* * *
SOMEWHERE TOWARD THE end of 1972, the Labor Committees began preparing for the fight. In a gym on the top floor of a New York apartment building, members attended Saturday morning classes at which NCLC security officers shouted instructions: “This group has been brought together with one purpose in mind: revolutionary discipline. Within two months you will all be commanding cadres of several hundred workers apiece. You must be prepared!” Those who couldn’t keep pace, or vomited before their eightieth jumping jack, received an angry earful. “Revolutionaries must be in shape!” they were told. “When the wars come, how do you expect the workers to follow orders like that?”
Elsewhere, the drill was even tougher. On rented farmland north of the city, recruits were shown how to cut throats and handle guns. (The training camp was disbanded after a state police team called at the property while investigating a local murder.) Most significantly, LaRouche’s foot soldiers—most of whom were graduate students, young academics, and trainee social workers—were taught the street-fighting techniques that were going to help them achieve mastery over the Communist Party USA. Their weapons of choice were knuckle-dusters, clubs, and nunchakus—two solid sticks linked by a length of steel chain, familiar to anyone who had been to the cinema that year to see Bruce Lee in The Way of the Dragon. These weapons would ensure that when the collapse of capitalism came, no old-style Stalinist would be fit to take command.
The official declaration of war came in April 1973, when a front-page editorial in the NCLC newspaper, New Solidarity, announced its campaign to pulverize the American Communist Party: “We must dispose of this stinking corpse to ensure that it cannot act as a host for maggots and other parasites preparing future scabby Nixonite attacks on the working class.” And in went the boys and girls of Operation Mop-Up. Forty NCLC members muscled into a meeting of mayoral candidates at Columbia University and charged the platform with wooden staves. Twenty steamed into a Third World Solidarity rally at Temple University in Philadelphia. “Chairs were overturned,” said a witness, “and there was blood all over the floor.”
Fifteen LaRouchians stormed into a conference of the Young Socialist Alliance in Detroit, pushing people to the floor and beating them with sticks. (Disabled delegates were not spared.) Victor Riesel, a journalist in Detroit, brought the news to the mainstream press. The NCLC, he explained, was “a new, virtually unnoticed, unreported revolutionary action network of young people, well dressed and well trained militarily.… It’s so far to the left it makes Trotskyism seem like a flower power daisy-picking sect.”
The most enthusiastic fighters were dubbed the Red Guard. Those who preferred an administrative role became known as the Ladies Auxiliary. They stayed in the office, logging the attacks, collating telephone numbers of Communist Party members, and making the occasional threatening call.
Unsurprisingly, this carnival of violence and intimidation did not cause the sudden evaporation of other left-wing groups from the political scene. Instead, there was uproar. American Communists wrote angry letters to the press alleging that the NCLC was controlled by police agents. (The NCLC, of course, said exactly the same about the Communists.) A correspondent of Workers Vanguard attacked the group as “a cult of demoralized psychotics engaged in a dance of death.” Student bodies banned the Labor Committees from campus buildings. Communists attended meetings with blunt instruments secreted about their person, in case the enemy came crashing through the doors. But this mattered little to LaRouche: he was interested in revolutionary strategy, but he was just as interested in consolidating his own personal power.
The violence of Operation Mop-Up generated an intense camaraderie among his followers. They had recaptured the thrill of the 1968 Columbia strike, only this time it was the radicals who were swinging the clubs, and not the police. Tessa DeCarlo, who worked on Labor Committees publications throughout the 1970s, described its exhilarations. “We’re about to create a national Soviet!” she exclaimed, recalling the thrill of the moment. “We’re going to wipe the floor with these assholes!”
Raw knuckles and split lips, however, were only the first part of LaRouche’s prescription. He also wanted to get under the membership’s skin. He fleshed out his approach in an essay called “Beyond Psychoanalysis,” the product of a year of experiments on his own comrades. Most Americans, he argued, lived in a world of illusion. They worked, watched television, drank beer on the weekend, and went on vacation once a year. This illusion, he argued, prevented them from seeing the pointlessness of their existence and taking a logical step into suicidal despair.
