Operation Chaos

by Matthew Sweet

  The American Deserters Committee was never a true part of the anti-war movement. The Next Step was not a real revolutionary cadre. Its members, from the beginning, had been the unwitting pawns of Michael Vale—whose sinister allegiances were revised, month by month, to fit the paranoia of the moment. Vale was a CIA agent. He was an operative deployed by the Tavistock Institute, a social science think tank in London that LaRouche had decided was a secret brainwashing laboratory. He was a member of “NATO’s Schwarze Kapelle [Black Orchestra] West and East European-Japanese–North American network”—a mysterious body whose shifting membership also included Noam Chomsky, Stephen Spender, and Michael Vale’s old friend Bo Burlingham.

  In George Orwell’s 1984, Winston Smith, a clerk in the Ministry of Truth, is employed to edit old newspaper articles to fit the propaganda requirements of the present. But he is never asked to rewrite his own biography. The Stockholm deserters did just that. Their pasts became mutable, changing to accommodate each new obscure imaginary threat that LaRouche discerned.

  In a New Solidarity article from December 1, 1975, “Why the Labor Committee Can’t Be Taken Over by Agents,” Warren Hamerman asserted that Joachim Israel, the former husband of the Swedish child psychologist Mirjam Israel, was a “Tavistock agent” who had used the deserters to launch a series of “hit and run ‘probing’ operations” against LaRouche. “Then The Next Step (TNS) American franchise of the network maintained by gutter operative Michael Vale was ordered to return to the U.S. for planting inside the Labor Committee.”

  In 1979, LaRouche added his explanation. During 1971–72, he wrote, “Vale was deployed by British intelligence to penetrate the U.S. Labor Party with ‘sleepers,’ acting in cooperation with the terrorist-linked section of the U.S. intelligence establishment.” Jim McGourty, too, devoured and regurgitated these stories. Even by the time I got to know him, they still exerted an attraction. “So do you not think,” he once asked me, “that Michael Vale was building a network of agents?”

  * * *

  ON ONE OF my visits Jim handed me a fat folder of papers that dated from the mid-1970s. He said they would explain his thinking during this time. He was right. They demonstrated how fully his personal and political life had become entwined, how the mythology of the Labor Committees altered his understanding of his own life story. One typewritten statement described a moment in November 1974 when Jim had spotted two old Stockholm comrades walking not far from his apartment on West Eighty-First Street: George Carrano, the former strategist and press officer of the ADC, and his friend Richard Bucklin.

  “The first,” Jim recorded, “has by now been determined to be one of the key operatives deployed by the CIA in the Spring of ’68 when agents poured into Paris and later the rest of Europe, like locusts.… Carrano and Vale were deployed to Stockholm. Bucklin was one of the members of the CIA front group the American Deserters Committee.”

  The title of this document was “Concerning CIA Agent Vale’s Recent Activities.” It was, in effect, an account of Jim’s divorce, written as a report from the front line of the war between LaRouche and the grand coalition of his enemies. In late 1974, LaRouche had urged his followers to beware “brainwashed gangs of zombies, deployed under direct or indirect control of covert operations agencies, as pseudo-leftists and zombie-fascist gangs and countergangs.” Jim concluded that Michael had recruited Michele to such a group. He was driving her “to a paranoid schizophrenic state, ideal criterion for the zombie agents he is trying to create.” For Jim, all the details pointed this way: Michele’s choice to dissociate herself from the former deserters in the Labor Committees; her new will, which made Michael Vale guardian of their son; her decision to spend a few days in a beach house with Michael, reading Sylvia Plath.

  Most striking, however, was the reason that Jim had compiled the dossier in the first place. It was not the basis for some NCLC internal communiqué, but notes for a court argument through which he hoped to win custody of his son. The paperwork suggested that LaRouchian loyalists were lining up to declare Michele a person of low morals. I recognized the names of the potential witnesses. Warren Hamerman and Bill Engdahl. Eugene Inch, the Long Island pediatrician who had assisted in the deprogramming of Chris White. These witnesses were never called. Jim’s attorney’s side of the correspondence showed why. Most of his letters were demands for payment, but they also hinted at a scene in which Jim had treated his lawyer to a long and serious tale about brainwashing, Michael Vale, and the CIA. “I strongly do not recommend that you pursue this custody case,” wrote the attorney, “especially on the grounds you described in my office.”

