Operation Chaos

by Matthew Sweet

  Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin, the book on Russia’s election-proof president, written by Cliff and the British academic Fiona Hill, is an object lesson in how to write about somebody who declines to give interviews, and about whom biographical data are scant. (“When there is no certifiably real and solid information,” they argue, “any tidbit becomes precious.”) It compares Mr. Putin to Mr. Benn, the quiet hero of a 1970s BBC children’s TV show who frequents a costume shop where the changing room is a magic portal to other times and places.

  Each week, Mr. Benn slips into a diving suit, a zookeeper’s uniform, or a wizard’s robes and is transported to an adventure appropriate to his dress. Mr. Putin’s adventures required other identities, and the authors give them names: the Outsider, the History Man, the Statist, and the Case Officer. In a video on the Brookings Institution website, Cliff explained the importance of the last identity. “That was his profession in the KGB, and it shines through in so many different ways. In the way he conveys this image. I’m actually nobody. I’m not going to let you know who I am. In a way he’s everybody. He’s anybody.”

  Cliff’s own life was similarly divisible. He, too, comprised a small constellation of different people. The Prodigy. The Deserter. The Cultist. The Expert. And, like Putin, his biography contained a number of silences and mysteries. His official résumé, circulated by Brookings, bore a blank space where his work in the 1970s and ’80s should have been. Only the Prodigy and the Expert were represented. The Deserter has been preserved in the local newspapers of Virginia and North Carolina and in the recollections of his friends. The Cultist is to be found on the pages of New Solidarity and Executive Intelligence Review.

  Cliff’s own book offers advice on how to interpret such a life. A person’s behavior in the past, it argues, is a poor predictor of his action in the future. Instead, we should look to the moments when his behavior changes, as he adapts to new circumstances. These are the moments when a person reveals his essential nature. Deserting the U.S. Army, for instance.

  Cliff’s alma mater, Wake Forest University, was a conservative campus, and Cliff’s fraternity was one of its most conservative institutions. The Kappa Alphas were given to marching around in Confederate uniforms during visits from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Perhaps their extremity explained Cliff’s sudden change of heart. Perhaps Cliff had enlisted in the army out of peer pressure and then, beyond the influence of his “Dixie”-singing comrades, had come to regret it? Or perhaps a more exotic explanation was possible. Perhaps he had never committed the crime of desertion in the first place. Perhaps his uncle at the National Security Agency, the master code breaker David Winfred Gaddy, had introduced him to the world of intelligence and arranged for him to be dispatched to Sweden. It seemed far-fetched, but not by the standard of weirdness established by the verifiable facts of Cliff’s life.

  When I discussed Cliff’s case with Bill Jones, he remembered that in late 1974, when President Gerald Ford proposed conditional clemency for the deserters, David Gaddy had called Stockholm to persuade Cliff and his comrades to accept its terms: honorable discharge in exchange for two further years of public service. Nobody took up the offer. Bill considered it a trap.

  At the time, a reporter from the Washington Post called Cliff’s parents to discover his views. Inez Gaddy gave a careful account of her son’s position. “He said, belief is not a belief unless I act the way I believe,” she reported. “In order to act the way I believe, I have to leave the country.” But what did Cliff Gaddy believe? Six impossible things before breakfast, as LaRouche demanded? Or something else that he kept hidden carefully from view?

  “He’s not going to be so eager to speak about all this,” said Bill Jones. “Cliff is working his way up through the bureaucracy. Probably he doesn’t talk too much about his past history. It may have hindered his movement forward.”

  He was right about the first part. Emails, letters, and registered letters to Brookings produced no response. Writing to Kerstin at her office at the Catholic University of America yielded nothing. The university declined to comment. A Brookings spokesperson told me that the institution took no view on the activities of its fellows. It simply gave them a place to work and study. “Brookings has no views,” she said. It was as if I had called a hairdresser and asked for the salon’s opinions on the political activities of a stylist who rented a chair on the premises.

