The Whites grew up years and a continent apart. Chris spent his early life in the English penal system: his father was deputy governor of HM Prison Lincoln. Academic success came early. Chris won a scholarship to Christ’s Hospital, a venerable public school in Sussex. By the end of the sixties, he had embraced the radical life, and was working on a PhD about the peasant revolts in seventeenth-century Brittany. He was also organizing for the British Trotskyist group International Socialists, which—on a trip to New York in 1971—brought him into contact with the NCLC and with Carol.
Carol was born in Brooklyn a decade before her husband. Her family, the Kronbergers, arrived from Austria-Hungary in 1892. Her maternal grandfather was an organizer for the Communist Party who worked as an electrician at the Metropolitan Opera. He would sing as he worked on the lighting rig—so well that he was offered a job in the chorus, but without sufficient money to tempt him away from filaments and sparks.
Carol had been twice married by the time she met Chris. First to a fellow activist in the Socialist Workers Party; second to a cartoonist named George Larrabee, in a ceremony that turned out not to be legal, thanks to an administrative omission on the part of the priest.
When she spoke of her life with Lyndon LaRouche, Carol insisted that for all the weirdness that came later he was once a man capable of ordinary pleasures. He liked kayaking and rock climbing and country walks. He liked Mission Impossible and The Man from U.N.C.L.E. But, she conceded, he could be secretive, self-absorbed, and volatile. When they played chess together, he would abandon a game if he thought he was losing. When once she expressed a tolerant attitude toward homosexual relationships between men in prison, he gave her a black eye. When she bought his son, Danny, a set of racing cars, LaRouche and the boy hunkered down on the floor of the apartment to play. “But Lyn disagreed with him about how to set up the track,” she explained, “and started screaming at him that his choices were immoral.”
In early 1972, Carol broke off the relationship with LaRouche. He took the separation badly. “Now,” he wrote in a savage little letter, “you are an empty, stinking hulk with a residual political value, which latter must be treated with the respect your person does not merit.” Carol paid little heed to such insults. Chris, who was in Paris working on his PhD, invited her to join him in Paris. She accepted. The thesis remained unfinished, but a new relationship began.
A few months later the couple moved to London to recruit members to a British branch of the Labor Committees. They were married in March 1973, and celebrated with their fellow activist Tessa DeCarlo at a pizza joint by the Roundhouse theater in Camden. Carol taught math to private pupils; Chris gave history lessons at the Sir William Collins Secondary School near St. Pancras station. The pupils were unruly, and Chris dreaded each new working day. On the weekends they sold copies of New Solidarity on the steps of the London School of Economics, or did karate practice on Hampstead Heath. Although the Whites had little luck in attracting new members, the Colindale flat became a magnet for wannabe revolutionaries. One or two of their visitors were members of the Angry Brigade, an anarchist group responsible for bombing the home of a Conservative cabinet minister. Most of them were hungry. To avoid being eaten out of house and home, the Whites sometimes pretended to be out.
* * *
FOR THE HOLIDAY season of 1973, Carol organized a cadre school in London for members of the European Labor Committees. The venue was the Conway Hall, an atmospheric nineteenth-century auditorium in Red Lion Square, long associated with progressive politics. “There was going to be general Christmas cheer and turkeys,” recalled Chris, “as well as classes and discussions.” Delegates arrived from France, Germany, Italy, and Sweden. Cliff Gaddy and his Swedish girlfriend Kerstin Tegin were among them. So was a member named Michael Liebig, who had helped LaRouche in his interrogation of Konstantin George.
In the cold days between Christmas and New Year, the young revolutionaries of the European Labor Committees sat on plastic chairs listening to lectures about classical music and the relationships between the work of Hegel, Feuerbach, and Marx. The atmosphere was cheerful and anti-American. Everyone was having a good time. Then the Whites took Cliff Gaddy and a small group of NCLC friends back to the flat in Colindale and the phone rang.
