Operation Chaos

by Matthew Sweet

  It was quite a switcheroo. In the space of three years, the organization’s official line on the CIA had changed from seeing it as a malign counterinsurgency plotting to depose the president and zombify America, to an essential state apparatus that required defending from reformers. The CIA’s enemies were now their enemies—the Soviet Union and President Jimmy Carter.

  The shift caused disquiet among some of LaRouche’s followers, who began to ask questions. One former member described his unease: “What if the results of all this research were being passed on elsewhere? To the CIA or the FBI or the KGB? To rightist governments who might appreciate an assessment of, say, networks of oppositional figures within their own sphere of influence?” It was his cue to leave. But other Labor Committees members had grown accustomed to performing ideological backflips and had learned to see them as tests of their loyalty.

  “It’s what Michael Vale would have called a necessary deviation,” said Jim McGourty. “In order to retain control of the executive portion of a political organization you have to abruptly and overtly change its direction.” People noticed: in Sweden, Cliff and Kerstin’s European Workers Party began to attract the attention of journalists and researchers who kept tabs on the European Far Right. One, Stieg Larsson, the future author of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, opened a file on them.

  When Larsson died in 2004, he left behind a large personal archive, much of which related to his long career as an investigator of Swedish political extremism. Going through this material, I was amazed to find swathes of notes on the European Workers Party. Biographical sketches of Cliff Gaddy, Kerstin Tegin, and Bill Jones—referred to, cutely, as “Billy.” Pages that showed Larsson engaged in the pointless task of trying to reconcile the disparate elements of the LaRouchian world picture. His conclusion was that the party was not a CIA or KGB front, but “a fascist group in its classical concept; it has its own ideology, its own organization, and is fully autonomous from outside interference.” Most intriguingly, Larsson had drawn a rough plan of the EAP’s offices, on which he’d scribbled speculations about the position of its unseen entrances and exits. It was the kind of diagram you’d make if you were planning a burglary.

  * * *

  ONE OF PRESIDENT Carter’s first acts in office was to sign Executive Order 11967, pardoning men who had avoided the Vietnam draft. Its terms did not stretch to deserters. In March, however, the Defense Department threw them a bone. If a deserter reported in person to the military authorities, he would receive an undesirable discharge. He could then apply to upgrade his status to a general discharge. The offer would expire on October 4, 1977.

  The scheme made many uneasy: a court-martial and prison sentence were still possible. It was a game of Russian roulette in which the players were not permitted to know how many bullets were in the gun. That summer, however, many of the Stockholm deserters took their chances. Bill Jones flew home and was met at the airport by two military policemen. He shrugged when I asked him if he had been nervous: the process, he said, had been brisk and painless.

  Chuck Onan admitted to a feeling of trepidation. He reported to Camp Pendleton and was amazed to find that nobody wanted to give him a hard time. He walked into the waiting room in a cool blue Swedish suit, and the envious looks of marines in fatigues, back from a last tour of duty, told him that he’d made the right decision.

  Cliff Gaddy also made a trip home that summer, which would have given him the opportunity to turn himself in at Fort Meade, Maryland, the headquarters of the U.S. Army Security Agency. Old LaRouchians to whom I spoke remembered Cliff and Kerstin going on an NCLC road trip in the summer of 1977. They had recently been married: perhaps it counted as a honeymoon. The couple spent time at the organization’s headquarters in Manhattan. They visited a local group in Houston, Texas, where Kerstin reinforced the official message on birth control: true revolutionary women were obliged to reject motherhood. (In the New York branch, pregnant members were offered a free ride to the abortion clinic, courtesy of its so-called coat hanger brigade.) The couple also spent three weeks in Cliff’s hometown of Danville, Virginia, where a LaRouche lifer, Alan Ogden, was running for governor on a U.S. Labor Party ticket.

