Operation Chaos

by Matthew Sweet

  The birth of the new party did not abolish the existence of that older entity the European Labor Committees; the LaRouche organization has always found it helpful to maintain a confusing plethora of identities. In her maiden speech as leader, Kerstin described the size of the prize. The Social Democrats, she said, were losing voters. The Communist Party was also in decline.

  “How could any worker,” she asked, “support their ass-licking of Palme?” The first objective of the new party, she declared, should be to secure a 4 percent share of the vote. “We need 250,000 votes to get into parliament. This is something that Palme and his Maoist countergangs cannot prevent except by fraud.” In that summer’s elections, the EAP fielded as many candidates as it could muster. Across the whole of Sweden, the party received 108 votes.

  In 1979, Bill Jones ran for office in Malmö, and he urged its people to support his vision: the city’s shipyards converted to the production of giant floating nuclear power stations that could move around the world to meet the energy needs of developing countries. Looking through the campaign literature, it was strange to see the shaggy radical of Deserter USA all tidied up and grinning from the page in a suit and tie and plastic glasses, enthusing about the power of the atom. “Don’t throw your vote away!” he implored. “Vote EAP!” That year, the party’s total rose to 158.

  But dismal performances at the ballot box never deterred a LaRouchian candidate. Like Scientologists and pod people, they have always been more interested in bodies. Bill Jones donated his. So did Cliff. For a while, Chuck Onan, the deserter with the tough Chicago childhood and the tall stories of torture training, loaned them his.

  By 1976 the furor over Mark Lane’s book Conversations with Americans had died down. No second edition appeared. A few disparaging mentions of Chuck’s name in American newspapers did not impede his progress. He settled back in Stockholm and married his teenage girlfriend, Maggie, who was studying for a degree in political science. Chuck had become a textbook hippie—long hair, Lennon glasses, bell-bottom jeans. When he got back in touch with his old comrades from the ADC and the Next Step, he found them oddly changed. They had become evangelists for LaRouche. They invited Chuck to meetings at their headquarters in Södermalm and gave him the hard sell on nuclear power, Rockefeller, and the CIA.

  “Bill and Cliff were the authorities,” Chuck told me. “They had all the best arguments. And they talked about Lyndon LaRouche as if he was the new Jesus Christ.” Chuck could never think of a clever comeback. He looked through an issue of Campaigner and raised an eyebrow at all the articles written under absurd pseudonyms such as Hermyle Golthier Jr. He sat puzzled through a lecture in which the speaker demonstrated the safety of nuclear power—and the contemptible nature of the environmentalist movement—by taking a chair and banging it down on the ground. The chair, said the speaker, also contained atoms. Therefore atomic power was safe.

  “LaRouche had an explanation of history and science that Cliff and Bill bought,” said Chuck. “A worldview that included everything. Even Beethoven. They were always talking about Beethoven.” The pressure was intense. Pretty soon, Chuck was also talking about Beethoven. “It was my wife who really saw it for what it was,” said Chuck. “A cult.”

  Chuck’s ex, Maggie Gambell, told me the story from her point of view. “All of a sudden, he changed. He started wearing a suit and tie. He cut his hair. He changed his glasses. He was only to listen to classical music. If something or somebody has this kind of influence on you, you have to beware.” One afternoon, Maggie came home from class to find her small living room crammed with people. Chuck and five or six members of the EAP. Serious men in suits and ties. “Come on in here,” said her husband. “We want to talk to you.”

  The visitors talked at her. “They wanted me to stop whatever I was doing,” recalled Maggie. “I was going to get rid of my dogs. I was going to stop studying. I was going to stop working. I would join this party and everything would be great.” She found their attitude threatening, but took a diplomatic approach and promised to consider their ideas. “I sort of managed,” she said, “and they left, but I realized that these guys were really dangerous.”

  The experience spelled the end of her marriage. She asked Chuck to stop attending EAP meetings. He refused. She asked him to move out of the flat for a few days while she gathered her thoughts. He turned pale with rage. The LaRouchians, concluded Maggie, had done nothing for her husband’s temper. “They were appealing to young intellectual people who for some reason felt lost. They were sucking them up into this organization.”

