Operation Chaos

by Matthew Sweet

  Bill Jones, alone of all the deserters, was among them.

  * * *

  I KNEW IT would end badly with Bill. Our first lunch had reached a friendly conclusion because I did nothing to disrupt the fantasy he invited me to enter—that he was the long-standing Washington correspondent of a respected magazine, and not one of the last survivors of a dying political cult. Our second meeting took place at the same venue, the Old Ebbitt Grill beside the White House. This time, no Red Army hat was necessary. Washington was overpoweringly hot. We were grateful for the air-conditioning.

  As I wanted to ask him about his life after the American Deserters Committee, I expected the conversation to be tricky. But it went well at first. He spoke happily about his anti-green activism, sniggering at the mention of the Hog Farm collective, a peripatetic peace group that arrived in Stockholm for the 1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment. The hippies, he recalled, led by a clown-suited activist called Wavy Gravy, marched through Stockholm behind a truck wrapped in plastic to represent the body of a whale. The Labor Committees organized a counterdemonstration.

  The first wobble came when I asked him about Michael Vale. He admitted that he’d bumped into him at the 1975 World Health Organization conference in Copenhagen. He didn’t mention that the meeting had produced an article in New Solidarity accusing his old friend of being part of the latest CIA plot. Or that he had accused Michael of posing as a member of the EAP in order to bring the party into disrepute—“at a time when our programmatic influence among Communists and left-wing Social Democrats is explosive.” Bill even told me that he’d like to meet up with Michael, though I didn’t believe it for a second. Then I asked him about his duties for the EAP, the nature of his position in the party.

  “Writing articles,” he said.

  When I pressed further, the temperature in our booth at the Old Ebbitt Grill fell suddenly. Paddington Bear could not have given me a harder stare. “Switch that off,” he said, indicating my voice recorder. “I’ve been in this game a long time, you know.” I did as he asked.

  “What is this all about?” he asked. He was not pleased to hear that I knew about the brainwashing affair. Horrified when I mentioned that I’d talked to Carol and Chris White. He seemed on the point of leaving the restaurant. But I stopped him. By talking about his favorite subject.

  “This stuff about the queen, Bill,” I ventured. “You don’t really believe it, do you?”

  Bill smiled. Did I know, he asked, what Prince Philip had said in 1989? I did know it, because I’d read dozens of references to it in Executive Intelligence Review. It was one of the most overworked out-of-context quotes in the history of his organization, and Bill had committed it to memory. “In the event that I am reincarnated, I would like to return as a deadly virus, to contribute something to solving overpopulation.”

  This, Bill claimed, was more than a bitter joke. It was a hint of the secret project that the royals have pursued for decades through their manipulation of the Commonwealth, the European Union, and the global financial system—a conspiracy to reshape the world with a brutal form of laissez-faire economics adapted from the ideas of the British philosophers Thomas Malthus and Jeremy Bentham.

  “You mean utilitarianism?” I asked.

  “You may want to call it that,” he laughed. “Maybe ‘fascism’ would be a better word.” And he reflected on a state visit to Germany that the queen had made that June. Did I think it was a coincidence that she had gone to meet Angela Merkel just a few days before the Greek referendum on a financial bailout from the European Union? These two events were connected. Her Majesty had gone to Berlin to give Merkel her orders, just as, a few months before, the British prime minister David Cameron had delivered the latest royal instructions to Barack Obama. “You don’t think she was just being friendly, do you? She’s an operator.”

  Why, I wondered, if Britain was run by a secret cabal of Malthusians, does it have the National Health Service and the welfare state? “Well,” said Bill. “There are always factions.”

  It was like talking to someone lost in a dream. Perhaps, at his stage in life, it was too dangerous for him to wake up. Better to die in it than endure the thought of having squandered a lifetime on such ideas.

  He drained his iced tea and left. I watched him go. “My Way” was playing on the restaurant sound system.

  * * *

  THERE IS NO such thing as brainwashing. Not in the way we see it in the movies. Not in the way it was envisaged by Lyndon LaRouche, who thought that filmstrips and electric shocks and sexual humiliation could soften a mind into behaving like a 1960s computer.

