AS THIS MADNESS blossomed, Jim McGourty, halfway through his sentence for deserting from the marines, sat in a cell at Camp Lejeune, awaiting news from the New York conference. It arrived in the form of a telephone call from a breathless Warren Hamerman, who brought him up to date on the brainwashing, the killer frogmen, and the international conspiracy in which their former mentor, Michael Vale, had played the role of mindbender in chief. Jim did not understand all the details, but he believed them. When, three weeks later, Michael turned up to visit him in his confinement, Jim was forewarned and forearmed.
His old friend arrived with a piece of paper in his hand. An article cut from the New York Times: “How a Radical-Left Group Moved Toward Savagery.” Its author, Paul Montgomery, had visited the offices of the Labor Committees and interviewed LaRouche. “He talked virtually nonstop about his life and his theories,” Montgomery reported. “Only once did his reasoned, pipe-smoking professorial air vanish—when, with an explosion of spittle, he lunged with an imaginary knife to show how a CIA-programmed assassin might kill him.” Jim read the piece, and listened as Michael gave him his assessment. “Marcus has initiated a test for total allegiance,” said Michael. “You and me and Michele are included in that group and believed to be CIA agents—and you will never be able to convince them otherwise.”
After his phone conversation with Warren Hamerman, Jim was determined to walk the LaRouchian line. Michael Vale was not to be trusted. Jim now blamed Michael for all his misfortunes, even the sudden cessation of his subscription to New Solidarity, which had prevented him from reading official accounts of the deprogramming of Chris White and Bill Engdahl. The books Michael sent were now construed as a form of attack. Jean Piaget’s Insights and Illusions of Philosophy was an attempt to wean Jim off Marxism. Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons was a choice “drawn from the pages of my psychological profile, which related to my lack of a relationship to my father during the crucial years of adolescence.” Most of all, Jim was suspicious of Michael’s Christmas visits to Michele, who was living with her parents in Washington, DC.
In February 1974, Jim left Camp Lejeune. He and twenty-eight other prisoners were flown north on a U.S. Navy plane and dumped, shivering, on an airfield somewhere in New Hampshire. They boarded a bus, on which they sat with their hands crossed and their heads pressed against the seat in front, to prevent them memorizing the route to their new home. The Naval Prison in Portsmouth. A new place for Jim to brood over Michael’s apparent treachery.
* * *
THE CHRIS WHITE Affair, as it soon became known in LaRouchian lore, sent a surge of paranoid energy through the Labor Committees. Loyalists, like Warren, were rewarded with important-sounding job titles. Dissenters walked. Waverers were identified as spies or Manchurian Candidates and expelled. “Put simply,” one former member told me, “the group lost its mind. It became a kind of Manichean cult.”
The wider membership was kept informed by the NCLC’s monthly magazine, the Campaigner. The February issue offered a landmark horror story. “On the Track of My Assassins”—an intense and detailed first-person account of Chris’s ordeal—illustrated with the hideous image of a human head, a hemisphere of bone removed to expose the brain beneath. It told how Chris had been saved from becoming “a self-perpetuating mental zombie.” It urged revolutionary war against the CIA brainwashers. “These two-legged rodents are the men who condemned me, and others, to death. They are not, however, interested in me alone. They are after your mind as well.… That is why you will join with us to hunt my assassins down. You know as well as we do that you have no other choice. Your humanity is at stake.”
“Did you write all that?” I asked him.
“That’s Lyn talking,” he said.
At the time, Chris didn’t feel able to resist LaRouche’s act of ventriloquism. Others did, however. In March, Christine Berl, the concert pianist who was one of the organization’s biggest fundraising assets, voiced her concerns about the growing madness of the Labor Committees. She then received a three a.m. phone call informing her that she was a “potential traitor to the human race.” Terrified, she and her partner set out their position in a document circulated to their friends, urging them to contact the authorities “in the event of our disappearance.” Berl’s principal conclusions were correct and clearheaded. Chris White and Bill Engdahl, she asserted, had never been brainwashed. Lyn Marcus’s enemies were chimerical. The organization had “embarked on a process of autocannibalism.”
Predictably, LaRouche had already taken another mouthful of flesh. In an internal bulletin headed “Why Christine Berl Could Be Turned into a Zombie,” he explained that the pianist was particularly vulnerable to mental attack from the CIA thanks to her poor relationship with her mother and her interest in the atonal music of the Second Viennese School.
