BETTER TO HAVE called it something else. Something innocuous. Something unburdened with strong meaning. Something that didn’t describe the screaming waste traversed by Satan in one of the scarier parts of Paradise Lost. Somebody with a sense of posterity should have spoken up. But they didn’t, and Operation Chaos was born.
President Lyndon Baines Johnson was its daddy. In 1967, he looked across America and saw things he neither liked nor understood. That spring, boys on town hall steps, outside army offices, and in Central Park put matches to draft cards, or, more enterprisingly, burned them up with home-brewed napalm or soaked them in their own blood. In May, Black Panthers padded around the California state capitol in their berets and shades, shotguns pointed at the plaster ceiling. Their images competed for space with news from Stockholm, where American radicals had joined the Russell Tribunal to find the Johnson administration guilty of genocide.
Then, at the end of June, the president sat down for a $1,000-a-plate fundraising dinner at the Century Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles and discovered that the city had laid on a floor show: speeches by the boxer Muhammad Ali and the childcare guru Dr. Benjamin Spock; ten thousand protestors chanting, “Hey, hey, LBJ! How many kids did you kill today?”; LAPD officers swinging nightsticks; enough violent disorder to convince the commander in chief that his days of campaigning in public should come to an end. Convince him, too, that dissent of this intensity could not be entirely indigenous—that it had to have blown in on some cold wind from Russia or China.
By summer, Johnson had decided that this weather should be mapped and its patterns disrupted. On August 15, three senior CIA figures met to discuss how to grant the president’s wish. James Jesus Angleton, a cadaverous poetry lover with a primly Anglicized accent, had been chief of the Counterintelligence Staff since 1954. Thomas Karamessines, deputy director for plans, had been in his job for only a fortnight—propelled there after his predecessor fell dead on the tennis court. Richard Helms, the director of central intelligence, was also a recent promotion, despite the failure of his attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro with a poison pen, a botulism-infected cigar, and an old-fashioned Mafia hit man. (The shoes laced with beard-killing thallium salts never progressed beyond the drawing board.)
All three men were examples of a now-vanished type: Ivy League graduates with good manners and clean fingernails who believed in their right to nurture a military coup, depose an elected leader, or offer a suitcase of cash to a gangster, if it retarded the spread of communism. Not because they were paranoid (though Angleton certainly was), but because they had been in freshly liberated Axis territory at the bitter end of the Second World War and had observed the brutal strategies by which the Soviet Union gathered Eastern Europe to its bosom. When they saw young Americans marching under anti-war banners, they imagined the smiles of satisfaction in smoke-filled rooms in Moscow and Peking. They imagined the hammer and sickle fluttering over the U.S. Capitol.
In selecting a leader for the operation, Angleton, Helms, and Karamessines chose one of their own. Two candidates were considered. Both had a strong scholarly background; both had worked as intelligence analysts at the CIA stations in Munich and New Delhi; both were career cold warriors.
The older of the pair, Harry Rositzke, was a crossword-loving scholarship boy from Brooklyn who had taught classes at Harvard and published a translation of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. His anti-communism had been confirmed in 1945, during an unauthorized jaunt into Soviet-controlled East Berlin, where he’d seen Red Army looters stripping buildings of bedding, toilet bowls, and electrical fittings, a column of doomed-looking German boys and old men being herded eastward by Mongolian troops wearing straw shoes.
Rositzke’s CIA career had been audacious but not wholly successful. As chief of station in New Delhi, he had funded the activities of nationalist guerrillas in Tibet, used stink bombs to break up meetings of the troublingly electable Indian Communist Party, and, according to one colleague, given staff meetings “a certain Dickensian quality, like a colloquy between Fagin and his young pickpockets.” As chief of Langley’s Soviet bloc division, he had been responsible for the mainly disastrous attempt to get spies on the ground in Russian territory. (Most were greeted by armed welcoming committees before they’d had time to roll up their parachutes.) Defeat gave Rositzke a profound respect for the enemy. So profound that a family acquaintance wrote to the FBI to share her worries about his extravagant praise of the USSR.