  But it is possible to train yourself to accept the impossible. To incorporate so many unfounded ideas into the way you view the world that you come to mistrust the processes of ordinary empirical inquiry. It was strange to think of Bill, shuffling through the streets of Washington, DC, pushing his shopping cart through a Leesburg supermarket, with this magical, paranoid universe turning in his head. One in which Bertrand Russell was the most evil man in history, Jimmy Carter was a programmed zombie, and the inhabitants of Buckingham Palace spent their evenings plotting nuclear Armageddon.

  “Paranoid delusion,” writes the philosopher John Gray, “is often a reaction against insignificance—the sense, often well-founded, of counting for nothing in the world.” But Bill did count for something. Or at least he did in 1968, when he deserted from an unjust war and became one of the leaders of a movement that wanted to bring that conflict to an end and build a more just and equitable world. And then he met Lyndon LaRouche and kissed reality goodbye.

  As I neared the end of my work, I hoped to have a final conversation with Bill. I thought, foolishly, that I might be able to crack his shell a little, present him with the facts that might inspire him to leave the organization. I began mailing him material that would remind him of the person he had been before he became a LaRouchian drone. I sent him the document announcing the dissolution of the ADC. I sent him a photograph of his younger self, with bright eyes and bright buttons, at the Christian Brothers School in St. Louis, Missouri. Weeks later, a reply arrived from Loudoun County.

  “I sincerely hope,” he wrote, “there is more to your life than chasing these moonbeams you seem to be obsessed with,” he wrote. “A mind is a terrible thing to waste.” I replied:

  Dear Bill,

  They might be moonbeams, I suppose. Certainly something bright and insubstantial. But I prefer another metaphor. I’ve realized, I think, that I’m writing a history of a collective dream, from which some people awoke and some didn’t. First the dream was of revolution—a dream inherited from Trotsky and Lenin. Then it became something else. A dream about brainwashing and the CIA. About Rockefeller and Olof Palme. We know how that one ended. After which, the queen and Bertrand Russell took their places. That kind of substitution only happens in dreams.

  When we last had lunch together, you told me how the queen had gone to Berlin to give Angela Merkel her orders; how she and Prince Philip were in the business of plotting genocide; how the British Empire was still exerting its power over America and was attempting to start World War Three with Russia. Did you really believe it, Bill? I looked you right in the eye, and I couldn’t tell.

  And, to pursue the question back to your Swedish years, did you really believe the equivalent stories of your first years with LaRouche? That Mike Vale organized the mental reprogramming of Chris White and Bill Engdahl? That, as EIR reported, Olof Palme had allowed “the Rockefeller forces to use [Sweden] as a laboratory for their 1984-style experiments”?

  I wonder if the LaRouche project is really quite as attractive today as it seemed to you in 1972? Could you leave it now, do you think? Or are you now with him to the end—whatever form that takes?

  You’re right. A mind is a terrible thing to waste.

  I think you deserve more.

  All the very best,

  Matthew

  On one of my visits to Virginia, Chris a
nd Carol White gave me the tour of LaRouchian Loudoun. They pointed out Cardinal Park, where the group had planned to build a spanking new headquarters—until the loan company discovered the organization had no books to examine. We drove through Woodburn, the antebellum estate that, once Rudolf Nureyev had moved out, had become LaRouche’s first headquarters in Virginia. We looked at the pond installed by LaRouche as a security measure, the barn used for mass meetings, the elegant manor raided by SWAT teams when LaRouche declared that fraud investigators would be repelled with bullets. All occupied by others now. But after dinner at a sushi place in Reston, Molly Kronberg joined us to scope out LaRouche’s present official residence. Another mansion on elevated ground, called Windy Hill.

  Finding the place was harder than anticipated. In the last decade, ugly million-dollar houses have sprouted in the fields like fiberglass mushrooms. After a right turn down an unmarked road, the landscape looked suddenly familiar to Chris. There, at the end of the lane, was a five-barred gate to the estate. A pair of sculpted hounds stood guard on the posts, beside which was planted an archaic-looking intercom system. A security camera gazed in our direction. Up on the hill, the vague shape of a house was discernible through the trees. I wondered about getting out to take a photograph.

