MY FIRST RESEARCH trip to Stockholm coincided with the final two weeks of Sweden’s 2014 general election campaign. As is traditional, a stretch of concrete near the entrance to the Sergels Torg metro had been turned into a political village. Sergels Torg is a creation of the Palme years. A large public square attacked from above by a surging concrete road system and skewered by a great tower by the sculptor Edvin Öhrström. Election time adds a touch of kitsch to all this brutalism: a cluster of garden sheds and summerhouses occupied by the contending parties. Social Democrats. Christian Democrats. Greens. Moderates. The Swedish tabloid Expressen (slogan: “It stings!”) also has a space, on which I watched the deputy prime minister Jan Björklund being hugged by a man dressed as a six-foot wasp.
On the other side of the street, the smaller parties were accommodated. A young, cheerful crowd was having a sociable time in the pink kiosk staffed by Feminist Initiative, the women’s party supported by Jane Fonda and Benny Andersson of ABBA. Next door, in a red hut stocked with Marxist-Leninist literature, a little knot of Communists maintained a more somber tone. Beside them, in a white shed under a brown plastic gable, were activists from Europeiska Arbetarpartiet—the European Workers Party. Judging by their hand-drawn posters, their main business was cheerleading for the Kremlin. “Sanctions on banks, not Russia!” declared one placard. “Stop Carl Bildt’s war against Putin.” Nobody was paying much attention, so I decided to cheer them up by accepting a free copy of their newspaper. It contained one English-language article, which argued that the financial crisis of 2008 was a manufactured catastrophe. “Call it Tonkin Gulf Syndrome,” it said. “It’s what the British Empire did to suck the U.S. into the Vietnam quagmire.” The author of the article was Lyndon LaRouche.
Issues that unite all commentators across the political spectrum are rare. But for the past five decades, the European Workers Party has provided one for Sweden. Everybody from SÄPO to the Communists to the Social Democrats to the libertarian Right has a long-held and consistent view on the EAP—it is profoundly, mystifyingly weird.
In 1978, the conservative magazine Contra reflected that there were many parties with unattractive ideologies, “but at least they accept that a horse is a horse and that a cow is a cow. You can’t say this about the EAP. They have a language all of their own.” A government report from the mid-1980s made this assessment:
The EAP is in all likelihood the most peculiar political organization to have appeared in Sweden in the post-war era. Through outlandish episodes, conspiracy theories, and focused attacks on individuals the party and its associated bodies have to the highest degree invalidated any influence they could have held over the political landscape. EAP has in national elections never polled more than a few hundred votes. To not have come further after 25 years’ struggle would be enough to leave any one person downhearted and ready to quit. But not the EAP, who tirelessly push onwards, apparently with the conviction that the world cannot manage without the insights they so eagerly wish to communicate.
Sweden’s Lyndon LaRouche party was founded at a conference in Stockholm in May 1976. Delegates chose a tractor for a logo and Kerstin Tegin for a leader. She was enthusiastic, articulate, and presentable. She had neatly cut hair and followed the group’s conservative dress codes without looking like she was selling double glazing door-to-door. She could mimic one of LaRouche’s most distinctive rhetorical habits—sustained speechmaking that combined Marxist jargon and vulgar personal attacks—and had dropped out of further study to spend more time with LaRouche’s theories.
The birth of the new party did not abolish the existence of that older entity the European Labor Committees; the LaRouche organization has always found it helpful to maintain a confusing plethora of identities. In her maiden speech as leader, Kerstin described the size of the prize. The Social Democrats, she said, were losing voters. The Communist Party was also in decline.
“How could any worker,” she asked, “support their ass-licking of Palme?” The first objective of the new party, she declared, should be to secure a 4 percent share of the vote. “We need 250,000 votes to get into parliament. This is something that Palme and his Maoist countergangs cannot prevent except by fraud.” In that summer’s elections, the EAP fielded as many candidates as it could muster. Across the whole of Sweden, the party received 108 votes.
In 1979, Bill Jones ran for office in Malmö, and he urged its people to support his vision: the city’s shipyards converted to the production of giant floating nuclear power stations that could move around the world to meet the energy needs of developing countries. Looking through the campaign literature, it was strange to see the shaggy radical of Deserter USA all tidied up and grinning from the page in a suit and tie and plastic glasses, enthusing about the power of the atom. “Don’t throw your vote away!” he implored. “Vote EAP!” That year, the party’s total rose to 158.
But dismal performances at the ballot box never deterred a LaRouchian candidate. Like Scientologists and pod people, they have always been more interested in bodies. Bill Jones donated his. So did Cliff. For a while, Chuck Onan, the deserter with the tough Chicago childhood and the tall stories of torture training, loaned them his.
By 1976 the furor over Mark Lane’s book Conversations with Americans had died down. No second edition appeared. A few disparaging mentions of Chuck’s name in American newspapers did not impede his progress. He settled back in Stockholm and married his teenage girlfriend, Maggie, who was studying for a degree in political science. Chuck had become a textbook hippie—long hair, Lennon glasses, bell-bottom jeans. When he got back in touch with his old comrades from the ADC and the Next Step, he found them oddly changed. They had become evangelists for LaRouche. They invited Chuck to meetings at their headquarters in Södermalm and gave him the hard sell on nuclear power, Rockefeller, and the CIA.
“Bill and Cliff were the authorities,” Chuck told me. “They had all the best arguments. And they talked about Lyndon LaRouche as if he was the new Jesus Christ.” Chuck could never think of a clever comeback. He looked through an issue of Campaigner and raised an eyebrow at all the articles written under absurd pseudonyms such as Hermyle Golthier Jr. He sat puzzled through a lecture in which the speaker demonstrated the safety of nuclear power—and the contemptible nature of the environmentalist movement—by taking a chair and banging it down on the ground. The chair, said the speaker, also contained atoms. Therefore atomic power was safe.