  I asked her about the men who’d invaded her flat. Were they Swedes or Americans?

  “Americans,” she said.

  * * *

  IF A MEMBER of the Swedish electorate does not wish to vote for one of the main political parties, she can write in the name of her preferred candidate—which provides an infinite number of ways to spoil a ballot paper. Historically, “Donald Duck” has outpolled the European Workers Party.

  It made the group’s tenacity and financial weightlessness all the more puzzling. How could such a tiny organization afford to rent offices and venues for their meetings? Hire telephones and telex machines? Put up almost as many election posters as the Christian Democrats? How could it fund a news agency that supplied Swedish media outlets with an unending stream of free stories? Or the production of a newspaper with a print run of eight thousand, half of which were given away?

  “It is hard,” wrote the journalist Håkan Hermansson, “if not impossible, to conclude other than that the majority of the ELC’s operations in Sweden must be financed externally.” As leader, Kerstin Tegin often found herself answering questions about where the party found its money. They were not, she explained, as rich as they seemed. Sometimes they were obliged to turn off the telex machines in order to avoid getting cut off. But they were never cut off.

  The party’s literature claimed that its expensive equipment was bought with money raised by working-class supporters in the States. This was a fantasy. The Labor Committees had very few working-class supporters in the States or Sweden. Much of its cash came from its own members, who signed over their trust funds and legacies to the cause. And thanks to a series of prosecutions made in the 1980s, we know that some of the NCLC’s resources came from fraud. One of LaRouche’s favorite films was The Producers, Mel Brooks’s 1968 comedy about two Broadway mountebanks who fund a musical about Hitler by conning rich widows out of their savings. The Labor Committees shared some of the same methods. Jim McGourty told me how fundraisers would spend long hours on the phones, fishing for donations, sometimes actually using that line from the Bible about camels and needles. One boiler-room Stakhanov favored soft persuasion. Jim impersonated his honeyed voice: “Your name is on a list of very special people who have the intellectual capability to understand the problems that we face today.…” Others just yelled that humanity was on the brink of nuclear destruction and the only way to do something about it was to hand over a credit card number now. Chris White recalled another pitch: “Rockefeller is going to start World War Three! Sell your house before the crash!”

  Fundraisers were obliged to stay in the office until they had met their targets and sometimes made up the difference from their own pockets in order to go home and get some sleep. Those who failed were punished with all-night ego-stripping sessions. Military language was deployed. Cold callers were told to think of themselves as Patton’s army, taking beachheads, taking the landing places—with the collapse of civilization as the price of failure.

  * * *

  FOR THE U.S. organization, the object of this toil was to get Lyndon H. LaRouche into the White House. LaRouche’s eight bids for high office are his principal claim on the historical memory. (A ninth, in 2016, may not count, as even his followers barely registered his declaration.) The 1976 contest was his first, but his electoral vehicle had already been constructed: yet another LaRouchian body—the U.S. Labor Party, launched in 1973 to allow NCLC activis
ts to run for congressional seats, mayoralties, and state governorships.

  When LaRouche announced his candidacy, the revolution was put on hold. He could not, however, dispense with the apocalyptic narrative. Nelson Rockefeller, by now vice president to Gerald Ford, retained his Sauron-like power in the story. Badges were struck and posters printed that read: IMPEACH ROCKY AND STOP WORLD WAR THREE. But when Jimmy Carter won the Democratic nomination, the old mythology required substantial revisions. LaRouche performed them live on prime-time television. The Labor Committees bought half an hour of air on NBC-TV and paid the fee with a paper bag containing $95,000 in cash. Picking his fingers and wiggling in his swivel chair, he told a tame interviewer that a Carter presidency would usher in an age of nuclear war and “genocidal austerity,” and claimed that Carter’s intellectual puppet masters were research fellows at the Brookings Institution, the venerable Washington think tank.

