July 13, 2018 • 59 mins
During the Vietnam War, the U.S. government was desperate to maintain order and combat the growing domestic opposition to the war effort -- both the U.S.S.R. and the U.S. waged a war of ideas, of propaganda that could, in its own way, wield as much power as a bullet or a bomb. When U.S. deserters fled the war and traveled to the U.S.S.R. or neutral countries, they became a propaganda tool of immense proportions -- and the U.S. wanted them back, regardless of what laws might get broken, or how many people might be injured along the way. Join the guys as they explore the strange, secret story of Operation Chaos.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to know. M
(00:24):
welcome back to the show. My name is Matt. They
call me Ben. We are joined, of course, with our
super producer Paul Decon on the ones and two's. Most importantly,
you are here, You are you, and that makes this
stuff they don't want you to know. That's what this is.
Brand new logo rocking feeling good. Yeah, that's true. We
(00:45):
have the six finger logo designed by the way, by
our super producer Paul Paul nice work, Sir, with consultation
from our graphic artist team. Yeah. Pam, Yeah, we can
your name, It's okay, Pam is awesome, Pam Peacock. Yeah.
And we have a situation here wherein it maybe deceptively
(01:10):
easy to think that there are only three or four
people involved in stuff they don't want you to know.
That could not be further from the truth, because this podcast,
like many many other things in the world, has an
entire team behind the curtain, actively working to make stuff
(01:35):
like this sound easy. I think we have the easiest
jobs on the team to be honest. Oh absolutely. We
We just get in here and ramble. Man, That's what
I do. You you do the hard stuff. I just
go whale bend. Guess what what I fell for? You
see there you go? No, no, no no. But the
(01:55):
reason we're bringing up this idea of a team that
often is not acknowledged is because today's episode dives into
something that could easily be seen as the um the
actions of just a few isolated people. Absolutely, maybe just
(02:17):
fifty two of them, perhaps as few as fifty two.
But as we're going to find, just like this podcast,
today's topic has many, many, many, many more people in play,
some of whom remain mysterious and unidentified today. If you're
(02:39):
listening to this show, then you probably won't be surprised.
Matt and I are going to go out on a
limb and assume you will not be surprised to learn
that most governments, at one point or another, love Them
or Hatum, have perpetrated secret, illegal programs against either their
citizens or citizens of another country. And since our show
(03:00):
is based in the US, we naturally tend to explore
stories based in this country. This one is new exception,
but it's one you may not have heard of before.
Today we're exploring a classified program known as Operation Chaos. Yes,
and to discuss this program, we need to take ourselves
back to nineteen fifty four onwards just a little bit there,
(03:24):
to the Second Indo China War. You probably don't know
it is that. You probably know it as the Vietnam War.
I know. That's how I was a little while ago.
It was a conflict between North and South Vietnam, which
were two separate countries at the time, and it lasted
from nineteen fifty four until nineteen seventy five. Now this
is distilling it like crazy, but this is just to
(03:47):
say what it is. And you probably already know this.
North Vietnam was a communist government. It was run by
a communist government, and they worked with these rebels in
South Vietnam who were called the Vietcong, and together they
attempted to overthrow the government of South Vietnam. And this
was a terrible, terrible conflict that cost the lives of
(04:12):
so many and we'll discuss that here shortly um but ultimately,
the physical combat took place in both South Vietnam and
North Vietnam. Laos and Cambodia, which are immediately to the
west of the Vietnam of Vietnam, that's right there, and
I guess spoiler alert. Ultimately the North Vietnamese were successful
in their attempts to overthrow the South Vietnamese government. Yeah. Yeah,
(04:36):
and along the way the US got involved. You may
have heard us reference earlier instances surrounding the the catalyst
that set the US on a path to war in
this part of the world, the most controversial one being
the Gulf of Tonkin incident, which did we do a
(04:59):
whole episode on that? Editor? Do we just do false flags?
We did false Flags and we rediscussed it at length,
but you know, maybe we could go deeper. Who knows?
Who knows? Check out the false Flags episode if you
have yet to do so. There's some pretty interesting stuff there.
For now, we're going to explore the not not the
(05:20):
entire Vietnam War, because this is the setup right to
Operation Chaos. We're going to look at the people the
US sent to wage this war. The Vietnam War, as
it's called in the US, used a conscription system, a draft,
and that is something that hasn't occurred since. Roughly two
(05:43):
point seven million US soldiers served in Vietnam, and of those,
two point seven million around were draftees, meaning that they
were forced to go, and in most cases it would
be a crime for them to refuse to serve the war.
Regardless of their ideological or political affiliations. There are cases
(06:06):
where you could be a conscientious objector, for instance, a
pacifist or a so called pacifist like the Quakers. Lindon
laruche was raised a Quaker, which will be important a
little bit later today's show. Or Muhammad Ali who was
a conscientious objector. Yeah, and so conscientious objection is a
(06:27):
genuine thing, but there were a lot of people who
high tailed it to Canada, for instance, because they felt
like they wouldn't be able to make a case for
conscientious objection, that they would have been popped into the
shaking bake system and then sent off to die in
the jungle. That's how a lot of people looked at it. Yeah,
especially towards the end of the Vietnam conflict, as as
(06:52):
the propaganda and the truth of the situation was coming forward,
and many many, many other people, as you can tell
from the statistics, about seventy of the forces there volunteered
or we're already career military, and not all of these
(07:13):
people came back. We discussed this briefly in our episode
on the allegations of POWs left behind in Vietnam, which
is still a contentious topic of conversation, right because there's
simply not enough proof one way or the other, unfortunately,
(07:34):
And we know that of the people who went to
the roughly two point seven million, not everybody made it home.
That's the reality. But we have the actual numbers to right, Yeah,
one out of every ten Americans who served in Vietnam
was in some way a casualty. There was somewhere between
fifty eight thousand and two d and twenty that were killed,
(07:59):
just killed while they were there, and then another three
hundred and four thousand that were wounded. And that's an
estimate there, right. Yeah. The oldest and this is again
just on the U. S side, The oldest person on
the U. S side killed was sixty two years old.
Of the people who were killed, sixty one percent, more
(08:19):
than half were younger than twenty one Wow, And more
than eleven thousand of those killed were younger than twenty
and five people who were killed in Vietnam were only
sixteen years old. That's again on the American side. It's
very important because there are a lot of people under
sixteen years old that died that were not on the
(08:42):
American side, that were civilians that we're simply trying to
live their lives. So let's look at the Vietnamese side.
The US military estimates that between two hundred thousand and
two hundred fifty thousand South Vietnamese soldiers died in the war.
And in nineteen Vietnam released its official estimate of war casualties,
(09:06):
and it's cited as many as two million civilians on
both sides, the North Vietnamese and South Vietnamese side, and
they said an addition, there were one point one million
North Vietnamese and Viet Kong soldier casualties. That is unthinkable.
It's a blood bath. Yeah. Well, you know, the overall
(09:29):
tonnage of bombs that were dropped during the Vietnam War
exceeds that of if you add up most of World
War two, of just if you think about the the
amount of munition that was used there, it exceeds almost
all of World War Two, which is insane, and in
many cases some of that ordinance remains allows right, right,
(09:54):
and the US conducted secret illegal operations in Cambodia and
Laos particular. A lot of people here in the US
agreed with the war, and a lot of people did not.
And this is where we hit upon the concept of deserters.
Deserters would be a little bit different from draft dodgers. Yes, yeah,
(10:18):
So if you're a draft dodger, your number gets called up,
they pull your card and you say, for one reason
or another, forget this, I'm out of here. I'm going
to Canada and going into Europe. I'm gonna head out
for the Southern continent, you know. And there were organizations
(10:39):
set up to assist people that wanted to dodge the draft.
That's a that's a pejorative kind of a draft dodger.
But like they wanted to, um, what what is a
better way? They did not want to participate in a
war with which they did not agree. Oh there you go.
But yeah, they they just they disagreed. Um. But if
we're going to talk about what a deserter is an
(11:01):
actual deserter, this is um. The military has a classification
for this, and it is that it's any person that's
been absent without leave a service member mind you, uh,
for more than thirty days. Thirty days or less, you're
a wall, right, yes, exactly, And you have to be
an active member of the military to be considered a deserter.
(11:23):
And desertion is something that occurs in almost every war. Yes,
it's it's often looked down upon. It's seen as an
unpatriotic move, to say the least, and at times it's
seen as tremendously unethical. Right, the idea of being that
(11:46):
someone has already to some extent agreed to serve in
a military and then they have gone back on their
word or the vow they took, the oath they took,
and Vietnam was no different. In fact, quite a few
people deserted during Vietnam. Yeah. According to reports from nineteen
seventy two from uh let's see July nineteen sixty six.
(12:10):
Until November nineteen seventy two, around four hundred and twenty
three thousand United States military personnel were classified as deserters.
Now again they've been classified as deserters. It doesn't mean
that that's necessarily, you know, whatever the situation they're going through.
