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.)
Operation Chaos is an untold Cold War story: how the CIA tried to infiltrate a radical group of U.S. military deserters, an audiobook 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.
Operation Chaos is an untold Cold War story: how the CIA tried to infiltrate a radical group of U.S. military deserters, an audiobook 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.
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Operation Chaos: The Vietnam Deserters Who Fought the CIA, the Brainwashers, and Themselves
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Operation Chaos: The Vietnam Deserters Who Fought the CIA, the Brainwashers, and Themselves
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Product Details
BN ID: | 2940171954123 |
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Publisher: | Macmillan Audio |
Publication date: | 02/13/2018 |
Edition description: | Unabridged |
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