  Jim lost his son and his marriage, but the NCLC provided a new family. LaRouche appointed Jim to its National Committee, the second tier of the leadership structure. Christina Nelson, the young activist who had admired the speeches Jim gave before his court-martial, also provided consolation. By the end of 1974 Jim had moved into her apartment in New York, where the pair ate, drank, and slept LaRouchian revolution. For two days a week they supervised the day care center for the children of NCLC members. The rest of the week brought other responsibilities. Jim worked in the Europe sector, for which he gathered intelligence on developments in Sweden and Denmark. Christina took on a more public role.

  In September she ran for Congress in the Democratic primary against the incumbent congresswoman Bella Abzug, the pioneering feminist and women’s rights lawyer. Christina’s campaign poster featured a photograph of herself below a caricature of Abzug in stockings and suspenders. “Selling favors to Rockefeller is Bella Abzug’s congressional career,” declared the text, “bumping Nixon to make way for the CIA, grinding workers in ‘full (slave) employment’ resettlement programs, and hooking youth to be methadone zombies.” (The image enjoyed a brief moment of exposure on the wall of the congressional canteen in Washington, DC.)

  Christina’s campaign generated more publicity than votes. When the election was over, she took to her bed, ill and exhausted. But there was little comfort in that. Their apartment was cold and crumbling. Cockroaches came up through the broken linoleum tiles and scuttered over the bed. The NCLC stipend upon which she and Jim lived was meager; a donation from Jim’s brother got them through the worst of it. Christina wrote to thank him: “The check really helped us live like human beings and not rats in a dirty city for a very difficult period.”

  * * *

  FOR STALIN, THERE was Trotsky; for the inhabitants of Airstrip One, there was Emmanuel Goldstein; for the LaRouchians, there was Michael Vale: the banished traitor around whom a mythology of terror could be built. Michael idolized Trotsky, but he had no desire to reenact this part of the story. “The Labor Committee was following me all over the place,” he told me. “Taking pictures of me in restaurants.” The columns of New Solidarity and its companion magazine, Campaigner, buzzed with weird accusations against him.

  “Vale,” argued a New Solidarity press release, “was also a key operative for Scandinavia and the Federal Republic in the British intelligence operation known as the ‘GI Deserters Movement.’ … During 1971–2 Vale was deployed by British intelligence to penetrate the U.S. Labor Party with ‘sleepers’ acting in co-operation with the terrorist-linked section of the U.S. intelligence establishment.” Mike found old associates were cold-shouldering him, not wishing to be incorporated into this growing conspiracist narrative. More painfully, new acquaintances also came under fire.

  In 1975, Michael sought refuge in France, where he moved into the orbit of a French child psychiatrist named Stanislaus Tomkiewicz. Michael mentioned him on every occasion we met. Tomkiewicz was a charismatic doctor who worked with juvenile delinquents rejected by the French system. Instead of punishing them, he gave them more control over their environments. Instead of subjecting them to analysis, he gave them cameras and told them to make photo stories about their lives. Instead of pacifying them with pills, he stimulated them with five-minute doses of pure oxygen. They found it exhilarating. So did Michael. He wanted
to be part of it, to become Tomkiewicz’s amanuensis and translator. He might have devoted his life to him.

  “This guy trusted me to be his emissary in America,” said Michael. “And I was so impressed by these techniques that he had.” But the Labor Committees intervened to wreck the relationship. A member named Mark Burdman wrote to the doctor and told him that Michael was a CIA agent who had come to spy on him. The doors of the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research slammed shut. Jim McGourty’s notes explained the Labor Committees’ line of thinking: “[Vale] is now working for a network which transports psychotics back to their homeland, once proclaimed to be in that state by a mental institution in Paris. With the escalation in terrorist activity by brainwashed zombies, there is little doubt where these victims will make their homes.”

  Michael attempted to rebut these accusations. “I went to the newspapers,” he said. “But they didn’t do anything about it. Mud sticks,” he said.

  Who threw it?

