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Operation Chaos

Page 36

by Matthew Sweet


  I emailed back, describing what I’d heard at the meeting.

  Bill replied: “How’s that ‘book’ going?”

  And at that moment, I knew that I had been assigned a place in the vast and senseless narrative of LaRouchian history. Bill thought that the book was a cover story, a pretext to spy upon him and his comrades. He thought that I was an infiltrator. And now he was tapping away at his keyboard, sharing his thoughts with the only people in the world who could take the idea seriously.

  “Our lives were fiction, you know,” Carol said to me as we drove. “A series of fictions.” Chris, at the driver’s wheel, made eye contact in the mirror.

  “You hear that?” he said. “You’d better write that down.”

  Nearby, in a bungalow in Leesburg, the former leader of the American Deserters Committee added another twist to his own impossible story.

  18 / CLIFFHANGER

  HALF A CENTURY ago, the men at the heart of this story went into exile in Sweden. Their details were recorded in the press, and recorded again on the punch cards and magnetic tapes of HYDRA, the computer in the vault-within-the-Vault beneath CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Most of these men are now back on American soil. But not all are at ease with their homeland, or their shared history, or themselves.

  In late 2016, Chuck Onan left his house by the gravel quarry in Eugene, Oregon, and moved with his dog, Ninja, to cheaper accommodation on a farm twenty miles south of the city. For a while, email and social media provided me with a picture of his shifting moods. He filled my Facebook feed with his increasingly extreme anti-Islamic views, supported by videos of ISIS beheadings and links to white nationalist websites. “Soon there will be neither Sweden or the Swedes,” he wrote. “The Islamists will rip your throat by 2020.” But from time to time, he would send me lyrical messages about Scandinavian literature; when my favorite sitcom was canceled, he wrote a post urging his alt-right friends to sign a petition to save it. It looked deeply incongruous on a timeline full of paeans to Marine Le Pen and Geert Wilders and Patriots Against the Islamization of North America.

  Of the deserters who traveled with Mark Shapiro from Japan to Moscow to Sweden, two are now dead. Terry Whitmore returned to Mississippi in 2001 and lived there among his family for six more years. His memoir, Memphis Nam Sweden, remains the best firsthand account of the Swedish deserter experience. Joe Kmetz, who lost his words after months of hiding in a little room in Tokyo, breathed his last in New Jersey in 2004.

  Mark Shapiro’s health remains fragile. When we speak on the phone, the expression “ironing my last shirt” is often on his lips. He has yet to find a piece of killer evidence that will prove his theory that George Carrano was the intelligence mole within the deserter community. He knows that he is unlikely to find it. The object of these suspicions is now retired and engaged in charitable works in his community, after a career in the management of the New York transit system, where, in the late 1970s, his boss was a former CIA officer once employed on Richard Ober’s campaign against Ramparts magazine. Another fact for Mark to compute. The uneasy friendship between these two old ADC comrades continues. Mark tickles him with enquiries about his past. George supplies answers that fail to satisfy the questioner. And so their dance goes on.

  * * *

  I JOINED IT, much to my surprise, in September 2017. The invitation came by telephone.

  “I have George on the line,” said Mark. “He wants to talk.”

  On the phone, George was not the confident, silver-tongued character described by his former comrades. His tone was mild and apologetic. If he resented the fact that Mark and I had spent several years speculating about his loyalties, then he did not betray it. Indeed, he admitted that some of the details of his biography were rather hard to swallow—how many people in the world had been in both the merchant marine and the SDS? For an hour and a half we examined the wrinkles in his story. During his Stockholm years he had claimed to be a graduate of the Columbia School of Journalism. This, he conceded, was untrue—he had invented the detail to protect a Swedish girlfriend who had procured him a journalist’s visa. “It was just a convenience,” he said. “I was under a lot of stress.” What about his relationship with the Swedish Aliens Commission? How, I wondered, had he obtained humanitarian asylum in August 1968, six months before draft resisters became eligible? George did not recall any such process, and was baffled when I sent some newspaper clippings that reported his change in status. “It’s a simple story,” he said, “made confusing because the bureaucracy made, and continued to make, classification errors.” He intended to take up the matter with the Swedish government.

