Operation Chaos

by Matthew Sweet

  In later years, journalists who investigated the Labor Committees reported physical attacks by members, but their preferred methods were much less conventional. The American organization threw a foil-wrapped hunk of liver at a Catholic archbishop, coordinated a telephone campaign to accuse Boston’s FBI officers of abducting dogs for sexual gratification, and confronted the actor Peter Fonda at an airport with a banner reading FEED JANE FONDA TO THE WHALES. The German group in Wiesbaden published a cartoon of Chancellor Willy Brandt in Nazi uniform. (Brandt sued for libel and won, but the European Labor Committees found themselves an unlikely ally in the form of the conceptual artist Joseph Beuys, who declared that this was art.)

  The Stockholm chapter developed weirdnesses all its own. More than one of my interviewees remembered Sweden’s happy band of LaRouchians making bizarre and incomprehensible interventions at meetings addressed by Olof Palme. A favorite stunt was a three-person operation: one member would sit near the stage and begin a loud diatribe against the speaker; a second would feign some kind of learning disability, like a character in Lars von Trier’s The Idiots; a third would then shout at them for being too noisy. It was a good strategy, if the aim was to cause chaos and confusion.

  * * *

  BILL JONES WAS a well-educated middle-class boy who had been destined for the priesthood. Most people who encountered the teenage Cliff Gaddy considered him one of the brightest blooms of his generation. Bill Engdahl was a Princeton graduate. How did the Labor Committees persuade such smart young people to do such strange and nasty things? Partly by insisting that black was white.

  “Take, for example, the person who describes the NCLC as being ‘paranoid’ because we have identified the Rockefeller conspiracy as governing capitalist politics today,” wrote Ed Spannaus in a 1975 article for Campaigner magazine.

  What such a person is actually saying is that there is no coherence or lawfulness to events, that everything is discrete and arbitrary. Such an individual must himself deny the coherence of external reality in order to satisfy his internal authorities who tell him that there can be no such thing as a conspiracy—with its implication that one would have to act upon reality in order to stop it. Thus he demands that reality be adjusted to “fit” his internal fantasy-map, just as the child magically attributes events outside himself to his imagined omnipotence. In a child, such paranoia is a normal feature; in an adult, it is pathological.

  Parlor tricks also helped. LaRouche would make furious insistence on the critical nature of some obscure technicality. One week he told his acolytes, “Anyone who doesn’t understand the isoperimetric principle is not qualified to save the human race.” Members who hadn’t listened in their high school geometry class scurried back to Pythagoras and attempted to deduce why this was so important. The following week LaRouche announced, “If you don’t understand the ablative absolute, you can’t think properly.” The ablative absolute is a Latin grammatical term. With these words having been said, Caesar departed. It had no particular significance. LaRouche just liked the sound of it, and the fact that most of his followers had to go and look it up.

  One former member, the Greek exile who used the nom de guerre Nick Syvriotis, told me, “He would take people who had at some point in their lives done serious work on serious topics and put them together with these nutcases, thereby keeping everybody off-balance. What was common in both groups, the cranks and the serious people, was the need for parental approval. Lyn supplied it to both. He would promote a crank to a position of authority, and the genuinely authoritative were left with their mouths hanging open. But they wouldn’t challenge for fear of losing his parental approval. That’s how the game was played.” He spoke from his own experience: “I had to break with my need for parental approval to quit,” he said. “Then I saw the extent of the insanity. What I learned from being in the Labor Committees is that insanity is curable.”

  Some of the damage they inflicted, however, was not so easily healed.

  * * *

  IN MAY 2016, Michael Vale summoned me to Paris. He’d decided to sell his flat and invited me to stay for the last few days of his ownership. The furniture had gone; the carpets had been taken up; the cupboards dismantled. I helped him carry lumber down to the street. The place was pretty filthy. When I went to bed that night, I wrapped a T-shirt around the pillow to avoid inhaling the sourness of the bedclothes. The next morning, in the eviscerated kitchen, Mike presented me with a stack of documents. Old copies of the Next Step. Paperwork recording his unsuccessful attempt to claim back a car confiscated by the German government. A collection of press clippings, saved as an actor might save his old reviews—but these were paranoid ramblings from Labor Committee publications, written by friends who had turned against him, or exposés on the Labor Committees from the Swedish and Danish papers. Attacks on all fronts, most accusing him of being an agent of the CIA.

