The mastermind of this program, he revealed, was a figure known to many present at the meeting. A charismatic intellectual who led the community of Vietnam deserters living in Swedish exile. An ideologue with a reputation for breaking men apart and rebuilding them as revolutionaries. A man who had encouraged the deserters to make common cause with the Labor Committees. “Mike Vale,” said LaRouche, “is the bastard who … got poor slobs like us into this mess. Vale is the guy who ruined a lot of good men. A real crud.”
Like much of the speech, this was pure improvisation. LaRouche thought he had uncovered a trans-European network of brainwashed agents. He might have named any number of potential villains. But Michael Vale’s name was the one with which he began to riff.
Out came the story: Michael Vale was no ally in the struggle, but an agent of the CIA. He had connived to put Jim McGourty behind bars, in order to protect himself and his coconspirators. He had also been responsible for the mysterious incident the previous summer, when Konstantin George had been photographed at a meeting in East Berlin, and professed to have no conscious memory of the trip. Bo Burlingham, the former Weatherman who had run a deserters’ group in Paris, was one of Vale’s gang. More mystifyingly, so was the British poet Stephen Spender.
No alternative reading of these events was permissible. “Anyone who says this is a hoax—let him go down and look at Bill Engdahl. Let him hear the tapes of what Chris White went through, let him see what White has to go through to get out of this damn thing. Any of you who say this is a hoax—you’re cruds, you’re subhuman! You’re not serious. The human race is at stake. Either we win or there is no humanity. That’s the way she’s cut.”
* * *
LAROUCHE’S ELUCIDATION OF the plot against America defies synopsis. Its purpose, perhaps, was to be incomprehensible. A class war, he said, had started. The shooting would soon begin. People in the room could expect to be killed. Orwell’s 1984 would become Sunday reading, a picture of prelapsarian paradise. Nelson Rockefeller would be the chief beneficiary, elevated to a totalitarian presidency by the machinations of the CIA, whose brainwashing program had already begun in America’s prisons and factories. LaRouche was one of the few people alive capable of cracking this mental conditioning, which meant the Labor Committees were a threat to this plan. So the CIA had launched Operation Chaos and Confusion “to discredit the organization, and then create the conditions under which a hit could be done without much public furor.”
Even LaRouche acknowledged that it was all insanely overcomplicated—this, he explained, was why he didn’t understand the plot the moment Chris White landed in New York: “We’ve got a game of three-player Riemannian chess, among the world’s three psychological powers: the KGB, the CIA, and the Labor Committees. Right. That’s exactly what it is. The most fantastic thing you ever imagined. And the reason I missed the boat on this thing is I said, ‘God, it can’t be that. What’s the matter? It’s getting to me. It’s impossible.’”
In this, at least, he was right.
13 / THE ZOMBIE ARMY
AS THIS MADNESS blossomed, Jim McGourty, halfway through his sentence for deserting from the marines, sat in a cell at Camp Lejeune, awaiting news from the New York conference. It arrived in the form of a telephone call from a breathless Warren Hamerman, who brought him up to date on the brainwashing, the killer frogmen, and the international conspiracy in which their former mentor, Michael Vale, had played the role of mindbender in chief. Jim did not understand all the details, but he believed them. When, three weeks later, Michael turned up to visit him in his confinement, Jim was forewarned and forearmed.
His old friend arrived with a piece of paper in his hand. An article cut from the New York Times: “How a Radical-Left Group Moved Toward Savagery.” Its author, Paul Montgomery, had visited the offices of the Labor Committees and interviewed LaRouche. “He talked virtually nonstop about his life and his theories,” Montgomery reported. “Only once did his reasoned, pipe-smoking professorial air vanish—when, with an explosion of spittle, he lunged with an imaginary knife to show how a CIA-programmed assassin might kill him.” Jim read the piece, and listened as Michael gave him his assessment. “Marcus has initiated a test for total allegiance,” said Michael. “You and me and Michele are included in that group and believed to be CIA agents—and you will never be able to convince them otherwise.”
