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

'A remarkable story of subterfuge and brainwashing that few Hollywood scriptwriters could have made up' Simon Heffer, author of The Age of Decadence In 1967, at the height of the Vietnam War, an exodus begins. A thousand American deserters and draft-resisters escape the brutal fighting for the calm shores of Stockholm. These defectors are young, radical and want to start a revolution. The Swedes treat their new guests like rock stars - but the CIA is going to put a stop to that. It's a job for the deep-cover men of Operation Chaos and their allies - agents who know how to invade radical organizations and crush them from the inside. And within a few months, the GIs have turned on each other - and the interrogations and recriminations begin. A gripping espionage story filled with a host of extraordinary and unbelievable plays, Operation Chaos is the incredible but true account of the men who left the war, how they betrayed each other and how they became lost in a world where anything seemed possible - even the idea that the CIA had secretly programmed them to kill their friends.

About the Author :
Matthew Sweet is a writer and broadcaster with a doctorate in Wilkie Collins. He presents Night Waves and Free Thinking on BBC Radio 3 and The Philosopher's Arms and The Film Programme on BBC Radio 4. He is the author of Inventing the Victorians and Shepperton Babylon: The Lost Worlds of British Cinema - which he adapted as a film for BBC Four. He has also edited and introduced the work of Wilkie Collins, Arthur Conan Doyle, William Thackeray, George Eliot and Edward Bulwer-Lytton.

Review :
Sweet has found a craziness right at the heart of the human condition. He tells a bizarre, alarming story with wit, grace and an increasing anxiety that by asking questions he might be about to trigger World War Three. Read it with my jaw on the floor. Sweet's book will suck you into the hall of mirrors in which these guys were forced to live their lives . . . and still do. Engrossing and accurate. A remarkable story of subterfuge and brainwashing that few Hollywood scriptwriters could have made up. Very well-informed and effortlessly funny. Operation Chaos is a wild ride—a deeply reported and gracefully written account of a fascinating piece of contemporary Cold War history. Can’t recommend Operation Chaos highly enough; a tale of noble intentions sliding into a paranoid mire. As weird and darkly comic a story about Vietnam as you’ll read 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. 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. 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. It’s the mistrust that interests Mr. Sweet, the book he set out to write morphed into a narrative that goes deep into the hothouse politics of the American Deserters Committee before taking a sharp turn into the bizarre machinations of Lyndon LaRouche. What he does do is tie together a strange story that continues to limp along 50 years after it began. Matthew Sweet's search for the cult's survivors is at the heart of this darkly comic story. They are, he finds, still crazy after all these years Sweet evocatively sketches his quest to uncover these resisters’ lives . . . Sweet uncloaks a relatively little-known aspect of the Vietnam War–era counterculture. A horribly readable account of the US military deserters who found asylum in Sweden during the Vietnam War, and their group’s infiltration by the CIA 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. Fortunately, Sweet was willing to throw himself into the middle of the chaos and come back with a confusing, confounding and utterly compelling narrative that spans decades, continents and levels of mental stability. I highly recommend this book