Operation Chaos

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What to expect

From a political cult to the heart of the Washington establishment – the bizarre and untold story of how the CIA tried to infiltrate a radical group of US military deserters during the Cold War.

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. 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, and the group dissolves into interrogations and recriminations.

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 intricate theory about the traitors in their midst.

All Sweet has to do is discover the truth . . . and stay sane.

Reminiscent of Jon Ronson’s The Men who Stare at Goats and as compelling as Ben McIntyre’s Agent Zigzag, in Operation Chaos Matthew Sweet’s fascinating journey of discovery sheds new light on one of the great untold tales of the Cold War, where the facts are wilder than any work of fiction.

Critics Review

Very well-informed and effortlessly funny.
Independent
Matthew Sweet's curiosity and sense of fun pulls back the heavy baize curtains on what we thought we knew about the war.
Linda Grant
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
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
Daily Mail
In the late 60s paranoia struck deep especially if you were a deserter from the US Army during Vietnam and the CIA was stalking you. Matthew 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. In the Sixties many people were far out but no group went further out than Vietnam deserters to Sweden. Matthew Sweet chronicles their descent into a world of CIA-induced paranoia in the most engrossing style. In telling the story of American deserters from Vietnam, Matthew Sweet captures the moment when the possibilities of the Sixties disintegrated into paranoia. Justifiable paranoia in their case. Excellent.
Michael Goldfarb
Sweet evocatively sketches his quest to uncover these resisters’ lives . . . Sweet uncloaks a relatively little-known aspect of the Vietnam War–era counterculture.
Publishers Weekly
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
Guardian
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.
Wall Street Journal
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.
Spectrum Culture
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.
New Yorker
Can’t recommend Operation Chaos highly enough; a tale of noble intentions sliding into a paranoid mire.
Al Murray
This tale of US military deserters who fled to Sweden during the Vietnam war is as weird and darkly comic a story about Vietnam as you’ll read
Daily Mail

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