After his phone conversation with Warren Hamerman, Jim was determined to walk the LaRouchian line. Michael Vale was not to be trusted. Jim now blamed Michael for all his misfortunes, even the sudden cessation of his subscription to New Solidarity, which had prevented him from reading official accounts of the deprogramming of Chris White and Bill Engdahl. The books Michael sent were now construed as a form of attack. Jean Piaget’s Insights and Illusions of Philosophy was an attempt to wean Jim off Marxism. Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons was a choice “drawn from the pages of my psychological profile, which related to my lack of a relationship to my father during the crucial years of adolescence.” Most of all, Jim was suspicious of Michael’s Christmas visits to Michele, who was living with her parents in Washington, DC.
In February 1974, Jim left Camp Lejeune. He and twenty-eight other prisoners were flown north on a U.S. Navy plane and dumped, shivering, on an airfield somewhere in New Hampshire. They boarded a bus, on which they sat with their hands crossed and their heads pressed against the seat in front, to prevent them memorizing the route to their new home. The Naval Prison in Portsmouth. A new place for Jim to brood over Michael’s apparent treachery.
* * *
THE CHRIS WHITE Affair, as it soon became known in LaRouchian lore, sent a surge of paranoid energy through the Labor Committees. Loyalists, like Warren, were rewarded with important-sounding job titles. Dissenters walked. Waverers were identified as spies or Manchurian Candidates and expelled. “Put simply,” one former member told me, “the group lost its mind. It became a kind of Manichean cult.”
The wider membership was kept informed by the NCLC’s monthly magazine, the Campaigner. The February issue offered a landmark horror story. “On the Track of My Assassins”—an intense and detailed first-person account of Chris’s ordeal—illustrated with the hideous image of a human head, a hemisphere of bone removed to expose the brain beneath. It told how Chris had been saved from becoming “a self-perpetuating mental zombie.” It urged revolutionary war against the CIA brainwashers. “These two-legged rodents are the men who condemned me, and others, to death. They are not, however, interested in me alone. They are after your mind as well.… That is why you will join with us to hunt my assassins down. You know as well as we do that you have no other choice. Your humanity is at stake.”
“Did you write all that?” I asked him.
“That’s Lyn talking,” he said.
At the time, Chris didn’t feel able to resist LaRouche’s act of ventriloquism. Others did, however. In March, Christine Berl, the concert pianist who was one of the organization’s biggest fundraising assets, voiced her concerns about the growing madness of the Labor Committees. She then received a three a.m. phone call informing her that she was a “potential traitor to the human race.” Terrified, she and her partner set out their position in a document circulated to their friends, urging them to contact the authorities “in the event of our disappearance.” Berl’s principal conclusions were correct and clearheaded. Chris White and Bill Engdahl, she asserted, had never been brainwashed. Lyn Marcus’s enemies were chimerical. The organization had “embarked on a process of autocannibalism.”
Predictably, LaRouche had already taken another mouthful of flesh. In an internal bulletin headed “Why Christine Berl Could Be Turned into a Zombie,” he explained that the pianist was particularly vulnerable to mental attack from the CIA thanks to her poor relationship with her mother and her interest in the atonal music of the Second Viennese School.
He issued another paper that formed a kind of contract with the remaining members of the Labor Committees, laying out the rules o
f the parallel universe in which they would now be required to dwell. He praised them for their “magnificent response” to the New Year crisis. He mourned the collapse of the British branch of the organization, particularly as the coming CIA takeover of the United Kingdom would have “permitted us to recruit fantastically, within the prisons and concentration camps in which our members would have been shortly prime pioneer candidates.” He acknowledged the emotional impact of the brainwashing affair—though only as a spur to more sacrifices. “We are faced with the fearful infinity of a world in which we, tiny, virtually alone at the moment, must take responsibility for the very future existence of the human race,” he wrote. “The mind reaches for comprehension of that, and withdraws with a shudder.”
