Operation Chaos

by Matthew Sweet

  The scandal, however, had been ridden out. Unlike Victor Gunnarsson, Cliff and Kerstin were not shouted at in the street. They could now settle in North Carolina, rebuild their lives, and forget past associations with the Palme inquiry and the European Workers Party. Bizarrely, that is precisely what Victor Gunnarsson also did.

  * * *

  IN THE FIRST weeks after the raid, the LaRouchians were not downhearted. A hysterical good humor overtook the organization. They began producing novelty T-shirts with the slogan I SURVIVED THE GREAT LEESBURG PANTY RAID. They put out their own local paper, the Loudoun County News, which blamed everything on the Russians. They held a Halloween costume party, to which one guest came as the AIDS virus and another as Warren Hamerman, complete with plastic pig snout.

  But the trials of Lyndon LaRouche ensured that this mood passed. Like so many things in his life, they were tortuous, peculiar, and long-winded. Over the course of four years, cases involving grand larceny, securities fraud, unpaid fines, and conspiracy to obstruct justice were heard by judges in New York, Boston, and Alexandria, Virginia. Dozens of NCLC members were indicted, among them Ed Spannaus and Molly Kronberg.

  LaRouche’s lawyers tried to dissuade their client from getting on the witness stand. Not just because he would start talking about KGB assassination plots and the coming apocalypse, but because he could not be trusted to keep quiet about many other doubtful activities that were not even on the charge sheet. But Warren Hamerman, whom LaRouche had appointed to head the legal team, overruled them.

  “LaRouche didn’t care about what happened to any of us,” said Molly. “But he did want to exculpate himself. I think he believed it would help his appeal if he could show that the rest of us were guilty as sin.” LaRouche also forbade his followers to plead guilty, which, when the verdicts came in, meant longer sentences for everyone.

  In December 1988, LaRouche and six of his associates were convicted of conspiracy and mail fraud amounting to $34 million. LaRouche was defiant. “The purpose of this frame-up is not to send me to prison, it’s to kill me,” he told reporters. “If this sentence goes through, I’m dead.” It did go through. He didn’t die. Instead, he served five years of a fifteen-year sentence at the federal prison in Rochester, Minnesota, where, for a time, he shared his cell with the disgraced televangelist Jim Bakker, freshly jailed for similar crimes. The prison authorities were generous. They had heard that LaRouche was a computer genius and gave him the job of overseeing the new IT system they had installed in the library. But it soon became clear that LaRouche barely knew how to switch it on.

  LaRouche’s five years in prison saw Warren Hamerman rewarded for his years of unquestioning loyalty. He was appointed the organization’s chief spokesman. He endured the sniggers of reporters as he insisted that his master was an American Dreyfus, the victim of “a political dirty operation carried out by the parallel government.” He issued proclamations when LaRouche ran for president from his prison cell in 1992. It also fell to Wally to tell the world about the latest assassination attempt on the leader of the Labor Committees. Agents of a hostile power, he announced, had tried to kill LaRouche during surgery to remove some anal polyps. The scheme had been foiled by canceling the operation. None of this nonsense caused Warren Hamerman the least bit of embarrassment.

  In 1985 he had taken on the running of the Labor Committees Biological Holocaust Task Force, in which capacity he advocated putting AIDS patients into quarantine camps and insisted, against scientific evidence, that the disease could be spread by insect bites and casual human contact. (He made a panic-mongering tour of Europe, recycling stories about the synthetic nature of the virus, a theory born in a disinformation campaign by the KGB.)

  His most operatic act of fealty occurred in September 1990, when delegates from the Labor Committees took over the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Arlington, Virginia, to listen to a speech recorded by LaRouche in his cell. During this period the organization decided, under the influence of LaRouche’s wife Helga, to make overtures toward right-wing Catholic organizations.

