Operation Chaos

by Matthew Sweet

  “The levels of paranoia were ridiculous,” said Steve Kinnaman, a deserter who came to Sweden on a false passport after months spent living incognito in Laos. “You could become a suspect for the slightest thing.” The loyalties of a prominent ADC member named Desmond Carragher, Steve recalled, were questioned because he smoked dope without ever seeming to get high. At twenty-three, Steve was a little older than most deserters, and he firmly refused to play the game of hunt-the-infiltrator. “My attitude from the beginning was: Who gives a fuck? Spy on me all you want. I am in the newspaper. I am being interviewed on television. I am not going to hide what I think. We are the revolutionary forces that will go back to the States and set the country right!”

  Others, though, could not resist the temptation to speculate. Half a century later, suspicions still smoldered. Most former members of the ADC were convinced that the CIA had a man inside their group. Many had theories about the identity of the infiltrator—or infiltrators. Chuck Onan was doubtful about Ou Yang Yotsai, whose Maoist ballyhoo sounded strained and overrehearsed. Bill Jones put the dope-smoking-but-clearheaded Desmond Carragher at the top of his list of suspects. The reason? Carragher wanted the ADC to take a more conciliatory attitude toward liberal Swedes.

  A few weeks after seeing Bill I met up with Åke Sandin, an old Swedish peace campaigner who in 1968 had given his spare room to one of the Intrepid Four. Sandin’s thinking ran in precisely the opposite direction. Bill Jones was his pick for the agency’s inside man. The reason? Bill did all he could to prevent cooperation between the ADC and the Swedish anti-war movement.

  Mark Shapiro, however, nursed the strongest suspicions. Ever since our meeting in a hotel parking lot in San Diego, he had been expressing them by phone and email. “George Carrano has been my friend for nearly fifty years,” he said. “But I’m convinced that he was a member of an intelligence agency.” Mark had spent many hours looking for inconsistencies in his old comrade’s education and employment records, and had shared his doubts with other contemporaries. More surprisingly, he had also shared them with the subject of his inquiries. In 2005 Mark had challenged George to produce paper evidence of his draft resister status. But George had not risen to the bait. “It’s only in response to personal attacks on my integrity,” he wrote, “my ‘credentials,’ so to speak, that I’m even looking back on this.”

  Over the years, the mistrust between the two men never quite destroyed their friendship. Instead, it evolved into an uneasy running gag. Mark even stayed at George’s home on Long Island, where, in long late-night conversations, Mark insisted that he was determined to crack his friend’s shell and discover the truth about his Stockholm years. “I’ll be hunting him down to my last dying breath,” Mark told me. But it was impossible to know if the scent of guilt was genuine.

  * * *

  NEAR MY HOME in London is a public park with a thriving population of concrete dinosaurs. They were poured and painted in the 1850s by naturalists who wanted to give the nineteenth-century public a glimpse of a lost prehistoric world. Two iguanodons loom above the ferns and water: gigantic lizards with muscular bodies and sharp rhinoceros horns. The first models of their kind. In 1878 the discovery of several complete skeletons in a Belgian coal mine exposed an error in the London paleontologists’ reckoning. The iguanodon horn was actually an iguanodon thumbnail—a bone stiletto protruding from a scaly reptile paw. My dinosaur neighbors were sharp in the wrong places.

  Historians of espionage and surveillance are more like Victorian fossil hunters than they would choose to be. The secret state is under no obligation to preserve its own remains. Those who carry out its work may be answerable to God, but they are not answerable to historians. Suspected spies are not obliged to answer our letters or return our calls. So we work with what evidence we can turn over, spreading out the spare and scattered fragments, doing our best to deduce the shape of the monster.

  The CIA has always had a passionate attachment to the shredder. Its habit of destroying documents was developed in compliance with U.S. legislation on data protection, but it has also obliterated evidence that would have been useful to anyone investigating its more serious transgressions of the law. Most of the extant CIA files on the deserters are accidental survivals—documents that escaped destruction because copies were made and dispatched to less amnesiac institutions.

