Two decades later, when the investigative reporter Angus Mackenzie was researching the history of the CIA, he discovered that “it was a breach of the code when one associate gave me a rough description of Ober as a big man with reddish skin and hair.” Ober’s love of biographical blank lines outlived him: when Frank Rafalko wrote his official history of MHCHAOS, the CIA refused permission to print simple details that had already appeared in Ober’s Washington Post obituary. As I write this, Ober doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page.
“Ober was disliked by people,” said Frank, listing some of his detractors within the agency. “But I liked him. He treated me very fairly. He took care of his people. Always backed us up.”
I pushed for an example. Frank told me about the day that a case officer came into the Vault to brief them about an asset he was running in the field. As they sat in Ober’s office, the officer pulled out a pack of cigarettes. Frank was trying to kick the habit and objected. “So Ober said, ‘Okay, don’t smoke here. He doesn’t want you to smoke.’ So he didn’t. That’s the kind of guy Ober was.” As the record stands, Richard Ober’s only documented act of kindness is the one described in this book. Telling someone not to smoke in a windowless room. It’s not much of a legacy.
A fact of Ober’s family history, however, means that a wealth of detail about his early life has lain on the record for decades, unnoticed by historians of spying. In 2016, another source of information emerged—a thick file compiled in the 1950s by the FBI. Its pages tell the story of how the future chief of Operation Chaos was investigated for his own suspected connections with the radical Left. Let us put this on the record, and fill that empty space he did so much to preserve.
* * *
RICHARD OBER’S FATHER was an agent, though the term made him uneasy. Harold Clark Ober preferred the term “author’s representative.” H. G. Wells, William Faulkner, J. D. Salinger, and Agatha Christie were the authors—though F. Scott Fitzgerald was the one who gave him the greatest glory and the greatest grief.
Ober showed a paternal interest in his writers. He sometimes took in their laundry, though he drew the line at taking them to the psychiatrist. With Fitzgerald, the line became blurred, and thousand-dollar loans were wired frequently across it. In 1937, when Fitzgerald was drunk, broke, and disconsolate, Ober secured him a contract with MGM, dispatched him to Hollywood, and took in the Fitzgeralds’ sixteen-year-old daughter, Frances—known as “Scottie”—as an “instant sister” to his two boys.
Richard was her exact contemporary, Nathaniel three years her junior. Neither boy welcomed the intrusion until they saw how it was changing the culture of the family. Suddenly, there were frequent trips to the movie theater in White Plains and visits to Schrafft’s for a Dusty Miller sundae—a confection of vanilla ice cream, marshmallows, chocolate sauce, and powdered malt. (“Well, we sure don’t much like having you here,” confessed Nat, “but I’ll say this for you: Father’s a lot nicer to us when you’re around.”) When Scottie was married in February 1943, the Ober boys were her ushers.
Thanks to Scottie Fitzgerald and other memoirists, it’s possible to construct a detailed picture of the world into which Richard Ober was born. His mother, Anne, was the daughter of Northern Irish Catholics and a journalist for Suburban Life magazine. She met Harold in Paris during the Great War—Anne was a Red Cross nurse; Harold had been sent by the U.S. government to investigate the wartime uses of Airedale terriers.
Home was a converted barn at the end of a wooded road in Scarsdale, New York. There was shrimp curry for dinner, Prokofiev and Shostakovich on the gramophone, asparagus and peas growing in a luxuriant garden. Tennis was played on the court belonging to their neighbors Robert Haas, a founder of the Book of the Month Club, and Merle Haas, the English translator of Babar the Elephant. Prize-winning dogs scurried around the house and—to the disgust of the servants—were sometimes allowed to lick the dinner plates. Fixed to a beam in the living room was the crimson oar commemorating Harold Ober’s rowing days at Harvard, carefully turned so as not to expose the exact age of its owner. (His sons, who also made the varsity crew, would move it, maliciously, to expose the date.)