He issued another paper that formed a kind of contract with the remaining members of the Labor Committees, laying out the rules of the parallel universe in which they would now be required to dwell. He praised them for their “magnificent response” to the New Year crisis. He mourned the collapse of the British branch of the organization, particularly as the coming CIA takeover of the United Kingdom would have “permitted us to recruit fantastically, within the prisons and concentration camps in which our members would have been shortly prime pioneer candidates.” He acknowledged the emotional impact of the brainwashing affair—though only as a spur to more sacrifices. “We are faced with the fearful infinity of a world in which we, tiny, virtually alone at the moment, must take responsibility for the very future existence of the human race,” he wrote. “The mind reaches for comprehension of that, and withdraws with a shudder.”
That shuddery feeling was one that members were ordered to resist, just as they were obliged to reject the doubt and skepticism of their parents and friends. Retreating into despair and depression was not an option. Nor was questioning LaRouche’s bizarre contention that Nelson Rockefeller was an American dictator-in-waiting. They were to continue to fight—and to get out on the street to raise money for the war to come. Marcus underlined the most important part of the text: “Unless the Labor Committees are able to deploy in almost a military exactness, with abrupt maneuvers, maintaining the financial level of activity necessary to function as an effective force, there will be no hope for the human race by the end of 1974.”
* * *
IN HAPPIER TIMES before the CIA-KGB psy-war, Lyndon LaRouche liked to lie in bed with his son, eating potato chips and watching episodes of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. Perhaps the premise of that show inspired him at this moment. The agents of U.N.C.L.E. occupied secret headquarters on the Lower East Side, accessed through an entrance concealed inside a dry-cleaning store. From here they opposed the machinations of THRUSH, a shadowy outfit with an interest in mind-bending and world domination.
From 1974, the men and women from the NCLC mobilized against their enemies on three floors of offices above a furrier’s on West Twenty-Ninth Street. Visitors stepped out of the elevator to arrive in a cramped hallway stacked with copies of New Solidarity. Here they were assessed by a pair of nunchakus-twirling security goons. If they passed muster, the receptionist behind a bulletproof glass window pressed a button and buzzed open the heavy steel door that led to the office.
Their new organizational structure was devised by Uwe Henke von Parpart, a philosophy lecturer at Swarthmore College who claimed to have worked at NATO headquarters in the early 1960s. (He is now in banking and occasionally pops up as a pundit on CNN.) Members were assigned to “sectors” and “files,” each monitoring developments in a different part of the world.
In the International Telex Room, keen young people handled messages from NCLC outposts in America and Europe. The wall of the War Room bore an enormous laminated map of the United States, with LaRouchian centers of influence ringed in red and green crayon. In the Press Room, reporters reckless enough to enter were bombarded with the key points of the week. Charles M. Young, a future Rolling Stone writer whose cousin was ensnared by the Labor Committees, reported a short meeting in which he had been briefed by two members “on how Rockefeller caused or is causing the food crisis, the energy crisis, the impeachment of Richard Nixon, the assassinations of Malcolm X and John Kennedy, the flu, massive slave labor camps in the Arctic, the fall of Willy Brandt, heroin addiction in the ghetto, the counterculture, the overthrow of the constitutional government in Great Britain, the Arab-Israeli wars, the civil war in Northern Ireland, and the deaths of a billion people by the end of the century in order to save capitalism.”
The daily routine was strict. Every morning someone would be sent out to buy armfuls of foreign newspapers from a news dealer on Forty-Second Street. These were filleted for useful stories, which were then translated, collated, and filed. Then members would hit the phones. They rang universities, hospitals, embassies, government offices, and Wall Street banks, sometimes impersonating journalists from more respectable outfits in order to get their calls put through, sometimes impersonating church ministers and rabbis. Whatever it took. They gathered data on politicians, terror groups, psychiatrists, the radical Right, and the radical Left. At the end of the afternoon this information was refined into a typed report, which was offered up to the National Executive Committee. The day’s intelligence was then telexed to outposts in Stockholm, Copenhagen, Wiesbaden, Paris, and Washington, DC.
Don’t imagine, though, some Manhattan version of the high-tech vault at Langley where Frank Rafalko wrangled IBM punch cards; still less the shiny world occupied by Napoleon Solo. Throughout the building, the atmosphere was fetid. Ashtrays remained unemptied, floors unswept, toilets uncleaned. Stuffing spilled from battered armchairs. Members were obliged to bring their own toilet paper. The haphazard supply of equipment produced a daily rush for the small number of typewriters that possessed a full set of keys. The office culture generated other peculiarities. “There was a period,” Tessa DeCarlo told me, “when wife beating was very on-trend.”