The voice on the end of the line was Greg Rose, a new and rather pompous member of LaRouche’s security staff in Manhattan. The Whites had been expecting some contact from the parent organization: Chris was booked to fly from Gatwick to New York the following day, in order to give LaRouche a personal progress report on NCLC activities in Britain. But this was not the subject Rose wished to discuss. He was calling from New York with more urgent information. There was, he said, a brainwashed infiltrator among the delegates in London. An unwitting agent, probably KGB. Chris was ordered to detect the spy, interrogate him, and deprogram him.
“It was a total paranoid intervention from the U.S.,” said Chris. “They had us totally freaked out.”
In situations like this, the finger of suspicion can point anywhere. That night, it pointed at Clifford Garland Gaddy. He was the only Russian speaker in the room. He had visited the Soviet Union. He seemed the most likely candidate. The room fell silent. Space was cleared for an interrogation, which would be carried out by Chris White and Michael Liebig. The questioning began. Was Cliff an infiltrator? Had he been programmed, like Konstantin George? Was he a creature of the KGB?
“It went on for hours,” said Carol. “It got nasty. But Cliff just went silent.” Perhaps this was his best policy. A denial would not have been accepted. This was a guilt that lay beyond the barrier of the conscious mind.
Eventually, the shouting stopped and the interrogation was abandoned. Cliff got up off the floor, an entirely unpeeled onion. Everyone went awkwardly to bed, knowing that a line had been crossed.
* * *
CHRIS WHITE IS a gentle man. He likes books and research. He likes cooking and bird watching. It was easy to imagine him coming to the end of this ordeal more shaken up than his victim; easy to see how his imminent trip to New York would have amplified his anxieties. What would he say when LaRouche asked him if he had exposed the spy at work in the European Labor Committees? That night, he barely slept.
The following morning, Carol, Cliff, Kerstin, and the others went back to the Conway Hall for more lectures and seminars, but the atmosphere had lost its jollity. Chris kissed his wife goodbye and set out for Gatwick Airport. He intended to be away for just over a week—long enough to attend the NCLC annual conference in New York before returning to London for the start of the new school term. At his kitchen table in Leesburg, Chris found it hard to describe his state of mind that day. Was he anxious about returning to the States to face Lyndon LaRouche, after his failed attempt to deprogram Cliff Gaddy? Perhaps. Did he expect to be criticized for having recruited so few members to the British branch of the Labor Committees? Maybe. Was he, as a former member suggested, fearful that LaRouche would punish him for having married Carol? Absolutely not, he insisted. This wasn’t a story about a love triangle. So might he have suffered some kind of breakdown? Chris thought this quite possible, and he was willing to question the veracity of his own memories.
The preliminary details were surprisingly bright and clear to him. He described British Caledonian flight 221 taking off, gaining altitude, heading northward. He recalled looking through the window and seeing a knot of flames erupt from one of the engines; the captain announcing their return to Gatwick; the plane making awkward landfall at its point of embarkation. He could even remember the color of the upholstery, how he sat alone in a bank of three seats. But it sometimes felt—to both of us, I think—as if I were asking him to recall the events of a dream, or a half-remembered episode of The Avengers. And if flight 221 did suffer engine trouble on that day, it escaped the aviation industry’s register of nonfatal accidents.
The next part of the story sounded like pure hallucination: the fantasies of a man who had entered a psychotic state. Fro
m Gatwick, Chris believed, most of his fellow passengers were bused to Heathrow to catch another flight—while he and two other refugees from flight 221, a Mr. Walsh and Mrs. Schroeder, were taken to the Copthorne, a nearby country club in forty acres of Surrey parkland. Chris recalled taking a short nap in his room, then coming down for tea—which he soon concluded had been spiked by Mr. Walsh. He remembered feeling a sudden pang of anxiety, handing his key to the concierge and ordering a taxi to the station, leaving Walsh and Schroeder behind in the tearoom. On the train back to London, he felt no better. “I was panicky,” he told me. “Not really in good shape at all. Woozy, high heart rate.”