Those are very they're varying to a large extent, but
(12:31):
um they're classified that way by the military. Now, uh,
let's see, by July of nineteen seventy two, according to
this report, a large number of these people were quote
returned to military control. That's a three hundred and ninety
one thousand of the four hundred and twenty three thousand,
so they were returned to military control. And it's interesting
(12:53):
because this around this time frame nineteen sixty six to
nineteen seventy two, this is when the US military began
even try king these numbers because they had been relatively
low in the past. If you if you look at
World War two, there were sixteen point three million Americans
who served in some capacity in the military during World
(13:14):
War Two, and there were only an estimated forty thousand
deserters at that time. But again, like, when do those numbers?
When are those numbers put forth? Is it after you've
returned a lot of the other ones to military control?
Are they still considered deserters in that number? It gets
a little ficiy because they weren't tracking it very well, right, Yeah,
(13:35):
And again these are official numbers which will almost always
differ from actual numbers, especially when you get into the
big government stuff. When whenever a government reports bad news,
about itself. Yeah, there's going to be a difference between
what what is officially said and what actually happened. But
(14:00):
let's not get lost in the numbers, right, Let's let's
explore these deserters as people. They didn't one day, well,
not to speculate too much, but most of them did
not one day say you know, I gave it a shot. Uh,
I'm just gonna I'm just gonna hide out. These people,
(14:24):
being rational, intelligent beings, had a series of desires and
motivations and fears and ambitions that drove them to commit
this act of desertion. But what are those reasons? What
are those motivations? Will get to that after a word
(14:45):
from our sponsor, we're back. And the first reason for
desertion is incredibly dare I say, painfully apparent. It is
the fear of physical harm or death. That's the one
that stands right out. Like, Hey, for instance, I'm born
(15:08):
in Nebraska, right, and I was easily going to live
most of my life in my small town. I was
gonna go watch the local high school or college games.
And now because someone I never met in Washington, d C.
Has a problem with Vietnam, now here, I am I
(15:31):
don't know these people. I don't speak Vietnamese. That guy
next to me got shot in the head. This is terrible,
that's understandable. And people have people deserted for fear of
being the next head shot at times. Right, and then
the calculation, Again, this is not to deride people were
attempting to illustrate the psychological process. Uh, they reached the
(15:57):
point where the instinct for self preservation outweighed the social
obligation to do one's duty or the ideological belief that
what they're doing is more important than their safety. Right. Yeah,
And I'm so glad you mentioned that, because that's another
reason for desertion. Right, ideological differences. Maybe I don't agree
(16:18):
that the way of life we are fighting for, you know,
the stated goals of removing communism or saving this country
from communist and invaders, Maybe I don't agree with it, right, Yeah,
maybe maybe you agreed with it originally, right when you
signed up in northern California or Oregon or something, and
(16:40):
then you went to the war and you saw what
was happening on the ground, and you said, this is
not what I believe to be. Just I'm not afraid
of dying, but I will not be a part of
this thing with which I disagree. Yeah, and that that's
a whole other situation there. When you're looking at the
actual operations that occurred in some of the tragedies and
(17:02):
massacres that were h it's true that we're perpetrated by
the U. S. Military, and it's unfortunate fact and sometimes
perpetrated by factions of the U. S. Military without the approval. Yes, oh,
absolutely larger entities, but yes, those atrocities did occur. A
(17:25):
third reason for an individual to desert would be a
little bit more mercenary, an opportunity for a new life,
for celebrity, for material goods, material gain, or for profit. So,
for example, you can think of the stories of people
(17:46):
in the Korean War. There have been a couple of
guys who deserted to the DPRK, to the Democratic People's
Republic of Korea, and when they deserted, they were occasionally
treated like celebrities. They were the bad Americans and the
propaganda films, they were literally movie stars. Yeah, it did
(18:08):
not end well for them, to be clear about that.
I think one guy recently was I believe he was
allowed to see his mother before she passed, she lived
his He lived most of his life in North Korea.
But those are the reasons. Fear of physical harm don't
kill me. Ideological differences. I disagree with the concept or
(18:33):
the motivations for this war, or the opportunity, the self
serving opportunity to you know, be famous, to get paid. Okay, Yeah,
and those are I mean, there are nuances to all.
But let's let's look at the other side of this
(18:53):
war as well. There was not just a physical side
of this large proxy war between capitalism and communism. There
was an ideological side, and war was functioning as a business.
War has always been about resource extraction, control, suppression, management,
(19:16):
et cetera. And deserters were another resource to be exploited.
Oh yes, by other countries, by by enemies of the state. Yeah,
for the USSR and communism at large, deserters are fantastic,
(19:36):
especially if they come over to your side. The best
anti war advertisements are always going to be images of
a wonderful life somehow better on the other side of
the trenches, the other side of the conflict. In the US,
for instance, of you'll see propaganda that touts amenities like
we have refrigerators, we have new automobiles. Why are you fighting?
(19:58):
You can buy four kinds of ham are grocery stores.
Think about how much food you can cook with this microwave?
M m m exactly. You know this idea of selling
again in the American dream, the retrofuturistic Jetson's life. Another
thing that is enormously beneficial from a propaganda perspective is
(20:21):
testimony from deserters actual word of mouth. Don't believe this
advertisement about the microwave. Oh, I don't believe. I don't know.
I don't believe that at all. You know why, because
I've seen it before and that all that microwave does
is burn your food and it just makes things soggy.
Don't listen to them. Join the revolution, yeah, whatever that
(20:41):
revolution might be at the time. Yeah, spot on. You
will tend to believe a person more so than an idea,
especially depending on how that person is presented to you.
There you go. So this is a crucial ideological tool
for the forces opposing the US in the Indo China
Vietnam conflict. Often these two propaganda opportunities were combined in
(21:06):
anti US operations. A deserter laments the injustices of the
war and imperialistic US culture overall, and then pivots to
tout the freedom they encountered after crossing over. That freedom
might not be what the Western world would think of
his freedom. It might not be necessarily freedom of speech.
(21:29):
It might be portrayed as freedom to join the great
collective pushing in for a better world, or something like that.
You know, but what about European nations. A lot of
times European nations are they want to be seen as
neutral parties when there's something like this going on, some
kind of conflict of this nature, or or maybe they
want to be a safe haven where either a deserter
(21:53):
or otherwise could come and you know, live in their land, um,
just to show that there or not on either side
really of the conflict, like you can come here, We'll
give you safe passage. You know, you can stay here
for X number of days or weeks or years, um.
And just to show that they can act on their
own accord and not be influenced by again usually the
(22:15):
US or whichever whichever countries in the power right, like
the old Disney Pinocchio, I have no strings. I can
act unilaterally, yes, and we will help you out. But
we also won't. You know, we won't. We won't really
help or hurt you, but we'll give you safe haven, right, Yeah,
a refugee status perhaps, or a a visa. In Sweden
(22:40):
in particular, many deserters joined something called the American Deserters Committee,
named in what kind of I can only imagine is
a burst of creativity. Yes, sorry, that's maybe it's they
had other stuff going on. I'm sure they didn't spend
you know, a week workshopping the name. Yeah, and there
were American Deserters Committees throughout several countries that kind of
(23:03):
popped up to do a similar thing. So what were
they doing. Well, they really just wanted to have some
kind of united front for deserters voice, for everyone to
speak in unison, right like, all deserters together. This is
this is us. We we are we have a powerful voice. Ah. Yes,
(23:23):
we are now a voting block of some sort or
we can unite. And now it's not just one or
two of us occasionally on uh anti war television spots.
It's a huge group of us, all at once a
stage protest. Yeah, and we can issue a statement from us,
(23:45):
not just from me, um Matt the deserter. Good call,
I didn't even think about that. It sounds so much
more official. Uncle Sam was predictably concerned, very much so,
because there sards for the US when it comes to
deserters from the war, and one of the it's it's
(24:07):
tough to say which is more important, but we can
walk through a couple of them in no particular order.
Then public opinion support for the war is incredibly fragile.
On the domestic front. The role of the media in
the Vietnam War, especially as it escalated, cannot be overstated.
This was not World War Two, where information was often
(24:30):
carefully managed for the domestic front. Journalists were out there,
sixty something of them got killed in the process, but
they were showing things that the American public would not
expect to see, and in many cases was not supposed
to see, would not normally see in any kind of
conflict like this. And because of this, the US was
(24:55):
unable to entirely suppress the flow of domestic in information
from domestic sources, much less suppressed the flow of anti
war messages from abroad. Can't It's tough to scramble a
short wave radio, you know what I mean. And there
was a tremendous and plausible, very well founded concern that
(25:17):
anti war movements in the US could trigger massive domestic unrest.