  This policy produced a number of spiritual conversions: Warren turned obediently from Judaism to Rome; Jim McGourty, born Presbyterian, did the same. Jim’s wife, Christina, a lapsed Catholic, followed her husband back into the Church. LaRouche’s rhetoric also took a religious turn. As the official account noted, his taped speech “traced those efforts through the Ruskin circle at Oxford University and their satanic co-thinkers around Friedrich Nietzsche and Aleister Crowley, who sought to revive the cult of Dionysus and the Age of Aquarius, through the rise of the ugly twins of Bolshevism and fascism, and into the Frankfurt School, which launched the rock-drug-sex counterculture.”

  Warren Hamerman followed this with an aria of flattery and wishful thinking entitled “The Role of the LaRouche Movement in World History.” “Anyone’s list of great leaders of our last two centuries would certainly include Martin Luther King, Lincoln, Gandhi, and de Gaulle,” he declared. “There is an unmistakable pattern. Like LaRouche, each was an explicit warrior against the slavery and racist genocide which emanated from British imperialism, basing themselves on the notion that all men are created equal.” Everyone applauded.

  But when LaRouche came out of prison in March 1994, he showed little gratitude for Hamerman’s loyal service. Wally and his wife Nora were expelled from the organization shortly after its Labor Day conference. They were purged along with other members thought to have been disloyal during Lyn’s imprisonment, and were denounced as “stay-behind agents” of “Buckley family-style Carlist Gnosticism.”

  Similar charges were made against Jim McGourty and Christina Nelson. In 1998 they had thrown themselves into a passion project: the establishment of a private Catholic school in a local community center. With Jim as headmaster, the St. John Bosco High School was a success, and soon it moved to permanent premises above the Leesburg branch of Subway. Fourteen pupils studied Latin and Shakespeare with the smell of baking bread in their nostrils.

  In 2000, however, the LaRouche organization reversed its position on Catholicism. “Sunday activity,” announced an internal memo, had caused “the repeated sharp deterioration in intelligence and morale of the Leesburg Labor Committee.” The truth lay in the opposite direction. “LaRouche stepped in it when he began to write about Church history and doctrine,” Christina Nelson told me, “because some members took these issues seriously. It amounted to a loss of control for him over a portion of the cult members.” She and Jim chose God over Lyndon LaRouche.

  They knew the process would be painful. Members moving for the exit had many unpleasant experiences to share—threatening letters, a hearse sent to their parents’ house to collect their bodies—but most were subjected to a process called the Shunning. “First they would call you night and day to try to get you back in,” Jim explained. “Come over to your house and try to convince you. If you left, then the Shunning began. If they saw you walking down the street they’d turn their heads. If you called on the telephone they hang up.” Once that process was exhausted, the denunciations began. Executive Intelligence Review attacked St. John Bosco as part of the “spreading slime-mold of tiny pro-Carlism-polluted schools” that aimed “to bring fascism to power throughout the Americas.”

  It meant nothing. But what had any of it meant?

  * * *

  WHILE THE LEADER of the Labor Committees sat in his cell discussing the Bible with Jim Bakker, the Gaddys were in North Carolina, building their post-LaRouchian lives. Both enrolled at Duke University. Kerstin began a master’s thesis on the German playwright and poet Friedrich Schiller. (This was an intellectual inheritance from LaRouche, who had conferred bogus respectability on his organization by setting up an institute in Schiller’s honor.) And Cliff started postgraduate work in the economics department, working under a professor named Vladimir Treml. A fairly unsensational development, you might think. But this, like Cliff’s desertion, is a shift of the kind that Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin asks us to ex
amine.

  Cliff’s doctoral work was not an ordinary PhD on an obscure subject. He was joining a group of economists on a project funded by the Office of Net Assessment, a think tank within the Pentagon. Their job was to examine data harvested from interviews with recent defectors from the Soviet Union in order to produce a picture of Russia’s black economy—from which the real economic strength of the Soviet Union might be deduced.

  Cliff was assigned to estimate the worth of the Russian prostitution market. (Gross revenues of 300 to 1,800 million rubles, it turned out.) Other scholars studied the sales of home-distilled alcohol, fruit and vegetables from private allotments, illegal gasoline, and illegal drugs. The CIA took a strong interest in the work. The project’s supervisor, Vladimir Treml, was a member of its Military-Economic Advisory Panel and had been sharing his findings with Langley since the mid-1970s.

