Operation Chaos

by Matthew Sweet

  * * *

  WHEN SURVIVORS OF the LaRouche cult find success in the real world, former comrades rejoice. When I appealed for memories of Cliff on LaRouchecontinued.org, the principal online forum for ex-members, a debate broke out on the morality of my request.

  “It’s creepy,” wrote one. “He’s made a new life for himself and been successful at it; isn’t that the mantra of some here? To me it’s McCarthyism.” Cliff and Kerstin, I assumed, felt the same. But they had placed themselves beyond the reach of any witch-hunter. Until I had dealings with the Brookings Institution, Duke University, and the Catholic University of America, I hadn’t understood how defensive and unaccountable such bodies can be. I’m used to dealing with their equivalent British institutions, which tend to be public, and are therefore obliged to answer questions from journalists. I wondered if Cliff’s career had been shaped by the closed nature of such places. He had never worked anywhere that a Freedom of Information request would penetrate.

  Cliff and Kerstin failed to respond to my letters, not even to decline the opportunity to talk. I could have taken no for an answer, but the silence led me to hope that I stood a chance of persuading them to be interviewed. Their musical interests gave me the opportunity.

  They were both, I discovered, members of a folk band called the Kensingtones. Cliff played the cello, Kerstin the flute. I decided to go to one of their gigs. “Make sure you have all your documents to back this up,” said a tough Washington journalist I contacted for advice. “Brookings will steamroller you.” I came equipped with a sheaf of clippings tracing the Gaddys’ relationship with LaRouche from the mid-1970s to the official Swedish government account of their interviews with the Palme investigation detectives.

  My journey from London acquired an appropriately LaRouchian tinge. There had been a security alert at JFK airport. Someone had reported gunshots. Flights were grounded, and mine was one of the casualties. After hours of hanging around at Gatwick, I was assigned a seat on a charter flight that touched down in New York at two a.m. and was then kept waiting on the tarmac for an hour. Having missed my connection to Washington, I took a shuttle bus to the nearest hotel.

  At around four a.m., the bus crashed into the metal railings outside the Days Inn. There were two other passengers on board. We got out to peel the fence away as the driver extricated his twisted bumper. When I finally reached my bed, sleep proved elusive. And I realized that I had entered that exhausted and overimaginative state in which paranoid thinking blossoms: the state in which the tiled edge of a bath looks fit to crack a skull, and a knock from the chambermaid seems to portend a reenactment of that scene from Michael Clayton in which two assassins murder Tom Wilkinson and cocoon him in plastic.

  The Kensingtones’ gig was at Gypsy Sally’s, a waterside venue in Georgetown. The audience was small—seven friends and colleagues from the Brookings Institution and the Catholic University of America. Perhaps the bad weather had put people off. I sat at the bar and ordered a beer. Cliff, in cargo shorts, bare feet, and a Panama hat, bowed the cello, strummed the ukulele, and sang somewhere down at Lee Marvin level. Behind him, Kerstin played the flute, sometimes sweetly, sometimes so flatly that the barman cast me a pained glance and redoubled his concentration on the women’s wrestling playing on the TV.

  I’d intended to approach them at the end of the night, but because the audience was so minuscule, I found Kerstin bounding over to me at the interval to ask me what I thought of the music. For me, it didn’t feel like a first meeting: I had been reading her weird speeches about Olof Palme’s fascist master plan for years.

  “I like it,” I said. “I have your album.” She was a bit surprised. I explained that I was hoping to have a word with her and her husband. Ice formed on Kerstin’s upper slopes.

  “Then I know who you are,” she said. “We have no interest in this. Do you respect that?” I began to answer, but every time I opened my mouth she fired out the question again. “Do you respect that? Do you respect that? Do you respect that?”

  I said that after two years of silence, it was good to have a reply. She walked away. In the meantime, Cliff had come to the bar. I introduced myself. “I know it’s your job to write about an enigmatic man who won’t give you an interview,” I said. “And you’re an enigma to me.” He smiled so wide his face seemed in danger of cracking. “Can I ask you one thing?” I said. “Were you a real deserter, Cliff? Or were you something else?”