  Only one of Cliff’s past colleagues would talk about him on the record: Bruce Blair, a former U.S. Air Force Minuteman missile launch control officer who is now a highly regarded expert on nuclear security. Blair worked alongside Cliff when he first arrived at Brookings in 1991. “I recall Cliff mentioning on a number of occasions working for LaRouche in Stockholm, which did seem strange but I discounted it as youthful wandering and a search for mission and identity.” I supplied him with some of the stranger details of Cliff’s LaRouchian life. The Rockefeller conspiracy. The hate campaign against Palme. “He is a person of character,” Blair concluded. “I am sure he followed his conscience wherever it led him.”

  * * *

  A FEW WEEKS after the Palme assassination, conscience, or some other force, took Clifford Gaddy out of Sweden, the European Workers Party, and the LaRouche organization. He and Kerstin had been loyal and enthusiastic NCLC members for almost fifteen years. They gave no public hint that their commitment to the organization had faltered. For Cliff, the previous year had been particularly busy. Since July 1985 he had been making trips across Europe to promote a report cowritten with a small group of NCLC researchers entitled Global Showdown: The Imperial Russian War Plan for 1988. It comprised 366 eccentric pages of scaremongering, warmongering, and bad statistical analysis that insisted that the Soviet Union was preparing a nuclear first strike.

  One of his fellow authors was Webster Tarpley, a shrill, rotund conspiracy theorist who would make headlines in 2017 when Melania Trump sued him for the false claim that she had worked as an escort. Another was Konstantin George, the LaRouchian whose phony story about an East Berlin brainwashing triggered the crisis of 1973–74, as well as Cliff’s experience of being interrogated as a KGB infiltrator in Chris and Carol White’s bedroom in Colindale.

  Cliff Gaddy and Konstantin George formed a double act. They went to London, Paris, Bonn, Rome, West Berlin, Copenhagen, Geneva, and Lisbon. In each city, the message was the same. The Soviets, they announced, had already declared war on the United States. They had also declared war on LaRouche and considered him “very dangerous” and a “principled adversary.”

  Reading through the report, I was struck by the persistent presence of the story of Michael Vale and his army of deserters. The names had faded away, and the sinister controlling forces had been recast, but the story remained intact. “Soviet deployed ‘sleepers’ were sent into LaRouche’s environment,” the dossier asserted. The CIA was nowhere. This was now an East German job. “These Stasi operations were run during 1972–74 in conjunction with the Palme-Brandt faction of the Socialist International, and elements of British intelligence, including the London Tavistock Institute, which were then and now heavily penetrated by Soviet intelligence.” Who in their audience, I wonder, realized that the two men leading the presentation were selling a strange dream version of their own shared past?

  Cliff’s final public act as a LaRouchian was to chair the Global Showdown conference in Stockholm. Here, he warned delegates—and the Swedish edition of New Solidarity—that Palme’s murder was the herald of a new world of Soviet-inspired political instability. Shortly afterward, he and Kerstin boarded a plane for the United States.

  What made Cliff leave so suddenly? Many in the U.S. organization assumed that he had been shipped out of Stockholm to avoid questioning by the Swedish police. Had the Palme inquiry made Sweden too hot for him? Were he and Kerstin afraid of bumping into a vengeful Victor Gunnarsson? Had they experienced some kind of awakening about the true nature of the Labor Committees?

  T
here was no shortage of material to bring them to their senses. In the first week of April 1986, Newsweek ran a four-page exposé on the organization—triggered by the surprising success of a pair of LaRouchian candidates in elections in the state of Illinois. The controversy even reached the pages of the Old Gold and Black, the newspaper of Cliff’s college, where a student columnist condemned LaRouchian tactics as “a form of terrorism, one which involves no guns or bombs but seeks to destroy established institutions nevertheless.” (That columnist, Rogan Kersh, would become provost of Wake Forest in 2012.) Whether Cliff and Kerstin fled from fear, guilt, disgust, or with the satisfaction of a job well done is a secret that only they know.

  * * *

  IN CLIFF’S ABSENCE, Bill Jones was promoted to Stockholm bureau chief. It was left to him and Bill Engdahl to coordinate the organization’s official response to the Palme assassination. Lyndon LaRouche gave them the task, and he thought up a portentous title.