Harry Rositzke’s younger rival was a less flamboyant character. In a building full of professional secret keepers, Richard Ober was known as a man of few words. “Tight mouthed,” they called him. “Close mouthed.” He liked the people around him to be the same.
His academic qualifications were impeccable: history and philosophy at Harvard, a master’s degree in international relations from Columbia, a year of further study at the National War College. But Ober’s killer credential came from work in the field. He was already running a prototype for the kind of scheme President Johnson had in mind: a spoiler operation against the anti-war Left. Its target was Ramparts, a noisily countercultural magazine published in Berkeley, California.
The agency wished to squish Ramparts because its investigative reporters had begun to make a habit of uncovering Langley’s most sensitive secrets. Its most recent scoop: revealing that since 1952 the agency had been funding the National Student Association, and was using its members to gather intelligence on campuses across the world. Ober failed to prevent Ramparts from running the story, obliging his colleagues to cut loose some of their paid agents. But the operation had allowed him to demonstrate a coolly pragmatic attitude to espionage techniques that were forbidden by the CIA’s own charter. And it was upon these techniques that Operation Chaos was founded, with Ober as chief; Rositzke, slightly offstage, in an advisory capacity; and Richard Helms as the man who would take the fruits of their labor to the White House.
When the National Security Act of 1947 brought the CIA into being, it permitted the agency “no police, subpoena, or law enforcement powers or internal security functions.” The Ramparts operation troubled the letter and the spirit of this law. It investigated the personal and financial affairs of the magazine’s staff and backers, all of whom were U.S. citizens and residents. It put them under surveillance. It gathered material for blackmail. Years later, Edgar Applewhite, a member of Ober’s staff, gave an interview about these activities. “We had awful things in mind,” he said, “some of which we carried out.” He also recalled the response of the deputy director for plans. “Oh, Eddie,” he said. “You have a spot of blood on your pinafore.”
* * *
FRANK RAFALKO NEVER asked to be part of Operation Chaos. What he really wanted was a place in the CIA’s career training program. A chance to escape his desk in the records division and go out into the field, acquiring intelligence hot from the mouth of the asset. But the agency decided that a master’s degree should be a requisite for this work. Frank didn’t have one, so that was that. He did his best to resist the assignment, telling his interviewers that counterintelligence was a dead end. But they didn’t pay much attention. By the time Frank got back to his desk in the basement, the job was his.
Frank and I arranged to meet in Wilmington, North Carolina, where he had business in town. An ice storm cleared his diary, but he came all the same, driving a careful forty miles through remarkable weather conditions: someone, it seemed, had taken the trees and dipped them in glass. He picked me up from the lobby of the Hilton and took me to his favorite restaurant, a seafood place beside the Cape Fear River, a popular venue for CIA reunions. Former agency employees, he explained, live tax-free in North Carolina; he hadn’t received a federal tax bill since he retired here in the 1990s. We ate fish and chips to a smooth jazz sound track.
At first, Frank explained, Operation Chaos was run from three second-floor rooms close to James Angleton’s office, in an area called the Black Section. Other colleagues on the project were scattered through the halls and corridors of the agency’s headquarters. Angleton, said Frank, took little interest in the project. It was his habit to arrive when Frank and his colleagues were at lunch, and he would work late into the night in a shuttered office, the gleam of his little desk lamp faintly visible through the blinds. “He was a very mysterious person,” said Frank.
Eventually the team migrated en masse to the most secure accommodation Langley could furnish: a suite of windowless rooms behind a cypher-locked steel door in the basement. “That,” noted Frank, “was called the Vault.” He traced a ghostly sketch on the tablecloth. Richard Ober’s office. The New Left section. The Black Power section. The coffee area, with its large table next to the Xerox machine. His own office, and that of his colleague Jason Horn, deputy chief of the unit, each equipped with a two-drawer safe in which they stowed the contents of their in-trays. Desks occupied by staff who processed material supplied by the National Security Agency, a secret intelligence-gathering body that monitored communications all over the world.
And, to the left of the entrance, a second cypher-locked bulkhead, a vault-within-the-Vault that housed gray filing cabinets stacked with paper records. With Richard Ober in charge, correct security procedure was followed to the letter. “Ober was not so much an operations-type guy, but an analyst,” Frank recalled. “Jason complained to me that he didn’t know half the stuff Ober was doing, because he was so secretive.”