  “Marcus. Because he was out of his mind.”

  The madness of Lyn Marcus was easy to accept. It was a phenomenon like the wind, always howling somewhere. Mike’s difficulty was with the idea that the men he regarded as comrades had begun howling in unison. “Why did all those other people relay it?” he asked. A note of emotion entered his voice. “Bill Jones? Cliff Gaddy? Warren Hamerman? They lived with me, like revolutionaries do. We bathed together.”

  This was, in part, a set of rhetorical questions. He’d worked most of it out for himself. Jim McGourty’s behavior, he thought, could be explained by the violence of Operation Mop-Up. “It’s a technique of political psychological warfare. You make people do things that mean they can never go back to their original moral position. And they’re trapped. So he denounced me.”

  Bill Jones, he believed, was embarrassed by the whole affair. “I met him at a World Health Organization conference in Copenhagen in 1975, and he was pretty sheepish. So he has a conscience.” Warren Hamerman was an open-and-shut case. “We were always humiliating Wally,” said Michael. “We didn’t take him seriously. This little pipsqueak of a personality. Those little men, those little guys, it seethes inside them and they have to have their revenge.”

  Cliff Gaddy’s role, however, was much harder to explain. Michael had been a mentor to him. He had encouraged him to pursue his studies in the Russian language, and secured him his first gigs as a professional translator. Cliff’s earliest publication credits were joint efforts with Michael Vale. In 1973 they tackled a long essay on adolescent schizophrenia, a subject with which Cliff then struck out on his own, carrying Michael’s preoccupations with him. Looking over these essays in the yellowing pages of old academic journals, it was strange to think of Cliff and Michael rendering all this psychiatric jargon from Russian into English—“enhanced excitability, motor disinhibition, uncontrolled instinctual drives”—while the leader of their organization was ushering the members into a zone of madness.

  At the end of this came a moment in Mike and Cliff’s relationship that would be familiar to anyone who had seen the ending of Henry IV, Part 2. At the end of 1975, Mike, harassed from his place with Tomkiewicz by the conspiracy theorists of the Labor Committees, called Cliff to tell him he was coming back to Stockholm.

  “Why?” asked Cliff, coolly.

  “I got the message,” Mike told me. Cliff had rejected his old mentor and pledged himself to Lyndon LaRouche.

  They never spoke again.

  * * *

  THE LAROUCHIAN EMPIRE was run from New York. Its Wiesbaden office became its European headquarters—where French, Swedish, and Italian members went for firearms training and “Beyond Psychoanalysis” sessions. Its outposts, however, had a fair degree of autonomy.

  The Stockholm organization was founded by Bill Jones and Cliff Gaddy. Gaddy’s girlfriend Kerstin Tegin also took a leadership role and gave up her studies in order to devote herself to the group. Almost immediately, it established a position on the local political landscape—marginal, noisy, ideologically unclassifiable, mysteriously flush with cash. It acquired offices, telex machines, and computers—made possible, according to its newspaper, by “considerable collections of money, conducted by the USA working class.”

  Like its parent in Manhattan, the Swedish group directed its energies into maintaining a great flood of printed material, much of it screamingly paranoiac. Its members leafleted employees at the Saab car factory in Trollhättan, warning them that their workplace was being turned into a “laboratory for depression” where they might expect “the same treatment the German working class received under Nazism.” Its press bureau churned out articles and communiqués that described how Sweden was being primed for a totalitarian takeover.

  Swedish readers learned that their country had been identified as “the most appropriate choice for the Rockefeller forces to use as a laboratory for their 1984-style experiments.” They heard that Sweden was on the point of economic collapse, that “medieval hordes of rats” were invading its towns, that “a two-tiered labor force now exists on the Third Reich principle, dividing the population into a dwindling number of older, skilled workers and a growing mass of robot-like laborers.” They heard—more than once—that Joachim Israel had been working since the 1960s to identify the neurotic weaknesses of the Swedes, and that the CIA and the Swedish prime minister Olof Palme intended to exploit these to create a “model for social fascist society.” They also implied that Israel had lied about being a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany.

