LaRouche’s obsessions with Kissinger and Elizabeth II made him a national joke. Saturday Night Live began “Lyndon LaRouche Theatre,” in which Randy Quaid, in a bald wig, bow tie, and spectacles, narrated the latest melodramatic twists and turns of the conspiracy. “Next week in part three,” he hooted, “diabolical Kissinger and miscreant Elizabeth engage KGB agents to assassinate me while continuing to sponsor attacks in the media which attempt to foster one of the most monstrous lies of the twentieth century—that I am insane!”
It seemed a fit subject for farce, but according to Dennis King, an investigative journalist who has studied the organization for five decades, violent action was also on the agenda. In 1983, LaRouche’s security team called a meeting and told the gathered membership “Kissinger must die.” LaRouche’s chauffeur was asked to consider putting a bomb under Kissinger’s car.
“But this rage,” writes King, “ultimately was just sublimated into more nasty leaflets and articles in Executive Intelligence Review. The LaRouchians had come to believe that really clever conspirators never carry out an assassination themselves, but simply spread hate propaganda about the targeted person that might trigger an attack by some disturbed personality or fanatic. That way, they can never be held legally responsible.”
* * *
IN SWEDEN, OLOF Palme was the target. He was a good choice. Palme had enemies at both ends of the political spectrum, many of whom shared LaRouche’s taste for violent fantasy. The right-wing Contra magazine produced a dartboard bearing an image of Palme’s face. Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, the crime-writing Communist Party members whose Martin Beck books invented the genre of Scandinavian noir, made their last novel, The Terrorists, a political thriller in which the girlfriend of an American deserter assassinates the Swedish prime minister, blaming him for her partner’s suicide.
The first dark blossoms of Cliff and Kerstin’s hate campaign against Palme appeared in the same year, when the Stockholm edition of New Solidarity declared that “Sweden’s population is led by a madman, a demented murderer who turns up out of the dark, cold winter nights and sneaks toward his victims with an ax ready.” In case readers found this picture hard to envisage, the paper provided a portrait of a mad-eyed Swedish premier shouldering an ax dripping with blood. It became the EAP’s favorite image—printed in its literature, blown up to placard size for use at its card-table shrines—and far more memorable than its boring logo with the tractor.
“Behind the Democratic mask,” read the handbills, “we find the true Olof Palme, a raging beast, an ax killer, the Devil’s devil.… The worker who tolerates Palme as his leader at this point in history … does so because he is terrified by the thought of leaving his world of impotent, deathlike fantasies.”
LaRouche offices across the world ensured the spread of this rhetoric. “Palme was one step below Satan,” recalled one former member of the U.S. organization. “We had never-ending articles, exposés and cartoons about him and whipped everyone into a frenzy about how he must be stopped. This one guy was among the most important participants in enslaving humanity.”
When the Stockholm paper Aftonbladet ran a series of investigative reports on the EAP in October 1975, LaRouche sent a telex to its editors:
GENTLEMEN: ARE YOU AND OLOF PALME SO ENTIRELY INSANE THAT YOU BELIEVE THAT SUCH HASHISH-SCENTED GOSSIP WILL DETER SERIOUS PERSONS WHO KNOW THAT THE CRUSHING OF THE ATLANTICIST FACTION IS ABSOLUTELY ESSENTIAL TO SAVE THE WORLD FROM A TAVISTOCKIAN FASCIST NIGHTMARE AND TOTAL THERMONUCLEAR WARFARE?
There was an obvious one-word answer to the question. But anyone turned on by such language could expect a welcoming hug from the EAP—particularly if that person had money in the bank.
Victor Gunnarsson, a braggartly fantasist of the Far Right, who liked to boast that he had served in Vietnam and worked for the CIA, signed up for membership and went home with an armful of anti-Palme literature. A better catch was Alf Enerström, a wealthy doctor who had broken with the Social Democratic Party in 1974 over its liberal policy on abortion. Enerström was a strange and damaged individual. In 1976 he was accused of beating his teenage son and, when the boy was taken into care, decided that this was part of a state operation against him, orchestrated personally by Palme. He made his case in a series of full-page advertisements in the Swedish press. The depth of his pockets and of his hatred made him an attractive ally for the EAP, for which he coughed up around $150,000 and a torrent of anti-Palme bile.