  The campaign, like everything to do with the Labor Committees, was noisy and confusing. Ogden had eleven arrests for trespassing and similar offenses on his record hanging over him: some of his campaign was conducted from prison. (An FBI setup, said Ogden.) Then the press obtained bureau documents that described the candidate as “a dangerous international terrorist.” The skinny, bespectacled pipe smoker seemed an unlikely bomber. He did nothing more offensive than take his soapbox to the state’s parks and street corners and shout through a megaphone about Jimmy Carter’s “fascist labor front” and the probable imminence of nuclear war with the Soviet Union. “And so it goes for the U.S. Labor Party,” reported the Danville Bee, “the freak show of Virginia politics, a party consigned by the news media and the political establishment to ridicule, or even worse, obscurity.”

  Cliff and Kerstin joined the campaign trail in August. Kerstin toured Danville in a neat gingham dress and told reporters about the importance of impeaching Jimmy Carter and forming a “Whig coalition” of farmers, factory workers, and industrialists against “the entire Rockefeller banking interests.” She brought the same message to the gates of the local textile mill. Not everyone was pleased to hear it.

  “It was only through President Carter’s intervention that people like ‘Chip’ Gaddy could come home,” complained one reader of the Danville Register. “‘Chip’ Gaddy’s past actions clearly show that he has no regard for the U.S. and Virginia.” The electorate may have agreed: Ogden secured only 0.8 percent of the vote. Fraud at the polls, said the LaRouchians. But that didn’t stop the Gaddys from returning to Sweden in triumph and going on a lecture tour to tell their fellow citizens about “the real America”—one ripe for a U.S. Labor Party victory.

  * * *

  IN DECEMBER 1977, the Labor Committees had something to celebrate: LaRouche’s marriage to Helga Zepp Ljustina, a German journalist who had reported from Beijing during the Cultural Revolution. (Her first husband, a Yugoslav sailor who worked on container ships, had transported her on a literal slow boat to China.) But his real romance was with the CIA. Like a besotted suitor who acquires a new haircut and wardrobe to impress a potential partner, LaRouche primped and pomaded his organization to attract Langley’s attention. Many of his gentleman callers were con men.

  Edward von Rothkirch was a chancer who presented himself as a freelance agency contractor working undercover behind the Iron Curtain with an anti-Soviet sabotage unit called the Freikorps of Barbarossa. Roy Frankhouser was a grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan who courted LaRouche by claiming to be a former CIA operative whose glass eye was the result of an injury sustained during the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion. It was hogwash, but LaRouche was impressed and signed him up on a $700 weekly retainer. He did little to justify the fee. On one occasion LaRouche dispatched him on a spying mission to Boston. Instead he went to a Star Trek convention in Scranton, Pennsylvania. Frankhouser did not admit his deception, but called from the hotel to warn the organization that he had just discovered that the FBI was tapping its phones.

  The most elaborate and costly scam was perpetrated by a group of hustlers led by a figure code-named “the Major,” who announced himself as a CIA officer who wanted to cooperate with LaRouche and his security team on a top-secret project. He persuaded them to buy a large farm south of Washington, DC, on which special agents would be trained for old-school missions of the sort discouraged by Stansfield Turner’s reforms. In exchange, the Major would supply LaRouche with agency intelligence on the latest assassination attempts against him. Then a call came through that the Soviets had got wind of the plan. To allay suspicion, hundreds of thousands more dollars would be required to stock the farm with animals to disguise its true function. Excited by this intrigue, LaRouche instructed his acolytes to hand over the cash.

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bsp; Not all of LaRouche’s contacts with power were imaginary. When Ronald Reagan won the 1980 presidential election, the organization made eyes at the new president’s advisers. The more respectable members of the Labor Committees invited Republican officials to policy seminars on Capitol Hill. Favored parties received free subscriptions to the glossy LaRouche magazine Executive Intelligence Review, and to War on Drugs, a title founded as an echo chamber for Reagan’s views on narcotics. Amazingly, the strategy worked. With loyal Warren Hamerman at his heels, LaRouche met with representatives of the Reagan transition team. He also had coffee with Admiral Bobby Ray Inman, the new deputy director of the CIA—an embarrassing fact that would dog Inman for years afterward.