  What, exactly, did Cliff say at his interview or put on his application form? Did he admit that he had spent a decade as a senior member of an organization that was proscribed by the FBI, put under surveillance by SÄPO and Swedish military intelligence, and suspected of involvement in the assassination of Olof Palme? Did he mention that his most recent publication was a LaRouchian farrago claiming the existence of an Imperial Russian War Plan for 1988? Was he greeted, perhaps, as an undercover operative back from the field? As a prodigal son, returned from a long, mad, misguided interlude? Or did Cliff, like many ex-LaRouchians taking their first steps out of the madhouse, present the association in a positive light and hope for the best? “If you come from a ‘good background’ and come across like a smart and reasonable person,” one told me, “most people don’t care what you’ve been up to.”

  Whatever the case, his LaRouche years did not retard the progress of Cliff’s career. He was awarded his PhD in May 1991 and was speaking on behalf of the Brookings Institution by the summer. In the turbulence that followed the collapse of communism, he went to Russia to visit collective farms and advise local government officials on their tax affairs. He also found work as an adjunct lecturer at Georgetown University, where he taught a course on Russian military economics. By 2015, he had reached his professional zenith, as a senior fellow at Brookings and a key contributor to “Order from Chaos,” its project to produce foreign policy ideas for the post–Cold War world.

  Cliff’s reinvention as an expert on the Soviet economy did not go unnoticed by his former comrades in the Labor Committees. In documents intended for internal consumption within the cult, he was cast as the protagonist of a bizarre pornographic fairy story that depicted a number of former members as sex workers in a German brothel. “Cliff Gladly,” we’re told, “went on to fame, for having made the leap from empirical experience … to enlightened theoretical studies, a fame properly earned with his scholarly study on Soviet prostitution cash flows, and later, his ground-breaking theory on the necessity for the Russian mafia in guaranteeing contracts in the free market.”

  Snide paragraphs about his disloyalty made occasional appearances on the pages of Executive Intelligence Review. A 2002 article referred to him as “a former LaRouche associate who has sold out himself.” After he joined the Brookings Institution, NCLC representatives would sometimes turn up to see him at seminars and press conferences. It’s hard to imagine that he felt particularly delighted when they got to their feet to ask him if he was aware of the latest turn of LaRouche’s political thinking. Particularly when the questioner was the NCLC counterintelligence staffer who compiled the notebooks that put the Palme detectives on his tail.

  Over the years, there may have been many such moments of discomfort for Cliff and Kerstin. In March 2003, when the British student Jeremiah Duggan was found dead on the autobahn after attending a series of LaRouche meetings in Wiesbaden. (“Mum, I’m frightened,” he said, in his last call home, fifty minutes before his body was discovered.) Or in November 2003, when the EAP’s sugar daddy Alf Enerström was back in the news for shooting a female police officer as she tried to evict him from his rubbish-strewn Stockholm apartment. (Enerström came running at her with a saucepan on his head and a Smith & Wesson revolver in his hand. He was sent to a psychiatric hospital, where he covered the walls of his room with aluminum foil to prevent the authorities using beam weapons to give him an “electromagnetic lobotomy.”)

  Or in January 2017, when, somewhere beneath a memorably gruesome tableau vivant depicting Donald Trump warming up for Miss World 2013 by watching a sex worker relieve herself on the soft furnishings of a Moscow hotel room, a doubtful dossier compiled by a former MI6 officer claimed that the Kremlin had recently paid for a delegation of LaRouchies to visit Russia.

  Unpleasant reminders of the world they had left behind.

  But the first of these moments came closest to home.

  * * *

  ON JANUARY 7, 1994, a surveyor from the North Carolina Department of Transportation was walking through the woods in Deep Gap, Watauga County, when he discovered the body of a man lying in the snow. The corpse was several weeks old and completely naked. Despite the cold, it had begun to decay. But the cause of death was not obscure. Two bullet wounds to the head.