  We discussed the doubts entertained by his friends. Michael Vale’s principal charge against George was that he had risked provoking a diplomatic incident with a phony story about a great gang of American GIs who were ready to be shipped to Sweden with the help of the North Vietnamese. George’s explanation was like a vignette from a spy film. The tale, he said, was fed to him on a trip to France, where he made contact with Max Watts and Arlo Jacobs, the bitter rival leaders of the Parisian deserter scene. Max, he recalled, was overseeing “a crazy Punch and Judy show” in which journalists interviewed GIs who were hidden behind a sheet to protect their identities. Arlo, conversely, had no such men in his charge. He was running a deserter group without any deserters. Instead, he took George on a cloak-and-dagger tour of the boulevards. “We went to three different cafés,” said George. “I suppose he wanted to check if we were being followed.” In the final venue, George came face to face with a French revolutionary whom Arlo wanted him to meet. A dark-haired, seedy-looking figure who used the code-name Adrian and talked about his connections with Che Guevara. It was the mysterious Adrian, said George, who urged the ADC to treat with the enemy and bring two hundred men from Indochina to Sweden. “But he was talking in whispers,” said George. “And his English was very poor. In the end I thought maybe I’d misunderstood.” The punchline was one calculated to appeal to my interest in old British movies. “I felt,” George said, “like the casting director on The Man Between.”

  I asked George for his own theories about infiltrators within the ADC. He was sure that there were American expatriates living in Stockholm who sent intelligence back home, but he didn’t believe that any ADC members were among them. “Michael and I had our falling out,” he said, “but it wasn’t over me thinking that he was some kind of agent.” Their disagreements were about strategy—the attacks on Bertil Svahnström, the trip to Bulgaria that turned the ADC into the stars of a Soviet propaganda film.

  He did confess, however, to feeling disturbed by Michael Vale’s psychological dominance of some members of their group. “He liked to break people,” he said. To George, the men who followed Michael into the Next Step and the LaRouche organization seemed the most broken. “The way they were was a lot the result of Michael’s intense dealings with them. They took on this harsh character themselves. They became his acolytes in a strange sort of way. They were almost like Jonestown people, ready to go for the Kool-Aid.”

  * * *

  THE SURVIVORS OF the Next Step—Bill Jones, Cliff Gaddy, Warren Hamerman, and Jim McGourty—live within forty miles of one another in the commuter belt around Washington, DC. They do not hold reunions. Warren is particularly keen to avoid contact with witnesses to his former life as LaRouche’s most loyal retainer. His reasons may be professional as much as personal. He spent his post-LaRouchian career as a technical writer and IT consultant, and his clients included the Department of Homeland Security and the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. Perhaps he figured these government agencies would have been unhappy about employing someone who had once been a member of an organization proscribed by the FBI. He and his wife Nora now live in a 1980s condominium in Reston, Virginia, where Nora teaches piano to private students.

  Like many who left the cult in middle age, the Hamermans used their freedom to adopt children. LaRouche discouraged reproduction among his followers
. “The moment the leadership discovered a pregnancy,” Christina Nelson told me, “spouses were isolated from one another and sessions started until the woman caved in and agreed to terminate it.” Once they were free of the organization, she and Jim McGourty also contacted the adoption agencies. On one of my visits, I met their teenage son, a polite young man who had grown up in that large house in their quiet corner of Loudoun County, surrounded by prints of Italian Renaissance masterpieces.

  Jim retired from St. John Bosco High School in 2007. He now offers his services as a private math tutor. He and Christina worry about big things—the moral decline of America, the liberality of its abortion laws—but life for them is settled, quiet, and comfortable. Jim would like to be reconciled with his son from his marriage to Michele, but he’s not holding his breath. The young man was married in August 2007. Jim was not invited to the ceremony and has yet to meet his grandchildren.