  Cliff began nodding and smiling. But not because he was pleased to see me or giving an answer to my question. It seemed to be for the benefit of observers. Anyone in the room looking in our direction might have assumed that Cliff was basking, delighted, in the compliments of an admirer.

  During the second half of the gig, the humid DC weather broke. Rain sluiced down on K Street. Lightning carved the sky. The Kensingtones were obliged to compete with the thunder. “You’re stuck with us now,” said the band’s chief vocalist.

  In his deep bass voice, Cliff began a Leonard Cohen number.

  Everybody knows that the dice are loaded

  Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed

  Everybody knows the war is over

  Everybody knows the good guys lost

  Everybody knows the fight was fixed

  The poor stay poor, the rich get rich

  That’s how it goes

  Everybody knows.

  As the song went on, I was struck by how its bitter pessimism spoke to the lives of the people in this story. The men I had come to know were players in the game of history. They had hoped to win the new world that had seemed so proximate at the end of the 1960s. Their refusal to fight in the Vietnam War was a respectable first move. But the game was rigged, and some of the other players weren’t even real. And despite the struggles, the upheavals, and the head-banging madness of all they had endured, the outcomes of their lives seemed more shaped by the circumstances of their births than the momentous choices they had made in their twenties.

  Half a century later, they had found ends that were very much like their beginnings. Chuck Onan, the poor kid from Chicago who shined shoes on his way from school, was still living hand to mouth, one small step away from penury. Michael Vale, that clever, unloved boy from Cincinnati who drifted from town to town talking to strangers, was still on the road, though it no longer wound through America. After a flirtation with revolutionary violence, Jim McGourty had returned to the staunch conservatism of his parents. Cliff Gaddy, the son of the kind of comfortable and well-educated family the establishment adores, was playing his cello, among friends, as a diversion from his respectable job in a Washington think tank. Untouched and apparently untroubled by his decade and a half of attachment to a batshit crazy cult. Still letting his wife do the talking.

  * * *

  LET US END this chapter in North Carolina. One bright afternoon in February 2016, I found myself behind the razor wire of the Alexander Correctional Institution, a citadel of colorless concrete boxes built over a landfill site in the Appalachian foothills. The deputy superintendent, a thoughtful, thirtysomething dad with the close-cropped hair favored by prisoners and guards alike, was taking me to meet Lamont Claxton Underwood, the man convicted of the murder of Victor Gunnarsson.

  But just as my escort was leading me through the remote-controlled bulkhead of the interview room, an announcement buzzed through the public address system. The midday head count had produced the wrong number. Life in the prison froze as its officers restarted the tally. The deputy superintendent and I waited, making conversation. He told me about his love of the British sitcom Are You Being Served? I complimented him on the shininess of his floors. The polish, he explained, was manufactured within the North Carolina prison system. So was the paint on the walls, the furniture in the rooms, the clothes and shoes worn by the prisoners, and much of the food consumed in the refectory. The prison sector, he said with pride, was leaving the taxpayer almost untroubled. It was an economy within the economy, in which boom and bust,
debt and credit had been eliminated—along with the freedom of its labor force.

  After half an hour, the alert was over. Lamont Underwood shuffled into the room, dressed in the colorless clothes produced by the prison workshops. The TV footage from 1997 had shown him as a tanned man with a neat side part. Inevitably, prison and the passage of time had changed him. He winced as he moved, and his hair was patchy on his skull. Once he had settled into his plastic chair, I asked him about his childhood in Winston-Salem. His mother, he said, worked in an ice cream factory. His father had a job in construction. There were complexities: Lamont was the product of his father’s relationship with another woman, and in the end, Mrs. Underwood decided to keep the son but rid herself of the husband. L.C., as he was always known, left home to join the army, but got out, went into law enforcement, and stayed until back pain forced him to take early retirement. He looked around the whitewashed walls. “And here’s how I’m spending my retirement,” he said.