  “I don’t know whether that’s a good idea,” said Molly. “They have guns.” We paused, taking time to watch a family of deer peering back at us from the other side of the fence. They held our gaze for a while, then skittered off into the trees. Chris restarted the car and we made our way back up the road. A large black Saab was coming the other way. As it passed us, we saw the occupants. Two unfriendly young men in black suits, who shot us a suspicious look and thankfully nothing more.

  * * *

  THE WHITES HAVE been out of the LaRouche cult for twenty years. They would have left sooner, but felt obliged to remain while their comrades served out their prison sentences. Just as they were formulating an exit strategy, Chris fell seriously ill. A blood clot on his intestine required emergency surgery. His recovery was slow. With no savings and no health insurance, he and Carol relied on the patronage of the organization. With no employment history, they knew it would be hard to find work out in the real world. But Chris went first, setting up as a real estate agent and gradually developing a base of clients in the Leesburg area. Carol followed a year later. They managed to make a modest living—enough to buy a home of their own and a place to put all their books. They also made peace with their families.

  Some former members feel compelled to follow the fortunes of the cult they left behind. The Whites are not among them. So when I told them I was planning to attend one of LaRouche’s Saturday afternoon meetings in Manhattan, they told me to wear a padded vest. I felt pretty sure that the organization’s nunchaku and pistol-whipping days were over, but I did take one or two precautions.

  I downloaded the first draft of this book and all my documents onto a USB stick, and I stowed my laptop, camera, and notebooks in the luggage room at Penn Station. I texted my wife and a couple of friends with details of where to find them. I took a taxi to the venue, and when we reached the destination, I popped the memory stick through the glass with the fare and a ten-dollar tip. “If you hear about anything weird happening in the basement of this hotel,” I told the driver, “would you take this to my publisher’s office in the Flatiron Building?” Being a New York cabdriver, he didn’t bat an eyelid. “Sure,” he said.

  The Hotel Beacon at Broadway and West Seventy-Fifth Street has a fancy lobby. The LaRouchies paid a weekly thousand-dollar charge to use its facilities and were made to enter through the side door. By the time I arrived, a couple of dozen people had already gathered in the basement conference room. Some looked familiar from the webcast. An enormous bearlike man with a copy of China Daily and a prodigious plumber’s crack. A red-faced, choleric senior with a dozen ballpoint pens tucked in the front pocket of his lumberjack shirt. A loaf-haired woman who lined up her medications in a row as she squinted at a copy of Executive Intelligence Review—not the glossy magazine of old, but a stapled and photocopied fanzine.

  There were a handful of younger members, too: intense, eager to please, as yet unhusked by the experience of living la vida Lyndon. One, a man with sweetly imperfect English, announced that he had just acquired American citizenship. He was carrying a celebratory sponge cake. Everyone applauded and tucked in.

  After I’d filled out my registration form and coughed up $25 for a seventy-page report on the queen’s plans for global genocide, two LaRouche ladies came over to chat. Margaret Scialdone, a friendly sixtysomething who told me that in 1985 she’d quit her job in computer programming to devote herself full-time to the organization. Renee Sigerson, a hare-eyed figure who I later watched on a YouTube clip, proudly displaying a poster depicting Barack Obama as Hitler. (“He got that mustache,” she told a heckler, “when he kissed the butt of the Queen of England.”)

  Renee informed me that there were LaRouche groups all over the world, but that some of them were probably MI6 operations. She might have said more, but up at the front Diane Sare, the leader of another LaRouche front, the Schiller Institute New York City Chorus, was firing up her Casio synth and announcing that we would now all join together to sing the opening of the Mozart Requiem. A score was provided. Margaret guided me through the soprano part. “Solfège first,” she said. “Do re mi. You remember The Sound of Music?” About half the room showed willing. The rest sat silently munching crackers or mulling over the latest LaRouchePAC handbill. I read it over someone’s shoulder.

