Eight hundred delegates had been accredited for the opening day of the NCLC New York conference. Visitors from overseas and out of town were billeted with members who had apartments in the city. It was not a closed meeting. Attendees were encouraged to bring their parents. Day care facilities were provided.
There were two old Stockholm comrades in the audience. Warren Hamerman was present with his new girlfriend, Nora, who had just finished an art history master’s at New York University. Another alumnus of the Next Step, Bill Engdahl, had arrived from Chicago and was staying with Molly and Ken Kronberg, a married pair of NCLC activists who had a place on West Seventy-Third Street.
Everyone had gathered to hear some confident Marxist analysis of the energy crisis. Instead, they received what their own newspaper, New Solidarity, described as “an actual battlefield report of the most devastating psychological warfare operation ever mounted in history.” The parents in the room were not impressed.
“Jesus Christ,” exclaimed Molly Kronberg’s mother. “What’s wrong with these people?” Others expressed their skepticism more quietly. But Warren Hamerman and Bill Engdahl swallowed the story in one gulp.
Molly Kronberg now lives near Chris and Carol in Virginia. On one of my trips we met up to discuss the events of that holiday season. Molly recalled that Bill Engdahl was a restless presence on their couch that weekend. LaRouche’s speech, he said, had given him nightmares. In his most troubling vision, he saw the leader of the Labor Committees being throttled to death by an assailant with huge, muscular arms. Thanks to his use of crutches, Bill Engdahl himself possessed a pair of huge, muscular arms. The following night, with their guest sleeping in the next room, the Kronbergs went nervously to bed.
At some point in the small hours of Monday, December 31, Molly and Ken were woken by a phone call from LaRouche’s intelligence chief, Ed Spannaus, reporting on the first night of Chris White’s deprogramming. Ed urged Molly to assemble the press team and start alerting the media.
“Ken and I got dressed in our bedroom very quietly—sneakers, jeans, the whole thing,” Molly told me, acutely aware that she was describing a scene from a farce. “Then Bill appeared at our bedroom door and we jumped back into bed, under the covers, fully clad.”
The Kronbergs tried to pretend there was nothing amiss. Engdahl didn’t buy it. Perhaps he saw their shoes sticking out from under the sheets. Wild-eyed and agitated, he began ranting about brainwashing and assassinations. Another element increased the atmosphere of hysteria. Molly and Ken Kronberg had never seen their friend without his leg braces. Now he was leaping around the apartment, propelled by his enormous biceps, as his crossed legs swung beneath him. Then came the pièce de résistance.
“I had this little pink polished ornament in the shape of a pig,” Molly told me. “I guess it’s quartz. It was on my bureau. Bill picked it up and stuck it in his mouth. I thought, ‘Okay, that does it. Something very wrong is going on here.’”
The Kronbergs told Bill Engdahl that they were popping out to see their downstairs neighbors. “And this is one of the most chickenshit things I’ve ever done,” confessed Molly. “We did not go back to the apartment. We did not say, ‘Gee, he’s in trouble; we need to help him.’ We just were terrified. We were convinced he was going to kill us.” As they crept down the stairs, they could hear Bill Engdahl crashing around their living room.
* * *
IT WAS NEW Year’s Eve, and the Labor Committees were at war. Its leader had inferred the existence of the conflict from the exhausted hysteria of a man in the throes of a psychotic episode. In doing so, LaRouche had abandoned his own sanity. Now it was time for his followers to do the same. The troops mobilized at the Ansonia Hotel on Broadway and West Seventy-Third Street. The Ansonia’s unheated conference hall became the NCLC war room. The brains of the intelligence section pored over shipping reports and manifests, hoping to identify a vessel with a Cuban execution squad on board. (One member was dispatched to watch the docks.) Security staff searched delegates as they arrived. Molly Kronberg gathered her colleagues on the press team and took notes.
