Operation Chaos Read online

  The theater of operations had many scenes: a submarine lurking in New York Harbor; a hotel near Gatwick Airport at which the guests were spies; a classroom in a North London school where the only pupils present were not real but photographs.

  The big opening number of the conspiracy, however, had been performed at a secret facility near Stockholm. Here, Marcus explained, brainwash candidates had been put under hypnosis, subjected to electric shocks, forced to eat their own excrement and endure sexual humiliation, and tortured until they whined like puppies. Once they had been reduced to mental pulp, the programming began. A literal kind of programming, following the rules of the computer age. Numbers linked to functions. Infinite loops of coded instructions, drilled into the subject by repetition, violence, the application of electrodes to bare skin. Finally, cyanide pills had been secreted inside their bodies, in order to eliminate the killers once they had fulfilled their programs. “We have the scoop,” declared Marcus, “on one of the nastiest, most vicious CIA operations—the brainwashing institutes of Sweden. It’s a great place to go for a vacation. But don’t eat anything, don’t drink anything. You may not come back a man, or a woman.”

  As he neared the end of his speech, Marcus looked around the room. There might, he suggested, be sleeper agents among the audience. Manchurian Candidates, conditioned to kill. Questions from the floor, therefore, would be taken in written form, to prevent the accidental utterance of a trigger word that would activate the program and bring bloodshed to the ballroom. “It is a crisis situation,” he said. “We are in class war. No significant shooting has started here yet. Shooting will occur. People will be killed. People will suffer brainwashing.”

  “Perfectly sane people were saying that they had been brainwashed,” recalled Christina. “It just kept getting weirder and weirder.” As, in the course of the following three years, it would for me.

  * * *

  THIS IS A book of impossible things, and how a group of men came to live their lives by them because they did not want to die in Vietnam. It is about how it felt to be faced with the great moral decision of the age, and the terrible consequences that came from calling it right. It is about how being paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.

  It contains imagined conspiracies and real ones. Some of the people you will meet are telling the truth. Some of them are liars. I belong in the former category, but I’ll understand if you have your suspicions. A few of my interviewees certainly did. “The same CIA operatives have been working for years,” raged one Stockholm deserter, in an email from Hawaii. “I am not sure about YOU.”

  That uncertainty, and how to live with it, also became a subject of the story. I was getting to know a band of comrades who had made a stand against an unjust conflict and came to believe, almost immediately, that enemy infiltrators were operating among them. Nearly fifty years later, documents released by the intelligence archives of America and Sweden suggested that this suspicion was well founded. But the names of the informants had been redacted from the files. As they entered their seventies, the deserters faced the possibility that life for them was an espionage whodunit from which someone had torn the last page—the one that revealed which of their friends had sold them out to the spooks. Except that the story was too strange for any spy novel. As time went on, I realized that I had joined something much weirder than a fifty-year-old mole hunt. Moles are unsensational creatures. They snuffle about. They dig tunnels. They make molehills. I was on the trail of fantastic beasts.

  In their teens and twenties, the figures at the heart of this story were American boys who felt the eye of war upon them and went to Sweden to escape its gaze. They joined the American Deserters Committee, a noisy and radical political organization that proved a thorn in the side of the Swedish political establishment. Then, tired of marching through Stockholm under earnest slogans about U.S. imperialism, they became revolutionaries and dreamed of taking over America and Europe, as the Bolsheviks had taken power in Russia. But the National Caucus of Labor Committees was not the Bolsheviks. It was an apocalyptic cult that believed in the satanic nature of the Queen of England, the prime minister of Sweden, and the Beatles and used violence, harassment, and financial fraud to achieve its goals. Goals that its successor organization is still working to accomplish.