“LaRouche had an explanation of history and science that Cliff and Bill bought,” said Chuck. “A worldview that included everything. Even Beethoven. They were always talking about Beethoven.” The pressure was intense. Pretty soon, Chuck was also talking about Beethoven. “It was my wife who really saw it for what it was,” said Chuck. “A cult.”
Chuck’s ex, Maggie Gambell, told me the story from her point of view. “All of a sudden, he changed. He started wearing a suit and tie. He cut his hair. He changed his glasses. He was only to listen to classical music. If something or somebody has this kind of influence on you, you have to beware.” One afternoon, Maggie came home from class to find her small living room crammed with people. Chuck and five or six members of the EAP. Serious men in suits and ties. “Come on in here,” said her husband. “We want to talk to you.”
The visitors talked at her. “They wanted me to stop whatever I was doing,” recalled Maggie. “I was going to get rid of my dogs. I was going to stop studying. I was going to stop working. I would join this party and everything would be great.” She found their attitude threatening, but took a diplomatic approach and promised to consider their ideas. “I sort of managed,” she said, “and they left, but I realized that these guys were really dangerous.”
The experience spelled the end of her marriage. She asked Chuck to stop attending EAP meetings. He refused. She asked him to move out of the flat for a few days while she gathered her thoughts. He turned pale with rage. The LaRouchians, concluded Maggie, had done nothing for her husband’s temper. “They were appealing to young intellectual people who for some reason felt lost. They were sucking them up into this organization.”
I asked her about the men who’d invaded her flat. Were they Swedes or Americans?
“Americans,” she said.
* * *
IF A MEMBER of the Swedish electorate does not wish to vote for one of the main political parties, she can write in the name of her preferred candidate—which provides an infinite number of ways to spoil a ballot paper. Historically, “Donald Duck” has outpolled the European Workers Party.
It made the group’s tenacity and financial weightlessness all the more puzzling. How could such a tiny organization afford to rent offices and venues for their meetings? Hire telephones and telex machines? Put up almost as many election posters as the Christian Democrats? How could it fund a news agency that supplied Swedish media outlets with an unending stream of free stories? Or the production of a newspaper with a print run of eight thousand, half of which were given away?
“It is hard,” wrote the journalist Håkan Hermansson, “if not impossible, to conclude other than that the majority of the ELC’s operations in Sweden must be financed externally.” As leader, Kerstin Tegin often found herself answering questions about where the party found its money. They were not, she explained, as rich as they seemed. Sometimes they were obliged to turn off the telex machines in order to avoid getting cut off. But they were never cut off.
The party’s literature claimed that its expensive equipment was bought with money raised by working-class supporters in the States. This was a fantasy. The Labor Committees had very few working-class supporters in the States or Sweden. Much of its cash came from its own members, who signed over their trust funds and legacies to the cause. And thanks to a series of prosecutions made in the 1980s, we know that some of the NCLC’s resources came from fraud. One of LaRouche’s favorite films was The Producers, Mel Brooks’s 1968 comedy about two Broadway mountebanks who fund a musical about Hitler by conning rich widows out of their savings. The Labor Committees shared some of the same methods. Jim McGourty told me how fundraisers would spend long hours on the phones, fishing for donations, sometimes actually using that line from the Bible about camels and needles. One boiler-room Stakhanov favored soft persuasion. Jim impersonated his honeyed voice: “Your name is on a list of very special people who have the intellectual capability to understand the problems that we face today.…” Others just yelled that humanity was on the brink of nuclear destruction and the only way to do something about it was to hand over a credit card number now. Chris White recalled another pitch: “Rockefeller is going to start World War Three! Sell your house before the crash!”
Fundraisers were obliged to stay in the office until they had met their targets and sometimes made up the difference from their own pockets in order to go home and get some sleep. Those who failed were punished with all-night ego-stripping sessions. Military language was deployed. Cold callers were told to think of themselves as Patton’s army, taking beachheads, taking the landing places—with the collapse of civilization as the price of failure.
* * *
FOR THE U.S. organization, the object of this toil was to get Lyndon H. LaRouche into the White House. LaRouche’s eight bids for high office are his principal claim on the historical memory. (A ninth, in 2016, may not count, as even his followers barely registered his declaration.) The 1976 contest was his first, but his electoral vehicle had already been constructed: yet another LaRouchian body—the U.S. Labor Party, launched in 1973 to allow NCLC activists to run for congressional seats, mayoralties, and state governorships.
When LaRouche announced his candidacy, the revolution was put on hold. He could not, however, dispense with the apocalyptic narrative. Nelson Rockefeller, by now vice president to Gerald Ford, retained his Sauron-like power in the story. Badges were struck and posters printed that read: IMPEACH ROCKY AND STOP WORLD WAR THREE. But when Jimmy Carter won the Democratic nomination, the old mythology required substantial revisions. LaRouche performed them live on prime-time television. The Labor Committees bought half an hour of air on NBC-TV and paid the fee with a paper bag containing $95,000 in cash. Picking his fingers and wiggling in his swivel chair, he told a tame interviewer that a Carter presidency would usher in an age of nuclear war and “genocidal austerity,” and claimed that Carter’s intellectual puppet masters were research fellows at the Brookings Institution, the venerable Washington think tank.
It was a new twist on the old Manchurian Candidate story that had once starred Chris White and Mike Vale, and the detail was provided on the pages of LaRouchian publications. The brainwashing institutes of Sweden were mothballed. Now the subbasement of the Brookings Institution housed a laboratory in which a team of doctors were reprogramming Jimmy Carter’s brain.
“Parroting such code words as ‘trust,’ ‘love’ and ‘unity’ in a linguistician’s computer,” claimed an NCLC press release, “Carter’s empty hulk is being transported around the country to preach the virtues of fascism to the population.” This time the brainwasher in chief was said to be an American-educated Englishman named Peter Bourne—“a key agent creator of the CIA’s terrorist gangs now being activated by Lower Manhattan’s insurrectionists to overthrow the country’s Constitutional government and to install a completely manipulable zombie like Carter in the Oval Office.”