Members of the Labor Committees, however, had the opportunity to enter a higher state of being. “Over the period since September 1972,” he wrote, “organizations of the Labor Committees in North America and Western Europe have been given preliminary exposure to techniques more advanced in some aspects than have so far been known to professional psychology. These approaches are being developed as indispensable auxiliary means for directly overcoming the fatal internal flaw of all socialist organizations, Lenin’s included, up to this time.”
The prize was great. If members let go of their fears, then they stood a chance of achieving a new status. They would be “world-historical people.” They would be “Cartesian beings.” They would be fit to run the new world that would be delivered by the coming collapse of capitalism. He used a term that was familiar to the Stockholm deserters: ego-stripping.
It would be tough, he warned: “In respect of the mental processes, absolutely nothing is secret; there is merely blindness. What you may imagine to be only your private insight into yourself is accessible to empirical demonstration for general knowledge. Not only that, but such things within you as you may, for a brief remaining time, merely imagine do not exist within you. Blindness will be ended; all the secrets will rapidly appear to become general public knowledge.” Remarkable results, he said, had already been achieved with a small group of followers in Düsseldorf. “In Germany I am Der Abscheulicher. I shall soon be regarded similarly here.” The title, plucked from Fidelio, Beethoven’s only opera, meant the Abominable One.
* * *
THE DETAILS OF the ego-stripping process were later recorded by Christine Berl, a concert pianist who was a member of the organization’s National Executive Committee. “According to Marcus,” wrote Berl, in a document cosigned by her boyfriend, “the purpose of the sessions was to create a new kind of leadership based on the capacity to withstand psychological terror; but in reality the content of the sessions themselves was pure psychological terror. What the leaders were asked to withstand was described by Marcus as the stripping away of the persona before the entire group; but in actuality what was stripped away was their very identities.”
LaRouche would attack the luckless subject of the session using foul and violent language. It was violence and intimidation disguised as love. “The procedure was brilliant and diabolical,” wrote Berl. “After Marcus had himself reduced the leaders to a state of self-hate and terror … only then would he rescue them, in the name of self-consciousness from the terror which he himself had created.”
Jim McGourty observed it, too—and wondered whether LaRouche had been taking lessons from Michael Vale. “The basic idea,” he explained, “was that everyone is tortured by their mothers and has this creepy alter ego. A mother-image that will twist them and hold them back whenever they try to do something creative. The key to life is defeating the mother.”
LaRouche impressed this point on members of the National Executive Committee, and they in turn did the same to those lower down the hierarchy. It even reached the children of NCLC members, who added “mother-dominated” to their repertoire of playground insults. “People would break down, cry, bring up stuff about their childhood, their mother and father, and how that was causing them to be weak and mistrusting,” said Jim. “Some of this involved breaking up families. Husbands and wives. He would say the father was incompetent. Not aggressive enough. Pretty soon there were se
parations and divorces going on.”
Jim’s marriage was one of the casualties. He was prepared to stay loyal to Lyn Marcus. But his wife, Michele, had other ideas. They had been living in a rough-and-ready apartment in Charlotte, North Carolina, with a gang of NCLC activists, bringing the literature and the arguments they’d used on army bases in Germany to the gates of manufacturing plants in the city. The workers did not greet them with open arms.
“It was hard,” Michele told me, “and we honestly did not know what we were doing.” She no longer had the appetite for long debates about LaRouchian economics—or the much more alarming rigors of “Beyond Psychoanalysis” sessions. Since the NCLC delegation had arrived in Frankfurt, she had found excuses to avoid their company. “To get away,” she said, “I would go upstairs and breastfeed my baby.” On one occasion, she remembered, the wife of another NCLC activist came up to join her. She also had little love for the increasingly cultish character of the movement. “She asked, ‘Is this baby important to you?’ That was the nail on the coffin. I remember just crying.”
