Operation Chaos

November 27, 2017
British journalist and BBC personality Sweet (The West End Front) details the strange and chaotic story of the “thousand-strong community of deserters and draft resisters” who went into exile in neutral Sweden during the Vietnam War, along with Operation Chaos, the CIA operation set up to spy on them. Sweet evocatively sketches his quest to uncover these resisters’ lives. Some of the exiles seemed to be upright and idealistic, some were criminals, others were prone to bizarre and outlandish conspiracy theories, and more than a few lived life through “a psychedelic filter.” Sweet tries to unravel their stories, but admits that of the dozens of former exiles he interviewed, only some “are telling the truth.” He injects himself into the narrative from the beginning, diligently recording how he tracked down and interviewed many of his subjects. In the book’s second half, Sweet turns his attentions to the “apocalyptic” cult joined by several of the deserters. It was (and continues to be) led by the conspiracist Lyndon LaRouche, whom Sweet calls “the longest-running gag in U.S. fringe politics.” Though rather fascinating, the highly detailed LaRouche narrative may exhaust some readers. Still, Sweet uncloaks a relatively little-known aspect of the Vietnam War–era counterculture.

February 1, 2018

Sweet (Inventing the Victorians) offers a chilling account of lesser-known Vietnam protestors. These deserters escaped to Sweden, eventually joining Lyndon LaRouche's cult-like political party, whose platform included labeling the CIA, Nelson Rockefeller, the Queen of England, and Henry Kissinger as a cabal seeking a new world order. At the time, Sweden was the only non-Communist European country that offered asylum to deserters. The American Deserters Committee (ADC) was formed in 1968 but collapsed the following year, possibly because of infiltration by the CIA's Operation Chaos, dedicated to bringing down the ADC. Eventually, the ADC morphed into "The Next Step," an underground organization that favored the military's overthrow by active duty soldiers. Sweet is especially good at describing how deserters were drawn into LaRouche's party and became his programmed foot soldiers, some of whom might have assassinated Swedish Premier Olaf Palme in 1986. Sweet's smooth writing about the deserters' descent into LaRouche's Orwellian world, his current interviews with ADC and Larouche Party veterans, and his tales about attending LaRouche political events are gripping. VERDICT Audiences intrigued by Kurt Andersen's Fantasyland will be drawn to this work, which describes how rational politics can fall prey to irrational beliefs with dangerous consequences.--Karl Helicher, formerly with Upper Merion Twp. Lib., King of Prussia, PA

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

February 1, 2018
Among the lesser-known effects of the Vietnam War was the desertion of a large number of American servicemen, many of whom made their way to Sweden.Newsweek International contributing editor Sweet (West End Front: The Wartime Secrets of London's Grand Hotels, 2011, etc.) begins with the defections of several men in 1968. In Japan, Mark Shapiro left his hotel and went to a safe house run by a Japanese antiwar group that put him on a Russian ship, eventually ending up in Stockholm. Shapiro quickly became a leader in the deserter community. Like the others Sweet interviewed nearly 50 years afterward, Shapiro is cagy about what he wants to tell about those days. The broad story is fairly clear, though. The deserters included antiwar idealists along with a fair number who saw desertion as their best way to get out of an increasingly impossible situation in Vietnam. The author does his best to record the different factions involved, as well as the attitude of the Swedes. At first, they welcomed the Americans as principled opponents of a colonial war, but they gradually became disillusioned. There were also a number of outside forces seeking to capitalize on the deserters: the Soviet Union, the international antiwar movement, the U.S. government, and others who saw them as tokens in a larger game. Sweet puts the spotlight on Lyndon LaRouche, whose conspiracy theories took hold among the deserters, following several of them who became members of his cultlike following. The author presents a wealth of intriguing stories about a largely unknown segment of the 1960s counterculture. Unfortunately, the presentation is somewhat disjointed, as Sweet jumps among a variety of perspectives. Readers looking for a neat conclusion to the deserters' story will likely be disappointed; the tale is ongoing, and the participants have gone in different directions. The shift from the antiwar story to the rise of the LaRouche cult, while implicit in the material, reads like an unannounced detour.Full of fascinating material but fails to gel as a whole.

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January 1, 2018
Operation Chaos, a CIA operation that ran from 1967 to 1974, was intended to determine the extent of foreign influence on domestic protest groups, especially those involved in the antiwar and civil rights movements. This fascinating book tells the story of one of Operation Chaos' targets, the American Deserters Committee in Stockholm, where many American soldiers fighting in Vietnam fled after they deserted. The goal of Operation Chaos was to determine whether members of the Deserters Committee had been turned into sleeper agents, or even Manchurian Candidate-style assassins. The author believed the story was of purely historical interest, but, as he spoke to former soldiers who had deserted and moved to Sweden, he discovered that for some of these men past events are still impacting their lives in the present. He found former soldiers who are living in constant fear and under false identities, convinced that they remain at risk from the CIA. A surprising, tragic, and, in many places, angry story of a country's paranoia inflicting itself upon its own citizens.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)