Peter Bourne is now a visiting senior research fellow at Green College, Oxford. Earlier in his career he was awarded the Bronze Star for his work as head of the U.S. Army’s psychiatric team in Vietnam. He was a senior medical adviser to the White House and assistant secretary-general at the United Nations. In 1972 he persuaded his friend Jimmy Carter, the governor of Georgia, to run for president, then held a senior position in his successful campaign in 1976.
“But there was no psychological manipulation,” he told me. “Just a clear statement of the facts and my faith in him that he could make it.” The Labor Committees, however, were committed to their paranoid reading of Bourne’s résumé. “I have been harassed by these people off and on over the last forty years,” he said. “Throughout the campaign and on into the White House years the LaRouchies showed up with placards and pamphlets to hand out every time I spoke in public. Sometimes they would completely disrupt the events. They inflicted this only on me and not on any other of Carter’s staff. I never understood their political philosophy or what they believed in.”
Their interest in him may have had an unanticipated literary consequence. When Robert Ludlum wrote a bestselling thriller about an amnesiac assassin shaped by a secret CIA brainwashing project, he borrowed Peter’s name for his hero, along with a few biographical details. The Labor Committees were energetic in their dissemination of their flyers and press releases. Perhaps Ludlum picked one up, and The Bourne Identity has its roots in one of their fictions.
* * *
CIA CONSPIRACY THEORIES sustained the Labor Committees. They were also used to explain their activities. In Sweden, the combative nature of the American Deserters Committee led many to suspect that it was a front group intended to create conflict and disunity on the left. Even Hans Göran Franck was telling friends, mournfully, that he thought Michael Vale and Bill Jones had been spooks from the start.
For the ADC’s successor organization, that suspicion was doubled. Olof Palme’s press officer defined the EAP as “an agency of North American origin whose behavior corresponds perfectly to a group tied to some sort of intelligence organization.” The deputy chairman of the Danish Social Democrats agreed: “I cannot deny that it is an American intelligence organization,” he said, “but it is impossible to say whether it is CIA or others behind it.”
The renegade agency man Philip Agee, in Stockholm to promote his confessional memoir Inside the Company, told journalists that the Labor Committees were a right-wing organization masquerading as a left-wing one. “That it is now expanded to Europe,” he said, “fits the pattern of a normal CIA operation.” Few in the Swedish media took issue with the explanation; the idea that EAP members were Langley’s paid provocateurs was the most orthodox interpretation of their existence. The title of Håkan Hermansson’s 1975 pamphlet spelled out the consensus: Moles in Socialist Disguises.
In recent years the CIA has released a large number of documents relating to Lyndon LaRouche and his political empire. They suggest that the agency found it as weird and alarming as everyone else. More so, perhaps, as the CIA was the focus of so many of its beliefs. Among the declassified papers put online in the first days of 2017 is the agency’s copy of a letter sent in late February 1974 by William Colby to the newspaper editor Ben Bradlee, complaining about the Washington Post’s coverage of the Chris White Affair.
Colby protested that readers could be left with the impression “that the CIA, through its refusal to comment, indeed might be involved in the kinds of activities the NCLC alleges. Our recollection is that we told your reporter that the NCLC appeared to be a domestic organization, so he should ask the Federal Bureau of Investigation rather than the CIA for information about it. While it appeared self-evident that the NCLC charges are only twisted fantasy, your circulation of them forces the CIA to deny them flatly as false.”
Seymour Hersh’s articles on Operation Chaos were eleven months away. After that, such protests would be pointless. And the archive now shows that, contrary to Colby’s letter, Langley accumulated a substantial dossier on the Labor Committees and their international offshoots: handbills about the brainwash plot, a leaflet urging action against Rockefeller’s Nazi doctors, a copy of LaRouche’s telegram to President Nixon, warning him that the agency was plotting to remove him from office. Handwritten annotations suggest that files were also kept on individual members.
In the mid-1970s, the CIA file on the Labor Committees was maintained by Michael Schneeberger, a counterintelligence officer in the Security Analysis Group at Langley. This should have remained a secret, but when the CIA declassified the file, someone forgot to redact his name. Schneeberger retired from the agency in 1998 but was happy to reminisce by email—and to confirm that his suspicions were an extension of those upon which MHCHAOS was founded. The CIA feared that the Labor Committees were working with the guidance and encouragement of Moscow.
“We were concerned,” he told me, “that the KGB was taking advantage of anti-war movements and organizations to infiltrate their ranks and use the principal movers and shakers as agents of influence.” Schneeberger and his colleagues busied themselves identifying contacts between members of the Labor Committees and suspected representatives of the KGB. “I’m not precisely sure of the genesis of our counterintelligence interest,” he told me, “but strongly suspect that there was some degree of credible information from Soviet defectors and recruited agents suggesting that the KGB had an interest in using domestic American anti-war organizations for intelligence purposes since they were typically ripe for recruitment given their progressive platforms.” The anxieties were manifold: the Russians might use the Labor Committees to spread propaganda, or, more seriously, “to identify any existential threats to U.S. intelligence or military establishments and facilities” or “create violence to disrupt and discredit Vietnam War efforts.”
Operation Chaos had been closed, its files incinerated. But its job was still being done, and the same blanks were being drawn. In 1976, as LaRouche gathered his skirts to run for president, the CIA conceded that there was no Russian money in his purse, or the detectable influence of any other government.
* * *
JIMMY CARTER WAS sworn in as president on January 20, 1977, having secured just over 50 percent of the popular vote in the election the previous November. Lyndon LaRouche had scraped 0.05 percent, trailing many thousands behind the Libertarians, the Communists, and the Socialist Workers. But this did not deter him. His aggressive campaign against Carter had won him a number of wealthy right-wing supporters. And he also sensed opportunity in Carter’s skeptical attitude toward the intelligence men.