LaRouche’s visits to the office were rare. After the brainwashing crisis he became an indoor creature, rarely venturing outside without armed guards. Once, when he felt that his retinue was not putting enough energy into defending him from his enemies, he pointed a gun at his own head and threatened to do the job himself. For much of 1974–75 he was in Germany, holed up in an apartment in Wiesbaden selected for its assassin-proof qualities. (“Prometheus caged,” reflected Chris White, “in a cupboard.”)
In New York, he found secure accommodation in a series of increasingly expensive properties, including an apartment on West Fifty-Eighth Street previously occupied by Sylvester Stallone, and a huge town house on Sutton Place, a few doors down from the silent film star Lillian Gish. “When he did come to the office,” said another former member, “you tried not to look him in the eye, in case he picked on you and said something horrible. But you also didn’t want to look like you were deliberately avoiding his eye.”
For all its lunatic intensity, this labor yielded results. The men and women who populated this sour-smelling world were smart, tenacious, and willing to work sixteen-hour days for minimal expenses. LaRouche told them that they were the chosen ones.
“There is no agency in the world to which we could look for approval of our work,” he said, “and barely a handful of the world’s leading figures and agencies which have the bare competence to act upon what we virtually alone can understand.… However queer your parents and miserable your feeling of yourself in your private fears and self-doubts, this 1,000-odd collection of seeming oddballs cannot be unfavorably compared with anything outside it today.” Slowly, through its members’ sleep-deprived toil, the organization transformed itself from a paranoid and introverted political sect to a paranoid and introverted political sect in control of a globe-spanning private intelligence agency. It became its own private CIA, with its own equivalent of Operation Chaos.
* * *
AFTER JIM MCGOURTY left jail, this world became his home. But not before he had spent one last summer with Michele. He was released early. Not for good behavior—though he did spend most of his time quietly learning German verbs and reading articles about nuclear fusion—but because, at the beginning of June 1974, the Portsmouth Naval Prison was closed down, its inmates dispersed or liberated.
Looking back on those months, one incident stuck in Michele’s mind. It happened on the day that she agreed to accompany her husband to an NCLC meeting in New York. Warren Hamerman had arranged for the couple and their son to ride from Washington with a fellow activist. Everyone chatted pleasantly in the car. Later, Michele noticed that her passenger was not present at the meeting he had traveled so far to attend. She asked Warren what had happened to the man. Warren replied that he was a suspected police agent and had been brought to Manhattan only for an interrogation. The NCLC security team had just given him an enthusiastic pistol whipping. “I remember saying: ‘If this is true, why would you let us talk with him as if he’s a friend, and travel in a car with him for four hours?’” Hamerman was unrepentant. “Warren could be a sycophant around Michael Vale,” said Michele, “but when he became immersed in the Labor Committees, he was just vicious.”
A brief series of emails from Warren Hamerman rejected the story about pistol whipping. He professed never to have heard the expression before. Tales of dealing with hostile infiltrators were likewise dismissed as “false memories about events lost in the fog of time.” I attempted to jog his memory with an article he’d written in 1976, describing the duty of NCLC security “to detect and investigate enemy deployments against the organization, and to plan and execute offensive counterthrusts.” After that, he lost his appetite for our correspondence.
Of all the Stockholm veterans, Warren Hamerman was the most dedicated LaRouchian. “There was a tremendous amount of sucking up that went on in the Labor Committees,” recalled Tessa DeCarlo, “but nobody was as sucky as Warren Hamerman.” He would volunteer for anything. In 1974 he headed an NCLC investigation into the International Monetary Fund. In later years he would run LaRouche’s political action committee and head his campaign to put American AIDS sufferers into quarantine camps. “He was a classic bureaucrat,” one former comrade told me. “He was opaque in the sense that he had no charisma, always had short hair neatly combed, and as far as I can tell never entertained an original thought in his head.”
Some of the viciousness noted by Michele was directed against a more unusual target. His own past. For the Stockholm deserters who remained in the Labor Committees—Warren and Jim in the States, Bill Jones and Cliff Gaddy back in Sweden—it was almost a condition of membership. They were required to delete their own histories and overwrite them with the paranoid fictions prescribed by LaRouche.
