Operation Chaos

by Matthew Sweet

  I met Karen to hear the story of how she and Craig took the tough route home from Sweden—sneaking back into the States via Canada and living a life underground. Karen studies at a college in San Francisco; we had lunch in the cafeteria, surrounded by teenagers, and she told me about her exuberantly misspent youth. She was born a Catholic in Pennsylvania, but then the Beatles released Sgt. Pepper and, at the age of seventeen, she shouldered her guitar and set out for India in search of a guru. She never got there.

  Instead, she wound up in the Moroccan city Essaouira, sharing a sprawling courtyard apartment with some sprawling hippie musicians. They meditated, smoked hashish, played drums all night. “Then,” she explained, “somebody got the bright idea to go to Fez and get a bunch of kif and take it across Africa and sell it to Peace Corps workers in Tunisia. So we did it and we got busted and thrown into jail on a ten-year sentence.” She was obliged to bribe her way to freedom, and after an interlude on a houseboat in Amsterdam she moved north until she met Craig in Stockholm.

  In the warm summer months, she sang. People were generous with their coins. But the winter of 1970–71 was unkind to Karen and Craig. They squatted in a disused puppet theater down a Stockholm alley with a name that meant “the end of the world.” They warmed themselves at a wood-burning stove, talked about raising the airfare to go to India. A difficult proposition, when the only employment they could find was delivering newspapers. Neither of them had much enthusiasm for the four a.m. starts, trudging uphill, loaded with copies of Dagens Nyheter. Then an infected cut on Karen’s thumb brought their efforts to an end. The doctor who prescribed antibiotics sent her to the visa office for paperwork that would secure her free treatment. The authorities decided that she had already overstayed her welcome and deported her.

  She wasn’t sure that Craig would follow. “I loved him,” she said, “but I don’t think I was really his type. I think he was with me because I was so emphatic.” In her absence, however, he formulated a grand strategy—one that aimed to be as eye-catching as his decision to desert from the Intrepid. He would return to the States, make amends with his family, and give himself up to the authorities. He would turn his inevitable court-martial into a political act, use the dock as a pulpit to preach against the war. Perhaps that would be the end of it, and the end of President Nixon, too.

  Rather than jetting straight back home to California, Craig chose a soft landing in Canada. In May 1971 he flew from Stockholm to Montreal and was reunited with Karen. She wasn’t alone. On her return to the States, Karen had bought an old milk truck and converted it into a motor home. Four friends were on board for the ride. They crossed the entire breadth of the country to Vancouver Island, where they built an encampment out of driftwood, picked berries, harvested mussels, smoked dope, and watched for unidentified flying objects. When the weather cooled, they moved south to Seattle. At the border checkpoint, the guard demanded to see Craig’s draft card. Someone made a joke about him being a notorious outlaw. The guard laughed and waved them through.

  Their new underground life did not endure the winter. In February 1972, Karen went to the doctor with flu symptoms and discovered that she was pregnant. This, and the Seattle cold, sent them south to California. They sold the van and made the journey by Greyhound bus. Trouble followed them to new lodgings in San Francisco. Coming home early one day they found their apartment being used for a porn shoot.

  “There were all these naked people and the man of the house was walking round in a jockstrap,” Karen remembered. “Craig was really appalled. He had it out with the guy. I didn’t want to be militant about it.” Later that night, a more serious altercation took place. Karen was woken by sounds from the next room—one of the porn actors beating up his girlfriend. “At first it was arguing. Then I heard him punching her. I jumped out of bed and ran in, and he turned on me and pushed me down the stairs.”

  Shortly after this incident, the couple went to San Jose to see Craig’s family. When her son and his pregnant fiancée visited, Irene Anderson said little. Once the couple had left, she picked up the phone and reported her son to the FBI. “I suppose,” said Karen, “she was thinking of me and the baby. She wanted everything to be good for her grandchild, for Craig to take care of business and get it over with.” On the morning of March 30, 1972, Anderson went to buy a newspaper and found the men from the bureau lying in wait.