In March 1977, Carter appointed Admiral Stansfield Turner to reform the CIA. Turner had commanded a destroyer, a guided missile cruiser, and a naval fleet before he assumed the captaincy of Langley. On his first day in the job he asked for a report on Operation Chaos. His initial inspection found that the super-secret, highly compartmentalized bureaucracy that produced efforts such as MHCHAOS had evolved into a mechanism for obscuring unethical activities, from the toppling of the Allende government in Chile to the maintenance of assets who were actually the mistresses of CIA officers, or arms dealers with whom they were doing business on the side.
Turner’s first move was a swift one: he sent out a computer-generated letter informing 820 case officers that their services were no longer required. Then he set about redefining the business of spying. Espionage under Turner was oriented away from blackmail, cyanide capsules, and exploding cigars and toward more academic activities. Rather than trying to cultivate moles in the Kremlin, a new breed of officer would investigate the enemy by analyzing public and private opinion in their field of operations. “Undercover case officers or agents … with the polling skill of George Gallup,” Stansfield proposed, might “take the pulse of a foreign country.”
Lyndon LaRouche was ready to offer his services. He was in an upbeat mood. He was the head of an intelligence-gathering body with offices all over the world, staffed by zealous operatives who would work for starvation wages. Perhaps the Labor Committees could take up the slack? Charles Tate, a security aide to LaRouche, described the thinking. “I’m not suggesting that he was advocating that the security staff storm Langley and take over,” he explained. “I just mean that we were to aid and abet the CIA and other intelligence agencies which had taken a body blow from Stansfield Turner.”
It was quite a switcheroo. In the space of three years, the organization’s official line on the CIA had changed from seeing it as a malign counterinsurgency plotting to depose the president and zombify America, to an essential state apparatus that required defending from reformers. The CIA’s enemies were now their enemies—the Soviet Union and President Jimmy Carter.
The shift caused disquiet among some of LaRouche’s followers, who began to ask questions. One former member described his unease: “What if the results of all this research were being passed on elsewhere? To the CIA or the FBI or the KGB? To rightist governments who might appreciate an assessment of, say, networks of oppositional figures within their own sphere of influence?” It was his cue to leave. But other Labor Committees members had grown accustomed to performing ideological backflips and had learned to see them as tests of their loyalty.
“It’s what Michael Vale would have called a necessary deviation,” said Jim McGourty. “In order to retain control of the executive portion of a political organization you have to abruptly and overtly change its direction.” People noticed: in Sweden, Cliff and Kerstin’s European Workers Party began to attract the attention of journalists and researchers who kept tabs on the European Far Right. One, Stieg Larsson, the future author of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, opened a file on them.
When Larsson died in 2004, he left behind a large personal archive, much of which related to his long career as an investigator of Swedish political extremism. Going through this material, I was amazed to find swathes of notes on the European Workers Party. Biographical sketches of Cliff Gaddy, Kerstin Tegin, and Bill Jones—referred to, cutely, as “Billy.” Pages that showed Larsson engaged in the pointless task of trying to reconcile the disparate elements of the LaRouchian world picture. His conclusion was that the party was not a CIA or KGB front, but “a fascist group in its classical concept; it has its own ideology, its own organization, and is fully autonomous from outside interference.” Most intriguingly, Larsson had drawn a rough plan of the EAP’s offices, on which he’d scribbled speculations about the position of its unseen entrances and exits. It was the kind of diagram you’d make if you were planning a burglary.
* * *
ONE OF PRESIDENT Carter’s first acts in office was to sign Executive Order 11967, pardoning men who had avoided the Vietnam draft. Its terms did not stretch to deserters. In March, however, the Defense Department threw them a bone. If a deserter reported in person to the military authorities, he would receive an undesirable discharge. He could then apply to upgrade his status to a general discharge. The offer would expire on October 4, 1977.
The scheme made many uneasy: a court-martial and prison sentence were still possible. It was a game of Russian roulette in which the players were not permitted to know how many bullets were in the gun. That summer, however, many of the Stockholm deserters took their chances. Bill Jones flew home and was met at the airport by two military policemen. He shrugged when I asked him if he had been nervous: the process, he said, had been brisk and painless.
Chuck Onan admitted to a feeling of trepidation. He reported to Camp Pendleton and was amazed to find that nobody wanted to give him a hard time. He walked into the waiting room in a cool blue Swedish suit, and the envious looks of marines in fatigues, back from a last tour of duty, told him that he’d made the right decision.
Cliff Gaddy also made a trip home that summer, which would have given him the opportunity to turn himself in at Fort Meade, Maryland, the headquarters of the U.S. Army Security Agency. Old LaRouchians to whom I spoke remembered Cliff and Kerstin going on an NCLC road trip in the summer of 1977. They had recently been married: perhaps it counted as a honeymoon. The couple spent time at the organization’s headquarters in Manhattan. They visited a local group in Houston, Texas, where Kerstin reinforced the official message on birth control: true revolutionary women were obliged to reject motherhood. (In the New York branch, pregnant members were offered a free ride to the abortion clinic, courtesy of its so-called coat hanger brigade.) The couple also spent three weeks in Cliff’s hometown of Danville, Virginia, where a LaRouche lifer, Alan Ogden, was running for governor on a U.S. Labor Party ticket.
The campaign, like everything to do with the Labor Committees, was noisy and confusing. Ogden had eleven arrests for trespassing and similar offenses on his record hanging over him: some of his campaign was conducted from prison. (An FBI setup, said Ogden.) Then the press obtained bureau documents that described the candidate as “a dangerous international terrorist.” The skinny, bespectacled pipe smoker seemed an unlikely bomber. He did nothing more offensive than take his soapbox to the state’s parks and street corners and shout through a megaphone about Jimmy Carter’s “fascist labor front” and the probable imminence of nuclear war with the Soviet Union. “And so it goes for the U.S. Labor Party,” reported the Danville Bee, “the freak show of Virginia politics, a party consigned by the news media and the political establishment to ridicule, or even worse, obscurity.”