Once everyone had been pronounced clean, Ed Spannaus began the briefing. It was bad news. The brainwashed were among them. The KGB was planning to gain control of the Labor Committees by decapitating its leadership. Anyone in the room might be the unwitting bearer of the assassination program. Those present were invited to consider any gaps in their recent memory, during which conditioning might have taken place. Those who suspected themselves were invited to give their names to the security staff, then return home to await instructions. Using the telephone was forbidden—one call might be the means to deliver a lethal trigger word and end the life of Lyndon LaRouche.
“The message,” said Tessa DeCarlo, “was ‘Be afraid, be very afraid.’ It was like some horrible seventies paranoid movie, starring us. I was terrified, my husband was terrified, and everybody else looked terrified. Some people now say that they didn’t believe it, but in that moment, how could you not believe it?”
One event made the scenario infinitely more compelling. The appearance of Bill Engdahl, who staggered into the room, firmly convinced that he was an unwitting part of the conspiracy. “He couldn’t account for certain days and assumed he was One of Them,” Christina told me.
“Bill went berserk,” recalled Tessa. “He was this amiable, levelheaded guy. He was ambling around, screaming, ‘Cancel me, cancel me!’” In his panic, Engdahl lost control of his crutches and went crashing down a flight of stairs. Security staff picked him up, bundled him into a Volkswagen Beetle, and drove him off to Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital.
“It was,” recalled Molly, “like an image from Hieronymus Bosch.”
Ed Spannaus, however, seemed satisfied by the uproar. They had foiled the assassination plot. It was the greatest moment in their history. “This,” he declared, “should be a time of joy.”
Engdahl’s spectacular collapse altered the flow of suspicion within the group. The new brainwash victim had been a protégé of Michael Vale. Michael Vale was an expert in Soviet psychology. In recent months, he had distanced himself from the Labor Committees. Perhaps the GI deserter network was not what it seemed. Perhaps it was a mechanism for delivering agents across continents, and programmed assassins into the presence of their targets. The security staff began taking the names of anyone who had recently visited Stockholm. Several people were ordered to isolate themselves in their apartments and await the arrival of a member of the intelligence staff. The rule also applied to those who had spent time with anyone who had been to Sweden. Soon, a dozen or so senior figures were under house arrest.
As the only close associate of Michael Vale present at the conference, Warren Hamerman ought to have been top of the list of suspects. His gung ho attitude, however, seems to have removed him from consideration. Nobody was keener than Warren to detect the enemy infiltrators. Molly Kronberg offered an explanation for his zeal: since returning to the States from Germany, Warren had been dissatisfied with his lowly position in the NCLC hierarchy. “All this brainwashing stuff,” she told me, “was a great opportunity for promotion.”
It was a smart move. Anyone who cast doubt on the Manchurian Candidate hypothesis was identified as a Manchurian Candidate. On Wednesday, January 2, 1974, six prominent members dismissed the whole business as a cynical power play. “In cases directly known to us the only conceivable substance of these charges is internal political opposition to the increasingly moronic policies of the leadership,” they wrote. “In light of the latest spate of psychotic denunciations we have strong reason to suspect that all dissenters and critics will be hysterically singled out as KGB-CIA agents and the like.”
They were right. The signatories were informed that they, too, had been brainwashed, and they were urged to submit to LaRouche to have the process reversed. “We,” said the reply, “are the only people in the world who can. Why? Because we know how—slowly and painfully—to unlock the cage door and allow self-conscio
usness [and] humanity to re-emerge.”
These dissenters were permitted to leave. But when Alice Weitzman, a twenty-two-year-old music student and recent recruit to the Labor Committees, expressed her skepticism about the brainwashing conspiracy, she was taken prisoner. A knot of members confined her to her apartment in upper Manhattan and attempted to deprogram her by using medicine prescribed by LaRouche—Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, turned up to eleven.
After a few hours of this ordeal she scribbled a note pleading for help, folded it into a paper airplane, and launched it from her living room window. A child below picked it up and showed it to her mother, who called the cops. Forty minutes later, the police were running up the stairs of Weitzman’s apartment building and snapping their handcuffs on six NCLC members.
Weitzman’s testimony led to a second police raid, on the apartment of Ed and Nancy Spannaus. Molly Kronberg was present when it happened and remembers pandemonium, the Spannaus children cowering in their bunk beds, and the strong conviction that everybody present was going to be shot. But as Weitzman declined to press charges, nobody was incommoded for long.