The most impressive element of the operation lay in a room on the other side of the records division. This was the home of HYDRA—an IBM System/360 mainframe computer that marshaled files on 9,994 named subversives and was tended by a team of three technicians. HYDRA was an omnivorous beast. She devoured the name of anyone who had published an article in the New York Review of Books. She fed happily on information about Grove Press, because it had published Kim Philby’s memoir, My Silent War, and distributed the Swedish sex-and-socialism film I Am Curious (Yellow). Published reviews went into HYDRA’s maw. “We were ahead of a lot of other people in the technology field,” Frank reflected. “Everything was put on computers.” Visiting men from the FBI would gaze upon these tape spools and punch cards and cathode ray tube terminals and suck their teeth in envy.
It was hard to picture Frank surrounded by this gleaming machinery. With his lantern jaw and bearlike physique, he had the air of a retired cop or football player. I wasn’t surprised to hear him describe his delight at being assigned to monitor the sharp-dressed, gun-toting Black Panthers rather than the more drily academic New Left. “The Panthers were a bunch of thugs,” he said, “but they sounded exciting.” When Frank spoke of Eldridge Cleaver, the leader of the Black Panther Party, his tone revealed something of the intimacy that can grow between a counterintelligence officer and his quarry. “If he’d stuck around at home and kept out of trouble,” said Frank, like the high school careers officer musing on the fate of one of the bad boys, “he might have ended up as the new Malcolm X.” Years after Operation Chaos, Frank was out on a joint operation with the FBI and found himself in Cleaver’s neighborhood. Had it not been a breach of protocol, he said, he might have called to discuss old times.
* * *
FRANK IS THE only CIA officer who has ever gone public about his work on Operation Chaos, the only person in the world you can ask for an on-the-record interview about its activities. His account is a minimalist one. The program, he insisted, was modest, not massive. It never had more than fifty-four people on staff, including the secretaries. It ran only a handful of assets in the field: additional eyes and ears were borrowed from other CIA divisions and other government agencies. Its scale and plenitude lay in the amount of data it harvested, more than it was ever able to process. CACTUS, a cable system separated from the mainstream agency wires, brought in reports from the police, the FBI, the National Security Agency, and CIA stations all over the world. Paid subscriptions to radical newspapers and magazines yielded another torrent of material, channeled by the ordinary U.S. mail.
Producing order from all this, Frank insisted, was the program’s business. Not kidnappings or assassinations or messing with people’s heads. “We never disrupted, we never interfered,” he said. “All we did was collect and report.” He paused. “The bureau, though. That was a different story. The military also got involved in disrupting things, but we didn’t. It was hands-off for us.” It was a picture of a billion-dollar brain: a nerve center that sent impulses firing into the muscles of other bodies—the FBI, military intelligence, the White House—which then twitched in response.
Our conversation had become one about cause and effect. About whether surveillance might not also constitute a form of disruption; whether the suspicion that your group had been infiltrated might not be as corrosive as the presence of an active agent provocateur. Frank accepted the principle: actions that appeared inconsequential in Langley might have wrought powerful effects upon individuals in the field. “Something could happen that affects that person’s mind,” he said. “That could lead to that person’s death or serious illness. Maybe destroy his rational thinking. So you have to ask yourself, are you the cause of that death, directly or indirectly? Maybe some outside influence you know nothing about has caused it, but you always have that worry. Some of these people may have gone off at the deep end because they felt they were being persecuted. Even if they only thought it was happening to them. They’re in a strange country. There’s a lot of pressure on them. So do you blame yourself, or do you blame an outside force that is interfering with your mind?”
It was the chaos theory of Operation Chaos. A small action—a meeting in a café between a handler and an asset—might produce ripples or create waves; it might change the weather conditions as profoundly as the work of an army of salaried officers. The deserters already lived in a world of suspicion and paranoia. How much genuine interference would it have taken to trigger something spectacular?