  Under Operation Edgar Allan Poe, the two Bills produced a theory attuned to their own paranoia and narcissism: that the Soviets were behind Palme’s killing and were now working hard to achieve their second objective: “laying the blame at the doorstep of the ELP [European Labor Party], as a first step in dismantling the LaRouche movement globally.” LaRouche liked this theory, because it was all about him.

  Their hefty report, A Classical KGB Disinformation Campaign, proved nothing about the assassination, but contained much evidence that the LaRouchians inhabited a Ptolemaic universe with themselves as its center. Legitimate press interest in the European Labor Party was “a coordinated wave of lies and innuendo” unleashed from Moscow. Journalists who described the party’s gruesome methods were subject to personal attacks. (Paranoid schizophrenia, for instance, was diagnosed in a newspaper columnist who made the reasonable observation that “the public activities of the ELP have long passed the limits of decency.”) The report speculated that Victor Gunnarsson might have been a KGB agent provocateur who signed up for party membership in order to bring suspicion on the LaRouchians once the assassination had been carried out.

  The dossier was published in October 1986. And it would have received much more attention had the Labor Committees not had a more urgent problem to attend: a raid on their headquarters by four hundred armed agents.

  * * *

  IT HAPPENED BECAUSE of a federal investigation in Boston, where a grand jury was examining the financial arrangements of the Labor Committees and the group’s tangle of subsidiary organizations and shell companies. The investigators found evidence of fraud on a massive scale. Loans solicited with no intention to repay. One million dollars skimmed from credit card accounts. The LaRouchians knew trouble was coming. Ed Spannaus and his security staff had already begun a counteroffensive. They shredded documents and made plans to fly indicted members to Germany, beyond the reach of the court. Roy Frankhouser, the former Klansman who was LaRouche’s security adviser, had floated another bright idea: killing the prosecutor in charge of the case.

  These tactics, however, were their undoing. Obstruction of justice was added to the charge sheet, and at seven a.m. on October 6, 1986, the FBI descended on LaRouche’s 172-acre property in Loudoun County, Virginia, search warrants ready, guns loaded.

  His home was well protected. There were sandbagged guard posts at the gate, cement barriers and metal spikes in the driveway, a retinue of ten guards armed with semiautomatic weapons, employed to patrol the barbed-wire perimeter. The FBI took no chances. The agents brought helicopters and armored cars, strapped on bulletproof vests, and massed in the early hours on a field above the estate. When the signal was given, an army of agents and law enforcement officers surrounded the property. Inside his redbrick antebellum mansion, LaRouche told his staff that any attempt to arrest him should be considered an assassination attempt. It fell to the obedient Warren Hamerman to relay LaRouche’s response to the FBI and the wider world. “I will not submit passively to arrest,” said the statement, “but in such a scenario I will defend myself.” It sounded like a threat of armed resistance.

  LaRouche went on to accuse the KGB of masterminding the operation against him. “Mikhail Gorbachev,” he declared, “has demanded my head.” Nobody, however, was much interested in LaRouche’s head. They wanted his bank statements, account books, and dud promissory notes. LaRouche meekly withdrew his threat of violence. For three days, the police, the FBI, and the Internal Revenue Service searched the mansion and the offices of Executive Intelligence Review in downtown Leesburg, looking for evidence of wrongdoing.

  Four hundred boxes of papers were wheeled away for examination. Records of credit card details used without the consent of their owners. Memos describing the cases of donors who had been persuaded to mortgage their homes and lend the proceeds to the Labor Committees; pensioners who had signed over the contents of their bank accounts on the understanding that they would be repaid in full. If they asked for their money back, they were stalled or bullied, told they were a troublemaker or a psychotic. The paperwork referred to these people as “hardship cases.” The material was so damning that IRS officials were seen toasting one another over the ransacked filing cabinets.

  The first documents to make headlines, however, had nothing to do with conning old ladies out of their life savings. They were a set of notebooks compiled by a member of LaRouche’s counterintelligence staff that contained forty-five references to Victor Gunnarsson and the assassination of Olof Palme.