The American Deserters Committee was never a true part of the anti-war movement. The Next Step was not a real revolutionary cadre. Its members, from the beginning, had been the unwitting pawns of Michael Vale—whose sinister allegiances were revised, month by month, to fit the paranoia of the moment. Vale was a CIA agent. He was an operative deployed by the Tavistock Institute, a social science think tank in London that LaRouche had decided was a secret brainwashing laboratory. He was a member of “NATO’s Schwarze Kapelle [Black Orchestra] West and East European-Japanese–North American network”—a mysterious body whose shifting membership also included Noam Chomsky, Stephen Spender, and Michael Vale’s old friend Bo Burlingham.
In George Orwell’s 1984, Winston Smith, a clerk in the Ministry of Truth, is employed to edit old newspaper articles to fit the propaganda requirements of the present. But he is never asked to rewrite his own biography. The Stockholm deserters did just that. Their pasts became mutable, changing to accommodate each new obscure imaginary threat that LaRouche discerned.
In a New Solidarity article from December 1, 1975, “Why the Labor Committee Can’t Be Taken Over by Agents,” Warren Hamerman asserted that Joachim Israel, the former husband of the Swedish child psychologist Mirjam Israel, was a “Tavistock agent” who had used the deserters to launch a series of “hit and run ‘probing’ operations” against LaRouche. “Then The Next Step (TNS) American franchise of the network maintained by gutter operative Michael Vale was ordered to return to the U.S. for planting inside the Labor Committee.”
In 1979, LaRouche added his explanation. During 1971–72, he wrote, “Vale was deployed by British intelligence to penetrate the U.S. Labor Party with ‘sleepers,’ acting in cooperation with the terrorist-linked section of the U.S. intelligence establishment.” Jim McGourty, too, devoured and regurgitated these stories. Even by the time I got to know him, they still exerted an attraction. “So do you not think,” he once asked me, “that Michael Vale was building a network of agents?”
* * *
ON ONE OF my visits Jim handed me a fat folder of papers that dated from the mid-1970s. He said they would explain his thinking during this time. He was right. They demonstrated how fully his personal and political life had become entwined, how the mythology of the Labor Committees altered his understanding of his own life story. One typewritten statement described a moment in November 1974 when Jim had spotted two old Stockholm comrades walking not far from his apartment on West Eighty-First Street: George Carrano, the former strategist and press officer of the ADC, and his friend Richard Bucklin.
“The first,” Jim recorded, “has by now been determined to be one of the key operatives deployed by the CIA in the Spring of ’68 when agents poured into Paris and later the rest of Europe, like locusts.… Carrano and Vale were deployed to Stockholm. Bucklin was one of the members of the CIA front group the American Deserters Committee.”
The title of this document was “Concerning CIA Agent Vale’s Recent Activities.” It was, in effect, an account of Jim’s divorce, written as a report from the front line of the war between LaRouche and the grand coalition of his enemies. In late 1974, LaRouche had urged his followers to beware “brainwashed gangs of zombies, deployed under direct or indirect control of covert operations agencies, as pseudo-leftists and zombie-fascist gangs and countergangs.” Jim concluded that Michael had recruited Michele to such a group. He was driving her “to a paranoid schizophrenic state, ideal criterion for the zombie agents he is trying to create.” For Jim, all the details pointed this way: Michele’s choice to dissociate herself from the former deserters in the Labor Committees; her new will, which made Michael Vale guardian of their son; her decision to spend a few days in a beach house with Michael, reading Sylvia Plath.
Most striking, however, was the reason that Jim had compiled the dossier in the first place. It was not the basis for some NCLC internal communiqué, but notes for a court argument through which he hoped to win custody of his son. The paperwork suggested that LaRouchian loyalists were lining up to declare Michele a person of low morals. I recognized the names of the potential witnesses. Warren Hamerman and Bill Engdahl. Eugene Inch, the Long Island pediatrician who had assisted in the deprogramming of Chris White. These witnesses were never called. Jim’s attorney’s side of the correspondence showed why. Most of his letters were demands for payment, but they also hinted at a scene in which Jim had treated his lawyer to a long and serious tale about brainwashing, Michael Vale, and the CIA. “I strongly do not recommend that you pursue this custody case,” wrote the attorney, “especially on the grounds you described in my office.”
