He’d been rapidly promoted to dealing with CPUSA, the Communist Party of America. The party’s membership was in decline. He wasn’t sure whether this was due to new members being ordered underground. They weren’t taking any chances. COINTELPRO wanted the party dead. Nothing else would satisfy them. The new leader of CPUSA, Gus Hall, had been trained at the International Lenin School in Moscow and COINTELPRO had no intention of giving him the space to expand the organization’s public profile, or create a secret network that could better evade the range of measures deployed against it. There were several methods open to them: infiltration, psychological warfare, legal harassment – such as tax, sending in the IRS to go over every scrap of paper, searching for the smallest of mistakes. They could deploy the local police force and finally but importantly use non-legal harassment. He didn’t get involved in that: it was farmed out to retired officers or people with no connection to the FBI. He had no qualms with it, of course. According to Hoover:

The purpose of counterintelligence action is to disrupt and it is immaterial whether facts exist to substantiate the charge.

As COINTELPRO officers they were tasked with pinpointing and neutralizing troublemakers before they could exercise their potential for violence. And Yates was one of the best.

Entering the stairway of a redbrick five storey, the temperature seemed to jump. It was so hot Yates had to stop, taking out a handkerchief and mopping his brow. The smells were bad, mingled odours he didn’t want to think about too much. Walking up the stairs, his pores seeping alcohol from last night, he surveyed the cracked plaster and broken floorboards, the shabby pipes and doors held together with mismatched planks of wood and cardboard, no doubt kicked apart in some argument or other. Yates could sense the hostility from the people in the walkways, people milling in the communal spaces, with no jobs to go to, no skills to offer, just an inbred sense of injustice. They’d talk for twenty-four hours a day about how they’d been wronged and how their country had failed them. At least twenty per cent of CPUSA membership was estimated to be Negro, far higher than the Negro proportion of the national population – that was their solution to not getting a job, ripping down the whole edifice of their nation. He smiled at them as he passed, knowing full well it would drive them crazy. Hatred radiated from their faces like heat off hot coals. If they thought it bothered him they were wrong. He wanted to ask the young man perched on the window:

You think your hatred matters?

Of all the hatred in the world, theirs mattered the least.