* * *
FRANK DOWNPLAYED LANGLEY’S interest in the deserters. He had no recollection of discussing them in any meeting. But they were there in paperwork. In 1978 the agency declassified 2,662 pages of documents relating to Operation Chaos and other domestic spying operations. These contained mainly dross: countercultural tidbits about rock concerts, picnics, and teach-ins; humorless attempts to describe the taxonomical differences between hippies, Yippies, and Zippies; a story about a Catholic priest who threatened to kidnap Henry Kissinger and hold him hostage until the air force stopped bombing Cambodia and Laos.
It also contained the program’s mission statement, which suggested that it was a countersubversion project with a long list of subversives to counter: “the extremist anti-war movement, extremist student/faculty groups, black extremism, Chicano extremism, Puerto Rican extremism, deserter/evader support and inducement, and international aspects of the domestic underground media.” Beneath this was a long list of specific organizations, their names obliterated by the censor’s ink. Details, too, about how assets were deployed in the field: “Americans with existing extremist credentials have been assessed, recruited, tested, and dispatched abroad for PCS assignments as contract agents, primarily sources offered for such use by the FBI. When abroad they collect information responsive to MHCHAOS program requirements, as well as other agency requirements.” “PCS,” I learned, stood for permanent change of station, and “MH” indicated that CHAOS was a worldwide operation. These were American agents living undercover among American subversives abroad. How many of them, I wondered, had I already taken out to lunch?
* * *
THE CIA WAS on the deserters’ case right from the beginning, before the Intrepid Four had even left Japan. It was receiving information from an FBI tap installed on the phone of Howard Zinn, a Boston University historian and vigorous anti-war campaigner. When a member of Beheiren called Zinn to discuss the fate of the four sailors, someone pressed play and record. Through this surveillance, the CIA learned that Ernest P. Young, a history professor at Dartmouth College, had agreed to travel to Tokyo in order to check out the deserters on behalf of the U.S. peace movement. The tap may also have yielded another piece of useful information—that Beheiren had made arrangements with the Soviet Embassy in Tokyo through a colorful intermediary named Brian Victoria, a Buddhist monk from Omaha, Nebraska, who had burned his air force discharge papers and raised $5,000 for North Vietnam by begging on the streets.
As the story developed, Thomas Karamessines pulled in all he could on the activists who had helped the four defectors get to Moscow. He sent out a dossier to the White House, the FBI, Richard Helms, and a cluster of military intelligence agencies. Beheiren, Karamessines concluded, had seduced these sailors into defection. The Intrepid Four were “misguided youngsters gone astray in a foreign land and due to get slapped back in line with traditional Navy justice when they finally decided to stop the fun and go back to the ship.… But once the Beheiren people made contact they recognized the potential immediately and moved in for the kill.”
Anti-war activity as a product of alien influence: it was a perfect fit for the narrative that President Johnson wanted to hear from the CIA, but it was wrong. The four had decided to desert days before they met anyone from Beheiren. They had formulated their opposition to the war in the roaring gray steel world of the USS Intrepid. It was working on the 27,000-ton aircraft carrier, watching planes depart and return—and sometimes fail to return—that pushed them toward desertion.
A day after Beheiren announced the four’s defection, two investigators in regulation dark suits and fedoras came aboard the carrier to question men who had known the vanished sailors. Crewman Robert Doyon was summoned to the captain’s cabin and given a grilling. Had his friends been brainwashed by Japanese communists? No, Doyon insisted. He could detect John Barilla’s turn of phrase in the public statements issued by the four. Barilla had described the Vietnam War as “ugly,” which was his favorite term of disapproval, and usually applied to the shipboard coffee or chow. This was not a view that the intelligence men wanted to hear. Doyon was kept away from inquisitive reporters with three weeks’ cleaning duty in the chief petty officer’s quarters. After that, he told me, his commanding officers made his life miserable.
* * *
THE AUTUMN OF 1968 brought a better harvest for the intelligence men. The juiciest fruit came in the form of Philip Callicoat, the hot-tempered teenage sailor who had been exported from Japan in the same boat as Mark Shapiro and Terry Whitmore. He seems to have been shaken from the tree by Bernice Foley, a globe-trotting, kid-gloved journalist from Cincinnati, author of The Three Fs of Charm, who rolled up in Stockholm looking for deserters to take out to dinner.