Instead of heading home, he went to the Conway Hall, where the NCLC cadre school was in session. It was getting dark by the time he arrived. He stumbled through the door into a lecture on the Bach Passions and announced that he’d been drugged. Carol, sitting in the audience, was astounded to see him. “His face was frozen,” she told me. “He looked really weird. He didn’t want to be with me. He went off with some other people in the organization.”
Those people might have taken him to a hospital. Instead, they interrogated him as Cliff Gaddy had been interrogated the night before. Later that day, they announced that Chris had identified the KGB spy. It was Carol.
Carol felt compelled to defend herself. If Chris had been brainwashed, then he may have been brainwashed to accuse his wife. But where could this process have been carried out? Only, replied Carol, at the place from which he had come home miserable each day. The Sir William Collins Secondary School in Camden. Her theory did nothing to defuse the situation. Instead, it had developed the story, and made it seem all the more real. The organization was hunting for brainwashed spies. Chris’s breakdown was an unwitting audition piece for a role that could have been played by anyone in the group.
“Why did you say it?” I asked.
“I flipped,” she said.
So did everyone else. Panic broke out in the group. Brainwashing was immediately accepted as the most likely explanation for Chris White’s strange behavior. Cliff Gaddy and Kerstin Tegin packed their bags and returned to Stockholm. The German contingent fled back to Berlin. Chris’s condition deteriorated further: he was noisy and agitated, hallucinating a halo of colors around his head. A call to British Caledonian produced no satisfactory account of events. A call to a British investigative journalist produced the claim that the mysterious Mr. Walsh and Mrs. Schroeder were MI5 agents. This doubtful assertion was instantly accepted as fact. British intelligence was now part of the narrative.
The panic then went transatlantic. Greg Rose, LaRouche’s security chief, summoned the Whites and four of their American comrades back to Manhattan, warning them not to eat the airline food. The only member with a credit card booked their party on a flight to JFK. Sandwiches were made and wrapped in foil.
Carol tried to keep her husband calm as they boarded the plane. Her efforts, though, were undone by the in-flight movie. In his agitated state, Chris became convinced that the film was being screened in order to reinforce his conditioning. They watched an underwater sequence with frogmen rising from the sea. They watched a love scene between the hero and his girlfriend, a woman around ten years his senior. They saw the lover shot dead in her car, the hero avenge her murder by killing the old patriarch of the story, then commit suicide with poison. This, Chris believed, was the script he was required to follow on his arrival in Manhattan.
“We were too cheap to buy the headphones,” Chris told me. “So that made the impression all the more powerful.” As the plane landed, he yanked off his seat belt and got to his feet. “The CIA,” he declared, adding another player to the game. “They’re going to kill my wife!”
His fellow passengers assumed he was joking. Chris sat down again. By the time they disembarked, he had recovered enough presence of mind to pass through customs without arousing the interest of the immigration officials.
Outside the terminal building, three cars were waiting to collect them. It was the NCLC security team—veterans of Operation Mop-Up who had proven their skill in beating up American Communists with nunchakus. They drove the Whites to 65 Morton Street, Carol’s old apartment. It was a small place, which seemed even smaller when packed with the gang that LaRouche had assembled to deal with Chris. Greg Rose. More heavies from the NCLC security staff. Gene Inch, a pediatrician from Long Island, a new recruit to the movement. And LaRouche himself—a man who had spent months readying himself and his comrades for some imminent but obscure form of psychological warfare. They were a receptive audience for the declaration Chris made as he came face-to-face with Lyndon LaRouche.
“I’ve come here to assassinate you,” he said.
“Did you believe it?” I asked, forty years later. “As you walked through that door, did you really believe that you had been programmed to kill him?”
“No,” said Chris. “All I can say is that in that moment, it seemed to me that was the quickest route to getting the whole thing settled.”
It wasn’t.
* * *
LAROUCHE AND HIS team made Chris stand in the middle of the room. Someone pressed PLAY and RECORD on a reel-to-reel tape machine. The group bombarded him with questions—the same kind of questions with which Chris had bombarded Cliff Gaddy just a few days before. Had he been sent by the KGB to infiltrate the Labor Committees? Was he a spy? Was he a Russian agent?
