Young recruits make ideal pupils: their minds are curious, their bodies likely tireless (and later, strong, for armed struggle), and their pasts, by definition, brief: no one needs to worry that much about a 12-year-old’s commitment to her bourgeois life, let alone about her being a Fed. (The memory of COINTELPRO was not distant for RevCom, and the group was serious about security culture.) The Party’s “Central Task,” according to the Draft Programme, was to “prepare the masses,” psychologically and organizationally, to seize power when the moment of revolutionary crisis arrived. Young people were the easiest demographic to prepare — hence the Youth Brigade.