  One of the most tantalizing survivals is filed at the Nixon Presidential Library, in the personal archive of John W. Dean, one of the White House officials jailed for his role in the Watergate scandal. In a box of Dean’s papers is a twelve-page report on the 1968 World Festival of Youth. Its writer, who was apparently a member of the American delegation, preserves some rich firsthand details. Border guards, he notes, ordered U.S. visitors to shave off their hippie beards before entering Bulgarian territory. The Laotian delegation presented their U.S. counterparts with rings forged from the remains of downed air force bombers. In addition to Kendra Alexander’s speech about peace and unity, a young North Vietnamese woman spoke of killing eighteen Americans with twenty-six bullets, and another told how she had been captured by the U.S. Army and tortured by having acid poured down her throat.

  The CIA’s inside man also gives an account of an awkward meeting between the American delegates and the ADC: “The deserters seemed to have their own individual psychological and behavioral problems,” he wrote. “They appeared generally agreed that they had never felt so clear in their thinking; that they found it impossible to kill; were pacifists; believed that war in general was immoral and that American participation in the war in Vietnam was illegal; and that they had no immediate plans or goals but wanted to return to the United States eventually, either under an amnesty or after a revolution.”

  * * *

  TWO OTHER CIA documents demonstrated that the agency was using undercover operatives to inform on the deserters. A report from July 1969 included a CIA officer’s account of a meeting with an informer inside the deserter movement who had been given the fragrant code name PETUNIA. PETUNIA met his handler at the Café Batavia by the Dupleix metro station in Paris and laid his blossoms on the table. Most of his information had been obtained at the deserter safe house in the suburb of Pantin, rented by Larry Cox with funds supplied by the film star Catherine Deneuve and the Left Bank stars Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre. I knew that both Michael Vale and Bill Jones had visited the place, and PETUNIA mentioned that he had also been up to Stockholm to meet the ADC. (“Said nobody likes Sweden,” reported the spy. “Lousy weather, no work, lousy people.”)

  By PETUNIA’s account, Michael and Bill had completed their mission of the summer. All deserters with revolutionary potential had been spirited out of Paris. Those who remained were “apolitical bums.” He described their shortcomings with relish. One, he reported, amused himself by pulling a knife on visitors. Another had gone on a starvation diet to pay for false documents to get him out of France, then changed his mind and spent his savings on a pet monkey. A third spent his time writing letters to Mao Zedong, informing him that an army of Americans—one thousand exiles in Canada, fifteen thousand activists in Alaska, and others in France—were in training to take over the United States. Would the chairman, he wondered, care to contribute a few divisions to ensure the success of the invasion?

  “Everyone displays the usual paranoia on the subject of CIA,” PETUNIA added. “Larry and others are positive that there is an agent in the house. They are very suspicious of each other and play games trying to trip each other up.” In an email Cox confirmed the basic accuracy of the report, and his own presence in Sweden. “Our main contact there was a shady guy called Michael Vale,” he recalled. “There were a lot of shady guys.”

  Another report, from April 1972, clearly the work of someone trusted by the deserters, described a visit by a source code-named MHYIELD to the ADC offices in Stockholm. MHYIELD noted the committee’s latest internal disagreements, its new enthusiasm for the ideas of the North Korean dictator Kim Il Sung, and t
he contents of its mailbag, which contained seventy-one typed anti-war statements purporting to be from American prisoners of war in Vietnam, as well as a letter from Harry Pincus in London, asking for information on a U.S. Army deserter who was causing panic in the States by planting time bombs in safety deposit boxes.

  The informer observed that the ADC leadership knew nothing of this terror campaign, but a reply would have been pointless in any case. Harry Pincus hanged himself the following month. He had money worries and was perhaps in some deeper kind of crisis. He had spent much of the previous year living in a commune in Primrose Hill, North London, under the supervision of David Cooper, a therapist who advocated the disarticulation of the family and the establishment of new social groups through bed therapy—“going to bed with the girl or guy—or child—you are most interested in.”