Cliff and Kerstin joined the campaign trail in August. Kerstin toured Danville in a neat gingham dress and told reporters about the importance of impeaching Jimmy Carter and forming a “Whig coalition” of farmers, factory workers, and industrialists against “the entire Rockefeller banking interests.” She brought the same message to the gates of the local textile mill. Not everyone was pleased to hear it.
“It was only through President Carter’s intervention that people like ‘Chip’ Gaddy could come home,” complained one reader of the Danville Register. “‘Chip’ Gaddy’s past actions clearly show that he has no regard for the U.S. and Virginia.” The electorate may have agreed: Ogden secured only 0.8 percent of the vote. Fraud at the polls, said the LaRouchians. But that didn’t stop the Gaddys from returning to Sweden in triumph and going on a lecture tour to tell their fellow citizens about “the real America”—one ripe for a U.S. Labor Party victory.
* * *
IN DECEMBER 1977, the Labor Committees had something to celebrate: LaRouche’s marriage to Helga Zepp Ljustina, a German journalist who had reported from Beijing during the Cultural Revolution. (Her first husband, a Yugoslav sailor who worked on container ships, had transported her on a literal slow boat to China.) But his real romance was with the CIA. Like a besotted suitor who acquires a new haircut and wardrobe to impress a potential partner, LaRouche primped and pomaded his organization to attract Langley’s attention. Many of his gentleman callers were con men.
Edward von Rothkirch was a chancer who presented himself as a freelance agency contractor working undercover behind the Iron Curtain with an anti-Soviet sabotage unit called the Freikorps of Barbarossa. Roy Frankhouser was a grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan who courted LaRouche by claiming to be a former CIA operative whose glass eye was the result of an injury sustained during the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion. It was hogwash, but LaRouche was impressed and signed him up on a $700 weekly retainer. He did little to justify the fee. On one occasion LaRouche dispatched him on a spying mission to Boston. Instead he went to a Star Trek convention in Scranton, Pennsylvania. Frankhouser did not admit his deception, but called from the hotel to warn the organization that he had just discovered that the FBI was tapping its phones.
The most elaborate and costly scam was perpetrated by a group of hustlers led by a figure code-named “the Major,” who announced himself as a CIA officer who wanted to cooperate with LaRouche and his security team on a top-secret project. He persuaded them to buy a large farm south of Washington, DC, on which special agents would be trained for old-school missions of the sort discouraged by Stansfield Turner’s reforms. In exchange, the Major would supply LaRouche with agency intelligence on the latest assassination attempts against him. Then a call came through that the Soviets had got wind of the plan. To allay suspicion, hundreds of thousands more dollars would be required to stock the farm with animals to disguise its true function. Excited by this intrigue, LaRouche instructed his acolytes to hand over the cash.
Not all of LaRouche’s contacts with power were imaginary. When Ronald Reagan won the 1980 presidential election, the organization made eyes at the new president’s advisers. The more respectable members of the Labor Committees invited Republican officials to policy seminars on Capitol Hill. Favored parties received free subscriptions to the glossy LaRouche magazine Executive Intelligence Review, and to War on Drugs, a title founded as an echo chamber for Reagan’s views on narcotics. Amazingly, the strategy worked. With loyal Warren Hamerman at his heels, LaRouche met with representatives of the Reagan transition team. He also had coffee with Admiral Bobby Ray Inman, the new deputy director of the CIA—an embarrassing fact that would dog Inman for years afterward.
The great prize of this effort, however, was something LaRouchians still celebrate today as their leader’s great achievement—a modest consultative role in the development of the Strategic Defense Initiative, Reagan’s plan to win the Cold War by putting laser cannons in space. With the blessing of the National Security Council, an NCLC intelligence specialist met with a contact from the Soviet mission in New York to convey a reassuring message: America intended to share this embryonic technology, and had no intention of using it to launch a nuclear first strike. When Reagan went public with his plans in March 1983, the Soviets backed off and these meetings withered away. But LaRouche barely acknowledged the failure. He kept on smiling, as if his relationship with the Reagan administration were close and warm.
Around this time LaRouche chose to move his headquarters from New York to Leesburg, a pretty little town in Loudoun County, Virginia, in order to breathe the same air as its population of government officials and Pentagon types. (He’d also heard that Washington’s nuclear bunkers were located in Loudoun County.) In August 1983 he took the lease on an estate that had once been the home of the ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev and encouraged his followers to find homes in the vicinity. About two hundred did. Among them were Warren and Nora Hamerman, Jim McGourty and Christina Nelson, Chris and Carol White, and Molly Kronberg and her husband, Ken. From here, everyone proselytized for “Star Wars” technology—though as LaRouche believed that science fiction was morally pernicious, the popular nickname for the project rarely passed his lips. SDI became an inescapable subject for his publications, in America and beyond.
* * *
IN SWEDEN, CLIFF and Kerstin were not visibly troubled by this ninety-degree turn. The conflict with Eurasia was over, and they were now at war with Oceania. Their party launched its own antidrug campaign, which mimicked the official Swedish equivalent so convincingly that several prominent celebrities—among them Björn Ulvaeus and Frida Lyngstad of ABBA—were fooled into giving their support. SDI was added to the party’s list of prescribed obsessions: the Gaddys became cheerleaders for space weapons and the end of Swedish neutrality.
In December 1983, they held a conference in Oslo at which they urged delegates to celebrate the opportunities brought by this new extraterrestrial frontier. Cliff spoke in favor of space-mounted lasers. Kerstin delivered a tirade against the peace movement. Their colleague Michael Liebig, who, a decade before, had tried to extract a confession from Cliff in the Whites’ bedroom in Colindale, urged NATO to open a front beyond the earth. The event did not go smoothly. Anti-war protestors occupied the conference hall and chained the doors. Once they had been ejected, they cut off the electricity supply to the building. The LaRouchians declared that the demonstrators were controlled by Moscow.
