ago)

If this story turns out true, I'll eat my hat.

― Tuomas (Tuomas), Sunday, 28 May 2006 10:51 (twenty years ago)

It's probably the Sparts rather than the Communists anyway.

― DV (dirtyvicar), Sunday, 28 May 2006 11:17 (twenty years ago)

I've heard other variations of this story that involve just two guys spying on each other...but I also feel like there's something like this in Zinn somehwere, maybe?

― Thomas Tallis (Tommy), Sunday, 28 May 2006 11:28 (twenty years ago)

wasnt this a law and order episode?

― jewess harvell (dubplatestyle), Sunday, 28 May 2006 11:34 (twenty years ago)

one day I will perceive all l+o episodes as for-real history

what a fine day that will be

― Thomas Tallis (Tommy), Sunday, 28 May 2006 11:46 (twenty years ago)

I suspect I am already at that point.

― tokyo nursery school: afternoon session (rosemary), Sunday, 28 May 2006 12:15 (twenty years ago)

I said it before, but whatever: Canada's national police force, the RCMP, did something like that for real and for worse: to beef-up their argument to make war on terrorism they terrorized the population themselves with real explosion (detonated where risk for casualties was low. thanks RCMP). They were not only massively present within FLQ,they wrote tracts inciting to violence. and other real stuff like that.

― S. (Sébastien Chikara), Sunday, 28 May 2006 12:30 (twenty years ago)

I heard something similar to that ' legendary last session of the Communist Party of the State of Utah' but it was set in a middle east setting, where financing of these groups would have stopped earlier if it would not have been for the membership fee of agents.

oh that made me think of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Livre_noir_du_Canada_Anglais the secret funding of fascist "separatist" Adrien Arcand by former Canadian Prime Minister R. B. Bennett

― S. (Sébastien Chikara), Sunday, 28 May 2006 12:36 (twenty years ago)

http://journal.davidbyrne.com/2004/06/63004_wisconsin.html :

The FBI used to infiltrate Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) on a regular basis, so the SDS intentionally set up a division that taught sabotage, explosive making, etc. — all the stuff that the FBI was hoping to find out about. But the division was never serious. It was a successful scam to attract the agents, so much so that at one point an FBI agent at a meeting of this division looked around at the others in the room and realized that they were all agents too.

― StanM (StanM), Monday, 29 May 2006 08:57 (twenty years ago)

That doesn't look like the most reliable source either. It is the nature of urban legends that they mutate to different settings.

There's no doubt FBI has spied on different organizations, but surely all FBI agents inside a particular organization know about each other, especially in such small groups as the ones this story is attached to. So it is quite unlikely that they'd "suddenly" realize there weren't any genuine members left.

― Tuomas (Tuomas), Monday, 29 May 2006 09:07 (twenty years ago)

You're trying to get out of eating your hat, aren't you? ^_^

― StanM (StanM), Monday, 29 May 2006 09:09 (twenty years ago)

another variation: a bunch of high-ranking nazi officials at an expensive dinner (minus hitler) decide that those of them that have read mein kampf should have to pay for everyone else; they finally realize that none of them has read it!

― J.D. (Justyn Dillingham), Monday, 29 May 2006 09:40 (twenty years ago)

one thing that adds some possible belivability to these stories -- the fbi wasn't the only agency spying on these things -- lots of times the state and city police would send in undercover operatives too, etc.

― Sterling Clover (s_clover), Monday, 29 May 2006 15:39 (twenty years ago)

One slightly kind of real thing based on this is the suggestion that one reason why the Stasi in East Germany did not open fire on crowds of demonstrators was that that said demonstrators were so heavily infiltrated by Stasi agents that they would be shooting their own. This is asserted in Anna Funder's book "Stasiland", but I don't think it is that convincing an explanation for the fall of the DDR.

― DV (dirtyvicar), Monday, 29 May 2006 16:04 (twenty years ago)

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