  Who wrote this stuff? At first, much of it went out under the byline of the International Press Service—a company established by the Labor Committees in order to acquire media accreditation for its members in Europe and America. But its representatives were such a weird and disruptive influence at press conferences that they were soon declared a bogus organization. Henry Kissinger ordered them banned from the White House in March 1975. (“Fascist pressure exerted by the CIA,” said the Labor Committees.)

  In time, LaRouchian publications began to acknowledge individual authors and editors. Cliff Gaddy was named as Stockholm bureau chief, with ultimate editorial responsibility for the stories it issued. He stayed in the post for over a decade. Bill Engdahl and Bill Jones acquired their own bylines. In 1974 the Stockholm organization had only fifteen members, of whom only seven were full-time Swedish residents, so it seems reasonable to assume that most of the articles published in this period were the work of this triumvirate.

  Like the fabulists of Foucault’s Pendulum, Cliff, Bill, and Bill discovered that any event, no matter how irrelevant, could be absorbed into their master narrative and made to thrum with mysterious energy. In May 1974, an ex-convict walked into a pharmacy in Gothenburg with a machine gun, taking five hostages. LaRouche’s Stockholm bureau announced that this incident proved that “the CIA’s international terrorist network is now being activated in Sweden.” A month later, Bill Jones made a nuisance of himself at a conference on occupational stress held at the University of Uppsala, accusing puzzled academics of being part of the CIA’s secret behavior-modification project. He handed out copies of “On the Track of My Assassins” and called for a delegate to be indicted for crimes against humanity. “When challenged,” he wrote, “these doctors quickly reveal their own insanity.”

  In December 1974, a few words in a Swedish newspaper editorial were transmuted into proof that Olof Palme had been instructed by Nelson Rockefeller to increase Sweden’s offensive capability against Russia. LaRouchian hacks became masters at this kind of distortion: they could spin any innocuous remark into evidence for a plan of genocide. In 1975, the West German Embassy in Stockholm was bombed: LaRouche publications pronounced it a false flag operation by International Socialists—with whom Palme and all the journalists working on the story had collaborated. Those involved should “expect to answer to these actions with their lives.”

  These bizarre outpourings were not limited to the printed page. The organization was a disruptive
presence at all kinds of public, professional, and political gatherings. “I have not been to a single meeting the last two years without this company making their presence felt and sabotaging proceedings,” said Inga Thorsson, Sweden’s representative at the United Nations. Gösta Bohman, leader of the center-right Moderate Party, found himself bombarded with strange questions at his own party conference. The Social Democratic MP Birgitta Dahl once shouted at them from the platform: “Hold your own meetings instead of coming to disrupt ours!”

  Palme’s party was so concerned about the behavior of NCLC activists in Sweden that they commissioned Håkan Hermansson, a journalist from the Malmö paper Arbetet, to write a pamphlet about the organization. “They appear at public party gatherings and conferences where the most regular tactic is to destroy every attempt at a meaningful discussion or exchange of ideas,” reported Hermansson. “This occurs through an unrestricted venting of impossible vocabulary in seemingly endless propositions, by posing intentionally provocative questions, breaking off, making accusations and even threats.”

  There was little point, he suggested, in trying to follow their arguments. “Their political lingo,” he wrote, “is to all intents and purposes impossible to understand. Their argumentation builds on fantastical claims presented as uncontested truth. The fanatic conviction makes it impossible to conduct any meaningful discussion. Their worldview is complete, true, and indivisible, and every attempt at criticism risks being taken as evidence that the critic is a brainwashed victim of the organization’s enemies. Or a hired double agent.”

  Trouble for critics usually followed: Hermansson was harassed in his office in Malmö; European Labor Committees members came up to the newsroom to tell him that he was a CIA agent who should face trial as the Nazis did at Nuremberg. Klas-Örjan Spång, the owner of a Stockholm bookshop that declined to stock LaRouchian literature, was denounced on the pages of Ny Solidaritet as “Agent Spång” of Langley. When Aftonbladet ran a story comparing the European Labor Committees to the Children of God, a California cult that separated children from their families and became notorious for its toleration of sexual abuse, Kerstin Tegin declared that Olof Palme was behind the smear and threatened him and the paper with a $5 million libel suit—which never materialized.