Richard Ober registered as a Harvard freshman in September 1940. He studied philosophy and history, volunteered as an air-raid warden, and joined the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps with enough enthusiasm to earn a medal from the Sons of the American Revolution. By August 1944 he was training in southwest England with the 681st Glider Field Artillery Battalion; by the winter, he and his comrades were moving through the snows of Belgium and Luxembourg and on to the rigors of Operation Varsity, in which they made military history by forming the first glider crews to land in territory not already secured by paratroopers.
The experience must have been terrifying: dropped by towplane, flying blind through the drifting Allied smoke screen, strafed by German antiaircraft guns, crash-landing amid ditches, barbed wire, and hostile enemy troops. Back home in Scarsdale, Harold Ober sat by the radio with Scottie Fitzgerald, hoping for the best. He got it. Richard Ober survived to return home and exchange his first lieutenant’s stripes for the postgraduate degree that helped him acquire a desk at Langley.
Harold Ober may have disapproved of his son’s choice of profession. On his commute to the city, he would always avert his eyes when the train chugged close behind the houses of Harlem and the Bronx. “I don’t like prying into their private lives,” he told Scottie Fitzgerald.
* * *
THE CIA DOES not declassify the personnel files of its officers. Its culture reveres the shredder. The FBI, however, abhors the destruction of paper: its archives might comprise the richest history of the American people ever compiled. So we must thank its director J. Edgar Hoover for the knowledge that Ober joined the CIA in December 1948 as a foreign affairs analyst and that by the spring of 1952 he had graduated to a spookier role—an intelligence officer working out of a CIA office concealed inside the U.S. consulate in Munich, where Harry August Rositzke was his boss. The bureau put these details on file in the second half of 1956, a sour patch in Ober’s life, when a team of FBI agents was appointed to determine whether he might be a risk to the security of the American state.
The doubts about Richard were really doubts about his father. Harold’s name had been turning up in the papers and conversations of too many suspected Communists. It was spotted in a pencil note written by Stephen Laird, a journalist and movie producer alleged to be an asset of the KGB; on the mailing list of the United Committee of South Slavic Americans, who were unacceptably friendly to Marshal Tito of Yugoslavia; in a notebook that had been seen in the house of a Communist Party member in Los Angeles when a naval intelligence officer had been rifling through her papers all the way back in 1936.
Harold’s friendship with Inez Munoz, a Hollywood writer who had recently been questioned before the House Un-American Activities Committee, was also perceived as potentially compromising. Another connection caused alarm bells to ring: Ober had friends in common with Jack Soble, a KGB agent who had been inserted into Leon Trotsky’s entourage and would be arrested by the FBI in 1957.
Richard Ober was suspended from his duties and questioned by his colleagues. What were his father’s political views? How many Communists did his father know? Was it true that Harold’s assistant Ivan von Auw was homosexual? Ober told them that his father was a “liberal in the strict sense of the word, and an individual who was personally very interested in civil rights, government security standards, and similar issues.” He also professed to know little of his father’s professional life, and acknowledged that writers sometimes had “peculiar political views.”
The case was passed to Hoover, whose special agents checked out Richard Ober’s background as if it were a crime scene. They quizzed his neighbors, his rowing coach at Harvard, alumni of the foreign affairs course at Columbia, and the proprietor of the Dew Drop Inn Store in Fairfax, Virginia. But it was his colleagues at Langley who gave the sharpest assessments. Ober, o
ne said, was “the type who wants to make all the decisions rather than delegating in that respect to his subordinates as a result employee works himself to the point where he has to take sick leave.” This instinct was the secret of his success as a CIA officer, and the source of his hubris.
Frank Rafalko knew of one officer who regarded Ober as “a nincompoop who went way beyond his charter.” “Autocratic,” judged another. “Truly evil,” said a third. But the agency looked after its own. “They didn’t fire him,” explained one of Hersh’s anonymous sources, “but they didn’t want him around. The CIA had to get rid of him—he was too embarrassing, too hot.”