  * * *

  THERE IS SOME good news, however, from Loudoun County. Its residents no longer have Lyndon Hermyle LaRouche Jr. for a neighbor. During the summer of 2016, the leader of the Labor Committees left his mansion on Windy Hill, with its barbed wire and its armed guards. His wife Helga Zepp-LaRouche took him to live with her in Germany, where, when the time comes, she will bury him with all the ceremony that befits the greatest statesman of our times. That moment, however, may be years off. Only the good die young, and at the end of 2016 LaRouche, despite his age and frailty, showed that his opportunist instincts were still intact and successfully executed one of the nimblest ideological somersaults of his long career.

  Like much of the rest of the world, LaRouche and his followers spent that year sniggering behind their hands at the Republican candidate for the U.S. presidency. The organization even recorded a satirical song suggesting that the candidate’s core constituents were mentally ill. “He’s a festering pustule on Satan’s rump!” trilled the singer. “Don’t you be a chump for Trump!” But when Hillary Clinton conceded defeat, the tune changed. Suddenly, Donald Trump was not, as had been previously thought, a maniac poised to legalize heroin and govern on behalf of Wall Street, but America’s best chance to defeat the British Empire and forge a new alliance with Russia.

  The LaRouche membership, inured to every kind of switcheroo, sang from the new hymn sheet without protest. Fresh articles and handbills warned that Barack Obama and the financier George Soros were plotting a “color revolution” against the victorious candidate. Heroic work was done by LaRouche pundits, who transmuted Trump’s solecisms into art: “In the way he used the term ‘the failing New York Times,’” declared one, “I sensed a note of poetry.” When a leaked intelligence report by a former MI6 officer listed the LaRouche Political Action Committee among the recent recipients of Kremlin hospitality, the cult made hay—it was more evidence of British perfidy.

  Then, in February 2017, I was watching a live feed of one of the first White House press briefings of the Trump administration when the camera focused on a familiar face: Bill Jones, bowling a softball question in the direction of the president’s spokesperson Sean Spicer. It was shocking to see him standing in the press room among all the real journalists from real publications. But the Trump White House was at ease with conspiracy theorists, and 2017 was a year of shocks.

  * * *

  ONE CAME, UNHERALDED, in January, when Clifford Gaddy left the Brookings Institution. No announcement was made; no press release was produced. References to him on the think tank’s website were simply shunted into the past tense. The “Senior Fellow” became a “Former Expert.” Where Cliff had gone, or why he had left, the Brookings press officer declined to say. He was simply “not giving interviews at the moment.” Other sources, however, suggested that he’d been silent for some time. Cliff, I was informed, had barely been seen in the building for the past six months. He’d not even RSVP’d for the Brookings centenary party.

  Perhaps his reasons were personal. Cliff had reached his seventieth birthday in June 2016. On December 27, his mother, Inez Chapman Gaddy, died in Danville at the age of ninety-two. But at the beginning of March 2017, the story acquired another twist. Reports began to circulate that Fiona Hill, the coauthor of Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin and Cliff’s staunch intellectual collaborator, was to be made Donald Trump’s chief adviser on Russia.

  In Washington, the news was received with surprise. Hill was a hawk on Putin and no fan of Trump. She had wondered aloud about the Kremlin’s influence over the president. “Are they,” she had asked a reporter from the New Yorker, “trying to turn him into the Manchurian Candidate?” On March 28, Hill’s place was confirmed. The official announcement might have come sooner had her prospective boss General Michael Flynn not resigned in disgrace after admitting to a series of compromising conversations with Russian officials.

  Newspaper profiles discussed Hill’s experience as an intelligence officer under George W. Bush and her modest childhood in the northeast of England. Most commentators noted that her reputation was founded on the book she had written with Cliff Gaddy. A researcher who was one of the world’s most authoritative experts on Vladimir Putin at a moment when expertise on Vladimir Putin was urgently required—and yet was now sitting at home, apparently unemployed.

  Had Cliff withdrawn to do intelligence work behind the scenes? Was he, perhaps, busy examining links between the U.S. president and the Russian state, just as, fifty years ago, the snoops of Operation Chaos had gone looking for Soviet influence on the deserters? Or had my inquiries played some small part in his disappearance?