“He can’t be,” said Carol. “He looks just like his mother.”
LaRouche smiled at her naïveté. “You don’t understand about cosmetic operations,” he said. As with so much LaRouchian thinking, the first step of the argument was a triple somersault. But everybody jumped with him, and they jumped all night.
Dr. Inch tried hypnotism. LaRouche tried shouting. A breakthrough, the interrogators claimed, came between three and three thirty in the early hours of December 31—and the proof was captured on magnetic tape. The results are now lost but were heard by Paul Montgomery, a New York Times journalist who wrote up the story three weeks later. “There are sounds of weeping and vomiting on the tape, and Mr. White complains of being deprived of sleep, food and cigarettes,” Montgomery reported. “At one point someone says ‘raise the voltage,’ but Mr. Marcus says this was associated with the bright lights used in the questioning rather than an electric shock.”
At another point in the recording, Chris reacts to an excruciating pain in his arm. LaRouche seizes upon this as evidence for his programming. “The pain is real!” screams Chris. “I have to tell you what’s real and stop this crazy fantasy world. Because it’s not my fantasy.” Sometimes, however, he loses the will to contradict his interrogator, and LaRouche expresses his satisfaction. “Now do you see, Carol? Do you believe?”
Montgomery concluded that whatever Lyn Marcus had cracked, it wasn’t a brainwashing plot. “To a layman,” he wrote, “it appears obvious that the elements of the conspiracy he claims to extract from Mr. White’s mind are harmless bits of personal history or ideas suggested by Mr. Marcus himself.”
Four decades later, Chris White thought this a reasonable assessment. “Someone knows what they want you to say, and they keep badgering at you until you say something like what they want you to say. Then when you say something like what they want you to say, they take that and go further with it.”
Further they went. Greg Rose questioned Chris in Russian. Chris couldn’t speak it—but to everyone’s astonishment, he replied in what Rose reported was the Russian of a six-year-old with a heavy Ukrainian accent. (Rose, it later emerged, knew barely a word of the language, so what really occurred was an exchange of meaningless pseudo-Slavic noises.)
Chris’s description of the in-flight movie proved a particularly rich source of material. From his ramblings about the film’s underwater sequences, Marcus made one of the bizarre leaps of logic upon which his power over the group seemed to depend. A seven-strong squad of Cuban frogmen, he declared, was waiting beneath the Hudson to strike him dead, on receipt of a sig
nal from Chris, relayed via a KGB middleman living in Greenwich Village. If this amphibian murder squad failed in its mission, Chris’s programming would then compel him to lunge at Marcus with any available sharp instrument. Once the deed was done, the assassin would then execute himself by biting into a cyanide capsule planted into one of his teeth. Or possibly his bowel; LaRouche always favored the scatological angle.
LaRouche had created an environment in which all this seemed perfectly logical. His comrades thought they were being prudent when they took Chris to the emergency room at St. Vincent’s Hospital and asked the staff to extract the cyanide capsule. Nothing, of course, could be detected. They thought they were doing the right thing when they dragged Chris into the consulting room of a psychiatrist in Brooklyn and asked him to confirm that they were dealing with a case of brainwashing. The doctor shrugged at the question and warned that Chris was in a psychotic state and required proper hospital care—a diagnosis confirmed when the patient suddenly emerged from his state of dazed passivity to declare, “Lyn, we’ve done it. We’ve defeated the unholy alliance between man and goat—the Popular Front.”
* * *
CHRIS WHITE’S DEPROGRAMMING was a chamber drama that involved bright lights, sleep deprivation, and free association with Cold War imagery borrowed from the movies. But beyond its walls, a bigger production was being mounted. The curtain had opened on Saturday, December 29, 1973, the day before the Whites touched down in New York, as telephone messages about Cliff’s interrogation and Chris’s breakdown were crackling between Colindale and Manhattan.
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