  At the bottom of the pile was the letter that ruined his life. As Mike was neither its writer nor its addressee, it was hard to understand how he had acquired it, but there it was, a brittle photocopy on the notepaper of the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research. It was addressed to Mark Burdman of the Labor Committees and signed by Stanislaus Tomkiewicz. “Cher Ami,” wrote Tomkiewicz, “you earn my respect and my sympathy for having been the first (after me) to have understood the relationship of Michael Vale with supporters of order on a planetary scale.” The CIA again.

  On my last day, I accompanied Michael to his doctor. He was awaiting some test results. He emerged beaming from the appointment, clutching an envelope of X-rays that were the evidence of his good news. To celebrate, we went for lunch at Les Deux Magots, the famous haunt of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. Mike had quiche, most of which made it to his mouth. A splot of mozzarella became lodged in his stubble, and remained there four hours later, when we said goodbye at the Gare du Nord.

  As we were walking on the street, Mike asked me if I knew what had happened to Mark Burdman. Having read so widely in the lunacy of the Labor Committees, I knew the answer. In 1980 he had taken a position at its German headquarters in Wiesbaden, where his writing passed completely through the LaRouchian looking glass. His magnum opus—which now enjoys a quiet afterlife on websites with names like “Jew World Order”—was an essay asserting that the British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli was the founder of both Zionism and Nazism.

  “Did I outlive him?” asked Mike.

  “Yes,” I told him. Burdman had died in July 2004.

  Mike’s eyes lit up. “Good,” he said. “Good.”

  14 / OPERATION DESTRUCTION

  OFTEN, WHILE WRITING this story, I felt as if I were recording a series of dreams. Dreams of distant homes, where baffled parents sat, thinking of lost sons. Dreams of Vietnam, where officers in khaki and Ray-Bans may or may not have ordered men to burn the huts with villagers inside them. Dreams of revolution, in which Rosa Luxemburg’s mass strike came to 1970s New York, and young American Marxists built colonies on the Red Planet.

  Apocalyptic dreams, too, with electrodes and pigs and ketchup bottles, and Michael Vale and Nelson Rockefeller wandering through a landscape built by Hieronymus Bosch. Those were LaRouche’s favorites. The ones he hoped would steal upon his followers when they closed their eyes at night. “The most optimistic view of AD 1990 under the Rockefellers’ program would be the reduction of earth’s population to no more than a few hundred millions of psychotic cannibals, scavenging a wretched subsistence from the wreckage of the collapsed civilization.” That was Lyn’s Christmas message of 1974. The same Christmas that the existence of Operation Chaos was revealed to the American public.

  Radicals and revolutionaries are supposed to be dreamers. The best of them bequeath their visions to us. Nothing to lose but your chains. Nothing to kill or die for. Little black boys and black girls joining hands with little white boys and white girls. But during the period of MHCHAOS, the forces of established order also seemed to enter this untethered state
.

  Lyndon Johnson had a dream. He dreamed that the KGB was joining hands with the youth of America and leading it onto the streets to protest against the Vietnam War. His successor, Richard Nixon, shared that illusion. Operation Chaos was established to turn fantasy into prophecy. Richard Ober, the taciturn Harvard man assigned to run the project, did his best to make that happen.

  But no matter how much energy its operatives expended, no matter how much money it spent, or how many files it opened, Johnson and Nixon’s vision remained insubstantial. HYDRA chuntered through the data on its 9,994 names, but it couldn’t detect a ruble of Moscow gold. American radicals, it seemed, were as self-reliant as Ralph Waldo Emerson. They had decided to hate LBJ and Nixon and the Vietnam War without anyone from the Kremlin encouraging them to do it for cash.