  These two documents bore the mark of the CIA operation that brought them into being: a project whose existence was known to only a handful of intelligence officers, secretarial staff, and government officials. The investigative journalist Seymour Hersh was the first beyond this circle to discover its existence. He observed its effects but could not name it, like an astronomer who suspects the presence of a black hole after noticing the distortion of the starlight. His sources told him about wiretaps and break-ins, about CIA infiltrators in anti-war organizations at home and abroad. Serious stuff, in contravention of the agency’s own charter. Details, though, were scant. Even within the walls of Langley, this work was kept dark. “Despite intensive interviews,” Hersh conceded, when he broke the story for the New York Times in December 1974, “little could be learned about the procedures involved in the alleged domestic activities except for the fact that the operation was kept carefully shielded from other units inside the CIA.”

  Now, though, we know its name. Its name was Operation Chaos.

  6 / THE BIRTH OF CHAOS

  BETTER TO HAVE called it something else. Something innocuous. Something unburdened with strong meaning. Something that didn’t describe the screaming waste traversed by Satan in one of the scarier parts of Paradise Lost. Somebody with a sense of posterity should have spoken up. But they didn’t, and Operation Chaos was born.

  President Lyndon Baines Johnson was its daddy. In 1967, he looked across America and saw things he neither liked nor understood. That spring, boys on town hall steps, outside army offices, and in Central Park put matches to draft cards, or, more enterprisingly, burned them up with home-brewed napalm or soaked them in their own blood. In May, Black Panthers padded around the California state capitol in their berets and shades, shotguns pointed at the plaster ceiling. Their images competed for space with news from Stockholm, where American radicals had joined the Russell Tribunal to find the Johnson administration guilty of genocide.

  Then, at the end of June, the president sat down for a $1,000-a-plate fundraising dinner at the Century Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles and discovered that the city had laid on a floor show: speeches by the boxer Muhammad Ali and the childcare guru Dr. Benjamin Spock; ten thousand protestors chanting, “Hey, hey, LBJ! How many kids did you kill today?”; LAPD officers swinging nightsticks; enough violent disorder to convince the commander in chief that his days of campaigning in public should come to an end. Convince him, too, that dissent of this intensity could not be entirely indigenous—that it had to have blown in on some cold wind from Russia or China.

  By summer, Johnson had decided that this weather should be mapped and its patterns disrupted. On August 15, three senior CIA figures met to discuss how to grant the president’s wish. James Jesus Angleton, a cadaverous poetry lover with a primly Anglicized accent, had been chief of the Counterintelligence Staff since 1954. Thomas Karamessines, deputy director for plans, had been in his job for only a fortnight—propelled there after his predecessor fell dead on the tennis court. Richard Helms, the director of central intelligence, was also a recent promotion, despite the failure of his attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro with a poison pen, a botulism-infected cigar, and an old-fashioned Mafia hit man. (The shoes laced with beard-killing thallium salts never progressed beyond the drawing board.)

  All three men were examples of a now-vanished type: Ivy League graduates with good manners and clean fingernails who believed in their right to nurture a military coup, depose an elected leader, or offer a suitcase of cash to a gangster, if it retarded the spread of communism. Not because they were paranoid (though Angleton certainly was), but because they had been in freshly liberated Axis territory at the bitter end of the Second World War and had observed the brutal strategies by which the Soviet Union gathered Eastern Europe to its bosom. When they saw young Americans marching under anti-war banners, they imagined the smiles of satisfaction in smoke-filled rooms in Moscow and Peking. They imagined the hammer and sickle fluttering over the U.S. Capitol.

  In selecting a leader for the operation, Angleton, Helms, and Karamessines chose one of their own. Two candidates were considered. Both had a strong scholarly background; both had worked as intelligence analysts at the CIA stations in Munich and New Delhi; both were career cold warriors.