The Gaddys were relaxed in his company. During the 1982 election campaign Kerstin stood beside Enerström at rallies and public meetings as they railed against Palme and accused him of collusion with the KGB. Cliff accompanied Enerström to a community radio station, where they presented the case for Palme’s fascist modus operandi: the evidence included conspiracy theories about the hidden Nazi history of his family and an account of his plan to give Swedish officials the right to commit murder with impunity. (“Freedom of speech in Stockholm community radio reaches far beyond our own galaxy,” wrote a perplexed journalist who tuned in.)
The LaRouchian accusations became increasingly weird. In May 1982, William Engdahl wrote a piece for Executive Intelligence Review asserting that Palme was part of a heroin-smuggling syndicate that also included a group of Turkish neofascists that had plotted to assassinate Pope John Paul II. The following month LaRouche produced an essay entitled “Olof Palme and the Neo-Nazi International,” which argued that the Swedish prime minister was part of a secretive and powerful network known as the Black Guelph. “They are presently the single wealthiest political force in the world, the dominant rentier-finance interest centered in such places as Venice, Trieste, Liechtenstein, Switzerland, Amsterdam, and London,” he wrote. It was as insane as it was meaningless, but any nut with a copy of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion would have read between the lines and nodded in agreement. They may even have felt compelled to do something about it.
* * *
SWEDEN IS A small country. Its politicians are not distant figures. In the 1960s and ’70s, they were even more proximate. The home number of Palme’s predecessor Tage Erlander was listed in the phone directory; if you rang, he would pick up. Olof Palme liked to walk through the streets without a bodyguard. When Cliff, Kerstin, Bill, and their comrades distributed literature that suggested Palme was a paranoid schizophrenic, or, more colorfully, a “foul-smelling excretion from a dead world, the progeny of a lunatic military-aristocracy,” they must have calculated that its target would be among their readers. But this did not give them pause for thought. On at least one occasion, a member of EAP approached Palme and tried to sell him some of this literature.
Eventually, the leader of the Social Democrats felt moved to comment. In May 1979, the EAP circulated a letter that purported to be from a group of union leaders, denouncing Palme’s nuclear energy policy. The letter was a hoax, but this was not discovered before it had run on the front page of the main Swedish evening newspaper. “This CIA organization,” said Palme, wearily, “has been after me for several years.”
The psychology of stalking would probably explain the party’s reaction: when the object of its fantasies acknowledged its existence, it was Christmas for the EAP. It gave them an opportunity to issue lengthy communiqués calling for a government inquiry into the harassment of their party, and declaring how wounded its members felt by the false accusation that it was an instrument of the CIA.
As leader, Kerstin always signed these, but their use of distinctly English idioms suggests that Cliff may have been the one sitting at the typewriter. They achieved their aim: publicity. By the early 1980s, the Swedish media treated Kerstin as an entertaining if faintly unsavory political curiosity. Her sullen good looks and tight smile made regular appearances in the press, usually when her party was accused of extremism or electoral misconduct.
In early 1982 the Channel TV-2 program Magasinet put its reporter Larsolof Giertta on Kerstin’s case. He interviewed her, attended a party meeting, caught a few shots of C
liff, shuffling papers and looking mistrustfully at the camera, and concluded that the EAP was a “Nazi-influenced” organization of the Far Right. A quote was obtained from Palme himself, who described the party as “a tiny fascist-like sect.” Predictably, the EAP was not delighted. Just as predictably, a pair of intense Swedish LaRouchians appeared on Giertta’s doorstep to tell the journalist that if he went to Wiesbaden to investigate the European headquarters of their organization, he should beware of fast-moving cars on the autobahn.
Magasinet invited Kerstin Tegin-Gaddy into the studio to explain her political position and her strange beliefs about Olof Palme. She was not in a conciliatory mood. Kerstin argued that Magasinet was part of Palme’s smear campaign against the EAP. “Okay, Olof Palme,” said Kerstin, as if the prime minister were in the room. “Let’s take this discussion. You or me, which is it who is pushing a fascist politics?”