  The NBC Nightly News broke the story on December 4, 1986, and had more intrigue to add. Its reporter spoke to Irwin Suall, chief fact finder at the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, an anti-Semitism watchdog organization based in New York. Suall revealed that he had made a recent visit to Sweden while compiling a report into LaRouche’s activities.

  The report concluded: “The potential threat to America’s democratic values and institutions posed by the LaRouche political cult derives from the movement’s thriving on secrecy, deception, disruption, fear and hostile confrontations, and its peculiar brand of erratic, bigotry-laced extremism, cunningly camouflaged by the outward respectability of front groups and business suits.” Since the assassination, said Suall, the Swedish authorities had asked for his assistance in locating two of those business-suited acolytes: Clifford Gaddy and his wife, Kerstin Tegin-Gaddy. He proved unable to help, but he seems to have tried. The ADL archive still holds his files of press clippings, with the Gaddy name ringed in red ink.

  The Swedish police did not declare their interest in the couple until the spring of 1987. The line of inquiry was opened shortly after Hans Holmer, the Stockholm police commissioner who had headed the inquiry since the beginning, resigned his post and was replaced by a new chief.

  Ulf Karlsson kept a low public profile and allowed his detectives more independence than his predecessor. The European Workers Party returned to the agenda. Detectives announced that a woman answering Kerstin’s description had been spotted outside the Grand Cinema on the night of February 28, 1986; they used the press to appeal for information on her whereabouts. The papers granted her the favor extended to all criminal suspects. Although Kerstin was the leader of a national political party, they kept her name and her face out of the coverage. Front pages ran censored photographs of Kerstin, her face as smooth and blank as a figure from a Magritte picture.

  The appeal worked. A few days later the Swedish police learned that Kerstin and Cliff had taken refuge in a deafeningly quiet suburb of Raleigh, North Carolina. Three detectives flew to the States to interview them, but a Swedish journalist found the house first—a nondescript gray bungalow, empty and bolted, its lawn unmown and correspondence piling on the doormat.

  “The area is fenced off and a sign says it is guarded by private security guards,” he reported. “In the South this generally means that blacks should keep away if they do not have good reason to be there. It also means that those who live here—many pensioners—prefer to be left in peace.” The reporter asked an elder
ly neighbor if the couple had moved. “Not moved,” she said. “Maybe disappeared. If they’ve got the police on their tails then they may well have disappeared. That happens.”

  Farcically, however, while Swedish detectives crossed the Atlantic to follow her trail in North Carolina, Kerstin had moved in the opposite direction, flying back to Stockholm to spend the Easter holidays with her family. As the Swedish papers printed faintly sinister photographs of her rented bungalow and her talkative neighbor, another group of detectives simply drove to the Tegin family home to interview her.

  They spoke for an hour in a police car parked outside the house. The detectives asked her whether EAP members had weapons training like their comrades in Leesburg, but she professed to know nothing about this. She also claimed that she and Cliff had been planning to quit the party months before Palme was assassinated. The usher who thought he had seen her outside the Grand Cinema must have been mistaken. On the night of the murder, Kerstin insisted, she had been at home with her husband. They had eaten dinner, watched a TV program about the Israeli conductor Zubin Mehta, and gone to bed. The alibi was not perfect, but one fact of their domestic life made them unlikely assassins: on January 17 that year, Kerstin had given birth to a son.

  A couple of weeks later Kerstin was back in the States, where she and Cliff were interviewed by another Swedish detective. An FBI agent was also present. Cliff described his work as Stockholm bureau chief for Executive Intelligence Review and his interest in military development in the Soviet Union and Europe. He was also asked about his attempts to communicate with a Swedish naval commander who, like the EAP, disapproved of Palme’s desire to maintain friendly relations with the Soviet Union. He repeated Kerstin’s description of a quiet night at home with Zubin Mehta on the TV, and her assertion that they had both been looking for a way out of the EAP. The detective seemed satisfied but would not grant Kerstin’s request to make a public statement about eliminating them from the list of suspects.