That shuddery feeling was one that members were ordered to resist, just as they were obliged to reject the doubt and skepticism of their parents and friends. Retreating into despair and depression was not an option. Nor was questioning LaRouche’s bizarre contention that Nelson Rockefeller was an American dictator-in-waiting. They were to continue to fight—and to get out on the street to raise money for the war to come. Marcus underlined the most important part of the text: “Unless the Labor Committees are able to deploy in almost a military exactness, with abrupt maneuvers, maintaining the financial level of activity necessary to function as an effective force, there will be no hope for the human race by the end of 1974.”
* * *
IN HAPPIER TIMES before the CIA-KGB psy-war, Lyndon LaRouche liked to lie in bed with his son, eating potato chips and watching episodes of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. Perhaps the premise of that show inspired him at this moment. The agents of U.N.C.L.E. occupied secret headquarters on the Lower East Side, accessed through an entrance concealed inside a dry-cleaning store. From here they opposed the machinations of THRUSH, a shadowy outfit with an interest in mind-bending and world domination.
From 1974, the men and women from the NCLC mobilized against their enemies on three floors of offices above a furrier’s on West Twenty-Ninth Street. Visitors stepped out of the elevator to arrive in a cramped hallway stacked with copies of New Solidarity. Here they were assessed by a pair of nunchakus-twirling security goons. If they passed muster, the receptionist behind a bulletproof glass window pressed a button and buzzed open the heavy steel door that led to the office.
Their new organizational structure was devised by Uwe Henke von Parpart, a philosophy lecturer at Swarthmore College who claimed to have worked at NATO headquarters in the early 1960s. (He is now in banking and occasionally pops up as a pundit on CNN.) Members were assigned to “sectors” and “files,” each monitoring developments in a different part of the world.
In the International Telex Room, keen young people handled messages from NCLC outposts in America and Europe. The wall of the War Room bore an enormous laminated map of the United States, with LaRouchian centers of influence ringed in red and green crayon. In the Press Room, reporters reckless enough to enter were bombarded with the key points of the week. Charles M. Young, a future Rolling Stone writer whose cousin was ensnared by the Labor Committees, reported a short meeting in which he had been briefed by two members “on how Rockefeller caused or is causing the food crisis, the energy crisis, the impeachment of Richard Nixon, the assassinations of Malcolm X and John Kennedy, the flu, massive slave labor camps in the Arctic, the fall of Willy Brandt, heroin addiction in the ghetto, the counterculture, the overthrow of the constitutional government in Great Britain, the Arab-Israeli wars, the civil war in Northern Ireland, and the deaths of a billion people by the end of the century in order to save capitalism.”
The daily routine was strict. Every morning someone would be sent out to buy armfuls of foreign newspapers from a news dealer on Forty-Second Street. These were filleted for useful stories, which were then translated, collated, and filed. Then members would hit the phones. They rang universities, hospitals, embassies, government offices, and Wall Street banks, sometimes impersonating journalists from more respectable outfits in order to get their calls put through, sometimes impersonating church ministers and rabbis. Whatever it took. They gathered data on politicians, terror groups, psychiatrists, the radical Right, and the radical Left. At the end of the afternoon this information was refined into a typed report, which was offered up to the National Executive Committee. The day’s intelligence was then telexed to outposts in Stockholm, Copenhagen, Wiesbaden, Paris, and Washington, DC.
Don’t imagine, though, some Manhattan version of the high-tech vault at Langley where Frank Rafalko wrangled IBM punch cards; still less the shiny world occupied by Napoleon Solo. Throughout the building, the atmosphere was fetid. Ashtrays remained unemptied, floors unswept, toilets uncleaned. Stuffing spilled from battered armchairs. Members were obliged to bring their own toilet paper. The haphazard supply of equipment produced a daily rush for the small number of typewriters that possessed a full set of keys. The office culture generated other peculiarities. “There was a period,” Tessa DeCarlo told me, “when wife beating was very on-trend.”