  The older of the pair, Harry Rositzke, was a crossword-loving scholarship boy from Brooklyn who had taught classes at Harvard and published a translation of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. His anti-communism had been confirmed in 1945, during an unauthorized jaunt into Soviet-controlled East Berlin, where he’d seen Red Army looters stripping buildings of bedding, toilet bowls, and electrical fittings, a column of doomed-looking German boys and old men being herded eastward by Mongolian troops wearing straw shoes.

  Rositzke’s CIA career had been audacious but not wholly successful. As chief of station in New Delhi, he had funded the activities of nationalist guerrillas in Tibet, used stink bombs to break up meetings of the troublingly electable Indian Communist Party, and, according to one colleague, given staff meetings “a certain Dickensian quality, like a colloquy between Fagin and his young pickpockets.” As chief of Langley’s Soviet bloc division, he had been responsible for the mainly disastrous attempt to get spies on the ground in Russian territory. (Most were greeted by armed welcoming committees before they’d had time to roll up their parachutes.) Defeat gave Rositzke a profound respect for the enemy. So profound that a family acquaintance wrote to the FBI to share her worries about his extravagant praise of the USSR.

  Harry Rositzke’s younger rival was a less flamboyant character. In a building full of professional secret keepers, Richard Ober was known as a man of few words. “Tight mouthed,” they called him. “Close mouthed.” He liked the people around him to be the same.

  His academic qualifications were impeccable: history and philosophy at Harvard, a master’s degree in international relations from Columbia, a year of further study at the National War College. But Ober’s killer credential came from work in the field. He was already running a prototype for the kind of scheme President Johnson had in mind: a spoiler operation against the anti-war Left. Its target was Ramparts, a noisily countercultural magazine published in Berkeley, California.

  The agency wished to squish Ramparts because its investigative reporters had begun to make a habit of uncovering Langley’s most sensitive secrets. Its most recent scoop: revealing that since 1952 the agency had been funding the National Student Association, and was using its members to gather intelligence on campuses across the world. Ober failed to prevent Ramparts from running the story, obliging his colleagues to cut loose some of their paid agents. But the operation had allowed him to demonstrate a coolly pragmatic attitude to espionage techniques that were forbidden by the CIA’s own charter. And it was upon these techniques that Operation Chaos was founded, with Ober as chief; Rositzke, slightly offstage, in an advisory capacity; and Richard Helms as the man who would take the fruits of their labor to the White House.

  When the National Security Act of 1947 brought the CIA into being, it permitted the agency “no police, subpoena, or law enforcement powers or internal security functions.” The Ramparts operation trou
bled the letter and the spirit of this law. It investigated the personal and financial affairs of the magazine’s staff and backers, all of whom were U.S. citizens and residents. It put them under surveillance. It gathered material for blackmail. Years later, Edgar Applewhite, a member of Ober’s staff, gave an interview about these activities. “We had awful things in mind,” he said, “some of which we carried out.” He also recalled the response of the deputy director for plans. “Oh, Eddie,” he said. “You have a spot of blood on your pinafore.”

  * * *

  FRANK RAFALKO NEVER asked to be part of Operation Chaos. What he really wanted was a place in the CIA’s career training program. A chance to escape his desk in the records division and go out into the field, acquiring intelligence hot from the mouth of the asset. But the agency decided that a master’s degree should be a requisite for this work. Frank didn’t have one, so that was that. He did his best to resist the assignment, telling his interviewers that counterintelligence was a dead end. But they didn’t pay much attention. By the time Frank got back to his desk in the basement, the job was his.

  Frank and I arranged to meet in Wilmington, North Carolina, where he had business in town. An ice storm cleared his diary, but he came all the same, driving a careful forty miles through remarkable weather conditions: someone, it seemed, had taken the trees and dipped them in glass. He picked me up from the lobby of the Hilton and took me to his favorite restaurant, a seafood place beside the Cape Fear River, a popular venue for CIA reunions. Former agency employees, he explained, live tax-free in North Carolina; he hadn’t received a federal tax bill since he retired here in the 1990s. We ate fish and chips to a smooth jazz sound track.