Jim lost his son and his marriage, but the NCLC provided a new family. LaRouche appointed Jim to its National Committee, the second tier of the leadership structure. Christina Nelson, the young activist who had admired the speeches Jim gave before his court-martial, also provided consolation. By the end of 1974 Jim had moved into her apartment in New York, where the pair ate, drank, and slept LaRouchian revolution. For two days a week they supervised the day care center for the children of NCLC members. The rest of the week brought other responsibilities. Jim worked in the Europe sector, for which he gathered intelligence on developments in Sweden and Denmark. Christina took on a more public role.
In September she ran for Congress in the Democratic primary against the incumbent congresswoman Bella Abzug, the pioneering feminist and women’s rights lawyer. Christina’s campaign poster featured a photograph of herself below a caricature of Abzug in stockings and suspenders. “Selling favors to Rockefeller is Bella Abzug’s congressional career,” declared the text, “bumping Nixon to make way for the CIA, grinding workers in ‘full (slave) employment’ resettlement programs, and hooking youth to be methadone zombies.” (The image enjoyed a brief moment of exposure on the wall of the congressional canteen in Washington, DC.)
Christina’s campaign generated more publicity than votes. When the election was over, she took to her bed, ill and exhausted. But there was little comfort in that. Their apartment was cold and crumbling. Cockroaches came up through the broken linoleum tiles and scuttered over the bed. The NCLC stipend upon which she and Jim lived was meager; a donation from Jim’s brother got them through the worst of it. Christina wrote to thank him: “The check really helped us live like human beings and not rats in a dirty city for a very difficult period.”
* * *
FOR STALIN, THERE was Trotsky; for the inhabitants of Airstrip One, there was Emmanuel Goldstein; for the LaRouchians, there was Michael Vale: the banished traitor around whom a mythology of terror could be built. Michael idolized Trotsky, but he had no desire to reenact this part of the story. “The Labor Committee was following me all over the place,” he told me. “Taking pictures of me in restaurants.” The columns of New Solidarity and its companion magazine, Campaigner, buzzed with weird accusations against him.
“Vale,” argued a New Solidarity press release, “was also a key operative for Scandinavia and the Federal Republic in the British intelligence operation known as the ‘GI Deserters Movement.’ … During 1971–2 Vale was deployed by British intelligence to penetrate the U.S. Labor Party with ‘sleepers’ acting in co-operation with the terrorist-linked section of the U.S. intelligence establishment.” Mike found old associates were cold-shouldering him, not wishing to be incorporated into this growing conspiracist narrative. More painfully, new acquaintances also came under fire.
In 1975, Michael sought refuge in France, where he moved into the orbit of a French child psychiatrist named Stanislaus Tomkiewicz. Michael mentioned him on every occasion we met. Tomkiewicz was a charismatic doctor who worked with juvenile delinquents rejected by the French system. Instead of punishing them, he gave them more control over their environments. Instead of subjecting them to analysis, he gave them cameras and told them to make photo stories about their lives. Instead of pacifying them with pills, he stimulated them with five-minute doses of pure oxygen. They found it exhilarating. So did Michael. He wanted to be part of it, to become Tomkiewicz’s amanuensis and translator. He might have devoted his life to him.
“This guy trusted me to be his emissary in America,” said Michael. “And I was so impressed by these techniques that he had.” But the Labor Committees intervened to wreck the relationship. A member named Mark Burdman wrote to the doctor and told him that Michael was a CIA agent who had come to spy on him. The doors of the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research slammed shut. Jim McGourty’s notes explained the Labor Committees’ line of thinking: “[Vale] is now working for a network which transports psychotics back to their homeland, once proclaimed to be in that state by a mental institution in Paris. With the escalation in terrorist activity by brainwashed zombies, there is little doubt where these victims will make their homes.”
Michael attempted to rebut these accusations. “I went to the newspapers,” he said. “But they didn’t do anything about it. Mud sticks,” he said.
Who threw it?
“Marcus. Because he was out of his mind.”
The madness of Lyn Marcus was easy to accept. It was a phenomenon like the wind, always howling somewhere. Mike’s difficulty was with the idea that the men he regarded as comrades had begun howling in unison. “Why did all those other people relay it?” he asked. A note of emotion entered his voice. “Bill Jones? Cliff Gaddy? Warren Hamerman? They lived with me, like revolutionaries do. We bathed together.”
This was, in part, a set of rhetorical questions. He’d worked most of it out for himself. Jim McGourty’s behavior, he thought, could be explained by the violence of Operation Mop-Up. “It’s a technique of political psychological warfare. You make people do things that mean they can never go back to their original moral position. And they’re trapped. So he denounced me.”