  They took him to the naval correctional center on Treasure Island, a rubble platform constructed in San Francisco Bay. When his fellow inmates realized who he was, the beatings and the threats began. When he protested, the guards set him scrubbing the cement floors with a toothbrush, then placed him in solitary confinement. When he went on a hunger strike, the prison doctor prescribed antipsychotic drugs.

  On August 24, 1972, Karen Fabec had a memorable twenty-second birthday—a cloudless day that she spent in downtown San Francisco. At eleven o’clock, she was standing outside city hall, cradling her three-month-old baby, Shandra. At midday her fiancé turned up in a van from military prison, handcuffed, sedated, and accompanied by two guards, who helped him struggle up the steps and into the presence of Judge Joseph Kennedy.

  The judge asked Karen if she took Craig W. Anderson to be her lawful wedded husband. “Sure,” she said. Craig proved unable to muster a reply. Perhaps it was the lithium in his bloodstream. Perhaps it was the distracting sound coming from the street outside: the amplified voice of Jane Fonda, newly returned from Hanoi, telling a crowd of demonstrators about what she’d seen in North Vietnam—bombed schools, bombed churches, bombed theaters, bombed factories. The judge took silence for assent and pronounced Craig and Karen man and wife. The couple embraced, handcuffs were snapped on the wrists of the groom, and the van sped back to Treasure Island. Baby Shandra had slept all the way through the ceremony. A reporter asked the bride for a quote. “It’s a drag,” she said.

  * * *

  CRAIG NEVER MADE his speech about the war and Nixon. At the preliminary hearing for his case, he suffered a catatonic seizure and was rushed to the hospital. The intervention proved beneficial: the psychiatrists took the view that further confinement might cause irreparable damage to his sanity. Craig walked from the court with a three-year probation order and a dishonorable discharge from the navy.

  Eight months in the brig, however, had already done their work. His mouth was a mess of abscesses. His skin broke out in boils. Noise and crowds distressed him—so much so that Karen allowed herself to be persuaded to move with him to a tent in the mountains of northern California. “He was becoming a recluse,” she recalled. “He didn’t want to see or talk to anybody. He always acted angry and bitter.” Eventually, Karen lost her appetite for this life. The couple separated in 1975 and have barely seen each other since. Karen now lives modestly in San Francisco with her grandchild and her dog, catching up on the education she missed when she went on the trail to North Africa.

  Craig’s path, however, has been much weirder, and it demonstrates that even those deserters who were not interested in politics could end up living their lives by strange, conspiratorial ideas. A decade ago he adopted the pseudonym Will Hart, under which he writes books that mix biblical scholarship with speculation about the relationship between the American state and extraterrestrial intelligences. The Apollo missions, he thinks, encountered something sentient on the moon. The moon, he suspects, is an artificial object. He has no doubt that the CIA has alien bodies and alien equipment hidden in its labs, and that the last half century of U.S. foreign policy has been determined by these secrets.

  He and I exchanged a few emails on these subjects. I was surprised that he seemed not to know that a coauthor of The Roswell Incident, the foundational text of UFO conspiracies, had identified Harry Rositzke of Operation Chaos as the head of Langley’s aliens division. Craig was more expansive, I discovered, when the questions were asked by a true believer. One of his favorite interlocutors is a clairvoyant called Dr. Rita Louise, who offers “intuitive health readings” over the
phone. (“Dr Louise,” says her website, “infuses every engagement with both credibility and content.”) She also hosts an Internet radio show on which Craig, in the person of Will Hart, is an occasional guest.

  On one of these podcasts he described a visit he’d made to Mexico shortly after he had separated from Karen. Here, he made measurements that proved the ancient Mayans had access to alien laser technology. However, “very powerful forces” were preventing this information from emerging. Archaeologists were being discouraged from publishing their findings. Those who tried to add these details to Wikipedia found their revisions weeded out. “The power elites,” he said, “don’t want you to know about this.”