It’s worth stopping to imagine what it must have been like to inhabit the mind of Cliff Gaddy at this moment. He had once been part of an anti-war movement suspected, wrongly, of being funded by the Soviet Union. Now he was urging Sweden and its neighbors to join NATO and take human conflict beyond the limits of the earth—to fight the next Vietnam War in space. As he gave the opening speech, mixing enthusiasm for orbiting laser weapons with the usual goggle-eyed catastrophism about the imminent collapse of Western civilization, the irony must have struck him. It was a moment from the last page of Animal Farm.
* * *
THE ORGANIZATION’S SHORT affair with the Reagan administration did not dilute the weirder aspects of the LaRouchian project. As the CIA were now the good guys, and Nelson Rockefeller had dropped dead of a heart attack in January 1979, his network of slave labor camps unestablished, new obsessions were required. LaRouche saw conspirators everywhere. Even the Leesburg Gardening Club was a nest of KGB agents. (“Clacking busybodies in this Soviet jellyfish front … oozing out their funny little propaganda and making nuisances of themselves.”)
But he required a more prominent enemy. His pick was both astute and insane. He chose Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, then commissioned a book contending that the British Empire had never fallen but had reinvented itself as a covert body of power and influence. Dope Inc. argued that the queen controlled the world’s illegal drug markets and was fighting a secret opium war against the United States. It had been a long campaign: the British had drawn the United States into the Vietnam War and had also encouraged the development of the student anti-war movement. But it had prevented that movement from achieving its revolutionary potential by keeping it supplied with hashish and LSD.
Inevitably, the Tavistock Institute was incorporated into the royal master plan: Her Majesty had charged it with the task of popularizing and weaponizing a minor rock group called the Beatles, who, under the guidance of the philosopher Bertrand Russell, were dispatched to the States on a mission to ruin American youth. “Once caught in the environment defined by Russell and the Tavistock Institute’s wartime psychological warfare experts,” asserted Dope Inc., “their sense of values and their creative potential were snatched up in a cloud of hashish smoke.”
Some became instant enthusiasts for this idea. Warren Hamerman supported it because he supported anything that LaRouche said, no matter how peculiar. For those who retained a better sense of how LaRouche was perceived beyond his own organization, the principal response to this royal conspiracy theory was embarrassment.
Chris and Carol White remembered that those who campaigned for LaRouche in 1979, when he dissolved the U.S. Labor Party and made the first of seven attempts to secure the Democratic nomination for the presidency, saw their hard work evaporate when LaRouche turned up for the 1980 New Hampshire primary and started making speeches about the Satanic influence of the House of Windsor. The audience soon realized that it was in the presence of a crackpot.
* * *
OVER THE YEARS, NCLC members have expended as much energy thinking about the queen as the makers of Royal Wedding souvenir mugs. They have put her, headscarfed and grim, on the covers of their magazines. They have published tracts describing Her Majesty’s desire to murder billions of people. They have hired lecture halls to express the view that she had a jeweled hand in the 9/11 attacks. One member, even today, likes to pull on a gray wig and tiara and troll around Manhattan, making regal statements in a voice that owes rather more to the Wicked Witch of the West than the head of the Commonwealth. (I’m not convinced that Elizabeth Windsor has ever used the phrase “Fly, my pretties.”) But the queen is of limited use to an organization of provocateurs. LaRouche has always preferred enemies who answer back, in order that their annoyance or bafflement can be quoted in the pages of his publications and spun into evidence of guilt. Her Majesty’s public statements about her own feelings are rare. And unless she sits up late at Buckingham Palace, tapping her own name and “green genocide” into Google, it is doubtful whether she has even heard of Lyndon Hermyle LaRouche Jr.
So the silent Elizabeth had to be teamed with another, more vocal supervillain. The role was given to former secretary of state Henry Kissinger. In his case, NCLC members were much more hands-on. They disrupted his diary by impersonating his staff over the phone and canceling engagements. They ordered pizza to be delivered to his home. They harassed him in public. In February 1982 a pair of LaRouche activists accosted Kissinger as he passed through Newark International Airport on his way to triple-bypass heart surgery in Boston.
“Is it true,” yelled a member named Ellen Kaplan, “that you sleep with young boys at the Carlyle Hotel?” An enraged Nancy Kissinger reached for Kaplan’s throat, and found herself up on an assault charge. The judge dismissed the case. So did the press. (“Nancy Kissinger made one mistake in etiquette,” reflected a newspaper columnist. “Mrs. Kissinger did not stomp on the woman’s face.”) LaRouche publications, however, recorded this dismal event as a major victory.
The organization produced a Kissinger joke book full of obscene cartoons that depicted him as a cannibal and a pervert. They planted stories in the overseas press that accused him, variously, of murdering the Italian prime minster Aldo Moro and braining a Romanian waiter with a whiskey bottle during an orgy in Acapulco. When Kissinger spoke at a meeting in Germany, a LaRouchian prankster dressed as the former secretary of state disrupted the event by insisting that the man on the podium was an impostor.
LaRouche issued a press release entitled “Henry Kissinger, the Politics of Faggotry.” “His heathen sexual inclinations,” argued LaRouche, “are merely an integral part of a larger evil.… Kissinger is the kind of homosexual personality who ordinarily makes a potential professional assassin, a gangland thug for hire.” He ended with a catastrophist flourish. “That kind of faggotry destroyed Rome. Will you permit it also to destroy the United States?” In documents for internal distribution within the cult, he used even less attractive language: “I wouldn’t want Kissinger dead. I’d want him in a pit to come out once a day to be pissed on by the widows and orphans of the world.”
LaRouche’s obsessions with Kissinger and Elizabeth II made him a national joke. Saturday Night Live began “Lyndon LaRouche Theatre,” in which Randy Quaid, in a bald wig, bow tie, and spectacles, narrated the latest melodramatic twists and turns of the conspiracy. “Next week in part three,” he hooted, “diabolical Kissinger and miscreant Elizabeth engage KGB agents to assassinate me while continuing to sponsor attacks in the media which attempt to foster one of the most monstrous lies of the twentieth century—that I am insane!”