  Underwood placed a heap of brown envelopes on the table between us. He was going to present his case to me, and I had been assigned the role of the jury. For two hours he gave me his theories about who really killed Victor Gunnarsson and how the crime had been pinned on him. The forensic evidence was faked, he said. He’d seen the lab report on the hair teased from the mat in his car. It was dated Sunday, and the lab was closed on a Sunday. His lawyers, he said, were not up to the job. “You could tell they were both idiots. One sat in the courtroom and was throwing candy behind him to the crowd. Whoever paid for his law school deserves a refund.”

  One line of his defense would not have pleased the conspiracy theorists who believe that Victor Gunnarsson was murdered by the CIA. The killing, Underwood said, was a botched job. “I was a homicide detective,” he reflected. “I worked all kinds of major crimes. At the trial they said: He was a detective, he would know about all this. And that’s true, absolutely that’s true. But I also wouldn’t have left that trunk mat in that car if Gunnarsson had been in there, too. I wouldn’t have. If I had killed Victor Gunnarsson, they would never have found his body. Never.”

  “What would you have done?” I asked.

  “What would I have done to get rid of him?”

  “Yes.”

  “Probably found an old well somewhere,” he said. “And I know where a bunch of them are. They’d have never found him. They’d still be looking for him on Judgment Day.”

  I asked him how he felt about Gunnarsson. A man he never knew and said he never met, and yet, thanks to his conviction, the reason for his two decades in jail.

  “He’s like the mist,” said Underwood. “He’s like the mist to me.” His next remark surprised me. “But I do think he killed the prime minister,” he said. “There’s no doubt in my mind.”

  * * *

  THERE WAS PLENTY in mine. But not so much, perhaps, about the justice of L. C. Underwood’s conviction. It is hard to make the case that Victor Gunnarsson was Olof Palme’s assassin. Gunnarsson was a fanatic and a fantasist. He liked the idea of CIA intrigue, and he liked anyone who hated Olof Palme. That’s why he signed up for the European Workers Party and took its vile literature back to his apartment. There are many hypotheses that link him to the crime, but no convincing piece of evidence.

  In November 1995, the Swedish prime minister Ingvar Carlsson attended the funeral of Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli prime minister assassinated by a right-wing extremist. On his return, he told Aftonbladet how the tragedy had brought back memories of the killing of Olof Palme. “Far to the right,” he said, “there was the EAP, which in its leaflets were calling Olof Palme ‘mentally ill’ and ‘murderer.’ … I will never get rid of the thought that the act of the murderer, be it spontaneous or planned, was influenced by the hatred which, after years of campaigning, was permitted.”

  Only the gunman bears true responsibility for the act. But if I were an alumnus of the Stockholm LaRouchians, this is the idea that would keep me up at night. If it were possible to alter time, if we could remove the European Workers Party from history, then Olof Palme would still have been gunned down in the snow, and by the same assassin.

  But I think it more likely that we would know the identity of that killer. A world without the EAP’s paranoid speechmaking, its poisonous rhetoric, its baroque and meaningless opinions, is one in which the detectives investigating the murder did not waste their time following Cliff and Kerstin Gaddy halfway across the world or trying to understand the political ideas upon which their party was founded. There was nothing to understand. It was founded upon chaos, and Cliff and Kerstin were its agents.

  17 / THE END OF THE WORLD

  I CAN CHART the progress of this book against the mental and physical decline of Lyndon LaRouche. At first, I watched his weekly webcast on the website of the LaRouche Political Action Committee. Every Friday night he gripped the lectern in a tiny TV studio in Leesburg and addressed the middle distance with faux-presidential grandeur. “The British Isles has been the British Isles,” he would say, with thunderous authority. “Which has been a sick department of humanity.” He was a niche act, but impressive.

  On Monday lunchtimes he would treat his fans again, convening the LaRouche Policy Committee to debate the most urgent issues of the day. I became a regular viewer for a couple of years—partly because these roundtable discussions illustrated the ideological milieu that claimed many of the protagonists of this book, partly because the “A Mad Tea-Party” has always been my favorite chapter of Alice in Wonderland.