After three months of this life in Charlotte, Michele asked Jim for a separation. “I realized I simply needed to go back to school and take care of my son,” she explained. “It was time to stop playing at being a leftist. Contact with the Labor Committees crystallized a lot of things for me. They had no idea what they were asking people to do. Idiotic stuff. Violent stuff. Illegal stuff.” Stuff entirely incompatible with the responsibilities of parenthood—which, she couldn’t help noticing, LaRouche regarded with complete contempt. “Do you know what he once did?” Michele asked. “He took a cigarette lighter and waved it in my son’s face just to see if he reacted. That’s the kind of man he was.” She moved back to her parents in Washington, DC, and enrolled in a course at George Washington University.
Jim McGourty had no such crisis of faith. Instead, he became one of the heroes of the movement. When he and Michele separated he went to live with Jose Torres, the NCLC security chief who led the organization’s nocturnal raids on the Communists of Philadelphia. On May 6, 1973, Jim went out on a Mop-Up assignment in West Philly with a gang of NCLC activists. They bowled into a meeting of the Young Workers Liberation League and wreaked havoc.
Did you use nunchakus? I asked.
“Just karate,” said Jim McGourty. “But the Communists had screwdrivers. One of them jabbed me in the head. And conveniently the police were right around the corner from the event, and scooped up all the Labor Committee members.”
Jim and fifteen of his comrades were put in the back of a van, taken to the police station, fingerprinted, and sent home. Several weeks passed, and no further action was taken. On a day that he knows must have been June 25, 1973, Jim had a frank conversation about his past with Jose Torres. He told Torres that he wasn’t a phone company employee named Jim McGourty but a Vietnam deserter born under an entirely different name. The following day, four FBI agents turned up on his doorstep. The fingerprint system, they explained, had detected his fraud, but Jim assumed that Torres had betrayed him. He was arrested and dispatched to Camp Lejeune in North Carolina to await his court-martial.
It took eighty days for his case to be heard. As he was married, he was permitted weekend and holiday leave. As his marriage was in trouble, he spent much of this time at meetings of the Labor Committees. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he declared, “I know you came here because Jim McGourty is on trial. Well, I’m here to tell you that is not the reason. We are putting the government on trial.” On one of my visits to his home in Loudoun County, he repeated this speech, mock heroically, in his own living room.
“That’s when I fell in love with him,” said his second wife, Christina. “I remember that line. Oh, what a man!”
The arrest, however, set alarm bells ringing in the organization. Ed Spannaus, the NCLC’s head of intelligence, fired off a memo to his staff. “There is a strong possibility that the government will attempt to use the McGourty case as a springboard to frame up the NCLC for aiding and abetting deserters,” he wrote. “We have to know the following information immediately: 1) if anybody claiming to be a deserter has approached us asking for help or simply establishing contact with members of the NCLC; 2) if any members of the organization are known or thought to be known as deserters. If we can get this information at once, we may be able to expose the government’s plans before they can carry them out.”
It is the first hint that the leadership of the Labor Committees had begun to think of Michael Vale’s group not as a gang of comrades who had joined them in the revolutionary struggle, but as enemy agents. Agents who were not even conscious of their own destructive function.
This is what lay beyond psychoanalysis. A paranoia so potent that it turned the deserters against one another, and against themselves.
* * *
PARANOIA ADORES A network. During the summer of 1973, LaRouche was busy constructing one across a continent: connecting a constellation of tiny radical groups into a new organization called the European Labor Committees (ELC). His former girlfriend Carol Larrabee was in London, attempting to kick-start a British outpost of the organization with the help of her new British husband, Chris White. In Cologne, a knot of Greek exiles were ready for a formal alliance. In Düsseldorf, a cadre of Trotskyist medical students joined the cause. In Frankfurt and Stockholm, small groups coalesced around former members of the Next Step. They, too, studied LaRouche’s theory of the revolutionary mind.
In this, Clifford Gaddy had an intellectual advantage. Michael Vale’s influence had secured him the job of translating an entire issue of Soviet Psychology, and he had also begun a romantic relationship with a bright student in the field—Kerstin Tegin, a cool and self-possessed twenty-three-year-old graduate of the University of Stockholm. Everyone gathered in a beer hall near Düsseldorf to celebrate the birth of a new revolutionary organization and to discuss how the imminent collapse of Western capitalism would bring them, in LaRouche’s words, “the successful seizure of world power within the decade.”