We're talking about the fall of states and follow the
rule of law, and that if the American public sympathized
with deserters who could not return home and who also
implicitly avoided the legal consequences of desertion, then the powder
(25:41):
head would explode. People would watch this and say, these
people deserve to come back to our homeland. And I
guess our homeland is not as powerful as it wants
us to believe. Right, if the ideological foundations begin to crumble,
then every thing does. It sounds kind of abstract, but
(26:02):
I think you're right. Yeah, I don't know. People are
so weird, you know, like there's so many things that
if we if we attempted to explain to an extraterrestrial civilization,
we would sound insane. Oh hey, welcome, let me take
you two. Our leaders hop in this we call the car.
(26:22):
And then the aliens like, why are we stopping? Oh
we have to wait for this thing to change colors?
Why there's no one here. It's it's just the thing
we do. Man. Be cool, Be cool. We're on the
way to see the president. Wait, hold on, are you
saying Are you saying that I shouldn't follow traffic signals
if there's no one around, I cannot legally I agree
(26:42):
with that. No, I'm using it as just a poor example. No, No,
it's not worrivable. It's weird because we'll we'll sit. I
think most deaf has a as a great line about
that on on Black Star when um they're quoting up
Home in one of the songs where a guy says,
(27:03):
we were sitting three deep into traffic stop talking about
how brainwashed some of our brothers and sisters are while
we waited for a green light to tell us when
to go. It sounds way better when when you hear
the yeah and there's a nice beat behind it. Yeah.
But this, I mean, we're we're pointing out, hopefully that
(27:24):
the ideological things, the programmed behaviors of people are very
easily normalized and accepted, and it doesn't take as much
as you might think to disrupt those things. Right, we're gullible.
How many people did you see wearing a tie today?
Why do they do that? What does a tie do?
What's the point? What's the point of a tie? Okay,
(27:47):
so no, you're good. You're good on my mind for
a while. I get it, man, I feel the same way.
I'm just not as vocal about it. I need to start,
you know, saying the things I think I feel like.
I like saying that ties are silly is maybe not
the best way to start a revolution. But anyway, ideology aside. Sorry,
(28:08):
I went off the rails on that one. That, uh,
there are other things that are perhaps more material. Oh yeah,
the other The next one has to do with triangulation. Really, so,
let's imagine that you are another country, right, You're an
intelligence officer for another country, and there's a group of
American deserters. You you meet one of them, and you
(28:30):
start talking to them. Maybe you even let's say capture them,
or maybe maybe you don't even have to capture. Maybe
you just have some drinks with them at a r
H and you get intelligence from this person. You're essentially
interrogating them, right, one individual, one small group of individuals,
and you get any and all relevant information that you
(28:52):
can from these people. Operation aims programs, both ongoing ones
that are occurring right now, ones from the past. You
can get all hinds of details about your enemy with
somebody like this. And then here's the deal I said triangulation.
You take that information you've gathered, then you compare and
contrast it to another individual, perhaps that you met at
(29:14):
another bar or that was also captured. Okay, question them separately. Yeah,
and now you've got leads. You've got real leads. You
can you can decide what is probably bunk, what is
probably real. Um, I don't know. It's a it's a
gold mine for an intelligence mind. Yeah, yeah, because then
(29:35):
you would be able to falsify misinformation. Oh yeah, right,
unless the people you were questioning already had an established
story or narrative, you would ultimately be able to find
out what they were thinking, where they were going. And
this can lead to all these massive insights. And there's
a sticky think here. It's a it's logical then in
(30:00):
a world of rational actors, which all nations and states are,
It's logical then that you could be in a situation
as a leader of a country where you can rationalize
the death of a single prisoner or deserter because it
can be framed as a effective way, albeit brutal, an
(30:21):
effective way of saving the lives of multiple other people.
And when we say rationalize the death of a deserter
a prisoner. That doesn't just mean abandoning them, leaving them
in the cold, or throwing them to the wolves. That
also could mean sending one of your own people to
get rid of them. Possibility. Yeah, it's an unfortunate comparison,
(30:45):
but I think it works of the mafia. If you
join the mafia in some capacity or another, or let's
just say an organized crime association, leaving that group is
probably not a good idea, just because of for that saint,
for the information that you have, for the loose end
that you become. You know, Can I make a confession
(31:07):
to you, man, I have never seen The Sopranos? What
is it good? I love it? Do you really? I really?
Did you have seen it? Do I have? I've seen
it twice all the way through. Should I watch it?
I mean I would recommend it. What do you think? Anyone?
Do you Sopranos? Yeah, Tony, I read the WICKI does that? Sure?
(31:31):
That's all you need? Paul, Paul Paul? Or did you
watch the Sopranos? Oh? I didn't watch it either. It's
classic HBO. It's like, all right, I will watch it.
You are the one who told me to watch the wire. Yeah. Wow,
I was one of those guys. Huh no, do the
(31:51):
wire is so good? Paul, you gotta watch the Wire.
Man is so good? It really was. It was great.
But yeah, I like the out of it so that
I think your comparison holds up this idea of Omerta,
this idea of silence above all right, the idea that
this is a one way entry organization that does apply,
(32:16):
maybe not to all militaries, maybe not even to the U. S. Military,
but that applies to a lot of things when we
start talking about the murky world of government secrecy. And
then deserters are also very very useful as another form
of propaganda. Propaganda advertised two soldiers in the field, actively
(32:37):
occurring while soldiers are trying to fight, like in a battle. Yeah,
and there were radio stations that would bombard people with
broadcasting several of several of you listening to today's episode,
maybe Vietnam veterans, and we would be intensely interested to
hear whether you personally encountered this sort of propaganda. Some
(33:04):
something like Hanoy Hannah Whenever, which would release these broadcasts
in English telling soldiers how useless, the u S side
of the war was, and how dumb it was to
be there. So imagine you're up to your waist and
mud and filth, and you're marching your feed, rotting in
(33:24):
your socks. The rain hasn't stopped for three days, and
at this point everybody knows it's it's just not going
to Some of your friends and acquaintances have just died.
And then you hear a radio broadcast featuring a soldier
who sounds like he could be from your hometown in
Nebraska and Kansas and Oregon in California, and they're talking
(33:45):
about the injustices of war, the freedom of life in
neutral Sweden or Europe, the ideological struggle and progress occurring
in communist Russia. How much more marching do you have
in you with all these things bombarding you? What is
the limit? That's where that first one, the public opinion
(34:07):
and the ideological foundations are so important, because if you
don't have, if you don't have that stuff as just steal,
if that stuff is not steal in your mind, then
maybe your chips away enough to get you to go. Yeah.
And in many cases we must be said that that
(34:29):
kind of attempt at brainwashing might just make somebody more
resolute in their existing convictions, and I'm sure that has happened.
But due to these concerns, which again are not specific
to the Vietnam War, they echo throughout history, and they're
not specific to the US either. They echo throughout cultures.
(34:52):
Due to these concerns, countries have legal punishments for the
act of desertion, incredibly hard punishments. In the US, any
person found guilty of desertion or attempt to desert shall
be punished. If the offense is committed in a time
of war, they will be punished by death or such
(35:13):
other punishment as a court martial might direct. But if
the desertion or attempt to desert occurs at any other time,
by such punishment other than death, as a court martial
may direct. What that means is, if we're in a
war and you run away, technically you're just gonna get shot.
It's the death penalty. Yeah, if you you might get
(35:35):
court martialed and sentenced to several years in jail or
something like that. And in some cases in the Vietnam War,
there would be attempts to negotiate with deserters where people
would say, through one entity or another, they would say, hey, well,
if you agree to come with us voluntarily, then you know,
(35:56):
just have a year in prison. Dishonorable this charge. Go
on with your life. We get it, war as hell,
come in from the cold. But still it's tough to
believe people when they say things like that, especially if
you know legally it is a death sentence. Julia Songs,
(36:20):
just come on over, man, it's gonna be fine. We're
going to treat you well. What's ecuadour goad that we
ain't got? Oh too soon, too soon, We should do
an update on him soon. But with all this in
in play, we have to ask ourselves, how far would
Uncle Sam go to by hook or by crook bring
(36:41):
its soldiers home? And we'll find out right after a
word from our sponsor. Here's where it gets crazy. The
US went above and beyond all legal thresholds and attempts
to survey and or apprehend deserters with minimum publicity. Absolutely
(37:07):
the one of the top priorities of of let's say
the goals here were to avoid propaganda of successful desertion.
