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  For David Sweet

  WHO’S WHO IN OPERATION CHAOS

  This is a strange story and a populous one. Some of its protagonists lost their grip on their own identity. Some of them are not what they seem. This guide will help you decide who you’re dealing with.

  THE DESERTERS

  BILL JONES

  Former seminarian. Deserted from his army base in Germany in 1968 and became the leader of the American Deserters Committee in Stockholm. Now believes that the Queen of England secretly rules the world. Look out for him at White House press briefings.

  CLIFF GADDY

  Schoolboy prodigy from Danville, Virginia. Athlete. Cellist. Good teeth. Deserted from the Army Security Agency base at Fort Devens. World-renowned expert on the mind of Vladimir Putin.

  WARREN HAMERMAN

  Draft dodger. Poet. Beret wearer. Left Baltimore for Paris, where he joined the French Union of American Deserters and Draft Resisters. Fled to Stockholm in the summer of 1968.

  JIM MCGOURTY

  A pseudonym. Clerk in the Marine Corps. Deserted to Sweden from Camp Pendleton in 1968. Returned to the States on a false passport. Arrested after his involvement in a campaign to destroy the Communist Party USA with martial arts.

  GEORGE CARRANO

  A hustler. A mystery. Escaped the draft on an obscure technicality. Son of an army colonel. Later worked for the New York transit system.

  CHUCK ONAN

  Born on a military base in Germany. Grew up in the Chicago projects. Joined the U.S. Marines, deserted to Sweden via Iceland. Now a fan of medicinal marijuana and the alt-right.

  MARK SHAPIRO

  Army corporal from Minnesota. Deserted from Vietnam in 1968, traveling from Japan in the hold of a Russian trawler with five other deserters, namely …

  EDWIN ARNETT

  Army specialist. Member of the “Moron Corps.” Claimed to have witnessed atrocities, and said so on Russian television. The first Vietnam deserter to be court-martialed in America.

  PHILIP CALLICOAT

  Cook’s helper on the USS Reeves. Volatile. Untrustworthy. Informed on his fellow deserters. Former member of the Singing Callicoats, a Pentecostal variety act.

  KENNETH GRIGGS

  Also known as Kim Jin-Su. Korean war orphan adopted by a couple from Boise, Idaho.

  JOE KMETZ

  New York GI. Spent too much time in isolation and lost his knack for the English language.

  TERRY WHITMORE

  Decorated marine from Memphis, Mississippi. Deserted via Tokyo and Moscow with Mark Shapiro. A deserter with a movie career.

  RAY JONES III

  Army private from Pontiac, Michigan. The first deserter to seek asylum in Sweden, arriving with his wife and son in 1967. Ballet coach. Sharp dresser.

  THE INTREPID FOUR

  The Beatles of Vietnam desertion. A quartet of serving sailors smuggled from Tokyo to Moscow by Japanese anti-war activists. They landed in Stockholm at the very end of 1967. Their names were John Barilla, Michael Lindner, Rick Bailey, and Craig Anderson. But in this story, the most important is …

  CRAIG ANDERSON

  Californian. Now known as the author Will Hart. His big idea: the CIA has a base on the moon.

  ROB ARGENTO

  Deserter from Miami Beach, Florida. Arrived in Sweden on the day the American Deserters Committee was born.

  JOHN ASHLEY

  Son of a Pentagon official. Gifted writer. One of many drug users among the deserters.

  WALTER MARSHALL

  Also known, briefly, as Jesus Zeus Lorenzo Mungi. Reform school runaway.

  JAMES DOTSON

  Texas deserter used as bait to trap a suspected CIA agent.

  FRED PAVESE

  Dope-smoking former artilleryman from New York State. Guitar player. Porn performer.

  THOMAS TAYLOR

  Painter. Hawaiian exile. Would file the author of this book in the section below.

  THE SPIES

  RICHARD OBER

  The chief of Operation Chaos, the CIA’s campaign against the deserters, the New Left, and the Black Panthers. Other spies thought him paranoid and secretive.