  * * *

  IF THE CIA was doing its work with equipment borrowed from the inhabitants of the Zeta Reticuli system, then no surveillance technology was salvaged from the saucer. The agents of Chaos had to make do with making phone calls and knocking on doors. In April 1972, as Craig Anderson languished in the brig, the CIA asset code-named MHYIELD was sniffing around the offices of the ADC in Stockholm.

  MHYIELD was on a tour of radical groups in Europe, with an itinerary that included Frankfurt, Copenhagen, and Belfast. In Stockholm, Mike Powers told his visitor that the organization was going through an identity crisis. The flow of deserters and resisters had slowed, men were returning to their bases in Germany, and the ADC, by now a tiny organization, had suffered another split. Two members had objected to Powers’s growing enthusiasm for Maoism and had formed an even smaller group, the Revolutionary American People’s Party. Those who remained included Mark Worrell, a California GI who had started a Kim Il Sung study group, and Mike Bransome, a deserter whose colorful past included time in the Baltimore city jail, an alarming interlude with the Moonies, and the donation of a pint of blood to a group who broke into a draft board office and spilled it over a cache of draft cards.

  MHYIELD was trying to work out if the ADC was still plugged into radical networks that extended over international borders. He discovered that not only did they know little about what was happening on the army bases in Germany, or among deserters living underground in the States, they seemed barely aware of what was happening elsewhere in Sweden. They hadn’t, for instance, talked to the ADC’s representative in Malmö for over a month.

  The depleted state of the ADC reflected a shift in public attitudes toward the deserters. The romantic enthusiasm that had greeted the arrival of the Intrepid Four was long exhausted. Every few weeks seemed to bring a fresh piece of bad publicity. In May 1971, a deserter was convicted of killing the three-year-old daughter of his Swedish girlfriend. The details shocked the public. Ten days later, Earl Pennington, a deserter who had lived in Malmö for seven months, took his girlfriend to Bulltofta Airport, where he pressed a knife to her throat, burst through the gate, and climbed the steps of a DC-9. Pennington ordered the pilot to fly to the United States, but the captain told him that a DC-9 would never make it across the Atlantic. “Fly to Stockholm,” said Pennington. “Or anywhere.” The police moved in; Pennington was dragged away.

  In June, Ray Jones III, deserter number one, surfaced again, in a maxi coat and silk shirt, imploring King Gustaf VI Adolf to protect him from the Swedish police, who, he believed, were harassing him on behalf of the U.S. government. “It is a hidden fact that the United States puts pressure on this country,” he said. “I have had constant threats of physical violence against my wife and kids.”

  His examples were hard to interpret. The police, he said, had forced his car off the road, charged him with negligent driving, and assaulted him and his wife. They had allowed his creditors to remove property from his home in lieu of rent. “My two children sat naked eating a bowl of cornflakes,” he said. “After one spoonful the authorities burst into our home and removed every piece of furniture we owned.” Stories like this produced little public sympathy. The most common response in the press was to suggest that the Swedish benefits system was too generous toward American exiles.

  One of many low points came in the small hours of October 10, 1972, when two deserters, Wayne Ellis and Rudolph Mitchell, began causing an uproar in a room at the Rex Hotel in Malmö. The assistant manager, Sven Persson, discovered the two men in a state of insane agitation. Believing there was a bomb in the room, they had cleared it of all flammable objects, hurling blankets and pillows out into the corridor. They had also removed their clothes, fearing that the imminent blast would ignite their plastic buttons and zippers. LSD was to blame, but so was their unusual relationship.

  Ellis, the son of a middle-class Chicago family, had deserted his unit when his bank account was cleared of $3,000 by a woman he met on leave in Copenhagen. Mitchell, who had deserted via Amsterdam after a failed attempt to secure a false passport in Paris, promised to help his friend take revenge. Instead, they took drugs, began pimping, and became lost in a bizarre narcotic delusion. Mitchell decided that he was a prophet whose word was divine law. Ellis accepted this idea and began following his commandments. When Sven Persson came into the hotel room, Mitchell ordered Ellis to kick the man six times in the head with his bare feet. The attack proved fatal. With their victim lying senseless on the floor, master and disciple threw a mattress over the body and ran, naked and holding hands, out into the streets of Malmö, where they were quickly arrested.