It seemed a fit subject for farce, but according to Dennis King, an investigative journalist who has studied the organization for five decades, violent action was also on the agenda. In 1983, LaRouche’s security team called a meeting and told the gathered membership “Kissinger must die.” LaRouche’s chauffeur was asked to consider putting a bomb under Kissinger’s car.
“But this rage,” writes King, “ultimately was just sublimated into more nasty leaflets and articles in Executive Intelligence Review. The LaRouchians had come to believe that really clever conspirators never carry out an assassination themselves, but simply spread hate propaganda about the targeted person that might trigger an attack by some disturbed personality or fanatic. That way, they can never be held legally responsible.”
* * *
IN SWEDEN, OLOF Palme was the target. He was a good choice. Palme had enemies at both ends of the political spectrum, many of whom shared LaRouche’s taste for violent fantasy. The right-wing Contra magazine produced a dartboard bearing an image of Palme’s face. Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, the crime-writing Communist Party members whose Martin Beck books invented the genre of Scandinavian noir, made their last novel, The Terrorists, a political thriller in which the girlfriend of an American deserter assassinates the Swedish prime minister, blaming him for her partner’s suicide.
The first dark blossoms of Cliff and Kerstin’s hate campaign against Palme appeared in the same year, when the Stockholm edition of New Solidarity declared that “Sweden’s population is led by a madman, a demented murderer who turns up out of the dark, cold winter nights and sneaks toward his victims with an ax ready.” In case readers found this picture hard to envisage, the paper provided a portrait of a mad-eyed Swedish premier shouldering an ax dripping with blood. It became the EAP’s favorite image—printed in its literature, blown up to placard size for use at its card-table shrines—and far more memorable than its boring logo with the tractor.
“Behind the Democratic mask,” read the handbills, “we find the true Olof Palme, a raging beast, an ax killer, the Devil’s devil.… The worker who tolerates Palme as his leader at this point in history … does so because he is terrified by the thought of leaving his world of impotent, deathlike fantasies.”
LaRouche offices across the world ensured the spread of this rhetoric. “Palme was one step below Satan,” recalled one former member of the U.S. organization. “We had never-ending articles, exposés and cartoons about him and whipped everyone into a frenzy about how he must be stopped. This one guy was among the most important participants in enslaving humanity.”
When the Stockholm paper Aftonbladet ran a series of investigative reports on the EAP in October 1975, LaRouche sent a telex to its editors:
GENTLEMEN: ARE YOU AND OLOF PALME SO ENTIRELY INSANE THAT YOU BELIEVE THAT SUCH HASHISH-SCENTED GOSSIP WILL DETER SERIOUS PERSONS WHO KNOW THAT THE CRUSHING OF THE ATLANTICIST FACTION IS ABSOLUTELY ESSENTIAL TO SAVE THE WORLD FROM A TAVISTOCKIAN FASCIST NIGHTMARE AND TOTAL THERMONUCLEAR WARFARE?
There was an obvious one-word answer to the question. But anyone turned on by such language could expect a welcoming hug from the EAP—particularly if that person had money in the bank.
Victor Gunnarsson, a braggartly fantasist of the Far Right, who liked to boast that he had served in Vietnam and worked for the CIA, signed up for membership and went home with an armful of anti-Palme literature. A better catch was Alf Enerström, a wealthy doctor who had broken with the Social Democratic Party in 1974 over its liberal policy on abortion. Enerström was a strange and damaged individual. In 1976 he was accused of beating his teenage son and, when the boy was taken into care, decided that this was part of a state operation against him, orchestrated personally by Palme. He made his case in a series of full-page advertisements in the Swedish press. The depth of his pockets and of his hatred made him an attractive ally for the EAP, for which he coughed up around $150,000 and a torrent of anti-Palme bile.
The Gaddys were relaxed in his company. During the 1982 election campaign Kerstin stood beside Enerström at rallies and public meetings as they railed against Palme and accused him of collusion with the KGB. Cliff accompanied Enerström to a community radio station, where they presented the case for Palme’s fascist modus operandi: the evidence included conspiracy theories about the hidden Nazi history of his family and an account of his plan to give Swedish officials the right to commit murder with impunity. (“Freedom of speech in Stockholm community radio reaches far beyond our own galaxy,” wrote a perplexed journalist who tuned in.)
The LaRouchian accusations became increasingly weird. In May 1982, William Engdahl wrote a piece for Executive Intelligence Review asserting that Palme was part of a heroin-smuggling syndicate that also included a group of Turkish neofascists that had plotted to assassinate Pope John Paul II. The following month LaRouche produced an essay entitled “Olof Palme and the Neo-Nazi International,” which argued that the Swedish prime minister was part of a secretive and powerful network known as the Black Guelph. “They are presently the single wealthiest political force in the world, the dominant rentier-finance interest centered in such places as Venice, Trieste, Liechtenstein, Switzerland, Amsterdam, and London,” he wrote. It was as insane as it was meaningless, but any nut with a copy of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion would have read between the lines and nodded in agreement. They may even have felt compelled to do something about it.
* * *
SWEDEN IS A small country. Its politicians are not distant figures. In the 1960s and ’70s, they were even more proximate. The home number of Palme’s predecessor Tage Erlander was listed in the phone directory; if you rang, he would pick up. Olof Palme liked to walk through the streets without a bodyguard. When Cliff, Kerstin, Bill, and their comrades distributed literature that suggested Palme was a paranoid schizophrenic, or, more colorfully, a “foul-smelling excretion from a dead world, the progeny of a lunatic military-aristocracy,” they must have calculated that its target would be among their readers. But this did not give them pause for thought. On at least one occasion, a member of EAP approached Palme and tried to sell him some of this literature.
Eventually, the leader of the Social Democrats felt moved to comment. In May 1979, the EAP circulated a letter that purported to be from a group of union leaders, denouncing Palme’s nuclear energy policy. The letter was a hoax, but this was not discovered before it had run on the front page of the main Swedish evening newspaper. “This CIA organization,” said Palme, wearily, “has been after me for several years.”