  Fiona Hill’s appointment to the White House was bringing new scrutiny to her character and background. For years, Cliff’s weird LaRouchian past had lain quietly in old copies of Ny Solidaritet and Executive Intelligence Review. Once released from those places, it would be a gift to Hill’s enemies. The brainwash plot, the Palme assassination, the drug-pushing Queen of England. None of these stories would amplify the authority of the authors of Mr. Putin.

  Hill was soon under attack from conspiracy theorists and alt-right apoplectics. A blogger in Moscow declared that she was a KGB sleeper agent and superimposed her face on the cover of an old horror comic entitled Return of the Zombies. Roger Stone, Donald Trump’s former campaign adviser and a man happy to describe himself as an Agent of Chaos, went on the Infowars channel to accuse her of being a mole for George Soros. “Disgusting,” said Strobe Talbott, the head of Brookings, as dubious online theorists ran with the idea.

  * * *

  IN THE MIDDLE of April 2017, I attended a lecture at the Brookings Institution. Its little bookstore was piled with fresh new paperback copies of Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin. “Is this one of your bestsellers?” I asked, picking up a copy. The assistant pulled his ask-a-stupid-question face. “I hoped,” he said, “he would do another book before he went.” Cliff, he confirmed, had left the think tank suddenly and unexpectedly. Nobody knew why he’d gone. “The news didn’t go down well here,” he said. “It’s kind of a mystery.”

  Two days later, on Good Friday, I walked through the suburbs of Washington with a letter in my hand. The blossoms were out. The people weren’t. Cliff’s street, I noticed, shared a name with the road in Colindale on which Chris White had made his ill-fated attempt to expose a spy and an infiltrator. On that night, Cliff had maintained a policy of silence. Just as he had done with me.

  The Gaddys’ place was a corner house on a grassy slope. I climbed the cement steps up to the front door. It was ajar. I could hear voices coming from inside. My letter laid out two interpretations of Cliff’s life. Two hypotheses on which I had settled, but between which I had been unable to choose, despite several years of trying.

  Cliff was a deserter who got involved with a cult but found a lucky, Pentagon-funded escape into a fancy Washington think tank. Or Cliff was an operative, and always had been. An operative in the American Deserters Committee. An operative in the Next Step. An operative among the LaRouchians. An operative in Brookings. An operative n
ow having lunch at home, with a journalist standing on his doorstep, who knew that his own work was unlikely to reduce the amount of chaos in the world.

  I put the envelope on a chair on the veranda. It was a beautiful spring day. Perhaps later, Cliff would come out to watch the sunset and find he had something to read.

  * * *

  WHEN I GOT back to London, I met up with a friend for a drink. I told him about my trip to Washington. I was going to end the book, I said, with the image of my letter sitting on Cliff’s chair. Not, sadly, a rocking chair, but you couldn’t have everything. It was American enough.

  He burst out laughing. “You’ve seen the film, haven’t you?” he asked. We were in the Edgar Wallace pub, named in honor of England’s most prolific thriller writer. The back of our booth was a wall of yellowback crime and espionage novels. “Don’t you remember the ending of The Parallax View?” I did. Warren Beatty thought he’d exposed the villains, but realized, in the closing moments, that he’d become part of their operation. Then he got shot.

  “Who benefits,” my friend asked, “if Cliff gets into a load of trouble about cults and brainwashing and a dead Swedish prime minister?”

  “Well,” I said. “Vladimir Putin, obviously. But I can’t do much about that. I just had to follow the story.”

  “No,” he said. “Someone you’ve talked to. Who wanted you to write it this way?”

  * * *

  WHEN I BEGAN this story, I thought I might crack its code, experience the thrill of exposing a CIA mole inside a group of isolated and troubled young men. Instead, I had written a history of their agonies, an account of how it felt to live life in a cloud of suspicion and uncertainty. Some of these men had told me their secrets. Some had lied to me. But all those who talked had a reason to talk. Jim McGourty craved reconciliation with his son. Bill Jones wanted to feel important in a fancy Washington restaurant. Mark Shapiro wanted an ally in his obsessions. Chuck Onan wanted to defend the reputation of his old mentor. His own, too, perhaps.

 

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