So if we don't want anyone to know that people
have deserted and they got away with it, like, let's
keep that to a minimum at least. And it was
(37:27):
also a thing where it's probably not a good idea
to actually go out and assassinate deserters, Like that's probably
a bad idea because this is you know, you turn
them into a martyr of sorts. And again I'm speaking
from the side of the the intelligence system within the
United States, like this is what you're imagining, Um, that
would just it would totally fuel the fire for anti
(37:47):
war protests and the activists that are already inside the
United States fullmenting these feelings of anti war UM. And
this led to something that we researched this week called
Operation Chaos. Yes, yes, it's through the intelligence agencies were
in quite a pickle, a rock and a hard place
(38:09):
type deliver. You don't want deserters to flout the law right,
and you don't want them to be successful in their desertion,
and you certainly don't want other people to know that
they can do any of that. But you also don't
want to be known as a government that actively goes
out and kills its own did Neither of these are
(38:34):
particularly good looks. So Operation Chaos was formed a special
Operations Group within the CIA, and it was secret for
a while for a long time after it was closed
down because it it only functioned for a number of years, right, Yeah,
it was established in August of ninety seven and it
(38:57):
was then active for six full years. And the stated
purpose here was to collect, coordinate, evaluate, and report on
foreign contacts with American dissidents. And for it, they collected
information on dissident Americans and they did that via the
FBI domestically. So if they want to get information on
(39:19):
dissidents who were within the United States, they use the
FBI because that's their purpose. To who's on the mailing
list for this communist newsletter? Yeah, yeah, exactly, And then uh,
I guess thankfully for these for this intelligence community. There
are so many active military stations overseas in other countries
that they are just using these stations to collect information
(39:41):
on let's say, the local dissidents, the local American dissidents,
the local would be expats. Right, So, how how many
people were involved with this on the espionage side, Well,
you heard us say fifty two people at the top.
There were officially fifty two staff members working on Operation
Chaos officially. Well, yeah, because you had, there were there
(40:03):
were operatives. I'm gonna go out on a limb and
say they were probably operatives who were not known in
any official capacity or maybe even recorded anywhere, just a
friend of a friend perhaps just I mean, in in
any undercover operation, there's going to be a few of those.
If you're just actors assets, yeah, you know what, I think,
(40:27):
you're absolutely right, or a few people who may not
know that they are assets are helping the operation. Right,
they just run a local newspaper there, they're a photographer
who happens to have a mysterious but loaded benefactor would
like to buy some photos. Jeez, that's how it happens.
So they they successfully did this right for years, they
(40:51):
created files on thousands of US citizens, officially American citizens,
and then within these there are the names of over
three hundred thousand people in organizations that were associated with
those people. Just to be clear, this is an active conspiracy. Yeah,
the government is the conspirator in this case. But this
(41:15):
is illegal. They're not supposed to be doing it, and
they sure did. I mean, it's not as bad as
the n s A from a couple of years back
and currently, but you know, it's not great, all right,
I mean it feels weird to split these hairs. Yes,
but the argument used to justify these actions was very,
(41:36):
very similar to the argument used today to justify the
essays warrantless access to anything you do online in theory,
anyone you associate with and anyone they associate with, and
on and on and on. Kevin Bacon pops up sooner
than you think in this game and echelon five eyes forever. Amen,
Oh boy, do you think we have records? Come on,
(42:00):
remember we used to joke about it intern at the
n s A. If someone was listening to us by
this point, we have like an associate producer, or there's
there's somebody that guy's uh, that poor guy or girl,
that poor kid is just so bored, right, maybe it's
a junior officer. Do you think we got? Oh man,
moving on up? All right, you know what, I'll take it.
(42:22):
And hey, if you're listening, I don't know if you
can write in, but I feel free to do so.
We would love, we would love to hear from you.
And also, if you know my internet history, friendly stranger,
you'll see that I'm really into cauliflower recipes, So send
a few my way, cauliflower is amazing. Okay, we're talking
(42:46):
about the food, right, Yeah, the food, not eganism, not
a weird thing. I actually love cooking with cauliflower. No.
Nol does as well. I believe very good. I'm a
broccoli guy, but you know, you know, I'm trying to
get into more vegetables. Man, Rockley is my first love. Dude.
Food wise, this took a third. We're just trying to
(43:07):
prove that we are innocuous to the n s A.
And we have an opportunity to attempt to that because
we are aware that these programs exist. The people being
surveiled had very strong suspicions and in many cases very
strong circumstantial evidence, but for the most part, they had
(43:28):
no proof of what was happening. They had no opportunity
to be like, hey, yeah, you know, and I'm not
great on the war, but have you heard about cauliflower.
They couldn't do any of that endearing stuff, and most people,
even in the modern day, didn't have any idea what
was happening. We learned about this through a book called
(43:49):
Operation Chaos. The Vietnam deserters who fought the CIA brainwashers
and themselves that's a title. Yeah, it's it's pretty specific.
In this book, the author Matthews Sweet outlines the strange
and often contradictory accounts from Vietnam deserters who joined the
a d C that we mentioned there in Sweden, and
(44:09):
he also asked them about their opinions regarding intelligence agencies
from the US, Russia, and Sweden, all of whom infiltrated
their group at some point in some shape fashion re
form and then later infiltrated the subsequent extremist offshoots of
the A d C. Because Operation Chaos, as as you
(44:33):
outlined earlier, matt is an umbrella term domestic monitoring, foreign monitoring,
all sort of for the larger aim. The aspects of
Operation Chaos that Matthew Sweet focuses on our exclusively the
stories of the deserters living abroad, and he tracks them
(44:58):
down those who are still alive, and he asked them
to tell their stories. He also asked members of foreign
intelligence agencies to tell their stories if they can right
and the U s Intelligence Agency, the community in the
US had a sustained effort to not only infiltrate these
deserter organizations, but to repatriate deserters. They're the ones who
(45:22):
would say, hey, no harm, no foul, just to come back,
who can probably get you out of jail in a
year dishonorable discharge. But you can go on with your life.
All you have to do is say that you made
a mistake publicly, that you regret it. Still Team America
and we're all good. Have you seen the show, Barry? Yes? Yeah, yeah, yeah?
(45:45):
Are you a fan? Yeah? You did something just now
that totally reminded me of I forget his name. He's
the super nice guy who's one of the bad guys.
He's bald. Hey, Barry, what's going on? Just let you know?
You know they're gonna kill you, so anyway, be careful.
I love that guy. That's one of my favorite characters
(46:05):
in this shows. What you call alopecia. He's hairless. Yeah,
that that guy is for me a scene steeler because
everyone he meets. And this is not spoiling the show
for you. This guy is a a gangster who does
horrific things. Did he my country? He ever did anything horrific?
(46:28):
I couldn't even tell you. And this is we don't
even have to talk about this man. I just all
I could think about was that for a split second
and then it just reverberated. Yeah, because well, the most
endearing thing about that dude is everyone he meets is
described as a super nice guy. He's a super nice guy,
especially Berry though, Barry, do you want some juice? Yeah,
(46:50):
I've got to go back and rewatch it. If you
haven't watched the do do check it out because it's
it's a fantastic show and it's not Bill Hayters in it,
but it's it's not really a comedy. Is fantastic? Yeah? Yeah,
the comedy parts are pretty much that guy that we
just mentioned. And did you know that other gangster is
(47:11):
the bad guy from Tree Detectives. Yeah, man, now I'm impressed.
Oh yes, anyway, yeah yeah, yeah. So graphic widespread abuse
is a power by the intelligence agencies, not just the US,
also Russian Sweden. So they wanted to the US wanted
to repatriot these deserters, suppress or nullify their anti war messages. Right,
(47:38):
And in this book, Matthew Sweet explores the explores the
facts through statistics, but then primarily through anecdotes and accounts
of the deserters and the other players on the field.
So well, who, what's our Who's who? If we were
(48:03):
to do Who's who? What are some of the main
players in this well one is well. One of the
deserters is Chuck on en O N A N and
he he joined the the U. S. Marines when he
was a bit younger than He ended up deserting to
Sweden via Iceland with this a d C. And um
(48:24):
the other information that was in the book. There's a
little section at the front of this book that gives
you kind of a rundown of the characters, and it
said he's a now a big fan of medical marijuana. Right. Yeah.
If you read sweets initial encounters with the guy when
he gets to his house, uh, he's The author spends
(48:46):
some time describing how this dude thinks marijuana is going
to save the world, and how he's going to start
this growing operation, and how he's extremely uncomfortable because I
think at some point while Matthew Sweets is talking to
this guy, a drug deal occurs. It's like, I think
someone comes to buy marijuana, and this is this is
(49:11):
one guy. There's there are other ones. One of the
big players, and one of the most controversial, is a
fellow named Michael Vale. Yes, this is I guess the
leader of the the a d C, the American Deserters Committee,
and he was considered by some to be the resputant
(49:32):
of the a d C. And this guy was suspected
of being a CIA infiltrator. He used interrogation and breakdown
techniques on people, so he was known for breaking down
would be members of the a d C or people
trying to join the a d C. These are people
(49:53):
who have already deserted on the basis of their politics
or their beliefs, reducing them to tears uh winnowing way
their personalities so he could remake them a new and
a lot of people followed him. He had disciples, you know,
a lot of people hated the guy. And using those
sorts of techniques, of course, lends some credence to the
(50:16):
idea that someone is a CIA infiltrator works for an
intelligence agency. But what becomes apparent very quickly here is
that these people were all accusing each other. No one
was dedicated enough to the cause, no one was ideological enough.