  Ellis and Mitchell were both African American, which added a racial dimension to the hostility provoked by the case—particularly when it emerged that they were living off the immoral earnings of Ellis’s Swedish girlfriend, a hotel receptionist named Candy. The two-day trial was a circus. Ellis was too drug-addled to speak. Mitchell was adamant that the murder had been “necessary.” A group of deserters who came to attend were arrested. A rumor spread around the city that some Yugoslav gangsters were planning to spring them from custody, after which the Yugoslav Embassy received a bomb threat. Both men were found guilty and told they would be deported after serving their sentences.

  As if this wasn’t bad enough, Vernon Boggs, a hip young sociology PhD from the City University of New York, turned up in Malmö to write an academic paper claiming that Ellis and Mitchell were typical cases. In “Black American Deserters in Sweden: From Desertion to Drugs to Despair,” Boggs wrote of men who’d earned a “degree in ‘pimpology’ in Copenhagen and then sought asylum in Sweden, where the racket was much easier to pursue.” Like Michael Vale, Boggs had been reading the theorist Émile Durkheim. The deserter, he wrote, “is powerless, homeless, and very often despondent; he is truly living in a state of anomie. His anomic existence spirals downwards until he reaches rock bottom: drug addiction, desperation and imprisonment.” Like Vale, he was fingered as a government spook. One interviewee taunted him: “You resigned from the CIA now, huh?”

  Boggs may not have been a creature of Langley, but he did have help from a shadowy source: an enemy of Olof Palme in the Swedish civil service who, disgusted by what he saw as the “fondling and cringing position” toward the deserters, supplied Boggs with a secret report that toted up their crimes, from traffic offenses and smuggling to burglary and rape. The report asserted that only 3.7 percent of Sweden’s new American residents were in any danger of being sent to Vietnam, and concluded that their presence was detrimental to Swedish society.

  For Boggs, this was an academic question. At the beginning of 1973, that’s what it became for the Swedish state. On January 27, America’s war in Vietnam came to an end. America would send no more unwilling troops to Indochina. On April 2, the Swedish government announced that it had withdrawn its offer of humanitarian asylum to deserters and draft resisters.

  But for many of those living in the moral and political space opened up by these changes, the struggle was far from over. Michael Vale and his band of allies had already decided that desertion had outlived its usefulness as a political act. For them, revolution was a goal now best pursued by those inside the army. They had to go where the GIs were and get the message out to them. And as soon as that decision was made, it was
relayed back to Langley and to the head of Operation Chaos.

  10 / THE NEXT STEP

  ON MAY 24, 1970, a meeting was convened at the Club Voltaire, the Frankfurt coffeehouse that helped deserters on their way to Sweden. Michael Vale was in the chair. The others present were U.S. servicemen from bases in Germany, and members of Newsreel, a transnational network of filmmakers who produced 16 mm documentaries offering a revolutionary take on current affairs. (Instead of the Pathé rooster or the MGM lion, Newsreel viewers saw the collective’s name appear in a volley of machine-gun fire.) Also in the room, either as part of the group or sitting at a nearby table, was a spy for military intelligence.

  A hotheaded GI spoke in favor of bombing some German post offices or telephone exchanges. Nobody was very enthusiastic. Michael gave an upbeat assessment of a conference he had just attended in Copenhagen, where deserters had promised to comb the left-wing press for stories that might be of interest to Newsreel. But most of the afternoon’s discussion was taken up with one job—the founding of a new revolutionary organization. The Next Step, as they decided to call it, would be an activist group. It would also be the title of a newspaper. These would share personnel, accommodation, facilities, and a common aim: to encourage soldiers on American bases in Germany to fight the army from inside the army. To give GIs a taste for revolutionary Marxism. The cover price, said Mike, would be ten cents. But if there were no takers, they would just give it away.