Callicoat accepted her invitation, giving her the fourth F of charm in the restaurant of the Strand Hotel. He told her the CIA was following him. He wanted it on the record that he was no pacifist. Having been sacked from his new job as a stevedore at the Oxelösund docks, he was considering leading a band of Swedish deserters into the Israel Defense Forces. Nor did he approve of any plan to halt the bombing in Vietnam.
“When you’re on deck being attacked by the Commies you see your buddy’s head blown to bits with its brains and eyes splattering you. Your own arm is suddenly in ragged and bloody tatters, then you hear and see overhead American bombers streaking out toward the Commies. Whether you’re a religious man or not, you fall a moment to your knees knowing that you, a mortal man, have just seen a vision of heaven opening up to your scorched and suffering eyes.”
He didn’t go to Israel. Instead, he called his dad. On August 24, Edward N. Callicoat, the Pentecostal minister with the all-singing band of children, arrived on a plane from Canada to escort his son to the American Embassy in Stockholm. The following night they were both flown by military plane to an air force base in New Jersey, from which Philip was briskly transferred to the brig at the Naval Shipyard in Philadelphia.
Here he struck a deal and informed on everyone he had met since going underground in Japan. He dredged up details about Mark Shapiro, Terry Whitmore, and his other traveling companions. He named all the Beheiren activists he could recall and enumerated the physical characteristics of those whose names he didn’t know, estimating ages, weights, and heights. He described the route through Russia, its people and places. He described the American Deserters Committee, spilling what he knew about Mike Vale and Bill Jones, their allies and enemies on the Swedish political scene.
Naval intelligence collated this information. It was turned into a report with flow charts, footnotes, and appendices. In return, there was no court-martial and no dishonorable discharge. Callicoat was allowed to rejoin the navy. But here his story took a stranger turn. After ten days back in uniform he made a run for the Canadian border in the company of a girlfriend who had followed him from Sweden. They flew back to Stockholm together, where Callicoat began filling out the forms that would make him the only deserter to have been twice granted asylum in Sweden.
The Swedes soon had cause to regret it. In July 1969 Callicoat attempted to rob a Stockholm bank using a water pistol. The teller pressed the emergency button, causing the glass bank door to close automatically. Callicoat crashed straight through it, which disoriented him sufficiently for a passer-by to grab him and pin him to the pavement. All the papers printed her picture: Gunilla Norén, a fifteen-year-old with a passing resemblance to Velma from Scooby-Doo.
Because Phil Callicoat had made a clandestine arrangement with the intelligence men, few of the deserters knew about his boomerang trip to the brig and back. It remained a secret until 1976, when the navy gave evidence to a congressional committee on organized subversion in the armed forces. In the autumn of 1968, Mike, Bill, and their comrades were preoccupied with the fate of another member of the six-man crew of defectors who had traveled with Mark Shapiro—Edwin “Pappy” Arnett, the strange, somnambulant character whose horror stories had made him a nine-day wonder in the Soviet Union. Which is not to say that anyone liked him very much. Arnett’s conversational habits made him a tricky houseguest. Fukumi Shinsuke, the Beheiren activist who gave him a room as he lay low in Japan, was so freaked out by his incessant atrocity talk that he considered leaving the anti-war movement. (The details seemed always to be shifting: the Russians were told about necklaces of ears; poor Shinsuke got a monologue about a sergeant who collected the eyes of his victims.)
His Swedish benefactors must have learned to live with it. When he arrived in May, Arnett found shelter under the wing of a peace group in the Stockholm suburb of Tyresö. Its founding member was Åke Sandin, the peace campaigner who had picked up the Intrepid Four from the airport in his little Renault car. “They thought it was very funny to see all the road signs with the word ‘utfart’ on them,” he told me, as we sat in the studio of his local community radio station. “It means ‘go out.’” The four, said Sandin, were just boys. Unlike Edwin Arnett. “He was special.”
Sandin issued the euphemism with a sigh, recalling the preposterous game of chase that he and his wife had played with Arnett in the summer of 1968. One day in August they heard that the deserter was on his way to the U.S. Embassy in Stockholm. “My wife got in a taxi and said to the driver, ‘Follow that car!’” Mrs. Sandin caught Arnett on the steps of the building and managed to persuade him to return to Tyresö. At the beginning of September he did it again, but this time it was too late to stop him. He was already on a plane to New York.