The psychology of stalking would probably explain the party’s reaction: when the object of its fantasies acknowledged its existence, it was Christmas for the EAP. It gave them an opportunity to issue lengthy communiqués calling for a government inquiry into the harassment of their party, and declaring how wounded its members felt by the false accusation that it was an instrument of the CIA.
As leader, Kerstin always signed these, but their use of distinctly English idioms suggests that Cliff may have been the one sitting at the typewriter. They achieved their aim: publicity. By the early 1980s, the Swedish media treated Kerstin as an entertaining if faintly unsavory political curiosity. Her sullen good looks and tight smile made regular appearances in the press, usually when her party was accused of extremism or electoral misconduct.
In early 1982 the Channel TV-2 program Magasinet put its reporter Larsolof Giertta on Kerstin’s case. He interviewed her, attended a party meeting, caught a few shots of Cliff, shuffling papers and looking mistrustfully at the camera, and concluded that the EAP was a “Nazi-influenced” organization of the Far Right. A quote was obtained from Palme himself, who described the party as “a tiny fascist-like sect.” Predictably, the EAP was not delighted. Just as predictably, a pair of intense Swedish LaRouchians appeared on Giertta’s doorstep to tell the journalist that if he went to Wiesbaden to investigate the European headquarters of their organization, he should beware of fast-moving cars on the autobahn.
Magasinet invited Kerstin Tegin-Gaddy into the studio to explain her political position and her strange beliefs about Olof Palme. She was not in a conciliatory mood. Kerstin argued that Magasinet was part of Palme’s smear campaign against the EAP. “Okay, Olof Palme,” said Kerstin, as if the prime minister were in the room. “Let’s take this discussion. You or me, which is it who is pushing a fascist politics?”
It was a fairly cranky performance, but the EAP claimed it as a great propaganda victory. “The general response everywhere is the same,” enthused a party report to the mother organization in Leesburg. “Great relief and joy that finally somebody is able to challenge the Social-Democratic-Greenie-Fascist power-structure.” Invigorated, Kerstin announced a national speaking tour—apparently convinced that by 1987, Palme would be toppled and she would be the new prime minister of Sweden. Half of the prediction came true.
* * *
LAROUCHIAN FANTASIES ABOUT Palme became so intense and omnivorous that they began to devour the biographies of the people who constructed them. Bill Engdahl identified Palme’s policy of granting humanitarian asylum to Vietnam deserters as a smoke screen to make Sweden a safe haven for terrorists and gangsters. LaRouche contended that the GI movement in Sweden was “a front organization using unwitting Vietnam War opponents and critics as a diversionary cover for an evil operation against the United States.” (The illustration featured Olof Palme as a vampire and Bo Burlingham as a gun-toting frogman with a cigarette in his mouth.)
For LaRouchians who had entered the movement through the American Deserters Committee and the Next Step, this was the most baroque, prog-rock concept-album phase of their incorporation into LaRouchian mythology. For a decade Bill Jones and his former comrades had been obliged to accept that they had not, after all, been the leaders of a group that had fought for the rights of deserters and grabbed the attention of the world. They had been the dupes of some Cold War intelligence operation. Now they were part of a conspiracy that went back centuries—part of a master plan designed by Bertrand Russell and the Tavistock Institute and executed by Michael Vale and his allies, to preserve the dominance of Olof Palme, the House of Windsor, and an Illuminati-like organization founded by the East India Company and a group of old Venetian banking families. My lunchtime conversations with Bill suggested that, decades later, he remained loyal to this mad, fake version of his own life story. Bertrand Russell, he told me, had once sent a letter of support to Michael Vale, and that was evidence enough.
Bo Burlingham, whose life also furnished the material for these fantasies, offered me the best explanation of their power. As we sat under the blossoms in the courtyard of the Berkeley City Club, he described how the Labor Committees became a sticky-doll trap for a certain kind of radical.
“The LaRouche blandishments have this pseudo-intellectual quality,” he said. “It’s all smoke and mirrors. Ultimately, to get involved in that you’re a fool, an agent provocateur, or somebody who has a need of some sort that leads them to get involved in a cult. The Weathermen were a cult, so I’m not saying this with any great sense of superiority, but the LaRouchies are generally cultish. You adopt a certain orthodoxy from which it becomes a grave sin to stray. There are mechanisms inside to make sure it gets reinforced, reinforced, reinforced, to the point where you’re detached from reality. You’re living in this bubble.”
That bubble burst on the night of February 28, 1986. It happened when Olof Palme, his wife, Lisbet, and their son Mårten walked out of the Grand Cinema on Sveavägen, in the heart of Stockholm. They had watched a Swedish comedy called The Brothers Mozart. It had been a last-minute decision: Lisbet had wanted to see Lasse Hallström’s picture My Life as a Dog. Despite the bitter cold and the slippery conditions, Palme and his wife began walking home to their apartment in Gamla Stan. On the way they passed an arts and crafts shop called Dekorima. Its illuminated windows cast a bright light on the icy street.
At 11:21 p.m., a man grabbed Olof Palme by the shoulder, pulled a large handgun from his coat, and fired a single shot into the prime minister’s back. Blood ran into the snow. The assassin stood for a moment, gazing down upon his victim, then bolted into the darkness.
At six minutes past midnight, Palme was pronounced dead. A description of the perpetrator was constructed from impressions gleaned from passersby. The dread news spread through the early hours. A radio bulletin at 1:10 a.m. A television report at 4:00 a.m. A government press conference an hour later. Sweden reeled in horror.
In the offices of the EAP, they opened a bottle of champagne. In the offices of the investigating detectives, the phone rang. An anonymous caller supplied the name of a man he thought might be responsible for the assassination. The man answered the description of the assassin and had been heard speaking about Palme with memorable viciousness. The man was Cliff Gaddy.