At the end of the summer, however, rumors began circulating through the Labor Committees about a strange affair involving a member of the organization in Cologne. LaRouche had passed through the city on his way back from attending a conference in Yugoslavia. Buzzing with his new ideas on evil and motherhood and the revolutionary mind, he offered the German members his own form of marriage guidance counseling.
One of those members, Konstantin George, a Greek-American Trotskyist and recent recruit to the Labor Committees, was discovered to have been making secret trips to East Berlin. He was, it seems, conducting an extramarital affair with a psychiatrist on the other side of the wall. Rather than admit his adultery, he claimed to have mysterious gaps in his memory and insinuated that there was an espionage angle on his case. LaRouche ran wild with the idea.
“He wished to be interrogated, and stuck to it,” LaRouche wrote in his autobiography. “I conducted a very hard interrogation, but a supportive one. It was like peeling away one layer of the onion after the other.” Beer and cigarettes were supplied, and a story emerged. Konstantin George said that there was no girlfriend on the other side of Checkpoint Charlie: she was a fantasy constructed by his KGB programmers who had used hypnosis, drugs, and the photograph of an unknown woman to implant a series of false images in his memory. Those images concealed the real purpose of the treatment from his conscious mind—to assassinate Lyndon LaRouche.
This was, of course, impossible. But George played along with it, declining to contradict LaRouche’s triumphant announcement that he had successfully deprogrammed a brainwashed enemy agent deployed to decapitate their movement. The membership, for whom psychological ordeal had already become part of the daily business of life, accepted the story without a murmur. Konstantin George had been a Manchurian Candidate. An unwitting enemy programmed to kill by a secret Soviet psychiatric technique. The intellectual universe of the Labor Committees had found space for nunchakus and ego-stripping. Now it found a pla
ce for the zombie assassin. So when LaRouche warned everyone to be vigilant for such beings, his followers concurred.
When they found them, war broke out.
12 / THE BRAINWASHERS
BILL JONES, CLIFF Gaddy, Warren Hamerman, and Jim McGourty risked their futures, their freedom, and their family relationships by taking a public stand against the Vietnam War. But they were willing soldiers in the war declared by Lyndon LaRouche. No draft was required, nor any boot camp. The rigors of Operation Mop-Up and “Beyond Psychoanalysis” had supplied all the training they required. The enemy was not a foreign state, but a nightmarish coalition of intelligence agencies, political figures, and their own comrades. The CIA. The KGB. Nelson Rockefeller, the governor of New York. Michael Vale. The stakes were high: if they lost, it meant the death of democracy, the death of the revolution, and the coming of a new world of prison camps, slave labor, mind control, mass starvation.
Though this war was a dream and delusion, the Stockholm deserters became its casualties. It turned them against their mentor and destroyed their relationships with one another. It enforced their loyalty to causes that were mad, meaningless, and immoral. It created periods in their personal histories that, in later years, they would be ashamed to acknowledge to employers, friends, family members.
The war broke out in suburban North London, five months after the Konstantin George brainwashing crisis. And, rather as any history of the First World War must describe what happened to Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his duchess on a boulevard in Sarajevo in June 1914, the history of LaRouche’s CIA-KGB psy-war must begin with an account of what happened to Chris and Carol White on Woodfield Avenue, Colindale, during Christmas 1973.
* * *
I FIRST MET the Whites at a Vietnamese restaurant in a strip mall on the edge of Leesburg, Virginia. Carol, a small, shrewd, birdlike woman in her eighties, was waiting outside. They did not disguise their unease. “We’ll hate you when this is over,” said Carol, ruefully. But I spent more time with them than anyone else in the story. We cooked for one another, swapped recipes and books, hung out in diners, went hiking through the Blue Ridge Mountains. I grew to admire them: unlike some of the deserters who acted beside them, they could name the madness in which they participated, honestly and on the record.
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