  It was a new twist on the old Manchurian Candidate story that had once starred Chris White and Mike Vale, and the detail was provided on the pages of LaRouchian publications. The brainwashing institutes of Sweden were mothballed. Now the subbasement of the Brookings Institution housed a laboratory in which a team of doctors were reprogramming Jimmy Carter’s brain.

  “Parroting such code words as ‘trust,’ ‘love’ and ‘unity’ in a linguistician’s computer,” claimed an NCLC press release, “Carter’s empty hulk is being transported around the country to preach the virtues of fascism to the population.” This time the brainwasher in chief was said to be an American-educated Englishman named Peter Bourne—“a key agent creator of the CIA’s terrorist gangs now being activated by Lower Manhattan’s insurrectionists to overthrow the country’s Constitutional government and to install a completely manipulable zombie like Carter in the Oval Office.”

  Peter Bourne is now a visiting senior research fellow at Green College, Oxford. Earlier in his career he was awarded the Bronze Star for his work as head of the U.S. Army’s psychiatric team in Vietnam. He was a senior medical adviser to the White House and assistant secretary-general at the United Nations. In 1972 he persuaded his friend Jimmy Carter, the governor of Georgia, to run for president, then held a senior position in his successful campaign in 1976.

  “But there was no psychological manipulation,” he told me. “Just a clear statement of the facts and my faith in him that he could make it.” The Labor Committees, however, were committed to their paranoid reading of Bourne’s résumé. “I have been harassed by these people off and on over the last forty years,” he said. “Throughout the campaign and on into the White House years the LaRouchies showed up with placards and pamphlets to hand out every time I spoke in public. Sometimes they would completely disrupt the events. They inflicted this only on me and not on any other of Carter’s staff. I never understood their political philosophy or what they believed in.”

  Their interest in him may have had an unanticipated literary consequence. When Robert Ludlum wrote a bestselling thriller about an amnesiac assassin shaped by a secret CIA brainwashing project, he borrowed Peter’s name for his hero, along with a few biographical details. The Labor Committees were energetic in their dissemination of their flyers and press releases. Perhaps Ludlum picked one up, and The Bourne Identity has its roots in one of their fictions.

  * * *

  CIA CONSPIRACY THEORIES sustained the Labor Committees. They were also used to explain their activities. In Sweden, the combative nature of the American Deserters Committee led many to suspect that it was a front group intended to create conflict and disunity on the left. Even Hans Göran Franck was telling friends, mournfully, that he thought Michael Vale and Bill Jones had been spooks from the start.

  For the ADC’s successor organization, that suspicion was doubled. Olof Palme’s press officer defined the EAP as “an agency of North American origin whose behavior corresponds perfectly to a group tied to some sort of intelligence organization.” The deputy chairman of the Danish Social Democrats agreed: “I cannot deny that it is an American intelligence organization,” he said, “but it is impossible to say whether it is CIA or others behind it.”

  The renegade agency man Philip Agee, in Stockholm to promote his confessional memoir Inside the Company, told journalists that the Labor Committees were a right-wing organization masquerading as a left-wing one. “That it is now expanded to Europe,” he said, “fits the pattern of a normal CIA operation.” Few in the Swedish media took issue with the explanation; the idea that EAP members were Langley’s paid provocateurs was the most orthodox interpretation of their existence. The title of Håkan Hermansson’s 1975 pamphlet spelled out the consensus: Moles in Socialist Disguises.

  In recent years the CIA has released a large number of documents relating to Lyndon LaRouche and his political empire. They suggest that the agency found it as weird and alarming as everyone else. More so, perhaps, as the CIA was the focus of so many of its beliefs. Among the declassified papers put online in the first days of 2017 is the agency’s copy of a letter sent in late February 1974 by William Colby to the newspaper editor Ben Bradlee, complaining about the Washington Post’s coverage of the Chris White Affair.

  Colby protested that readers could be left with the impression “that the CIA, through its refusal to comment, indeed might be involved in the kinds of activities the NCLC alleges. Our recollection is that we told your reporter that the NCLC appeared to be a domestic organization, so he should ask the Federal Bureau of Investigation rather than the CIA for information about it. While it appeared self-evident that the NCLC charges are only twisted fantasy, your circulation of them forces the CIA to deny them flatly as false.”