Bill Jones, he believed, was embarrassed by the whole affair. “I met him at a World Health Organization conference in Copenhagen in 1975, and he was pretty sheepish. So he has a conscience.” Warren Hamerman was an open-and-shut case. “We were always humiliating Wally,” said Michael. “We didn’t take him seriously. This little pipsqueak of a personality. Those little men, those little guys, it seethes inside them and they have to have their revenge.”
Cliff Gaddy’s role, however, was much harder to explain. Michael had been a mentor to him. He had encouraged him to pursue his studies in the Russian language, and secured him his first gigs as a professional translator. Cliff’s earliest publication credits were joint efforts with Michael Vale. In 1973 they tackled a long essay on adolescent schizophrenia, a subject with which Cliff then struck out on his own, carrying Michael’s preoccupations with him. Looking over these essays in the yellowing pages of old academic journals, it was strange to think of Cliff and Michael rendering all this psychiatric jargon from Russian into English—“enhanced excitability, motor disinhibition, uncontrolled instinctual drives”—while the leader of their organization was ushering the members into a zone of madness.
At the end of this came a moment in Mike and Cliff’s relationship that would be familiar to anyone who had seen the ending of Henry IV, Part 2. At the end of 1975, Mike, harassed from his place with Tomkiewicz by the conspiracy theorists of the Labor Committees, called Cliff to tell him he was coming back to Stockholm.
“Why?” asked Cliff, coolly.
“I got the message,” Mike told me. Cliff had rejected his old mentor and pledged himself to Lyndon LaRouche.
They never spoke again.
* * *
THE LAROUCHIAN EMPIRE was run from New York. Its Wiesbaden office became its European headquarters—where French, Swedish, and Italian members went for firearms training and “Beyond Psychoanalysis” sessions. Its outposts, however, had a fair degree of autonomy.
The Stockholm organization was founded by Bill Jones and Cliff Gaddy. Gaddy’s girlfriend Kerstin Tegin also took a leadership role and gave up her studies in order to devote herself to the group. Almost immediately, it established a position on the local political landscape—marginal, noisy, ideologically unclassifiable, mysteriously flush with cash. It acquired offices, telex machines, and computers—made possible, according to its newspaper, by “considerable collections of money, conducted by the USA working class.”
Like its parent in Manhattan, the Swedish group directed its energies into maintaining a great flood of printed material, much of it screamingly paranoiac. Its members leafleted employees at the Saab car factory in Trollhättan, warning them that their workplace was being turned into a “laboratory for depression” where they might expect “the same treatment the German working class received under Nazism.” Its press bureau churned out articles and communiqués that described how Sweden was being primed for a totalitarian takeover.
Swedish readers learned that their country had been identified as “the most appropriate choice for the Rockefeller forces to use as a laboratory for their 1984-style experiments.” They heard that Sweden was on the point of economic collapse, that “medieval hordes of rats” were invading its towns, that “a two-tiered labor force now exists on the Third Reich principle, dividing the population into a dwindling number of older, skilled workers and a growing mass of robot-like laborers.” They heard—more than once—that Joachim Israel had been working since the 1960s to identify the neurotic weaknesses of the Swedes, and that the CIA and the Swedish prime minister Olof Palme intended to exploit these to create a “model for social fascist society.” They also implied that Israel had lied about being a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany.
Who wrote this stuff? At first, much of it went out under the byline of the International Press Service—a company established by the Labor Committees in order to acquire media accreditation for its members in Europe and America. But its representatives were such a weird and disruptive influence at press conferences that they were soon declared a bogus organization. Henry Kissinger ordered them banned from the White House in March 1975. (“Fascist pressure exerted by the CIA,” said the Labor Committees.)
In time, LaRouchian publications began to acknowledge individual authors and editors. Cliff Gaddy was named as Stockholm bureau chief, with ultimate editorial responsibility for the stories it issued. He stayed in the post for over a decade. Bill Engdahl and Bill Jones acquired their own bylines. In 1974 the Stockholm organization had only fifteen members, of whom only seven were full-time Swedish residents, so it seems reasonable to assume that most of the articles published in this period were the work of this triumvirate.