  “In 2018,” it announced, “a Chinese mission will reach the far side of the Moon—provided that we can succeed in defeating the British Empire’s forces of chaos.”

  Once Mozart had been successfully murdered, the webcast began under the chairmanship of Dennis Speed, an NCLC lifer who, forty years ago, had led the African American Students Association at Swarthmore College. From beneath a necktie so huge it made him look like he’d stepped from the middle reel of The Incredible Shrinking Man, Dennis shared some bad news. LaRouche was in Germany and would not be participating in the day’s discussion. Margaret thought that this was his wife’s doing. (“Helga,” she whispered, “keeps him on a tight leash.”)

  In his absence we watched a fuzzy twenty-year-old video of Lyn giving a lecture about Chinese railways. Nobody even pretended to make notes. This was followed by disquisitions on why the public were shamefully unaware of recent developments regarding trans-Eurasian refrigerated freight trains, and why Bertrand Russell was the most evil man of the twentieth century. People fussed with their papers and nibbled bits of cake. Their behavior seemed a little against the spirit of the thing. There they were, the new intellectual elite, poised to revive classical culture and defeat Elizabeth Windsor’s plans for thermonuclear population management—and they were bored and listless. As I was ushered to the microphone to make my contribution, I did my best to change the temperature.

  I began by apologizing for being from London. A ripple of interest moved through the basement. I pushed on with a brainwashing gag. “I can assure you,” I said, “that I haven’t been sent on some secret mission from Her Majesty. To my knowledge, at least.”

  They laughed. This, I suppose, was a bit more fun than berating Americans for their ignorance about how long it takes a head of lettuce to get from Moscow to Beijing. An enterprising stand-up could probably have run with it further, but I had to produce an actual question.

  A few weeks before my trip, the world’s press had been preoccupied by the story of the Panama Papers, a massive leak of private information on the dodgy tax and business affairs of some of the world’s most influential people. The papers contained a small amount of dirt on the Russian president. Therefore, LaRouche declared, this was an attack on Vladimir Putin, coordinated by the West. By which, of course, he meant the British.

  However, LaRouche’s former ally Cliff Gaddy had published an article on the Brookings website that argued exactly the
opposite. “Does this strike anyone else as a very fishy story?” he asked. “It’s like something out of a cheap spy movie.” The material on Putin, Cliff argued, was harmless trivia. It would be water off a duck’s back. The release of the papers was, he suspected, a warning shot, signaling that the Kremlin had blackmail material on “real targets” in the USA. “You reveal secrets in order to destroy; conceal in order to control,” wrote Cliff. “Putin is not a destroyer. He’s a controller.”

  As I asked Dennis for his opinion on the competing theories of Gaddy and LaRouche, he smiled at the mention of Cliff’s name. He pushed against the lectern and reminisced about a trip he’d made to Stockholm in March 1984, when he’d listened to Cliff and Bill Jones squabbling about what their respective families had done in the Civil War. “Well,” said Bill to Cliff, “at least my family fought for the United States when it counted.” Dennis chuckled indulgently, then embarked on an upbeat speech about the glory of the present Russian regime.

  London feared Putin, said Dennis, because he was the most credible threat yet to the British East India Company, which had ruled our planet since 1763. “We don’t automatically condemn you for your origins,” he said, generously, “but we would wish that you might think through the deeper importance of what is actually happening. The final death of the British Empire is about to occur! And we are going to be very happy about that when we are responsible for it!” Everybody applauded furiously. Everybody, at last, was awake. What’s the point of being in a cult if you can’t enjoy yourself from time to time?

  Twenty-four hours after the meeting, I was driving with Chris and Carol White for lunch at the Silver Diner in Reston, Virginia. An email from Bill Jones pinged onto my phone. “I told him to stop ‘chasing moonbeams’ and do something productive for mankind,” it read. “Here is his response.” He had shared my last email with a third party. It was impossible to see the identity of the recipient—LaRouche? The FBI? His sister in Missouri? Who knew? But the message was clear. I’d been found out.