When Arnett landed at JFK on September 14, his army minders threw him to the press. It was a golden PR opportunity. Arnett seemed a perfect match for the military’s textbook deserter type: slow-witted, unmuscular, self-involved. He also had nothing good to report about Sweden. Housing conditions were terrible, he complained. Employment prospects even worse. Was it true, asked a journalist, that the Swedish authorities expected deserters to live on $10 a week? “I’m not going to live like a tramp!” snapped Arnett. “Would you?” After this, he was sent straight to the stockade at Fort Dix to await his appointment with history, as the first Vietnam War veteran to be tried for desertion.
* * *
THE ADC HAD always regarded Arnett with wary contempt, but it knew a useful symbol when it saw one. If justice treated him roughly, then it would have a quietly positive effect on their cause: who would be tempted to leave Sweden if five years’ hard labor was the penalty? It mounted a campaign to draw attention to Arnett’s plight. Their expedience showed: they didn’t spell his name right on the posters.
It took five months for Arnett to come to trial. He pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of absence without leave, but maintained his innocence of the charge of desertion—for which the penalty was dishonorable discharge without pay and half a decade of rock breaking. On February 26, 1969, a military jury of six men and one woman convened to hear Arnett’s case. A comrade who had toiled beside him on his maintenance ship told them that although Arnett had spoken about deserting to Sweden, this was simply a way of expressing his boredom and frustration: really, he wanted a transfer nearer to the action.
Here, the story became more exotic. The defense argued that when Arnett left Cam Ranh Bay for nine days’ leave in Tokyo, he had not intended to desert. The idea was put into his head by a glamorous young Beheiren activist who chatted him up in a teahouse, took him to a gambling den, and then whisked him off in a taxi to a house full of persuasive Japanese leftists. The prosecution, however, had a compelling piece of evidence. Ten minutes of color TV news footage taken in the international arrivals lounge of JFK airport, in which Arnett referred to himself as a deserter over and over again. The judge decided to admit it, obliging the defense to change its emphasis. One of Arnett’s lawyers said that his client was at “the bottom rung of dull” and waved the results of his IQ test in the air—somewhere below 90. Arnett, he contended, was too stupid to understand the legal implications of his words.
The jury took eighty-six minutes to decide that Arnett was responsible for his own actions. As the judge mulled over the punishment, the defense presented medical evidence it hoped might soften the blow. A psychiatrist had diagnosed Arnett as a borderline schizophrenic with an “abnormal tendency to fantasy” and had learned of other mitigating circumstances in the course of a long interview with the deserter. Arnett’s parents had both been alcoholics. At the age of eight, he had witnessed the violent death of his twin brother. The judge was not much moved. The sentence was four years’ hard labor. Perhaps the judge sensed that Arnett’s account of himself was as reliable as his stories of ear necklaces and disemboweled infants. I looked long and hard through the records to find evidence that Edwin Arnett had a twin brother who was killed in an accident. There was nothing.
On the steps of the court, Arnett urged the public to write to the president about his case—not least because there were others in Sweden whose future depended on the outcome of his trial. In the Nixon archive, only one letter is preserved. It was signed by a group of twenty-five soldiers on active duty in Vietnam, and it offers a stinging criticism of his case. “We are all in agreement about the degree of punishment meted out to Specialist Arnett. We feel that the court was lenient on Specialist Arnett and he should be grateful that his punishment was not more severe.”
They also had a message to communicate to the other Stockholm deserters. “It is our contention; as citizens of the United States and as Servicemen in Vietnam; that our country does not need or desire this type [of] individual. We should not solicit the return of those persons who have no desire to conduct themselves by the standards of a True American. If these deserters feel that Sweden is so much more advantageous to their standard of living … we feel it to our Country’s benefit that they remain where they have chosen to live.”
Nobody at the offices of the American Deserters Committee seems to have written a letter to the White House. They had their own problems to consider. In the time between Arnett’s arrest and his court-martial, the ADC had torn itself apart.