  HARRY ROSITZKE

  Freewheeling, ungovernable, crossword-loving, Brooklyn-born intelligence officer. Attached to Operation Chaos in its early days.

  PETUNIA AND MHYIELD

  Code names for Operation Chaos assets who spied on the deserters.

  GUNNAR EKBERG

  A Swedish James Bond. Handy with a harpoon. Excellent liar, competent burglar.

  FRANK RAFALKO

  The man at the Black Panther desk of Operation Chaos. The only officer on the project who has spoken publicly about his experiences.

  THE REBELS AND REVOLUTIONARIES

  MICHAEL VALE

  The éminence grise of the American Deserters Committee (though some preferred to think of him as its Rasputin). Interested in travel, Trotsky, and Soviet psychiatry. Suspected of being a CIA infiltrator.

  BO BURLINGHAM

  Also known as Arlo Jacobs. Weatherman. Student radical. Organizer of a deserters’ group in Paris. Also suspected of being a CIA infiltrator.

  THOMAS LEE HAYES

  Episcopalian minister. Padre to the deserters.

  LYNDON LAROUCHE

  Also known as Lyn Marcus or Hermyle Golthier Jr. Quaker. Management consultant to the shoe industry. Cult leader. World’s greatest economist. Founder of the National Caucus of Labor Committees.

  CAROL WHITE

  Also known as Carol Larrabee. Math teacher. Socialist. Bird-watcher. Partner of Lyndon LaRouche before her marriage to …

  CHRIS WHITE

  British student socialist. Unwilling lead in the Manchurian Candidate Scare of 1973–74.

  BILL ENGDAHL

  Mild-mannered conspiracy theorist. Walks with crutches. Now a pundit on Russia Today.

  MICHELE LLOYD

  Daughter of a military family. Persuaded her husband to desert to Sweden. First wife of the man we know as Jim McGourty.

  CHRISTINA NELSON

  New York congressional candidate. Second wife of the man we know as Jim McGourty.

  MAX WATTS

  Also known as Max Cook or Thomas Schwaetzer. Adventurer. Trotskyist. Organized safe houses for deserters in Paris.

  CLANCY SIGAL

  Novelist, activist, Hollywood agent. Stationmaster of the London safe house.

  KAREN FABEC

  Hippie chick from Pittsburgh. Free-spirited, good singing voice. Narrowly avoided spending her twenties in a Moroccan jail.

  NANCY AND EDWARD SPANNAUS

  Married students studying at the Columbia School of Social Work. LaRouchian loyalists.

  KERSTIN TEGIN

  Psychology student from Uppsala, Sweden. Leader of the European Workers Party. Taught at the Catholic University of America until 2017.

  VICTOR GUNNARSSON

  Right-wing extremi
st. Fantasist. Lothario. Pool player. Suspected assassin.

  THE HOSTS

  BERTIL SVAHNSTRÖM

  Former foreign correspondent. Old-school peace campaigner. Vice chair of the Swedish Committee for Vietnam. Awarded the Lenin Peace Prize in 1970. Despised by Michael Vale and Bill Jones.

  ÅKE SANDIN

  Peace activist who gave deserters the use of his spare bedroom. Tried to stop Edwin Arnett giving himself up at the U.S. Embassy in Stockholm.

  SVEN KEMPE

  Textile importer and philanthropist. Donated a farm to Michael Vale and the American Deserters Committee.

  HANS GÖRAN FRANCK

  Tall, soft-spoken lawyer to the deserters. Head of the Swedish section of Amnesty International. Cousin of …

  MIRJAM ISRAEL

  Child psychologist and advice columnist. Friend of Michael Vale. Once married to …

  JOACHIM ISRAEL

  Sociologist. Refugee from Nazi Germany. Landlord to Mark Shapiro. Accused of being involved in a secret plot to brainwash the population of Sweden with the help of the CIA and …

  OLOF PALME

  Leader of the Swedish Social Democratic Party. Prime minister of Sweden, 1969–76, 1982–86. Assassinated in February 1986. The crime remains unsolved.