LaRouche’s visits to the office were rare. After the brainwashing crisis he became an indoor creature, rarely venturing outside without armed guards. Once, when he felt that his retinue was not putting enough energy into defending him from his enemies, he pointed a gun at his own head and threatened to do the job himself. For much of 1974–75 he was in Germany, holed up in an apartment in Wiesbaden selected for its assassin-proof qualities. (“Prometheus caged,” reflected Chris White, “in a cupboard.”)
In New York, he found secure accommodation in a series of increasingly expensive properties, including an apartment on West Fifty-Eighth Street previously occupied by Sylvester Stallone, and a huge town house on Sutton Place, a few doors down from the silent film star Lillian Gish. “When he did come to the office,” said another former member, “you tried not to look him in the eye, in case he picked on you and said something horrible. But you also didn’t want to look like you were deliberately avoiding his eye.”
For all its lunatic intensity, this labor yielded results. The men and women who populated this sour-smelling world were smart, tenacious, and willing to work sixteen-hour days for minimal expenses. LaRouche told them that they were the chosen ones.
“There is no agency in the world to which we could look for approval of our work,” he said, “and barely a handful of the world’s leading figures and agencies which have the bare competence to act upon what we virtually alone can understand.… However queer your parents and miserable your feeling of yourself in your private fears and self-doubts, this 1,000-odd collection of seeming oddballs cannot be unfavorably compared with anything outside it today.” Slowly, through its members’ sleep-deprived toil, the organization transformed itself from a paranoid and introverted political sect to a paranoid and introverted political sect in control of a globe-spanning private intelligence agency. It became its own private CIA, with its own equivalent of Operation Chaos.
* * *
AFTER JIM MCGOURTY left jail, this world became his home. But not before he had spent one last summer with Michele. He was released early. Not for good behavior—though he did spend most of his time quietly learning German verbs and reading articles about nuclear fusion—but because, at the beginning of June 1974, the Portsmouth Naval Prison was closed down, its inmates dispersed or liberated.
Looking back on those months, one incident stuck in Michele’s mind. It happened on the day that she agreed to accompany her husband to an NCLC meeting in New York. Warren Hamerman had arranged for the couple and their son to ride from Washington with a fellow activist. Everyone chatted pleasantly in the car. Later, Michele noticed that her passenger was not present at the meeting he had traveled so far to attend. She asked Warren what had happened to the man. Warren replied that he was a suspected police agent and had been brought to Manhattan only for an interrogation. The NCLC security team had just given him an enthusiastic pistol whipping. “I remember saying: ‘If this is true, why would you let u
s talk with him as if he’s a friend, and travel in a car with him for four hours?’” Hamerman was unrepentant. “Warren could be a sycophant around Michael Vale,” said Michele, “but when he became immersed in the Labor Committees, he was just vicious.”
A brief series of emails from Warren Hamerman rejected the story about pistol whipping. He professed never to have heard the expression before. Tales of dealing with hostile infiltrators were likewise dismissed as “false memories about events lost in the fog of time.” I attempted to jog his memory with an article he’d written in 1976, describing the duty of NCLC security “to detect and investigate enemy deployments against the organization, and to plan and execute offensive counterthrusts.” After that, he lost his appetite for our correspondence.
Of all the Stockholm veterans, Warren Hamerman was the most dedicated LaRouchian. “There was a tremendous amount of sucking up that went on in the Labor Committees,” recalled Tessa DeCarlo, “but nobody was as sucky as Warren Hamerman.” He would volunteer for anything. In 1974 he headed an NCLC investigation into the International Monetary Fund. In later years he would run LaRouche’s political action committee and head his campaign to put American AIDS sufferers into quarantine camps. “He was a classic bureaucrat,” one former comrade told me. “He was opaque in the sense that he had no charisma, always had short hair neatly combed, and as far as I can tell never entertained an original thought in his head.”
Some of the viciousness noted by Michele was directed against a more unusual target. His own past. For the Stockholm deserters who remained in the Labor Committees—Warren and Jim in the States, Bill Jones and Cliff Gaddy back in Sweden—it was almost a condition of membership. They were required to delete their own histories and overwrite them with the paranoid fictions prescribed by LaRouche.
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