It was a fairly cranky performance, but the EAP claimed it as a great propaganda victory. “The general response everywhere is the same,” enthused a party report to the mother organization in Leesburg. “Great relief and joy that finally somebody is able to challenge the Social-Democratic-Greenie-Fascist power-structure.” Invigorated, Kerstin announced a national speaking tour—apparently convinced that by 1987, Palme would be toppled and she would be the new prime minister of Sweden. Half of the prediction came true.
* * *
LAROUCHIAN FANTASIES ABOUT Palme became so intense and omnivorous that they began to devour the biographies of the people who constructed them. Bill Engdahl identified Palme’s policy of granting humanitarian asylum to Vietnam deserters as a smoke screen to make Sweden a safe haven for terrorists and gangsters. LaRouche contended that the GI movement in Sweden was “a front organization using unwitting Vietnam War opponents and critics as a diversionary cover for an evil operation against the United States.” (The illustration featured Olof Palme as a vampire and Bo Burlingham as a gun-toting frogman with a cigarette in his mouth.)
For LaRouchians who had entered the movement through the American Deserters Committee and the Next Step, this was the most baroque, prog-rock concept-album phase of their incorporation into LaRouchian mythology. For a decade Bill Jones and his former comrades had been obliged to accept that they had not, after all, been the leaders of a group that had fought for the rights of deserters and grabbed the attention of the world. They had been the dupes of some Cold War intelligence operation. Now they were part of a conspiracy that went back centuries—part of a master plan designed by Bertrand Russell and the Tavistock Institute and executed by Michael Vale and his allies, to preserve the dominance of Olof Palme, the House of Windsor, and an Illuminati-like organization founded by the East India Company and a group of old Venetian banking families. My lunchtime conversations with Bill suggested that, decades later, he remained loyal to this mad, fake version of his own life story. Bertrand Russell, he told me, had once sent a letter of support to Michael Vale, and that was evidence enough.
Bo Burlingham, whose life also furnished the material for these fantasies, offered me the best explanation of their power. As we sat under the blossoms in the courtyard of the Berkeley City Club, he described how the Labor Committees became a sticky-doll trap for a certain kind of radical.
“The LaRouche blandishments have this pseudo-intellectual quality,” he said. “It’s all smoke and mirrors. Ultimately, to get involved in that you’re a fool, an agent provocateur, or somebody who has a need of some sort that leads them to get involved in a cult. The Weathermen were a cult, so I’m not saying this with any great sense of superiority, but the LaRouchies are generally cultish. You adopt a certain orthodoxy from which it becomes a grave sin to stray. There are mechanisms inside to make sure it gets reinforced, reinforced, reinforced, to the point where you’re detached from reality. You’re living in this bubble.”
That bubble burst on the night of February 28, 1986. It happened when Olof Palme, his wife, Lisbet, and their son Mårten walked out of the Grand Cinema on Sveavägen, in the heart of Stockholm. They had watched a Swedish comedy called The Brothers Mozart. It had been a last-minute decision: Lisbet had wanted to see Lasse Hallström’s picture My Life as a Dog. Despite the bitter cold and the slippery conditions, Palme and his wife began walking home to their apartment in Gamla Stan. On the way they passed an arts and crafts shop called Dekorima. Its illuminated windows cast a bright light on the icy street.
At 11:21 p.m., a man grabbed Olof Palme by the shoulder, pulled a large handgun from his coat, and fired a single shot into the prime minister’s back. Blood ran into the snow. The assassin stood for a moment, gazing down upon his victim, then bolted into the darkness.
At six minutes past midnight, Palme was pronounced dead. A description of the perpetrator was constructed from impressions gleaned from passersby. The dread news spread through the early hours. A radio bulletin at 1:10 a.m. A television report at 4:00 a.m. A government press conference an hour later. Sweden reeled in horror.
In the offices of the EAP, they opened a bottle of champagne. In the offices of the investigating detectives, the phone rang. An anonymous caller supplied the name of a man he thought might be responsible for the assassination. The man answered the description of the assassin and had been heard speaking about Palme with memorable viciousness. The man was Cliff Gaddy.
16 / THE ASSASSINS
AFTER A DECADE of vitriol throwing, it was hardly surprising that the European Workers Party should find itself under suspicion. It had portrayed Olof Palme as a vampire, an ax murderer, and an Iranian ayatollah. It had put hatred for him at the heart of its discourse and its policies. It had made the suggestion, in public, that the death of the prime minister would be a welcome event.