  INTRODUCTION

  DEEP SNOW

  ONE FEBRUARY MORNING, shortly before I became part of the queen’s secret plot to start World War III, I knocked on the door of a retired Catholic schoolteacher in the wealthiest county in the United States. His home—large, elevated, comfortable—rose from the snow-covered ground of Loudoun County, Virginia, a region populated by civil servants, senators, and spies. The cold heart of America.

  There was no answer. I kicked the snow from my boots, watched my taxi disappear down the dirt road, peered through the window, and met the gaze of a plaster saint perched on the sideboard. Jim McGourty had sounded nervous on the phone, and I feared he’d changed his mind about our interview. It had taken weeks of negotiation through a third party and came with a condition attached: that I would refer to him only by his nom de guerre. The man inside this house was not the real Jim McGourty. The real one had been dead before his second birthday. But in 1970, the first facts of his little life were resurrected, inscribed in a new passport, and used to bring an American fugitive back to his homeland. Back from exile, to take control of the United States. And then the world. And then the planet Mars.

  Like many of the people enmeshed in the events of this book, Jim had no obvious reason to talk to me, and many to keep silent—not least the presence of those civil servants, senators, and spies. I wouldn’t have blamed him for getting cold feet. Many of his former comrades had ignored my letters and emails. Some, when I reached them by phone, appeared to suffer sudden attacks of amnesia—or insisted that they were a different person with the same name.

  Others made it clear that my request for an interview was about as welcome as an envelope of compromising photographs. “I do not wish to be defined by my past,” read one whiplash reply from an American author who, in a former life, was smuggled from Tokyo to Moscow with the help of the KGB. (The story of his court-martial and his UFO encounters must be told instead by those who knew him.)

  “I would be reluctant to participate in this project on any basis,” wrote an American academic dismayed to be reminded of the time when he fought the same fight as Jim McGourty. (No firsthand account from him, then, of the nights he and his friends kept a woman imprisoned in her Manhattan apartment, playing Beethoven in an attempt to reprogram her brain.) Another witness, whose name I gleaned from a CIA surveillance report, agreed to have a drink with me in order to offer his discouragement. “I had dinner with some of the other guys last night and we agreed that none of us should speak to you,” said the former high school principal, when we met under the eye of the clock at Stockholm Central Station. “Keep my name out of it.” He was so agitated that he spilled his Diet Coke all over the café table.

  It was Christina, Jim’s wife, who heard me knocking and invited me in from the snow. A tall, immaculate woman in her sixties. “I know the English have tea at three,” she said. And there it was, laid out on the table in the music room at the back of the house. Finger sandwiches, crudités, slices of fruitcake. Beside it, in the corner armchair, was her husband, a soft-spoken man in the plaid shirt and slacks that are the uniform of retired Americans the world over. He had a folder of notes laid out on his knee. Dates, names, the details in proper order, as if he were preparing to teach a class on his own past. I asked him why he wanted to tell his story. He furrowed his brow. Perhaps, he reasoned, it would be a way of explaining himself to his estranged son, the offspring of his first marriage. Maybe the boy would read it and better understand his father’s motives—the road he took at the end of the 1960s from protest against an unjust war to participation in something darker and more outlandish.

  Certainly there was much to understand. Half a century later, some of it was still unclear to Jim. “I didn’t intend to do anything against the government,” he said, tears swimming in his eyes, “but then Bobby Kennedy was shot. Martin Luther King was shot. And I didn’t feel the sense of security that I had before.”

  That anxiety brought him to the decision that forms the common link among most of the people in this story. It was the choice upon which an American generation was skewered: whether to accept a kind invitation from the government to fight in the Vietnam War or to decline that offer and accept the consequences. Many men refused and suffered little. But Jim was part of a group that trod a more difficult path. Men who were already in uniform. Men who deserted from the military and went into exile in Sweden, the only non-Communist country in Europe that offered asylum to those who refused to fight.