Everyone could be a mole. The paranoia was definitely running
(50:37):
high because there was another gentleman named Bob Burlingham, he
went by Arlo Jacobs. For part of that time, he
was a student radical, a weatherman if you will, part
of the Weather Underground, and he was suspected of being
a CIA infiltrator as well by other members of the group.
It's the hip new thing to do, yeah, um. And
(50:59):
then we get into the actual spies, the people who
are confirmed intelligence officers like Richard Ober who was pretty
much the head of Operation Chaos, or at least in
some ways the functional head of it, right, And he
was considered by a lot of others to be paranoid
and secretive in his own workings, which again, you know,
(51:20):
if you're running an operation like that that's full of
secrecy and lies, you've got to be pretty paranoid, right, right.
And he expected the same out of the people who
worked with and for him, you know. And for his part,
he will argue, and he does argue in the book.
I believe that the mission was entirely meant to surveil
(51:43):
and collect information, not to do any sort of skullduggery
or wet work or kidnapping or assassination or any of
that black bag hoopla. I mean, the state of goals
are just that just vacuum up the information, right, who's
sending who notes, who's calling who? That's the official story. Yeah,
(52:07):
there's a there's another member of the intelligence community that
pops up in the book. Oh yeah, there's a gentleman
named Frank Rofalco, and he was he was working on
the Black Panther detail of Operation Chaos because they were
looking at what they considered to be extremist groups, and
they considered sections of the Black Panthers to be just that.
(52:27):
Um And this guy was the only officer so far,
at least according to Matthew Sweet that has spoken publicly
about Operation Chaos so far, and the stories continue. It's
it's just strange to learn that not only to this
operation go on successfully on a global scale for what
(52:50):
six years, more than half a decade, but there were
no repercussions for the US, right, A lot of the
deserters found their way back to the States or found
their way to a friendly country, and many of their
I mean, regardless of whether someone from the outside looking
(53:10):
in we call their lives successful or unsuccessful, the truth
is that their lives were tremendously affected by this program
right in ways that we probably still don't fully understand,
and there's still questions there. We don't know for sure
who was or wasn't a mole, who did or did
(53:32):
not provide information. Many of these people had torturous personal lives,
drug addiction, right, heavy debt, childhood's full of abuse, and
it's very difficult to speculate what motivated them and how
deep they got. We know something happened because the information
got out there, but we have to ask ourselves what
(53:57):
did this mean in the long run. Did it change
to the course of the Vietnam War? Probably not, probably not.
It's you know, in comparison to two point seven million soldiers,
it's not that many people. Were there any large movements
from groups that were helping out dissidents, I mean, it
doesn't seem to there's no at least there are not.
(54:18):
There aren't many. No. I can't think of a single
one where the United States took any kind of action
against a civilian group in another country because they were
aiding dissidents, at least not overtly. No. I mean, yeah,
that we would know about right, right, And it's common
to work through proxy groups and so on. But we
(54:40):
have to think beyond the events of Vietnam that still
have many unexplained things. Agent Orange is an example that
recurred during the Iraq War, at least allegations of exposure
to it. Is it possible that programs like this exist
now in the current wars the US is embroiled in
(55:00):
or I guess, since we don't call them wars anymore,
the current conflicts? Right, who is a the situation? Yeah?
Who is monitoring? Uh? These interactions? Why are people deserting
in the numbers that occurred during the Vietnam War? Probably not?
Probably not because there's not a draft. Yeah, but that
(55:24):
could change. Oh, that could absolutely change. It just takes
an act of Congress. Right, so we we wonder. We
have to wonder if there's more stuff they don't want
you to know, if there's an Operation Chaos two point
oh out there somewhere, and if so, what's it called. Currently,
the US military is comprised of volunteers, meaning that no
one is conscripted or drafted, and there are no laws
(55:48):
that compel a U. S citizen to serve mandatory time
in the armed forces. And that's that's not the same
in other countries. South Korea and Israel, for example, have
laws requiring sit aison's to serve in the military for
X amount of time. Absolutely, the one thing I would say.
In the US, it is still compulsory for all male
(56:08):
citizens to submit their information to the Selective Service system
within thirty days of their eighteenth birthday. And that's just
to make sure the Selective Service system remains in case
a draft is necessary. In Congress like puts the hammer
down and makes it happen, because, as Malcolm Gladwell so
eloquently explains in the Tipping Point, nothing seems like it
(56:30):
will ever happen until suddenly it does. Yeah, great point, Malcolm,
great point, Great point. Mr g Uh. Today we end
our episode with this, the this important point. Yes, there
is no draft going on now. There is no Operation
Chaos that we are aware of, even though the technological
(56:50):
abilities to do so are far and beyond what they
ever were before. In Vietnam. You know, we're all carrying
the average person is carrying a tiny spy in their pockets.
Two cameras at least, right, and how tough is it
to get in there? Who watches the watchman? All that jazz,
all that slow jazz, And what about on your wrist
(57:11):
if you got a smart watcher, who knows what? What
if you got a Google Home or an Amazon Echo
in your house, or a couple of security cameras. Don't please,
it's too late. Your TV have a camera on it?
Does your PlayStation have a microphone? You know what? Maybe
if they did, I would take better care of myself.
I'd eat more healthy food, you know I would. Uh,
(57:35):
that's where you'd start. That's where it'd started, the base level.
Check it out, I mean and kale, thank you please state.
But one other important thing to hit on here is
that in many cases, these deserters live on today somewhere right,
and they're real people. Are they perfect? No? Who is?
(57:56):
Some folks would consider them straight out traders. Other folks
would consider them the equivalent of freedom fighters. And there
are people who will make the argument that if they
broke the rules, the rules no longer apply to them.
But that goes into what sort of importance we place
on the rule of law, And it goes into, perhaps
(58:19):
even more importantly, what importance we place on the lawmakers
obeying the laws they create. Wow, So what do you
think about Operation Chaos? Do you have you read the book?
Do you know anything about it? Have you ever encountered
anyone who was a dissonant an American or otherwise. We'd
(58:41):
love to hear your stories. We'd love for you to
contact us and just talk to us about it. You
can find us on Twitter. You can find us on
Facebook where a conspiracy stuff on Instagram or conspiracy stuff Show.
You can find our website Stuff they Don't Want You
to Know dot com. You can also call us at
one eight three three st d w y t K
(59:02):
do it call us you might get on the error
after we get enough messages. We need more messages, honestly,
so like, stop what you're doing. Call us? Uh, I
don't know. If we sing we can sing a song
together or something, it will go to voicemail. Get weird
with it, yeah, get weird. We we We would love
you too. Um. If you don't want to do any
of that stuff, please send us an email. We are
(59:25):
conspiracy at how Stuff Works dot com
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to know. M
(00:24):
welcome back to the show. My name is Matt. They
call me Ben. We are joined, of course, with our
super producer Paul Decon on the ones and two's. Most importantly,
you are here, You are you, and that makes this
stuff they don't want you to know. That's what this is.
Brand new logo rocking feeling good. Yeah, that's true. We
(00:45):
have the six finger logo designed by the way, by
our super producer Paul Paul nice work, Sir, with consultation
from our graphic artist team. Yeah. Pam, Yeah, we can
your name, It's okay, Pam is awesome, Pam Peacock. Yeah.
And we have a situation here wherein it maybe deceptively
(01:10):
easy to think that there are only three or four
people involved in stuff they don't want you to know.
That could not be further from the truth, because this podcast,
like many many other things in the world, has an
entire team behind the curtain, actively working to make stuff
(01:35):
like this sound easy. I think we have the easiest
jobs on the team to be honest. Oh absolutely. We
We just get in here and ramble. Man, That's what
I do. You you do the hard stuff. I just
go whale bend. Guess what what I fell for? You
see there you go? No, no, no no. But the
(01:55):
reason we're bringing up this idea of a team that
often is not acknowledged is because today's episode dives into
something that could easily be seen as the um the
actions of just a few isolated people. Absolutely, maybe just
(02:17):
fifty two of them, perhaps as few as fifty two.
But as we're going to find, just like this podcast,
today's topic has many, many, many, many more people in play,
some of whom remain mysterious and unidentified today. If you're
(02:39):
listening to this show, then you probably won't be surprised.
Matt and I are going to go out on a
limb and assume you will not be surprised to learn
that most governments, at one point or another, love Them
or Hatum, have perpetrated secret, illegal programs against either their
citizens or citizens of another country. And since our show
(03:00):
is based in the US, we naturally tend to explore
stories based in this country. This one is new exception,
but it's one you may not have heard of before.
Today we're exploring a classified program known as Operation Chaos. Yes,
and to discuss this program, we need to take ourselves
back to nineteen fifty four onwards just a little bit there,
(03:24):
to the Second Indo China War. You probably don't know
it is that. You probably know it as the Vietnam War.
I know. That's how I was a little while ago.