Cliff Gaddy was not the only EAP member to be mentioned by a tipster. An usher at the Grand Cinema said that he had seen someone who looked like Kerstin Tegin-Gaddy loitering outside the building on the night of the murder. More than two hundred members of the public telephoned the investigation with information and theories about the party’s involvement in Palme’s death. The Swedish consul in New York and the Swedish ambassador to the United Nations also urged the detectives to put the EAP in the frame.
The investigators began interviewing the party’s principal members. They were easy to find. There were very few of them, and SÄPO had kept their names and addresses on file since 1975. The police spoke to a New Solidarity contributor whom an informer had overheard saying that the EAP had a plan to kill Palme. But he had been in the office that night. They contacted a member named John Hardwick and discovered that he had left the organization three years previously, after an unpleasant meeting with LaRouche at the European Labor Committees office in Wiesbaden. (Hardwick was now worried that his former comrades were spying on him.) They interviewed the EAP’s sugar daddy Alf Enerström, but his girlfriend Gio Petré (an actress who had appeared in Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries) furnished him with an alibi.
They did not interview Cliff or Kerstin, despite receiving more calls mentioning their names. The focus of the investigation had already moved to another individual on the EAP membership register: Victor Gunnarsson, a volatile eccentric with a Burt Reynolds mustache and links to the Swedish Far Right, who made a fitful living as a language teacher. (One school had sacked him for habitual lateness, another for punching a boy who had irritated him.)
Detectives found some of the EAP’s nastier anti-Palme literature in his apartment. On the night of the murder, he had been close to the scene. That evening he had made a nuisance of himself in a Stockholm restaurant called Mon Cheri, where he had pretended to be an American tourist and railed angrily against Olof Palme and his politics. “If you say what you think in Sweden today,” he had declared, “you’ll get shot in the back.” Failing to impress his audience, he left the restaurant. He told the police that he’d gone to see Rocky IV at the Rigoletto Cinema. No witness, however, could verify this. The next confirmed sighting was at 1:10 a.m., when he annoyed the staff
in a branch of McDonald’s not far from the murder scene.
Gunnarsson was taken into custody. He seemed utterly unbothered by the experience, infuriating his interrogator, Detective Börje Wingren, by laughing at his questions and replying in the voice of Eddie Murphy in Beverly Hills Cop. Gunnarsson’s attitude cooled only when a witness was produced: a cabdriver who claimed that the suspect had jumped into his taxi not far from the murder scene and told him to drive away as fast as he could. The driver picked Gunnarsson from a police lineup. But just as the suspect was about to receive a formal charge, the prosecutor learned that Detective Wingren had coached his witness to settle on the prime suspect. The case collapsed, and Gunnarsson was released. The wasted time, and Wingren’s unethical behavior, dealt the investigation a blow from which it did not recover.
The Swedish press does not print the names of criminal suspects until conviction is secured. It referred to Gunnarsson as “the 33-year-old”—a nickname that still has resonance for Swedes who remember the assassination. But interest was so intense that the newspapers broke their own rule, and Gunnarsson’s name and photograph were printed. When he was released from custody, he discovered that he had become notorious. Work was impossible to find. People shouted at him on the street, calling him a murderer and an assassin. Newspaper reports continued to mention him in connection with the LaRouchians, and the police recalled him several times to take part in lineups. He still hated Palme. Now he also hated the European Workers Party for having brought the inquiry to his door.
His prospects had been ruined because his apartment was littered with obnoxious LaRouchian literature. But the people who published it had fled Sweden and were already building new lives for themselves in the States. By mid-1986, it would be fair to say, the names of Cliff and Kerstin Gaddy would not have filled Victor Gunnarsson’s heart with joy.
* * *
CLIFFORD GARLAND GADDY was an academic whiz kid who enlisted and deserted in quick succession. He was a political exile who joined a cult and married its leader. His organization’s violent hatred for Olof Palme had brought him to the attention of the Swedish police. A dangerous right-wing thug had acquired reason to resent him. And yet, from this not inconsiderably deep shit, he would leap, unbesmirched and unstinking, into a fancy job in a Washington think tank. The Brookings Institution, which, his comrades once insisted, had used its subbasement to brainwash the president in mind-bending sessions straight out of The Parallax View. How was this possible?
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