  Thanks to the presence of a signet ring and fake gold watch, the police identified the victim with ease: Victor Gunnarsson, the first serious suspect in the Olof Palme case. He was four thousand miles from Stockholm, but less than two hours’ drive from Salisbury, the town in which he had settled in order to escape the notoriety conferred by the assassination, and where he had been reported as a missing person one month before.

  At the moment of his death, Gunnarsson was no longer of interest to the Palme investigation. He had been supplanted by Christer Pettersson, a petty criminal and drug user who was convicted of Palme’s murder in 1988 but freed on appeal the following year.

  Gunnarsson’s emigration was the product of a chance encounter on a Swedish ski slope, where a sympathetic American businessman offered him a room in his apartment in North Carolina. Gunnarsson accepted. But changing continents didn’t change his personality. In Salisbury, he acquired a reputation as a drinker, a braggart, and a womanizer. He traded on his exotic status, his air of mystery. He liked to tell people that he worked for the CIA. A clerk at the Hop In convenience store said that he had shown her seven different passports in seven different names. Another witness claimed to have heard Gunnarsson boasting, drunkenly, of being responsible for Olof Palme’s murder, describing how he ran up behind the prime minister and shot him in the back. Gunnarsson was also unaccountably wealthy. He professed to make his living teaching private language classes, but that did not explain the thick wads of cash that some had seen him flourish from his wallet.

  On the evening of December 3, 1993, Gunnarsson had a dinner of baked potatoes with his girlfriend Kay Weden at the home of her seventy-seven-year-old mother, Catherine Miller. At eleven-thirty he drove Weden home, kissed her good night, and went back to his apartment. She was the last person to see him alive. That night someone abducted Gunnarsson from his home, gagged him with a length of duct tape, tied him up, and put him in the trunk of a car. He was driven eighty miles to Deep Gap, then forced from the roadside into the forest, where he was executed with two bullets from a .22-caliber rifle.

  Five days after her last dinner with Gunnarsson, Kay Weden received some terrible news. It was not about her boyfriend’s disappearance. That had yet to be discovered. Her mother, Catherine Miller, had been murdered. Shot twice in the head as she cooked at her stove.

  Kay Weden knew of only one person who bore her family a grudge—Lamont Claxton Underwood, a retired homicide detective to whom she had once been engaged. Underwood had reacted badly to the breakup. Once, Weden recalled, he had spotted her at a restaurant on a date, marched in, and tipped iced tea into her lap.

  The State Bureau of Investigation began examining his case. Its agents discovered that on the night of the murder, Underwood had phoned a former colleague at the Salisbury police station and asked him to run a check on a license plat
e. It was Gunnarsson’s car. Underwood’s house was searched. His typewriter was identified as the source of some anonymous threatening letters received by Weden earlier in the year. The most compelling evidence was forensic. Underwood’s car, like his house, was spotlessly clean, but strands of hair were found embedded in the mat in the trunk of his car, and they proved a good match for Gunnarsson’s.

  At his trial in 1997, a jury took seventy-five minutes to find Underwood guilty of Gunnarsson’s kidnap and first-degree murder. He was handed a life sentence without parole. No trial for Miller’s murder ever took place. But Underwood did not accept the guilty verdict. He appealed his conviction on the grounds that his attorneys did not have sufficient experience to handle the case. In 2011, his appeal was rejected: the forensic evidence was so strong that the greenness of his lawyers was ruled irrelevant to the outcome of the trial.

  But he had supporters. Many of them were conspiracy theorists who believed that Underwood was the victim of a CIA plot. Gunnarsson, they argued, had murdered Olof Palme on the orders of Langley, which then disposed of its talkative assassin with a bullet. Voodoo history. Like another idea that was suggested to me over breakfast one morning by a mischievous Michael Vale. “There was a rumor,” he said, “that Gunnarsson came back to the States for revenge. To get rid of the people who had got him mixed up in the assassination.” He meant Bill, Cliff, and Kerstin. I looked at him and thought of the swing of Foucault’s Pendulum.