* * *
CHRIS WHITE, MEANWHILE, was still being held in NCLC custody. By day he was left alone and given the Pastoral Symphony treatment. By night, in a series of different apartments across New York, his interrogation resumed, the invention and revision of the bizarre dream-narrative with which LaRouche had become breathlessly obsessed.
Lyn pushed harder, and Chris gave him the fantastic details he thought he wanted to hear.
Chris’s position at the William Collins School in Camden was now identified as a setup from the start. There had been no job. There weren’t even any children on the premises. Instead of teaching a class on American history, he had been subjected to a grueling fifty-two-day course of behavior modification.
On his arrival at school on September 17, 1973, Chris had been jabbed by two hypodermic needles and removed to the basement. Strange sounds were piped into his ears from a phone line connected to a remote computer. An interrogator taunted him about his father, and commanded him to eat his own excrement. An electric shock was the penalty for refusal.
Visual imagery was provided by a series of filmstrips projected on the wall. One showed Chris loitering outside government offices near Trafalgar Square and seemed to prove that he had been involved in a recent IRA bomb attack there. The most dreadful of these filmstrips, however, offered a record of the tortures supposedly endured by Bill Engdahl in Sweden. Images slid through the projector. Engdahl sitting on a chair with a ketchup bottle inserted into his anus. Engdahl consuming a dinner of his own feces. The mirror image of Chris’s torture, occurring in some sister facility near Stockholm.
Chris was told that his conscious mind had retained no memories of this process because at three p.m. each day, he was disentangled from the apparatus, settled down, and shown another series of photographs. Rows of children looking back at him from their desks. Images of the normal school day that he would describe to Carol when he got home to Colindale.
Although his main contribution to the field had been the unpublished paper “Shoe Data Processing Comes of Age,” LaRouche considered himself an expert in information technology. Under interrogation, he claimed, Bill Engdahl had babbled a series of coded commands. Numbers, letters, lines of Boolean algebra. Chris and Bill, LaRouche asserted, had been programmed like a pair of IBM computers. “Reduced,” he said, in terminology that had gone out of fashion ten years previously, “to an eight-cycle infinite loop with a look-up table.” (He would eventually transcribe the code for publication, though he always refrained from speaking it aloud, believing that it might alter the behavior of his audience.)
The discovery of this sequence of numbers and letters had turned the whole case on its head. This wasn’t a plot by the Russian intelligence services to gain control of the Labor Committees and use them as a cover for their activities in the States. It was much worse than that. It was nothing less than a battle plan for the overthrow of democracy. A scheme to create a totalitarian America through the mass application of mind-control technology.
The KGB was a junior partner, possibly a dupe. The masterminds were the men of the CIA. But the CIA, LaRouche determined, was the tool of Nelson Rockefeller. And Chris, in his delirium, had called their project by its name: “Operation Chaos and Confusion.” He’d plucked it from the air, but LaRouche liked the sound of it. It was certainly true to the spirit of their situation.
“Maybe,” I suggested to Chris, “as he worked on you, trying to get you to crack, trying to get you to agree with his version of events, he cracked himself in some way? Maybe, in the act of trying to take you apart, Lyn managed to deconstruct himself?” Chris did not dismiss the idea.
* * *
AFTER SEVERAL SLEEPLESS nights of intrigue and alarm, the men and women of the Labor Committees were also beginning to show a few cracks. Perhaps that made it easier to accept the latest revelations. They were now at war with the CIA as well as the KGB. LaRouche, with an unerring instinct for colorful detail, decreed that no sleeper agent would be capable of hearing the phrase “CIA rats eat shit” without suffering a violent mental implosion. Members began shouting it at one another. Some rang up Alice Weitzman and yelled it over the phone.
Getting information through to the outside world proved more difficult. Two members of the organization went on a Manhattan radio station to spread the news: the host asked them if they were mentally ill. The press team called ABC, NBC, the New York Times, the New York Post, and the New York Review of Books. Molly Kronberg spent a peculiar few minutes on the line trying to stir the interest of the TV journalist Geraldo Rivera. When nobody bit, they produced a handbill claiming that the story was being suppressed on the orders of the CIA.