A new job on the National Security Council kept him safe. So did the White House. A memo from Henry Kissinger to Donald Rumsfeld, chief of staff to President Gerald Ford, sent two days before Christmas 1974, gave advice on how to handle awkward questions about Ober. If a journalist asked if he was to be suspended, the preformed answer was there on the page: “I am not prepared to discuss further Mr. Ober’s duties on the staff.” But nobody asked.
That silence continued until his death. Even after that, a sharper picture failed to emerge. A brief obituary in the Washington Post noted Ober’s CIA postings in India and Mexico, but MHCHAOS and Hersh’s exposure went unmentioned. More space was devoted to Ober’s horticultural pursuits—his second career as the owner of a thirty-two-acre Virginia farm that supplied herbs to the French restaurants of DC; his membership in the Herb Society of America; his editorial role on the guidebook to the National Herb Garden. Nobody took the opportunity to dig a little deeper. On the day that Richard Ober died, journalists with an interest in espionage had their eyes on a different story. The chief of Chaos breathed his last on September 11, 2001. The CIA had kept Richard Ober in obscurity for decades, but al-Qaeda provided the final ministrations.
His last recorded sighting, as far as I can tell, was logged by the French chef Jean-Louis Palladin. One day in 1979, Richard Ober appeared at the back door of Palladin’s restaurant at the Watergate hotel in Washington, DC. He was clutching a handful of mint, a bunch of thyme, and a seed catalog. He told the chef that he worked at the State Department and was bored of his job; that he’d made a bet with a friend that his garden could yield produce fit for the best restaurant in DC. Palladin recorded the moment in one of his recipe books.
“I looked at him and said, ‘Did God send you to me? You’re exactly what I’ve been looking for.’” A year later, Ober’s farm was sole supplier of herbs to Palladin’s restaurant. Their quality reminded the chef of the produce grown on land owned by his family. “My father owned an orchard he worked in every Sunday,” said Palladin. “He had cherry, apricot, apple, and peach trees, and the fruit he got from those trees was fantastic. Why? Because under his orchard was the old cemetery.”
* * *
IN OCTOBER 1973, an American novel was published that pictured the United States transformed by the ideological forces that Chaos had been established to frustrate. Left On! is set in a parallel post-Nixonian universe, where Republicanism and every conservative certainty lie crushed, and an entirely new political culture has been brought into being. Its architect is a charismatic Democratic candidate who has revitalized and radicalized his party using techniques that would have been familiar to any member of the National Caucus of Labor Committees.
“The practice of criticism and self-criticism,” asserts President Mack, “is the only means of changing men’s minds, of washing old brains and curing sick thoughts.” With the White House gained, he begins his cultural revolution. Mack curbs the powers of the FBI and fires 70 percent of its staff. Intelligence files on leftist agitators are closed, and new ones opened on their right-wing equivalents.
Out in the political wilderness, Ronald Reagan, the deposed Republican governor of California, forms a covert resistance group called the Secret Center. Mack’s intelligence services fight back with a computer project that analyzes the activities of any Americans earning over $50,000 a year, and soon identifies the ringleaders. Found guilty of “conspiring to incite reactionary riots across state lines,” Reagan submits to a program of moral and political reeducation. At the end of the process, public tears of contrition demonstrate that he has seen the error of his ways. “I envy the young, because I am old, and I have persecuted them,” Reagan confesses. “I can’t relate with the blacks and the browns because my white skin is my only heritage. I have been selfish, boastful, and hard of heart. This Committee, to whom I am eternally grateful, has shown me to myself as I am.”
There are at least two remarkable things about Left On! The first is that this isn’t a shivery dystopia of the Red Dawn variety—the novel greets this new world with full-throated pleasure. The second is that its author is Harry Rositzke of the CIA.
Rositzke’s mischievous proposition is that the wiretappers, snoopers, and black-bag men of the intelligence agencies are the principal financiers of the left-wing groups they are working to discredit and destabilize. When President Mack orders the spooks to end hostilities against the organizations on their watch list, those organizations are thrown into crisis. The 3,385 FBI informers paid to join the Communist Party USA resign simultaneously, creating a perilous black hole in the accounts of Daily Worker. Student bodies and black welfare groups falter. “Sit-ins, love-ins, think-ins, police-baiting and dean-hustling, the stump-oratory of Maoist fustian, Marxist folderol and Marcusan fog had ended.”
