Operation Chaos: The Vietnam Deserters Who Fought the CIA, the Brainwashers, and Themselves

by Matthew Sweet Narrated by Steve West

Overview

An untold Cold War story: how the CIA tried to infiltrate a radical group of U.S. military deserters, a tale that leads from a bizarre political cult to the heart of the Washington establishment

Stockholm, 1968. A thousand American deserters and draft-resisters are arriving to escape the war in Vietnam. They're young, they're radical, and they want to start a revolution. Some of them even want to take the fight to America. The Swedes treat them like pop stars—but the CIA is determined to stop all that.

It's a job for the deep-cover men of Operation Chaos and their allies—agents who know how to infiltrate organizations and destroy them from inside. Within months, the GIs have turned their fire on one another. Then the interrogations begin—to discover who among them has been brainwashed, Manchurian Candidate-style, to assassinate their leaders.

When Matthew Sweet began investigating this story, he thought the madness was over. He was wrong. Instead, he became the confidant of an eccentric and traumatized group of survivors—each with his own theory about the traitors in their midst.

All Sweet has to do is find out the truth. And stay sane. Which may be difficult when one of his interviewees accuses him of being a CIA agent and another suspects that he's part of a secret plot by the British royal family to start World War III. By that time, he's deep in the labyrinth of truths and half-truths, wondering where reality ends and delusion begins.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

11/27/2017
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. (Feb.)

From the Publisher

"In this meld of history and reportage, the deserters’ stories, and those of dozens of revolutionaries, hosts, and spies, coalesce into an often moving examination of loyalty and dissent. Sweet details an undercover C.I.A. mission to disrupt defection, and sheds light on the exiles’ complex motives. His quest to track down all the major players in the story takes him, variously, to a maximum-security prison, a cannabis refinery, and Paris cafés."—The New Yorker

"As humorously fascinating as it is deeply disturbing....Operation Chaos offers a new look at the era and the war that forgoes the usual combat and political narratives in favor of something truly strange and bizarre, rife with countless rabbit holes, plot twists and questionable characters and motives." —Spectrum Culture

"[Sweet] has reassuringly inserted himself into the narrative as a sane and rational guide down a weird rabbithole...Keeping a foot in the real world, he tries kindly but firmly to extract the truth concealed among buried memories and long-cherished fantasies.” —The Arts Desk

"Sweet evocatively sketches his quest....He injects himself into the narrative from the beginning, diligently recording how he tracked down and interviewed many of his subjects...Fascinating." —Publishers Weekly

"A surprising, tragic, and, in many places, angry story of a country's paranoia inflicting itself upon its own citizens." —Booklist

“Operation Chaos is a wild ride—a deeply reported and gracefully written account of a fascinating piece of contemporary Cold War history.”
—Susan Orlean, author of The Orchid Thief, Saturday Night, and Rin Tin Tin

“From his book’s opening pages, Matthew Sweet lured me into a looking-glass world of deserters, radicals, spies, and cultists, following them from Vietnam to Sweden to America, with many improbable stops along the way. Operation Chaos tells an American story that had been lost to history, one where people are not always who they seem to be and suspicions have a hard time keeping pace with reality.”
—Bryan Burrough, author of Days of Rage and Public Enemies

“Operation Chaos adds a new and fascinating chapter to the story of the Vietnam War. It will amaze anyone who thinks the war was fought only in Vietnam, that it was fought only with guns and bombs, or that it is truly over.”
—Stephen Kinzer, author of All the Shah’s Men, The Brothers, and The True Flag

Kirkus Reviews

2018-01-08
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.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940171954123
Publisher:	Macmillan Audio
Publication date:	02/13/2018
Edition description:	Unabridged

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