  * * *

  THIS IS NOT the book I intended to write. At first I planned a grand historical survey of the act of desertion from the Second World War to the present day. I went down to St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, where deserters from Iraq and Afghanistan were among the protestors living under the nylon tents of the Occupy camp. I read about the handful of American and British men who crossed the lines into North Korea and, because they were among the only white inhabitants of a closed state, were cast as the villains in Nameless Heroes, Pyongyang’s answer to the James Bond films. (YouTube will satisfy the curious.) I visited the retired British gangster “Mad” Frankie Fraser, whose desertion and housebreaking during the Second World War had put him in Wormwood Scrubs prison alongside the stage and screen star Ivor Novello. (“As Ivor passed down the landing,” he recalled, “all the prisoners came to their cell doors and sang ‘We’ll Gather Lilacs.’”)

  But the Vietnam deserters who went to Stockholm began to push these other figures from my mind. Partly because their very existence, once front-page news all over the world, was so little remembered beyond Sweden, and only hazily there. Partly because death was beginning to silence them and lock away their stories. Mainly, though, because I had a growing sense that I was exploring events that were mysterious even to those who had actually experienced them—and that those mysteries were now exerting their power over me.

  As I talked to the survivors of the American Deserters Committee, I heard them puzzle over incidents that remained undiscussed with friends, with children, with the spouse sleeping in the next room. I heard them voice doubts about the gaps in their memories, express bewilderment at the actions of the people they had once been. I became fascinated, too, by what they wanted from me—renewed contact with long-lost comrades; the opportunity to kick against press reports about their conduct; the means to settle an old score; some help to discover, fifty years on, who had been loyal and truthful, and who had secretly betrayed them. And in some cases, it was much simpler. All they wanted was a bit of company, and a free lunch to make the food stamps stretch a bit further.

  The pursuit of their stories took me to a cannabis refinery in Eugene, Oregon, and a maximum-security prison in Taylorsville, North Carolina. I met my subjects in parking lots and cafés; waited in hotel lobbies in Sweden and the States to keep appointments with former intelligence officers. I made a nuisance of myself at a prestigious Washington think tank and attended a cult meeting in the basement of a New York hotel. The story worked its way into my bones. I began dreaming of confrontations with the men who seemed to be the villains of the piece. I found myself awake at three a.m., reliving conversations with interviewees; getting up while my family slept to read emails that had arrived in the night, bearing more theories, names, scraps of information, scans of declassified documents. I entered the paranoid zone in which some of my subjects had spent a lifetime. A place it would be possible to wander forever, opening doors that led to more doors, and yet more beyond those.

  One day in April 2016, a friend, no older than I, suffered a near-fatal heart attack. The news appeared on my Facebook feed as I walked to the Tube from my office at the BBC. As I tapped something optimistic into the comments thread, I had that thought that often strikes middle-aged men whose working lives are slightly more exhausting than they ought to be. What would happen if I fell dead in the street? After the usual images—my wife alone, my children fatherless, my coffin disappearing to the laid-back Laurie Johnson jazz theme that ended every episode of The Avengers—another idea presented itself. If I were to die without finishing this book, then someone out there would undoubtedly set up a Web page claiming that I’d been bumped off, by either the CI
A, the Swedish secret services, or the bizarre political group that had once counted many of my interviewees as its members—and would, by the time my research was concluded, come to regard me as an enemy infiltrator. And that was when I knew I’d been swallowed by my own story.

  Swallowed, but not brainwashed.

  1 / THE HIGH ROAD

  A JAPANESE FISHING boat, moving north to Soviet waters. Six Americans in the forward hold below the captain’s cabin. Trying to stay warm. Trying to keep their nerve. Trying not to vomit too loudly. One is too drunk to feel seasick. He’s up on his feet, swigging from a bottle of sake, peering into the moonless night, swearing he can see dolphins in the water and helicopters in the sky. The others don’t bother to look. But when the beam of a searchlight streams through the crack in the door, all six scramble to the porthole, jostling to catch sight of the ship that has come down from the ice floes to meet them.

  “It’s them, man,” says one. “The Russians are coming. We gonna be free now, baby.”