As a Dear John letter to the secret state, it was stinging. As a satire for the general reader, it was pleasingly zeitgeisty. But sometimes the real world can do better. In February 1975, Lyndon LaRouche made the decision that would seal his reputation as one of America’s canonical crackpots, and allow him to become a gag on The Simpsons and a character on Saturday Night Live.
It was time, he concluded, to build his own political party and run for high office. It was time for President LaRouche to save the world from the zombies and the nuclear warmongers.
And in Sweden, Cliff Gaddy’s fiancée would do the same.
15 / THE BELIEVERS
MY FIRST RESEARCH trip to Stockholm coincided with the final two weeks of Sweden’s 2014 general election campaign. As is traditional, a stretch of concrete near the entrance to the Sergels Torg metro had been turned into a political village. Sergels Torg is a creation of the Palme years. A large public square attacked from above by a surging concrete road system and skewered by a great tower by the sculptor Edvin Öhrström. Election time adds a touch of kitsch to all this brutalism: a cluster of garden sheds and summerhouses occupied by the contending parties. Social Democrats. Christian Democrats. Greens. Moderates. The Swedish tabloid Expressen (slogan: “It stings!”) also has a space, on which I watched the deputy prime minister Jan Björklund being hugged by a man dressed as a six-foot wasp.
On the other side of the street, the smaller parties were accommodated. A young, cheerful crowd was having a sociable time in the pink kiosk staffed by Feminist Initiative, the women’s party supported by Jane Fonda and Benny Andersson of ABBA. Next door, in a red hut stocked with Marxist-Leninist literature, a little knot of Communists maintained a more somber tone. Beside them, in a white shed under a brown plastic gable, were activists from Europeiska Arbetarpartiet—the European Workers Party. Judging by their hand-drawn posters, their main business was cheerleading for the Kremlin. “Sanctions on banks, not Russia!” declared one placard. “Stop Carl Bildt’s war against Putin.” Nobody was paying much attention, so I decided to cheer them up by accepting a free copy of their newspaper. It contained one English-language article, which argued that the financial crisis of 2008 was a manufactured catastrophe. “Call it Tonkin Gulf Syndrome,” it said. “It’s what the British Empire did to suck the U.S. into the Vietnam quagmire.” The author of the article was Lyndon LaRouche.
Issues that unite all commentators across the political spectrum are rare. But for the past five decades, the European Workers Party has provided one for Sweden. Everybody from SÄPO to the Communist
s to the Social Democrats to the libertarian Right has a long-held and consistent view on the EAP—it is profoundly, mystifyingly weird.
In 1978, the conservative magazine Contra reflected that there were many parties with unattractive ideologies, “but at least they accept that a horse is a horse and that a cow is a cow. You can’t say this about the EAP. They have a language all of their own.” A government report from the mid-1980s made this assessment:
The EAP is in all likelihood the most peculiar political organization to have appeared in Sweden in the post-war era. Through outlandish episodes, conspiracy theories, and focused attacks on individuals the party and its associated bodies have to the highest degree invalidated any influence they could have held over the political landscape. EAP has in national elections never polled more than a few hundred votes. To not have come further after 25 years’ struggle would be enough to leave any one person downhearted and ready to quit. But not the EAP, who tirelessly push onwards, apparently with the conviction that the world cannot manage without the insights they so eagerly wish to communicate.
Sweden’s Lyndon LaRouche party was founded at a conference in Stockholm in May 1976. Delegates chose a tractor for a logo and Kerstin Tegin for a leader. She was enthusiastic, articulate, and presentable. She had neatly cut hair and followed the group’s conservative dress codes without looking like she was selling double glazing door-to-door. She could mimic one of LaRouche’s most distinctive rhetorical habits—sustained speechmaking that combined Marxist jargon and vulgar personal attacks—and had dropped out of further study to spend more time with LaRouche’s theories.
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