  The great prize of this effort, however, was something LaRouchians still celebrate today as their leader’s great achievement—a modest consultative role in the development of the Strategic Defense Initiative, Reagan’s plan to win the Cold War by putting laser cannons in space. With the blessing of the National Security Council, an NCLC intelligence specialist met with a contact from the Soviet mission in New York to convey a reassuring message: America intended to share this embryonic technology, and had no intention of using it to launch a nuclear first strike. When Reagan went public with his plans in March 1983, the Soviets backed off and these meetings withered away. But LaRouche barely acknowledged the failure. He kept on smiling, as if his relationship with the Reagan administration were close and warm.

  Around this time LaRouche chose to move his headquarters from New York to Leesburg, a pretty little town in Loudoun County, Virginia, in order to breathe the same air as its population of government officials and Pentagon types. (He’d also heard that Washington’s nuclear bunkers were located in Loudoun County.) In August 1983 he took the lease on an estate that had once been the home of the ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev and encouraged his followers to find homes in the vicinity. About two hundred did. Among them were Warren and Nora Hamerman, Jim McGourty and Christina Nelson, Chris and Carol White, and Molly Kronberg and her husband, Ken. From here, everyone proselytized for “Star Wars” technology—though as LaRouche believed that science fiction was morally pernicious, the popular nickname for the project rarely passed his lips. SDI became an inescapable subject for his publications, in America and beyond.

  * * *

  IN SWEDEN, CLIFF and Kerstin were not visibly troubled by this ninety-degree turn. The conflict with Eurasia was over, and they were now at war with Oceania. Their party launched its own antidrug campaign, which mimicked the official Swedish equivalent so convincingly that several prominent celebrities—among them Björn Ulvaeus and Frida Lyngstad of ABBA—were fooled into giving their support. SDI was added to the party’s list of prescribed obsessions: the Gaddys became cheerleaders for space weapons and the end of Swedish neutrality.

  In December 1983, they held a conference in Oslo at which they urged delegates to celebrate the opportunities brought by this new extraterrestrial frontier. Cliff spoke in favor of space-mounted lasers. Kerstin delivered a tirade against the peace movement. Their colleague Michael Liebig, who, a decade before, had tried to extract a confession from Cliff in the Whites’ bedroom in Colindale, urged NATO to open a front beyond the earth. The event did not go smoothly. Anti-war protestors occupied the conference hall and chained the doors. Once they had been ejected, they cut off the electricity supply to the building. The LaRouchians declared that the demonstrators were controlled by Moscow.

  It’s worth stopping to imagine what it must have been like to inhabit the mind of Cliff Gaddy at this moment. He had once been part of an anti-war movement suspected, wrongly, of being funded by the Soviet Union. Now he was urging Sweden and its neighbors to join NATO and take human conflict beyond the limits of the earth—to fight the next Vietnam War in space. As he gave the opening speech, mixing enthusiasm for orbiting laser weapons with the usual goggle-eyed catastrophism about the imminent collapse of Western civilization, the irony must have struck him. It was a moment from the last page of Animal Farm.

  * * *

  THE ORGANIZATION’S SHORT affair with the Reagan administration did not dilute the weirder aspects of the LaRouchian project. As the CIA were now the good guys, and Nelson Rockefeller had dropped dead of a heart attack in January 1979, his network of slave labor camps unestablished, new obsessions were required. LaRouche saw conspirators everywhere. Even the Leesburg Gardening Club was a nest of KGB agents. (“Clacking busybodies in this Soviet jellyfish front … oozing out their funny little propaganda and making nuisances of themselves.”)

  But he required a more prominent enemy. His pick was both astute and insane. He chose Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, then commissioned a book contending that the British Empire had never fallen but had reinvented itself as a covert body of power and influence. Dope Inc. argued that the queen controlled the world’s illegal drug markets and was fighting a secret opium war against the United States. It had been a long campaign: the British had drawn the United States into the Vietnam War and had also encouraged the development of the student anti-war movement. But it had prevented that movement from achieving its revolutionary potential by keeping it supplied with hashish and LSD.

