Operation Chaos by Matthew Sweet

Author:Matthew Sweet
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

12 / THE BRAINWASHERS

BILL JONES, CLIFF Gaddy, Warren Hamerman, and Jim McGourty risked their futures, their freedom, and their family relationships by taking a public stand against the Vietnam War. But they were willing soldiers in the war declared by Lyndon LaRouche. No draft was required, nor any boot camp. The rigors of Operation Mop-Up and “Beyond Psychoanalysis” had supplied all the training they required. The enemy was not a foreign state, but a nightmarish coalition of intelligence agencies, political figures, and their own comrades. The CIA. The KGB. Nelson Rockefeller, the governor of New York. Michael Vale. The stakes were high: if they lost, it meant the death of democracy, the death of the revolution, and the coming of a new world of prison camps, slave labor, mind control, mass starvation.

Though this war was a dream and delusion, the Stockholm deserters became its casualties. It turned them against their mentor and destroyed their relationships with one another. It enforced their loyalty to causes that were mad, meaningless, and immoral. It created periods in their personal histories that, in later years, they would be ashamed to acknowledge to employers, friends, family members.

The war broke out in suburban North London, five months after the Konstantin George brainwashing crisis. And, rather as any history of the First World War must describe what happened to Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his duchess on a boulevard in Sarajevo in June 1914, the history of LaRouche’s CIA-KGB psy-war must begin with an account of what happened to Chris and Carol White on Woodfield Avenue, Colindale, during Christmas 1973.

* * *

I FIRST MET the Whites at a Vietnamese restaurant in a strip mall on the edge of Leesburg, Virginia. Carol, a small, shrewd, birdlike woman in her eighties, was waiting outside. They did not disguise their unease. “We’ll hate you when this is over,” said Carol, ruefully. But I spent more time with them than anyone else in the story. We cooked for one another, swapped recipes and books, hung out in diners, went hiking through the Blue Ridge Mountains. I grew to admire them: unlike some of the deserters who acted beside them, they could name the madness in which they participated, honestly and on the record.

The Whites grew up years and a continent apart. Chris spent his early life in the English penal system: his father was deputy governor of HM Prison Lincoln. Academic success came early. Chris won a scholarship to Christ’s Hospital, a venerable public school in Sussex. By the end of the sixties, he had embraced the radical life, and was working on a PhD about the peasant revolts in seventeenth-century Brittany. He was also organizing for the British Trotskyist group International Socialists, which—on a trip to New York in 1971—brought him into contact with the NCLC and with Carol.

Carol was born in Brooklyn a decade before her husband. Her family, the Kronbergers, arrived from Austria-Hungary in 1892. Her maternal grandfather was an organizer for the Communist Party who worked as an electrician at the Metropolitan Opera.

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