  Harry Rositzke, the crossword-loving Anglo-Saxon scholar who had been attached to MHCHAOS in its earliest days, woke up to this before many of his peers. He left the CIA in 1970 to raise crossbred Angus calves on a farm near Middleburg, Virginia, but maintained a parallel career as a sympathetic commentator on agency affairs.

  In the early 1970s, American intelligence personnel felt in need of sympathy. First, a series of troublesome reporters and activists began exposing their unconstitutional habits. Military intelligence spying on civilians. The FBI sending its agents provocateurs into the Black Panthers, the Communist Party, and the civil rights movement. The Watergate burglaries.

  Then, government responded by setting up a series of inquiries into the morals of America’s spooks. The Pike Committee attempted to discover the cost of the CIA and the true scope of its activities. The Church Committee investigated the CIA’s tampering with the U.S. mail and its plots to assassinate foreign heads of state. The Rockefeller Commission, headed by the bête noire of the Labor Committees, heard evidence on MKULTRA, Langley’s failed attempt to develop chemical and psychological techniques for manipulating human behavior.

  In response to all this, in 1977 Rositzke published The CIA’s Secret Operations, an attempt to set the record half-straight on the agency’s clandestine activities. But the book also diagnosed the defining malaise of all intelligence outfits.

  “They form a society of their own, with purposes and standards distinct from those of the nation. Prolonged immersion in the segregated, self-contained, and self-justifying world of deception and secrecy tends to erode links to reality,” he argued. “The misuse and abuse of the CIA may have been as much the result of the inner momentum of an isolated and hallucinatory bureaucracy as of the interference of Presidents.” He might have been describing the workings of a cult.

  * * *

  A HALF CENTURY has passed since the creation of Operation Chaos. In the beginning it was nameless, hidden in the field of the CIA’s Special Operations Group. At this stage, few within the CIA knew of its existence, and those who did were uneasy about its activities. That unease grew. Rumors circulated around Langley that Richard Ober and his colleagues were doing something illegal down in the basement.

  In December 1971, Thomas Karamessines, the CIA’s deputy director of plans, felt obliged to fight this fire. He assembled his junior staff and listened to their concerns. “The group,” he noted, “mentioned Dick Ober’s unit and said that there was a lot of scuttlebutt that the purpose of this unit was to keep book on Black Power adherents.” Karamessines told them not to worry. He also told them not to believe anything they read in Ramparts magazine. He failed to put their minds at rest.

  Early in December 1974, Seymour Hersh, the investigative reporter who had brought the first news of the My Lai massacre, heard whispers about Langley’s biggest secret. His anonymous sources could not put a name to it, but they told him about wiretaps and burglaries, infiltrators and data banks. They told him about a well-funded, high-tech, and illegal surveillance operation against American citizens at home and abroad. They even told him who was running the show. Hersh dialed a number in Fairfax, Virginia. “There’s nothing I can say about this,” said Richard Ober. It was the most honest and expansive public statement that Ober made in his life.

  Hersh’s story ran in the New York Times on December 22, accompanied by photographs of the three most recent directors of central intelligence—Richard Helms, James Schlesinger, and William Colby. The headline read: HUGE C.I.A. OPERATION REPORTED IN U.S. AGAINST ANTIWAR FORCES, OTHER DISSIDENTS IN NIXON YEARS. Hersh’s source, a former CIA officer, reported the same suspicions that Karamessines had heard at his meeting. “Ober had unique and confidential access to Helms,” said the informer. “I always assumed he was mucking about with Americans who were abroad and then would come back, people like the Black Panthers.” By the time the story was in print, however, it was already too late to write the comprehensive history of Operation Chaos. The CIA had shut it down, Richard Ober had been kicked upstairs to the National Security Council, and the Chaos files had gone to oblivion.

  * * *

  FRANK RAFALKO, the man who mucked about with the Black Panthers on Ober’s behalf, was there when it happened. “People say they never cut out the Chaos program, but they did,” he told me. “It was cut out even before Colby. He shut it down officially, but it was already shut down before that. There were very few people left.” An officer named White was assigned to destroy the files. The undertaking was so vast that it gained an unofficial code name: Operation Destruction.