  Inevitably, the Tavistock Institute was incorporated into the royal master plan: Her Majesty had charged it with the task of popularizing and weaponizing a minor rock group called the Beatles, who, under the guidance of the philosopher Bertrand Russell, were dispatched to the States on a mission to ruin American youth. “Once caught in the environment defined by Russell and the Tavistock Institute’s wartime psychological warfare experts,” asserted Dope Inc., “their sense of values and their creative potential were snatched up in a cloud of hashish smoke.”

  Some became instant enthusiasts for this idea. Warren Hamerman supported it because he supported anything that LaRouche said, no matter how peculiar. For those who retained a better sense of how LaRouche was perceived beyond his own organization, the principal response to this royal conspiracy theory was embarrassment.

  Chris and Carol White remembered that those who campaigned for LaRouche in 1979, when he dissolved the U.S. Labor Party and made the first of seven attempts to secure the Democratic nomination for the presidency, saw their hard work evaporate when LaRouche turned up for the 1980 New Hampshire primary and started making speeches about the Satanic influence of the House of Windsor. The audience soon realized that it was in the presence of a crackpot.

  * * *

  OVER THE YEARS, NCLC members have expended as much energy thinking about the queen as the makers of Royal Wedding souvenir mugs. They have put her, headscarfed and grim, on the covers of their magazines. They have published tracts describing Her Majesty’s desire to murder billions of people. They have hired lecture halls to express the view that she had a jeweled hand in the 9/11 attacks. One member, even today, likes to pull on a gray wig and tiara and troll around Manhattan, making regal statements in a voice that owes rather more to the Wicked Witch of the West than the head of the Commonwealth. (I’m not convinced that Elizabeth Windsor has ever used the phrase “Fly, my pretties.”) But the queen is of limited use to an organization of provocateurs. LaRouche has always preferred enemies who answer back, in order that their annoyance or bafflement can be quoted in the pages of his publications and spun into evidence of guilt. Her Majesty’s public statements about her own feelings are rare. And unless she sits up late at Buckingham Palace, tapping her own name and “green genocide” into Google, it is doubtful whether she has even heard of Lyndon Hermyle LaRouche Jr.

  So the silent Elizabeth had to be teamed with another, more vocal supervillain. The role was given to former secretary of state Henry Kissinger. In his case, NCLC members were much more hands-on. They disrupted his diary by impersonating his staff over the phone and canceling engagements. They ordered pizza to be delivered to his home. They harassed him in public. In February 1982 a pair of LaRouche activists accosted Kissinger as he passed through Newark International Airport on his way to triple-b
ypass heart surgery in Boston.

  “Is it true,” yelled a member named Ellen Kaplan, “that you sleep with young boys at the Carlyle Hotel?” An enraged Nancy Kissinger reached for Kaplan’s throat, and found herself up on an assault charge. The judge dismissed the case. So did the press. (“Nancy Kissinger made one mistake in etiquette,” reflected a newspaper columnist. “Mrs. Kissinger did not stomp on the woman’s face.”) LaRouche publications, however, recorded this dismal event as a major victory.

  The organization produced a Kissinger joke book full of obscene cartoons that depicted him as a cannibal and a pervert. They planted stories in the overseas press that accused him, variously, of murdering the Italian prime minster Aldo Moro and braining a Romanian waiter with a whiskey bottle during an orgy in Acapulco. When Kissinger spoke at a meeting in Germany, a LaRouchian prankster dressed as the former secretary of state disrupted the event by insisting that the man on the podium was an impostor.

  LaRouche issued a press release entitled “Henry Kissinger, the Politics of Faggotry.” “His heathen sexual inclinations,” argued LaRouche, “are merely an integral part of a larger evil.… Kissinger is the kind of homosexual personality who ordinarily makes a potential professional assassin, a gangland thug for hire.” He ended with a catastrophist flourish. “That kind of faggotry destroyed Rome. Will you permit it also to destroy the United States?” In documents for internal distribution within the cult, he used even less attractive language: “I wouldn’t want Kissinger dead. I’d want him in a pit to come out once a day to be pissed on by the widows and orphans of the world.”