It was a conflict between North and South Vietnam, which
were two separate countries at the time, and it lasted
from nineteen fifty four until nineteen seventy five. Now this
is distilling it like crazy, but this is just to
(03:47):
say what it is. And you probably already know this.
North Vietnam was a communist government. It was run by
a communist government, and they worked with these rebels in
South Vietnam who were called the Vietcong, and together they
attempted to overthrow the government of South Vietnam. And this
was a terrible, terrible conflict that cost the lives of
(04:12):
so many and we'll discuss that here shortly um but ultimately,
the physical combat took place in both South Vietnam and
North Vietnam. Laos and Cambodia, which are immediately to the
west of the Vietnam of Vietnam, that's right there, and
I guess spoiler alert. Ultimately the North Vietnamese were successful
in their attempts to overthrow the South Vietnamese government. Yeah. Yeah,
(04:36):
and along the way the US got involved. You may
have heard us reference earlier instances surrounding the the catalyst
that set the US on a path to war in
this part of the world, the most controversial one being
the Gulf of Tonkin incident, which did we do a
(04:59):
whole episode on that? Editor? Do we just do false flags?
We did false Flags and we rediscussed it at length,
but you know, maybe we could go deeper. Who knows?
Who knows? Check out the false Flags episode if you
have yet to do so. There's some pretty interesting stuff there.
For now, we're going to explore the not not the
(05:20):
entire Vietnam War, because this is the setup right to
Operation Chaos. We're going to look at the people the
US sent to wage this war. The Vietnam War, as
it's called in the US, used a conscription system, a draft,
and that is something that hasn't occurred since. Roughly two
(05:43):
point seven million US soldiers served in Vietnam, and of those,
two point seven million around were draftees, meaning that they
were forced to go, and in most cases it would
be a crime for them to refuse to serve the war.
Regardless of their ideological or political affiliations. There are cases
(06:06):
where you could be a conscientious objector, for instance, a
pacifist or a so called pacifist like the Quakers. Lindon
laruche was raised a Quaker, which will be important a
little bit later today's show. Or Muhammad Ali who was
a conscientious objector. Yeah, and so conscientious objection is a
(06:27):
genuine thing, but there were a lot of people who
high tailed it to Canada, for instance, because they felt
like they wouldn't be able to make a case for
conscientious objection, that they would have been popped into the
shaking bake system and then sent off to die in
the jungle. That's how a lot of people looked at it. Yeah,
especially towards the end of the Vietnam conflict, as as
(06:52):
the propaganda and the truth of the situation was coming forward,
and many many, many other people, as you can tell
from the statistics, about seventy of the forces there volunteered
or we're already career military, and not all of these
(07:13):
people came back. We discussed this briefly in our episode
on the allegations of POWs left behind in Vietnam, which
is still a contentious topic of conversation, right because there's
simply not enough proof one way or the other, unfortunately,
(07:34):
And we know that of the people who went to
the roughly two point seven million, not everybody made it home.
That's the reality. But we have the actual numbers to right, Yeah,
one out of every ten Americans who served in Vietnam
was in some way a casualty. There was somewhere between
fifty eight thousand and two d and twenty that were killed,
(07:59):
just killed while they were there, and then another three
hundred and four thousand that were wounded. And that's an
estimate there, right. Yeah. The oldest and this is again
just on the U. S side, The oldest person on
the U. S side killed was sixty two years old.
Of the people who were killed, sixty one percent, more
(08:19):
than half were younger than twenty one Wow, And more
than eleven thousand of those killed were younger than twenty
and five people who were killed in Vietnam were only
sixteen years old. That's again on the American side. It's
very important because there are a lot of people under
sixteen years old that died that were not on the
(08:42):
American side, that were civilians that we're simply trying to
live their lives. So let's look at the Vietnamese side.
The US military estimates that between two hundred thousand and
two hundred fifty thousand South Vietnamese soldiers died in the war.
And in nineteen Vietnam released its official estimate of war casualties,
(09:06):
and it's cited as many as two million civilians on
both sides, the North Vietnamese and South Vietnamese side, and
they said an addition, there were one point one million
North Vietnamese and Viet Kong soldier casualties. That is unthinkable.
It's a blood bath. Yeah. Well, you know, the overall
(09:29):
tonnage of bombs that were dropped during the Vietnam War
exceeds that of if you add up most of World
War two, of just if you think about the the
amount of munition that was used there, it exceeds almost
all of World War Two, which is insane, and in
many cases some of that ordinance remains allows right, right,
(09:54):
and the US conducted secret illegal operations in Cambodia and
Laos particular. A lot of people here in the US
agreed with the war, and a lot of people did not.
And this is where we hit upon the concept of deserters.
Deserters would be a little bit different from draft dodgers. Yes, yeah,
(10:18):
So if you're a draft dodger, your number gets called up,
they pull your card and you say, for one reason
or another, forget this, I'm out of here. I'm going
to Canada and going into Europe. I'm gonna head out
for the Southern continent, you know. And there were organizations
(10:39):
set up to assist people that wanted to dodge the draft.
That's a that's a pejorative kind of a draft dodger.
But like they wanted to, um, what what is a
better way? They did not want to participate in a
war with which they did not agree. Oh there you go.
But yeah, they they just they disagreed. Um. But if
we're going to talk about what a deserter is an
(11:01):
actual deserter, this is um. The military has a classification
for this, and it is that it's any person that's
been absent without leave a service member mind you, uh,
for more than thirty days. Thirty days or less, you're
a wall, right, yes, exactly, And you have to be
an active member of the military to be considered a deserter.
(11:23):
And desertion is something that occurs in almost every war. Yes,
it's it's often looked down upon. It's seen as an
unpatriotic move, to say the least, and at times it's
seen as tremendously unethical. Right, the idea of being that
(11:46):
someone has already to some extent agreed to serve in
a military and then they have gone back on their
word or the vow they took, the oath they took,
and Vietnam was no different. In fact, quite a few
people deserted during Vietnam. Yeah. According to reports from nineteen
seventy two from uh let's see July nineteen sixty six.
(12:10):
Until November nineteen seventy two, around four hundred and twenty
three thousand United States military personnel were classified as deserters.
Now again they've been classified as deserters. It doesn't mean
that that's necessarily, you know, whatever the situation they're going through.
Those are very they're varying to a large extent, but
(12:31):
um they're classified that way by the military. Now, uh,
let's see, by July of nineteen seventy two, according to
this report, a large number of these people were quote
returned to military control. That's a three hundred and ninety
one thousand of the four hundred and twenty three thousand,
so they were returned to military control. And it's interesting
(12:53):
because this around this time frame nineteen sixty six to
nineteen seventy two, this is when the US military began
even try king these numbers because they had been relatively
low in the past. If you if you look at
World War two, there were sixteen point three million Americans
who served in some capacity in the military during World
(13:14):
War Two, and there were only an estimated forty thousand
deserters at that time. But again, like, when do those numbers?
When are those numbers put forth? Is it after you've
returned a lot of the other ones to military control?
Are they still considered deserters in that number? It gets
a little ficiy because they weren't tracking it very well, right, Yeah,
(13:35):
And again these are official numbers which will almost always
differ from actual numbers, especially when you get into the
big government stuff. When whenever a government reports bad news,
about itself. Yeah, there's going to be a difference between
what what is officially said and what actually happened. But
(14:00):
let's not get lost in the numbers, right, Let's let's
explore these deserters as people. They didn't one day, well,
not to speculate too much, but most of them did
not one day say you know, I gave it a shot. Uh,
I'm just gonna I'm just gonna hide out. These people,
(14:24):
being rational, intelligent beings, had a series of desires and
motivations and fears and ambitions that drove them to commit
this act of desertion. But what are those reasons? What
are those motivations? Will get to that after a word
(14:45):
from our sponsor, we're back. And the first reason for
desertion is incredibly dare I say, painfully apparent. It is
the fear of physical harm or death. That's the one
that stands right out. Like, Hey, for instance, I'm born
(15:08):
in Nebraska, right, and I was easily going to live
most of my life in my small town. I was
gonna go watch the local high school or college games.
And now because someone I never met in Washington, d C.