  White was a blunt instrument. How long, he asked Frank, would it take to get rid of data stored on a computer tape? “Ten seconds, I told him,” said Frank. “You just had to erase them or write over them. It’s the hard copies that take the time. But he didn’t believe me.” So the tapes were unspooled and fed to the incinerator, along with shredded letters, telegrams, newspaper cuttings. All were made intangible by fire.

  As Frank was keen to point out, fires were started in accordance with the law. To retain such records would have been against the instructions of Congress. Obliterating them, however, had an unintended consequence. It created a space in which fantasies about the power and the reach of the Central Intelligence Agency could thrive. It opened up another space in which to dream. Lyndon LaRouche closed his eyes and gave it the full Kubla Khan.

  * * *

  DURING THE SLEEPLESS panic of his deprogramming, Chris White had cried out in the night about “Operation Chaos and Confusion.” It was a lucky guess, and one reason why the CIA should never have given its campaign against the New Left such an obvious and melodramatic code name. Another piece of luck followed in February 1975, when President Gerald Ford appointed his new vice president, Nelson Rockefeller, to head a new inquiry into the intelligence services. His report revealed the operational name of CHAOS and described its scale and scope.

  For LaRouche and his followers, these events seemed to support their own interpretation of recent American history. Encouraged, they added more to the story, placing themselves at its center. “Beginning in January 1974 with the attempted assassination of International Caucus of Labor Committees Chairman Lyndon H. LaRouche and the activation of a wave of National Security terrorist operations,” claimed Executive Intelligence Review, the new glossy LaRouchian magazine, “Nelson Rockefeller launched ‘Operation Chaos’—a program of escalating terrorism, economic destabilization, and red scare hysteria directed at creating a condition of ‘accepted’ military police-state rule throughout the advanced sector.”

  Why had the Rockefeller coup not happened? Because the Labor Committees had saved the day. “Millions of leaflets permeated every major industrial center in both the U.S. and Canada. Extraordinary public meetings were held on an ongoing basis until the cumulative effect of this mass ‘inoculation’ campaign forced Rockefeller to place Operation Chaos in a state of suspension.”

  New Yorkers might have faintly remembered a brouhaha at the Marc Ballroom, or the moment when two NCLC members went on a radio program and were asked by the host if they were drug users or psychiatric patients. But this did not matter in the Labor Committees, for
whom the facts never stopped mutating.

  In September 1978 an Executive Intelligence Review article by a member named John Sigerson announced that British intelligence had masterminded Operation Chaos and launched it at Heathrow Airport a few days after Chris White arrived in New York. The following year, when LaRouche published The Power of Reason, probably the world’s most inappropriately titled memoir, he described how Chris, Bill Engdahl, and Alice Weitzman were drugged in “an extensive operation of the sort catalogued by spooks under the name of ‘Chaos.’ The clear objective was to sow such chaos and paranoia-ridden confusion into the Labor Committees, as to destroy the organization to all intents and purposes.” In a sense, the opposite was true. Operation Chaos had sustained Lyndon LaRouche. It was the glue that bound his followers together.

  * * *

  THE INCINERATOR MADE its files disappear, but the greatest vanishing act of Operation Chaos was performed by its chief. Among the senior intelligence figures of his generation, Dick Ober remains the invisible man. In early 1975, when the CIA was under the most intense scrutiny it has ever endured, his name appeared in every newspaper in America from the Manitowoc Herald Times to the Emporia Gazette. But no reporter ever tickled a useful quote from him, or even persuaded him to confirm his date of birth. Silence was all he bequeathed to the archive.

  In June 1975 he wrote to Nelson Rockefeller to signal his disgust for the conclusions of his report: “I have made no public statements regarding allegations concerning my activities with the CIA and I have no present intention of doing so,” he stated. “Lest silence on my part be interpreted as agreement with the text of the report … I am writing to you to make my disagreement a matter of record.”