  Most of us would find it hard to pinpoint the single act that determined the course of our lives. Mark Shapiro can reenact his with the cutlery. When we spent the day together in San Diego, he collected me in a cream-colored vintage Volvo wagon, which was where most of our interview took place—stationary in the hotel parking lot or riding around the streets, where other drivers expressed their admiration for the age of his vehicle by beeping their horns and keeping a wary distance. But we did stop for lunch. And using the implements with which he was about to eat pasta, Mark illustrated the moment during the small hours of April 23, 1968, when he crossed from one life to another.

  His knife and fork became two ships on the churning waves of the Sea of Japan. One was the fishing vessel that brought him and his five companions from a little harbor at the northeast tip of Hokkaido island. The other was the Soviet coast guard craft that edged alongside, and that, slammed by the relentless sea, appeared like a cliff soaring and sinking before them.

  Between the two vessels was a six-foot span of furious air, through which Mark and his comrades were ordered to jump. Time was limited. The coast guards had boarded the fishing boat and were inspecting the captain’s paperwork and checking the hold for contraband, the bureaucratic pretext for maneuvering so close. The Soviets had dragged a mattress to the cutter’s deck of their ship and were holding it up like a firefighters’ life net. One by one, displaying varying degrees of bravado and terror, the Americans slithered across the fishing boat’s deck and around a funnel to reach an area unprotected by railings and open to the sea. One by one they jumped. Into the arms of a gang of Russian sailors, and into history.

  * * *

  IT TOOK THREE years to persuade Mark Shapiro to meet me. His first email was a blunt rejection. “I do not wish,” he wrote, “to be contacted again on the matter.” But the deserter grapevine brought him news of my inquiries and he changed his mind. Intimations of mortality also had something to do with it. Mark’s health was fragile. He had heart trouble, and he slept with an oxygen cylinder by his bed. A tumor, he said, was growing in his skull. (He traced his finger over the place where it lay buried.) He knew that his time was limited and wanted to answer a question that was gnawing away at him. He wanted to expose the mole within the American Deserters Committee. His suspect was not among the five who traveled with him from Japan. The man upon whom Mark’s suspicions turned—the man he’d been trying to catch out for years—had arrived in Sweden months before him, and he was one of the founders of the ADC. I said I would do my best.

  I knew the bones of Mark’s story from the accounts of his peers. On his tour of duty with the army in Vietnam, he’d found it hard to stomach talk of “gooks” and “slant-eyed bastards.” Then, out on patrol one day, the soldier beside him was felled by a Viet Cong bullet. A murderous wake-up call for twenty-two-year-old Corporal Shapiro, with an unblemished service record and good prospects for promotion as a military cryptographer.

  I was ready to take down more details, but Mark seemed incapable of fleshing out his narrative. Instead, he told me a story about his recent visit to a hypnotherapist.

  “I told him that there was something in my past that I wanted to remember,” he said. “And I didn’t tell him any more than that. The guy was a little skeptical. He asked for the money in advance.” The next thing Mark remembers is having his cash pressed back into his hand, and the therapist, visibly perturbed, assuring him that some stones were best left unturned. “So,” Mark told me, with a shrug, “I have nothing to say about Vietnam. It’s a form of amnesia.” I accepted the explanation. I was already used to thinking of my interviewees as jigsaws with missing pieces.

  Mark’s decision to desert was not so lost to him. It was a textbook example of the act. In the first days of 1968, he read a newspaper article about four men who had successfully escaped the war. They had been on leave in Japan but were now poised to begin new lives in neutral Sweden. Their names were Craig Anderson, Rick Bailey, John Barilla, and Michael Lindner, but the press nicknamed them “the Intrepid Four,” after the U.S. aircraft carrier that had sailed without them from Yokosuka, the Japanese home of the Seventh Fleet. Another expression was also used to describe them. Defectors. Used in recognition of what many saw as an act of treachery.