Like the fabulists of Foucault’s Pendulum, Cliff, Bill, and Bill discovered that any event, no matter how irrelevant, could be absorbed into their master narrative and made to thrum with mysterious energy. In May 1974, an ex-convict walked into a pharmacy in Gothenburg with a machine gun, taking five hostages. LaRouche’s Stockholm bureau announced that this incident proved that “the CIA’s international terrorist network is now being activated in Sweden.” A month later, Bill Jones made a nuisance of himself at a conference on occupational stress held at the University of Uppsala, accusing puzzled academics of being part of the CIA’s secret behavior-modification project. He handed out copies of “On the Track of My Assassins” and called for a delegate to be indicted for crimes against humanity. “When challenged,” he wrote, “these doctors quickly reveal their own insanity.”
In December 1974, a few words in a Swedish newspaper editorial were transmuted into proof that Olof Palme had been instructed by Nelson Rockefeller to increase Sweden’s offensive capability against Russia. LaRouchian hacks became masters at this kind of distortion: they could spin any innocuous remark into evidence for a plan of genocide. In 1975, the West German Embassy in Stockholm was bombed: LaRouche publications pronounced it a false flag operation by International Socialists—with whom Palme and all the journalists working on the story had collaborated. Those involved should “expect to answer to these actions with their lives.”
These bizarre outpourings were not limited to the printed page. The organization was a disruptive presence at all kinds of public, professional, and political gatherings. “I have not been to a single meeting the last two years without this company making their presence felt and sabotaging proceedings,” said Inga Thorsson, Sweden’s representative at the United Nations. Gösta Bohman, leader of the center-right Moderate Party, found himself bombarded with strange questions at his own party conference. The Social Democratic MP Birgitta Dahl once shouted at them from the platform: “Hold your own meetings instead of coming to disrupt ours!”
Palme’s party was so concerned about the behavior of NCLC activists in Sweden that they commissioned Håkan Hermansson, a journalist from the Malmö paper Arbetet, to write a pamphlet about the organization. “They appear at public party gatherings and conferences where the most regular tactic is to destroy every attempt at a meaningful discussion or exchange of ideas,” reported Hermansson. “This occurs through an unrestricted venting of impossible vocabulary in seemingly endless propositions, by posing intentionally provocative questions, breaking off, making accusations and even threats.”
There was little point, he suggested, in trying to follow their arguments. “Their political lingo,” he wrote, “is to all intents and purposes impossible to understand. Their argumentation builds on fantastical claims presented as uncontested truth. The fanatic conviction makes it impossible to conduct any meaningful discussion. Their worldview is complete, true, and indivisible, and every attempt at criticism risks being taken as evidence that the critic is a brainwashed victim of the organization’s enemies. Or a hired double agent.”
Trouble for critics usually followed: Hermansson was harassed in his office in Malmö; European Labor Committees members came up to the newsroom to tell him that he was a CIA agent who should face trial as the Nazis did at Nuremberg. Klas-Örjan Spång, the owner of a Stockholm bookshop that declined to stock LaRouchian literature, was denounced on the pages of Ny Solidaritet as “Agent Spång” of Langley. When Aftonbladet ran a story comparing the European Labor Committees to the Children of God, a California cult that separated children from their families and became notorious for its toleration of sexual abuse, Kerstin Tegin declared that Olof Palme was behind the smear and threatened him and the paper with a $5 million libel suit—which never materialized.
In later years, journalists who investigated the Labor Committees reported physical attacks by members, but their preferred methods were much less conventional. The American organization threw a foil-wrapped hunk of liver at a Catholic archbishop, coordinated a telephone campaign to accuse Boston’s FBI officers of abducting dogs for sexual gratification, and confronted the actor Peter Fonda at an airport with a banner reading FEED JANE FONDA TO THE WHALES. The German group in Wiesbaden published a cartoon of Chancellor Willy Brandt in Nazi uniform. (Brandt sued for libel and won, but the European Labor Committees found themselves an unlikely ally in the form of the conceptual artist Joseph Beuys, who declared that this was art.)
The Stockholm chapter developed weirdnesses all its own. More than one of my interviewees remembered Sweden’s happy band of LaRouchians making bizarre and incomprehensible interventions at meetings addressed by Olof Palme. A favorite stunt was a three-person operation: one member would sit near the stage and begin a loud diatribe against the speaker; a second would feign some kind of learning disability, like a character in Lars von Trier’s The Idiots; a third would then shout at them for being too noisy. It was a good strategy, if the aim was to cause chaos and confusion.
* * *
BILL JONES WAS a well-educated middle-class boy who had been destined for the priesthood. Most people who encountered the teenage Cliff Gaddy considered him one of the brightest blooms of his generation. Bill Engdahl was a Princeton graduate. How did the Labor Committees persuade such smart young people to do such strange and nasty things? Partly by insisting that black was white.