The only notable public relations success was, in part, the work of Warren Hamerman, who joined the task of recruiting an Emergency National Committee of Inquiry into the brainwashing of Chris White—a synod of authorities who would examine the case and act as custodians of the evidence if the CIA attempted to abduct, arrest, or murder any of its principals. Surprisingly, a number of prominent individuals agreed to consider participating. A lawyer, a union official, several church leaders, and a former IBM executive who had become president of Sarah Lawrence College and was probably persuaded because he was Tessa DeCarlo’s worried father. The committee never sat, nor issued any report, but the names looked good on the press release, and within months LaRouche had rewarded Warren with a position on the National Executive council. “A decision to co-opt Warren Hamerman onto the NEC,” he announced, “merely certifies the national leadership he has demonstrated since January, qualities that are well known to the membership throughout the continent.” It was the beginning of a three-decade tenure as one of LaRouche’s most trusted lieutenants.
* * *
ON THURSDAY, JANUARY 3, 1974, flyers went out across the city for the showstopping finale of the brainwash affair. A public meeting at the Marc Ballroom, a shabby venue on the west side of Union Square, at which Lyn Marcus promised to enumerate the crimes of the CIA and the New York City police—“two insurgent government agencies … in the process of psychologically brainwashing extensive portions of the populations with the ultimate plan being the takeover by the CIA of the United States of America.”
Molly Kronberg was asked not to attend. “A bunch of us were rounded up and taken to the Alternate Command Center. That was an apartment in the Bronx owned by a guy called Danny. We were told, ‘If the Marc Ballroom gets blown up, you guys have to call the press.’” As she related the story, she burst out laughing. “And, of course, the thing is, we didn’t bat an eye.”
LaRouche’s concluding speech that night was the maddest and most significant of his career. Even in its published form—edited and tidied up by the press team, and circulated in the organization’s New Solidarity newspaper—it reads like a conspiracy theorist’s attempt at a Samuel Beckett monologue, a breathless
surge of paranoia, threats, and filthy talk, punctuated with the names of those he imagined were moving against him. As he went to the lectern, LaRouche hushed the applause and urged his audience to remain calm. Then he delivered a lecture calculated to scare them out of their wits.
“A man of great dignity, a comrade, was sitting on a couch sucking a pig one morning recently,” he declared, turning Bill Engdahl’s breakdown into a horrible bedtime story. “Why was he actuating a pig? Because his control was in the Russian language, and ‘pig’ in Russian is penis. He was receiving a reward—what’s called ‘freedom’—‘svoboda’—for having completed a part of his assignment for the CIA.”
The dubious Greg Rose must have briefed LaRouche on Slavic genital vocabulary. The Russian word for penis is nothing like “pig.” There were probably people in the audience who could have corrected him. But nobody did. LaRouche was unstoppable, describing the visceral horrors of the brainwashing process—the products of his own imagination, fortified with images bullied out of Chris.
“I ask you to contemplate the high-voltage electro-convulsive shock therapy,” he said. “I ask you to contemplate eating shit as a way of getting less pain. I ask you to contemplate sucking a penis as a way of getting less pain. I ask you to contemplate sitting for hours with a bottle shoved up your rectum as a way of easing pain.” As he described the ultimate stage of the brainwashing process, his words collapsed into incoherence.
“There are some more real beauties,” he promised. “The best of them all—you know what it is? Svoboda. How does the program end? Svoboda, you’re free. The person goes into a final total caricature, sort of a Stepin Fetchit homosexual act. Pathetic. Worse. Like a dead cow. It begins to die. He’s free. Automatic crematoria. No gas ovens required. The person is programmed to self-destruct. That’s his freedom.”
There was detail, too, on where this programming had taken place. “We have the scoop,” LaRouche declared, “of one of the nastiest, most vicious CIA operations—the brainwashing institutes of Sweden. It’s a great place to go for a vacation. But don’t eat anything, don’t drink anything. You may not come back a man, or a woman.”
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