  On their journey from east to west, the Intrepid Four had passed through the Soviet Union and accepted several weeks of Russian hospitality. Maybe more than hospitality. They had shared their anti-war sentiments with the international press, attended celebrations for the fiftieth anniversary of the Russian Revolution, shaken hands with members of the Politburo, and flown from Leningrad to Stockholm with a $1,000 stipend from the Kremlin in their pockets. But they looked pretty happy in the photographs, waving and smiling on the tarmac at Stockholm Arlanda Airport, with their neat new haircuts and sharp new suits. And nobody was asking them to kill anyone in an increasingly unpopular war. Mark decided to follow their example and booked himself some R & R in Tokyo.

  The news reports offered another helpful detail. The Intrepid Four did not make their journey unaided. They had been smuggled into Russia by an outfit called Beheiren, a group of activists who were fast becoming the focus of the Japanese anti-war movement. Beheiren had organized a rally in Tokyo at which Joan Baez had performed. It had taken out full-page ads in the Washington Post declaring that 82 percent of the Japanese population was opposed to the Vietnam War. It had sent its members to U.S. naval bases with leaflets encouraging sailors to desert, intending to make a provocative gesture—and had been rather surprised to find the offer being taken up. All over Japan, doctors, teachers, shopkeepers, and Buddhist monks began preparing hiding places and airing the spare bedding.

  Beheiren, however, was a loose-knit organization, and when Mark arrived in Tokyo, determined to make contact, nobody seemed to know its address. “So,” he explained, “I got into a cab and just said, ‘Beheiren.’” The driver thought for a moment and made for Tokyo University and the office of Oda Makoto, a Harvard-educated novelist and academic who was the group’s most visible spokesperson—the man who had gone before the cameras to announce the disappearance of the Intrepid Four. Makoto made some calls, and his associates sprang instantly into action.

  By the end of the day Mark had checked out of his hotel and was installed in a Beheiren safe house. He soon discovered that he wasn’t the only deserter being sheltered by the group. Five others were also in hiding, kept in circulation among the homes of sympathizers across Japan until the time was right to make the journey to Russia. “When I eventually met the others it was a shock,” Mark said. “We had nothing in common, and it was immediately clear that two of them were nutcases.”

  His first American companion fit squarely into the category. Philip Callicoat was a nineteen-year-old sailor whose swaggering manner was at odds with his lowly status as a cook’s helper on board the USS Reeves. Perhaps the attitude was a gift from his background: his father was a Pentecostal minister who press-ganged his enormous brood of chi
ldren into service as the Singing Callicoats—a gospel act best known for having saved Ed Sullivan from humiliation by breaking into an unscheduled second number when a chimp act went badly wrong during a live TV show. Phil Callicoat had turned up at the Soviet Embassy seeking advice on how to defect, but his motives had less to do with politics and more to do with having drunk the last of his $120 savings in an all-night Tokyo jazz bar. Navy discipline did not suit him, and he had recently been confined to his ship for twenty-eight days for vandalism. He and Mark were brought together on a train from Osaka to Tokyo, then put up for the night in the apartment of a visiting French academic. Mark sensed that Phil was going to be trouble, and he was right.

  The fugitives were taken to Tokyo International Airport, where three more deserters made a party of five. The noisiest was Joe Kmetz, a bullish New Yorker whose opposition to the war, he said, had earned him a month in a dark isolation cell on a diet of bread, water, and lettuce heads. The oldest of the group, twenty-eight-year-old Edwin Arnett, was a skinny, stooping Californian who chewed his fingernails and spoke in slow, somnolent tones. He was not a clever man. His educational progress had halted after the eighth grade, after which he’d trundled gurneys in a New York hospital and spent two years in the merchant marine. The army had expressed no interest in him until 1967, when a Defense Department initiative called “Project 100,000”—cruelly nicknamed the “Moron Corps”—admitted a huge swathe of low-achieving men. The other deserters called him “Pappy”—partly in honor of his age, partly to distance themselves from his oddness.