“Take, for example, the person who describes the NCLC as being ‘paranoid’ because we have identified the Rockefeller conspiracy as governing capitalist politics today,” wrote Ed Spannaus in a 1975 article for Campaigner magazine.
What such a person is actually saying is that there is no coherence or lawfulness to events, that everything is discrete and arbitrary. Such an individual must himself deny the coherence of external reality in order to satisfy his internal authorities who tell him that there can be no such thing as a conspiracy—with its implication that one would have to act upon reality in order to stop it. Thus he demands that reality be adjusted to “fit” his internal fantasy-map, just as the child magically attributes events outside himself to his imagined omnipotence. In a child, such paranoia is a normal feature; in an adult, it is pathological.
Parlor tricks also helped. LaRouche would make furious insistence on the critical nature of some obscure technicality. One week he told his acolytes, “Anyone who doesn’t understand the isoperimetric principle is not qualified to save the human race.” Members who hadn’t listened in their high school geometry class scurried back to Pythagoras and attempted to deduce why this was so important. The following week LaRouche announced, “If you don’t understand the ablative absolute, you can’t think properly.” The ablative absolute is a Latin grammatical term. With these words having been said, Caesar departed. It had no particular significance. LaRouche just liked the sound of it, and the fact that most of his followers had to go and look it up.
One former member, the Greek exile who used the nom de guerre Nick Syvriotis, told me, “He would take people who had at some point in their lives done serious work on serious topics and put them together with these nutcases, thereby keeping everybody off-balance. What was common in both groups, the cranks and the serious people, was the need for parental approval. Lyn supplied it to both. He would promote a crank to a position of authority, and the genuinely authoritative were left with their mouths hanging open. But they wouldn’t challenge for fear of losing his parental approval. That’s how the game was played.” He spoke from his own experience: “I had to break with my need for parental approval to quit,” he said. “Then I saw the extent of the insanity. What I learned from being in the Labor Committees is that insanity is curable.”
Some of the damage they inflicted, however, was not so easily healed.
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IN MAY 2016, Michael Vale summoned me to Paris. He’d decided to sell his flat and invited me to stay for the last few days of his ownership. The furniture had gone; the carpets had been taken up; the cupboards dismantled. I helped him carry lumber down to the street. The place was pretty filthy. When I went to bed that night, I wrapped a T-shirt around the pillow to avoid inhaling the sourness of the bedclothes. The next morning, in the eviscerated kitchen, Mike presented me with a stack of documents. Old copies of the Next Step. Paperwork recording his unsuccessful attempt to claim back a car confiscated by the German government. A collection of press clippings, saved as an actor might save his old reviews—but these were paranoid ramblings from Labor Committee publications, written by friends who had turned against him, or exposés on the Labor Committees from the Swedish and Danish papers. Attacks on all fronts, most accusing him of being an agent of the CIA.
At the bottom of the pile was the letter that ruined his life. As Mike was neither its writer nor its addressee, it was hard to understand how he had acquired it, but there it was, a brittle photocopy on the notepaper of the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research. It was addressed to Mark Burdman of the Labor Committees and signed by Stanislaus Tomkiewicz. “Cher Ami,” wrote Tomkiewicz, “you earn my respect and my sympathy for having been the first (after me) to have understood the relationship of Michael Vale with supporters of order on a planetary scale.” The CIA again.
On my last day, I accompanied Michael to his doctor. He was awaiting some test results. He emerged beaming from the appointment, clutching an envelope of X-rays that were the evidence of his good news. To celebrate, we went for lunch at Les Deux Magots, the famous haunt of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. Mike had quiche, most of which made it to his mouth. A splot of mozzarella became lodged in his stubble, and remained there four hours later, when we said goodbye at the Gare du Nord.
As we were walking on the street, Mike asked me if I knew what had happened to Mark Burdman. Having read so widely in the lunacy of the Labor Committees, I knew the answer. In 1980 he had taken a position at its German headquarters in Wiesbaden, where his writing passed completely through the LaRouchian looking glass. His magnum opus—which now enjoys a quiet afterlife on websites with names like “Jew World Order”—was an essay asserting that the British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli was the founder of both Zionism and Nazism.
“Did I outlive him?” asked Mike.
“Yes,” I told him. Burdman had died in July 2004.
Mike’s eyes lit up. “Good,” he said. “Good.”