Has a problem with Vietnam, now here, I am I
(15:31):
don't know these people. I don't speak Vietnamese. That guy
next to me got shot in the head. This is terrible,
that's understandable. And people have people deserted for fear of
being the next head shot at times. Right, and then
the calculation, Again, this is not to deride people were
attempting to illustrate the psychological process. Uh, they reached the
(15:57):
point where the instinct for self preservation outweighed the social
obligation to do one's duty or the ideological belief that
what they're doing is more important than their safety. Right. Yeah,
And I'm so glad you mentioned that, because that's another
reason for desertion. Right, ideological differences. Maybe I don't agree
(16:18):
that the way of life we are fighting for, you know,
the stated goals of removing communism or saving this country
from communist and invaders, Maybe I don't agree with it, right, Yeah,
maybe maybe you agreed with it originally, right when you
signed up in northern California or Oregon or something, and
(16:40):
then you went to the war and you saw what
was happening on the ground, and you said, this is
not what I believe to be. Just I'm not afraid
of dying, but I will not be a part of
this thing with which I disagree. Yeah, and that that's
a whole other situation there. When you're looking at the
actual operations that occurred in some of the tragedies and
(17:02):
massacres that were h it's true that we're perpetrated by
the U. S. Military, and it's unfortunate fact and sometimes
perpetrated by factions of the U. S. Military without the approval. Yes, oh,
absolutely larger entities, but yes, those atrocities did occur. A
(17:25):
third reason for an individual to desert would be a
little bit more mercenary, an opportunity for a new life,
for celebrity, for material goods, material gain, or for profit. So,
for example, you can think of the stories of people
(17:46):
in the Korean War. There have been a couple of
guys who deserted to the DPRK, to the Democratic People's
Republic of Korea, and when they deserted, they were occasionally
treated like celebrities. They were the bad Americans and the
propaganda films, they were literally movie stars. Yeah, it did
(18:08):
not end well for them, to be clear about that.
I think one guy recently was I believe he was
allowed to see his mother before she passed, she lived
his He lived most of his life in North Korea.
But those are the reasons. Fear of physical harm don't
kill me. Ideological differences. I disagree with the concept or
(18:33):
the motivations for this war, or the opportunity, the self
serving opportunity to you know, be famous, to get paid. Okay, Yeah,
and those are I mean, there are nuances to all.
But let's let's look at the other side of this
(18:53):
war as well. There was not just a physical side
of this large proxy war between capitalism and communism. There
was an ideological side, and war was functioning as a business.
War has always been about resource extraction, control, suppression, management,
(19:16):
et cetera. And deserters were another resource to be exploited.
Oh yes, by other countries, by by enemies of the state. Yeah,
for the USSR and communism at large, deserters are fantastic,
(19:36):
especially if they come over to your side. The best
anti war advertisements are always going to be images of
a wonderful life somehow better on the other side of
the trenches, the other side of the conflict. In the US,
for instance, of you'll see propaganda that touts amenities like
we have refrigerators, we have new automobiles. Why are you fighting?
(19:58):
You can buy four kinds of ham are grocery stores.
Think about how much food you can cook with this microwave?
M m m exactly. You know this idea of selling
again in the American dream, the retrofuturistic Jetson's life. Another
thing that is enormously beneficial from a propaganda perspective is
(20:21):
testimony from deserters actual word of mouth. Don't believe this
advertisement about the microwave. Oh, I don't believe. I don't know.
I don't believe that at all. You know why, because
I've seen it before and that all that microwave does
is burn your food and it just makes things soggy.
Don't listen to them. Join the revolution, yeah, whatever that
(20:41):
revolution might be at the time. Yeah, spot on. You
will tend to believe a person more so than an idea,
especially depending on how that person is presented to you.
There you go. So this is a crucial ideological tool
for the forces opposing the US in the Indo China
Vietnam conflict. Often these two propaganda opportunities were combined in
(21:06):
anti US operations. A deserter laments the injustices of the
war and imperialistic US culture overall, and then pivots to
tout the freedom they encountered after crossing over. That freedom
might not be what the Western world would think of
his freedom. It might not be necessarily freedom of speech.
(21:29):
It might be portrayed as freedom to join the great
collective pushing in for a better world, or something like that.
You know, but what about European nations. A lot of
times European nations are they want to be seen as
neutral parties when there's something like this going on, some
kind of conflict of this nature, or or maybe they
want to be a safe haven where either a deserter
(21:53):
or otherwise could come and you know, live in their land, um,
just to show that there or not on either side
really of the conflict, like you can come here, We'll
give you safe passage. You know, you can stay here
for X number of days or weeks or years, um.
And just to show that they can act on their
own accord and not be influenced by again usually the
(22:15):
US or whichever whichever countries in the power right, like
the old Disney Pinocchio, I have no strings. I can
act unilaterally, yes, and we will help you out. But
we also won't. You know, we won't. We won't really
help or hurt you, but we'll give you safe haven, right, Yeah,
a refugee status perhaps, or a a visa. In Sweden
(22:40):
in particular, many deserters joined something called the American Deserters Committee,
named in what kind of I can only imagine is
a burst of creativity. Yes, sorry, that's maybe it's they
had other stuff going on. I'm sure they didn't spend
you know, a week workshopping the name. Yeah, and there
were American Deserters Committees throughout several countries that kind of
(23:03):
popped up to do a similar thing. So what were
they doing. Well, they really just wanted to have some
kind of united front for deserters voice, for everyone to
speak in unison, right like, all deserters together. This is
this is us. We we are we have a powerful voice. Ah. Yes,
(23:23):
we are now a voting block of some sort or
we can unite. And now it's not just one or
two of us occasionally on uh anti war television spots.
It's a huge group of us, all at once a
stage protest. Yeah, and we can issue a statement from us,
(23:45):
not just from me, um Matt the deserter. Good call,
I didn't even think about that. It sounds so much
more official. Uncle Sam was predictably concerned, very much so,
because there sards for the US when it comes to
deserters from the war, and one of the it's it's
(24:07):
tough to say which is more important, but we can
walk through a couple of them in no particular order.
Then public opinion support for the war is incredibly fragile.
On the domestic front. The role of the media in
the Vietnam War, especially as it escalated, cannot be overstated.
This was not World War Two, where information was often
(24:30):
carefully managed for the domestic front. Journalists were out there,
sixty something of them got killed in the process, but
they were showing things that the American public would not
expect to see, and in many cases was not supposed
to see, would not normally see in any kind of
conflict like this. And because of this, the US was
(24:55):
unable to entirely suppress the flow of domestic in information
from domestic sources, much less suppressed the flow of anti
war messages from abroad. Can't It's tough to scramble a
short wave radio, you know what I mean. And there
was a tremendous and plausible, very well founded concern that
(25:17):
anti war movements in the US could trigger massive domestic unrest.
We're talking about the fall of states and follow the
rule of law, and that if the American public sympathized
with deserters who could not return home and who also
implicitly avoided the legal consequences of desertion, then the powder
(25:41):
head would explode. People would watch this and say, these
people deserve to come back to our homeland. And I
guess our homeland is not as powerful as it wants
us to believe. Right, if the ideological foundations begin to crumble,
then every thing does. It sounds kind of abstract, but
(26:02):
I think you're right. Yeah, I don't know. People are
so weird, you know, like there's so many things that
if we if we attempted to explain to an extraterrestrial civilization,
we would sound insane. Oh hey, welcome, let me take
you two. Our leaders hop in this we call the car.
(26:22):
And then the aliens like, why are we stopping? Oh
we have to wait for this thing to change colors?
Why there's no one here. It's it's just the thing
we do. Man. Be cool, Be cool. We're on the
way to see the president. Wait, hold on, are you
saying Are you saying that I shouldn't follow traffic signals
if there's no one around, I cannot legally I agree
(26:42):
with that. No, I'm using it as just a poor example. No, No,
it's not worrivable. It's weird because we'll we'll sit. I
think most deaf has a as a great line about
that on on Black Star when um they're quoting up
Home in one of the songs where a guy says,
(27:03):
we were sitting three deep into traffic stop talking about
how brainwashed some of our brothers and sisters are while
we waited for a green light to tell us when
to go. It sounds way better when when you hear
the yeah and there's a nice beat behind it. Yeah.
But this, I mean, we're we're pointing out, hopefully that
(27:24):
the ideological things, the programmed behaviors of people are very
easily normalized and accepted, and it doesn't take as much
as you might think to disrupt those things. Right, we're gullible.
How many people did you see wearing a tie today?
Why do they do that? What does a tie do?
What's the point? What's the point of a tie? Okay,
(27:47):
so no, you're good. You're good on my mind for
a while. I get it, man, I feel the same way.
I'm just not as vocal about it. I need to start,
you know, saying the things I think I feel like.
I like saying that ties are silly is maybe not
the best way to start a revolution. But anyway, ideology aside. Sorry,
(28:08):
I went off the rails on that one. That, uh,
there are other things that are perhaps more material. Oh yeah,
the other The next one has to do with triangulation. Really, so,
let's imagine that you are another country, right, You're an
intelligence officer for another country, and there's a group of
American deserters. You you meet one of them, and you
(28:30):
start talking to them. Maybe you even let's say capture them,
or maybe maybe you don't even have to capture. Maybe
you just have some drinks with them at a r
H and you get intelligence from this person. You're essentially
interrogating them, right, one individual, one small group of individuals,
and you get any and all relevant information that you
(28:52):
can from these people. Operation aims programs, both ongoing ones
that are occurring right now, ones from the past. You
can get all hinds of details about your enemy with
somebody like this. And then here's the deal I said triangulation.
