The author of Inventing the Victorians and presenter for such BBC radio programs as Free Thinking presents an account of the lesser-known Cold War story of how the CIA attempted to infiltrate a radical group of U.S. military deserters and draft-dodgers who created a paranoid, cult-like group of revolutionaries in 1968 Stockholm. 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 establishmentStockholm, 1968. A thousand American deserters and draft-resisters are arriving to escape the war in Vietnam. Theyre young, theyre 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 starsbut the CIA is determined to stop all that.Its a job for the deep-cover men of Operation Chaos and their alliesagents 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 beginto 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 survivorseach 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 hes part of a secret plot by the British royal family to start World War III. By that time, hes deep in the labyrinth of truths and half-truths, wondering where reality ends and delusion begins.