  The structure was always the same. The chair asked Lyn to make some opening remarks. LaRouche, blinking, puffing, and finger wagging, riffed on themes that have been his comfort and joy since the time of the Chris White Affair. We were only weeks away from nuclear war—or thermonuclear war, as he called it, because that sounded worse. In order to save ourselves, we were obliged to follow his plan of action. The president must be impeached. The president’s British puppet masters must be restrained. The solar system must be colonized. Putin must have the Ukraine. The Chinese must mine helium-3 on the moon. The new human paradigm must be achieved by studying the ideas of the fifteenth-century German theologian Nicholas of Cusa. Pragmatism was the enemy of progress. A raven was very much like a writing desk.

  “You don’t define the behavior of mankind based on given facts,” insisted LaRouche. “That doesn’t work.” On this point, he always practiced what he preached. “Well,” he announced, on a broadcast in 2016, “Schwarzenegger is a sex maniac. He was the world’s leading sex maniac. He was promoted directly from Ireland, but not from the Irish; and he was shipped into the United States to become the leader of California. And what he did is he turned the whole California into a bunch of degenerate sex maniacs. What we’re trying to do is get rid of the sex maniacs out of California.”

  As LaRouche plucked concepts from his mental tombola, two or three hollow-eyed colleagues beside him would make furious notes. As if they hadn’t heard it all before. As if it made the faintest sense. He once gave some advice on how to deal with dissenters: “Well it’s very simple! He has that opinion? Kill him! Then we won’t have a problem.” Everyone laughed nervously at that but wrote it down all the same.

  When Lyn fell silent, the committee would flatter him by attempting to paraphrase his remarks. They had their work cut out. Between exquisitely awkward silences, they constructed a tapestry of phrases calculated to elicit his approval. The Kepler Question. The Eurasian Land Bridge. Energy-flux density. Zeusian genocide. Man is not an animal. Bertrand Russell was satanic.

  By the end of the hour, they had usually managed to encircle their guru in a cyclorama that depicted a world where world events were shaped by his contentions; where their organization was a vigorous and influential political movement. This done, he would beam at them, the happy inhabitant of a world that had no existence beyond the group’s own meeting rooms and lightly visited websites.

  As the months went by, LaRouche’s appearances became less frequent. In 2015 his
Friday night show was canceled and replaced with an audio-only Thursday night phone-in, billed as a “fireside chat,” in imitation of Franklin D. Roosevelt. The format required LaRouche to answer questions from members of the public. He didn’t seem very keen on this. “Don’t let any screwballs get on this week,” he told the moderator.

  As calls were sparse and screwballs his core constituents, the moderator relayed a question from me. I asked if LaRouche thought his ideas would ever gain any traction in Britain. “If you get Royal Family out of the picture, you can actually make miracles in the Scottish areas,” he said. “I know my Scottish ancestors. I didn’t know all of them, personally, but I do know a great deal about all of them. And that would be my opinion.”

  By the middle of 2016, this kind of thing was clearly too much for him. His online appearances dwindled to a weekly Saturday afternoon interaction with the faithful in the basement of a Manhattan hotel. Not in person, but over a video link, like the science-fiction dictator who cannot appear in public because he is actually a corpse whose actions are controlled by a giant alien arthropod lurking just out of view. The frequent technical glitches were blamed on interference by the FBI.

  No such excuse could be found for the condition of Lyndon LaRouche, who, in the space of two years, had declined from being a man capable of extemporizing conspiratorial join-the-dots from an upright position to a man sitting in a high-backed chair who couldn’t quite see where the dots were, but kept on talking anyway. Sometimes he pitched forward to shout his remarks into the carpet, allowing his bald skull to fill the screen. Even his small congregation seemed disengaged. Just before Christmas 2015 he announced that the world was going to end on January 2, 2016. Nobody seemed that bothered. And yet his acolytes still celebrated his greatness.