  Seymour Hersh’s articles on Operation Chaos were eleven months away. After that, such protests would be pointless. And the archive now shows that, contrary to Colby’s letter, Langley accumulated a substantial dossier on the Labor Committees and their international offshoots: handbills about the brainwash plot, a leaflet urging action against Rockefeller’s Nazi doctors, a copy of LaRouche’s telegram to President Nixon, warning him that the agency was plotting to remove him from office. Handwritten annotations suggest that files were also kept on individual members.

  In the mid-1970s, the CIA file on the Labor Committees was maintained by Michael Schneeberger, a counterintelligence officer in the Security Analysis Group at Langley. This should have remained a secret, but when the CIA declassified the file, someone forgot to redact his name. Schneeberger retired from the agency in 1998 but was happy to reminisce by email—and to confirm that his suspicions were an extension of those upon which MHCHAOS was founded. The CIA feared that the Labor Committees were working with the guidance and encouragement of Moscow.

  “We were concerned,” he told me, “that the KGB was taking advantage of anti-war movements and organizations to infiltrate their ranks and use the principal movers and shakers as agents of influence.” Schneeberger and his colleagues busied themselves identifying contacts between members of the Labor Committees and suspected representatives of the KGB. “I’m not precisely sure of the genesis of our counterintelligence interest,” he told me, “but strongly suspect that there was some degree of credible information from Soviet defectors and recruited agents suggesting that the KGB had an interest in using domestic American anti-war organizations for intelligence purposes since they were typically ripe for recruitment given their progressive platforms.” The anxieties were manifold: the Russians might use the Labor Committees to spread propaganda, or, more seriously, “to identify any existential threats to U.S. intelligence or military establishments and facilities” or “create violence to disrupt and discredit Vietnam War efforts.”

  Operation Chaos had been closed, its files incinerated. But its job was still being done, and the same blanks were being drawn. In 1976, as LaRouche gathered his skirts to run for president, the CIA conceded that there was no Russian money in his purse, or the detectable influence of any other government.

  * * *

  JIMMY CARTE
R WAS sworn in as president on January 20, 1977, having secured just over 50 percent of the popular vote in the election the previous November. Lyndon LaRouche had scraped 0.05 percent, trailing many thousands behind the Libertarians, the Communists, and the Socialist Workers. But this did not deter him. His aggressive campaign against Carter had won him a number of wealthy right-wing supporters. And he also sensed opportunity in Carter’s skeptical attitude toward the intelligence men.

  In March 1977, Carter appointed Admiral Stansfield Turner to reform the CIA. Turner had commanded a destroyer, a guided missile cruiser, and a naval fleet before he assumed the captaincy of Langley. On his first day in the job he asked for a report on Operation Chaos. His initial inspection found that the super-secret, highly compartmentalized bureaucracy that produced efforts such as MHCHAOS had evolved into a mechanism for obscuring unethical activities, from the toppling of the Allende government in Chile to the maintenance of assets who were actually the mistresses of CIA officers, or arms dealers with whom they were doing business on the side.

  Turner’s first move was a swift one: he sent out a computer-generated letter informing 820 case officers that their services were no longer required. Then he set about redefining the business of spying. Espionage under Turner was oriented away from blackmail, cyanide capsules, and exploding cigars and toward more academic activities. Rather than trying to cultivate moles in the Kremlin, a new breed of officer would investigate the enemy by analyzing public and private opinion in their field of operations. “Undercover case officers or agents … with the polling skill of George Gallup,” Stansfield proposed, might “take the pulse of a foreign country.”

  Lyndon LaRouche was ready to offer his services. He was in an upbeat mood. He was the head of an intelligence-gathering body with offices all over the world, staffed by zealous operatives who would work for starvation wages. Perhaps the Labor Committees could take up the slack? Charles Tate, a security aide to LaRouche, described the thinking. “I’m not suggesting that he was advocating that the security staff storm Langley and take over,” he explained. “I just mean that we were to aid and abet the CIA and other intelligence agencies which had taken a body blow from Stansfield Turner.”