  Jim could recount his steps toward that choice. He could remember the sinking feeling of knowing that he was to be sent from his desk job into action on the front line. He could give a good and comprehensible account of his arrival in Stockholm, the life he led among the thousand-strong community of deserters and draft resisters who’d made the same decision; how he’d become a prominent member of the American Deserters Committee, a group of radical exiles who sowed so much discord that many Swedes suspected they were a CIA front. Other details, though, were less sharply focused. How had he become a revolutionary, living underground in 1970s America? What about the business with the nunchakus? Or his prison sentence? Or the phalanx of Cuban frogmen lurking in the Hudson River, waiting for the order to kill? What about the men from Operation Chaos?

  Jim McGourty was right to be confused. His life remains part of a story that began fifty years ago but has never quite ended, thanks to the unhealed wounds of Vietnam, the secret strategies of the American and Swedish intelligence services, and the influence of a cult run by one of the weirdest personalities in American political history—a management consultant from New Hampshire who, even today, at the age of ninety-four, wants you to know that Britain started the Vietnam War, that the Beatles were created as an instrument of psychological warfare, and that he is the only man in the world who can save you, me, Jim, Christina, and everyone from the genocidal ambitions of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.

  “So,” said Christina, with the directness of someone who has spent a career as a professional copy editor. “How are you going to structure this? What are you going to begin with?”

  “Maybe,” I said, “with the brainwashing part. The moment when everything went nuts.”

  * * *

  IT HAPPENED IN the Marc Ballroom, a shabby venue on the west side of Union Square in Manhattan, on January 3, 1974. In those days, New York was a city sliding toward bankruptcy. Thanks to the oil crisis, it was also brutally cold. Gas stations across America were closed for business. Speed limits were brought down to reduce fuel consumption. Thermostats were dialed down, store windows darkened early. Inside the ballroom, they were already shivering.

  The events of that night would be beyond reconstruction, had Christina not bee
n present, taking notes—and had the political organization to which she and Jim belonged not had a mania for converting its proceedings into print. Despite its achingly dull name, the National Caucus of Labor Committees had no qualms about publishing sensational accounts of its own crises. They were spelled out in press releases and telegrams to the White House. They were spun from mimeograph machines and sold on the streets in ten-cent installments, then typeset for the pages of its newspaper, New Solidarity. The atmosphere in the Marc Ballroom was panicky and febrile. Many in the crowd were NCLC delegates enduring their fourth consecutive sleepless night. The rest were journalists, activists, and members of the public who had been summoned by flyers that promised to blow the whistle on the greatest conspiracy of modern times—“the takeover by the CIA of the United States of America.”

  At eight p.m., the head of the NCLC swept into the room—a sharp-eyed, tweedy, balding figure a good two decades older than the students and twentysomethings who formed his audience. They called him Lyn Marcus—an alias he’d been using since 1949. In recent months, however, he had begun referring to himself as Der Abscheulicher, the Abominable One—a name that nobody had called him when he was giving marketing advice to the footwear industry. As he went to the lectern, Marcus hushed the applause.

  “Don’t get freaked out by anything,” he said, “but I don’t want to create conditions which are not healthy for one or two individuals in the group here. I’m going to give you the worst part of the thing as well as the best so that there’s no question in your mind that I’ve given the whole scoop. We are now in the second phase of a psy-war game designed by the CIA, that is, a psychological warfare game conducted on a scale of four continents.” Everybody, quite naturally, freaked out.

  The Central Intelligence Agency—the state body tasked with gathering, processing, and analyzing national security information from around the world—had, he explained, turned some of their most trusted colleagues into killers. It had drugged them, imprisoned them, reconditioned their minds, erased their memories of the experience, and returned them to their friends as unknowing vehicles of a murderous conspiracy. The principal victims, Marcus explained, were now confined in a number of apartments across Manhattan, where their programming had been broken and the details of the plot had come tumbling out. One had spoken of “Operation Chaos and Confusion.” Another had been reduced to babbling in computer code—the language in which his instructions had been implanted. “This isn’t speculation,” Marcus insisted. “No guessing. This is hard fact. We know it.”