You take that information you've gathered, then you compare and
contrast it to another individual, perhaps that you met at
(29:14):
another bar or that was also captured. Okay, question them separately. Yeah,
and now you've got leads. You've got real leads. You
can you can decide what is probably bunk, what is
probably real. Um, I don't know. It's a it's a
gold mine for an intelligence mind. Yeah, yeah, because then
(29:35):
you would be able to falsify misinformation. Oh yeah, right,
unless the people you were questioning already had an established
story or narrative, you would ultimately be able to find
out what they were thinking, where they were going. And
this can lead to all these massive insights. And there's
a sticky think here. It's a it's logical then in
(30:00):
a world of rational actors, which all nations and states are,
It's logical then that you could be in a situation
as a leader of a country where you can rationalize
the death of a single prisoner or deserter because it
can be framed as a effective way, albeit brutal, an
(30:21):
effective way of saving the lives of multiple other people.
And when we say rationalize the death of a deserter
a prisoner. That doesn't just mean abandoning them, leaving them
in the cold, or throwing them to the wolves. That
also could mean sending one of your own people to
get rid of them. Possibility. Yeah, it's an unfortunate comparison,
(30:45):
but I think it works of the mafia. If you
join the mafia in some capacity or another, or let's
just say an organized crime association, leaving that group is
probably not a good idea, just because of for that saint,
for the information that you have, for the loose end
that you become. You know, Can I make a confession
(31:07):
to you, man, I have never seen The Sopranos? What
is it good? I love it? Do you really? I really?
Did you have seen it? Do I have? I've seen
it twice all the way through. Should I watch it?
I mean I would recommend it. What do you think? Anyone?
Do you Sopranos? Yeah, Tony, I read the WICKI does that? Sure?
(31:31):
That's all you need? Paul, Paul Paul? Or did you
watch the Sopranos? Oh? I didn't watch it either. It's
classic HBO. It's like, all right, I will watch it.
You are the one who told me to watch the wire. Yeah. Wow,
I was one of those guys. Huh no, do the
(31:51):
wire is so good? Paul, you gotta watch the Wire.
Man is so good? It really was. It was great.
But yeah, I like the out of it so that
I think your comparison holds up this idea of Omerta,
this idea of silence above all right, the idea that
this is a one way entry organization that does apply,
(32:16):
maybe not to all militaries, maybe not even to the U. S. Military,
but that applies to a lot of things when we
start talking about the murky world of government secrecy. And
then deserters are also very very useful as another form
of propaganda. Propaganda advertised two soldiers in the field, actively
(32:37):
occurring while soldiers are trying to fight, like in a battle. Yeah,
and there were radio stations that would bombard people with
broadcasting several of several of you listening to today's episode,
maybe Vietnam veterans, and we would be intensely interested to
hear whether you personally encountered this sort of propaganda. Some
(33:04):
something like Hanoy Hannah Whenever, which would release these broadcasts
in English telling soldiers how useless, the u S side
of the war was, and how dumb it was to
be there. So imagine you're up to your waist and
mud and filth, and you're marching your feed, rotting in
(33:24):
your socks. The rain hasn't stopped for three days, and
at this point everybody knows it's it's just not going
to Some of your friends and acquaintances have just died.
And then you hear a radio broadcast featuring a soldier
who sounds like he could be from your hometown in
Nebraska and Kansas and Oregon in California, and they're talking
(33:45):
about the injustices of war, the freedom of life in
neutral Sweden or Europe, the ideological struggle and progress occurring
in communist Russia. How much more marching do you have
in you with all these things bombarding you? What is
the limit? That's where that first one, the public opinion
(34:07):
and the ideological foundations are so important, because if you
don't have, if you don't have that stuff as just steal,
if that stuff is not steal in your mind, then
maybe your chips away enough to get you to go. Yeah.
And in many cases we must be said that that
(34:29):
kind of attempt at brainwashing might just make somebody more
resolute in their existing convictions, and I'm sure that has happened.
But due to these concerns, which again are not specific
to the Vietnam War, they echo throughout history, and they're
not specific to the US either. They echo throughout cultures.
(34:52):
Due to these concerns, countries have legal punishments for the
act of desertion, incredibly hard punishments. In the US, any
person found guilty of desertion or attempt to desert shall
be punished. If the offense is committed in a time
of war, they will be punished by death or such
(35:13):
other punishment as a court martial might direct. But if
the desertion or attempt to desert occurs at any other time,
by such punishment other than death, as a court martial
may direct. What that means is, if we're in a
war and you run away, technically you're just gonna get shot.
It's the death penalty. Yeah, if you you might get
(35:35):
court martialed and sentenced to several years in jail or
something like that. And in some cases in the Vietnam War,
there would be attempts to negotiate with deserters where people
would say, through one entity or another, they would say, hey, well,
if you agree to come with us voluntarily, then you know,
(35:56):
just have a year in prison. Dishonorable this charge. Go
on with your life. We get it, war as hell,
come in from the cold. But still it's tough to
believe people when they say things like that, especially if
you know legally it is a death sentence. Julia Songs,
(36:20):
just come on over, man, it's gonna be fine. We're
going to treat you well. What's ecuadour goad that we
ain't got? Oh too soon, too soon, We should do
an update on him soon. But with all this in
in play, we have to ask ourselves, how far would
Uncle Sam go to by hook or by crook bring
(36:41):
its soldiers home? And we'll find out right after a
word from our sponsor. Here's where it gets crazy. The
US went above and beyond all legal thresholds and attempts
to survey and or apprehend deserters with minimum publicity. Absolutely
(37:07):
the one of the top priorities of of let's say
the goals here were to avoid propaganda of successful desertion.
So if we don't want anyone to know that people
have deserted and they got away with it, like, let's
keep that to a minimum at least. And it was
(37:27):
also a thing where it's probably not a good idea
to actually go out and assassinate deserters, Like that's probably
a bad idea because this is you know, you turn
them into a martyr of sorts. And again I'm speaking
from the side of the the intelligence system within the
United States, like this is what you're imagining, Um, that
would just it would totally fuel the fire for anti
(37:47):
war protests and the activists that are already inside the
United States fullmenting these feelings of anti war UM. And
this led to something that we researched this week called
Operation Chaos. Yes, yes, it's through the intelligence agencies were
in quite a pickle, a rock and a hard place
(38:09):
type deliver. You don't want deserters to flout the law right,
and you don't want them to be successful in their desertion,
and you certainly don't want other people to know that
they can do any of that. But you also don't
want to be known as a government that actively goes
out and kills its own did Neither of these are
(38:34):
particularly good looks. So Operation Chaos was formed a special
Operations Group within the CIA, and it was secret for
a while for a long time after it was closed
down because it it only functioned for a number of years, right, Yeah,
it was established in August of ninety seven and it
(38:57):
was then active for six full years. And the stated
purpose here was to collect, coordinate, evaluate, and report on
foreign contacts with American dissidents. And for it, they collected
information on dissident Americans and they did that via the
FBI domestically. So if they want to get information on
(39:19):
dissidents who were within the United States, they use the
FBI because that's their purpose. To who's on the mailing
list for this communist newsletter? Yeah, yeah, exactly, And then uh,
I guess thankfully for these for this intelligence community. There
are so many active military stations overseas in other countries
that they are just using these stations to collect information
(39:41):
on let's say, the local dissidents, the local American dissidents,
the local would be expats. Right, So, how how many
people were involved with this on the espionage side, Well,
you heard us say fifty two people at the top.
There were officially fifty two staff members working on Operation
Chaos officially. Well, yeah, because you had, there were there
(40:03):
were operatives. I'm gonna go out on a limb and
say they were probably operatives who were not known in
any official capacity or maybe even recorded anywhere, just a
friend of a friend perhaps just I mean, in in
any undercover operation, there's going to be a few of those.
If you're just actors assets, yeah, you know what, I think,
(40:27):
you're absolutely right, or a few people who may not
know that they are assets are helping the operation. Right,
they just run a local newspaper there, they're a photographer
who happens to have a mysterious but loaded benefactor would
like to buy some photos. Jeez, that's how it happens.
So they they successfully did this right for years, they
(40:51):
created files on thousands of US citizens, officially American citizens,
and then within these there are the names of over
three hundred thousand people in organizations that were associated with
those people. Just to be clear, this is an active conspiracy. Yeah,
the government is the conspirator in this case. But this
(41:15):
is illegal. They're not supposed to be doing it, and
they sure did. I mean, it's not as bad as
the n s A from a couple of years back
and currently, but you know, it's not great, all right,
I mean it feels weird to split these hairs. Yes,
but the argument used to justify these actions was very,
(41:36):
very similar to the argument used today to justify the
essays warrantless access to anything you do online in theory,
anyone you associate with and anyone they associate with, and
on and on and on. Kevin Bacon pops up sooner
than you think in this game and echelon five eyes forever. Amen,
Oh boy, do you think we have records? Come on,
(42:00):
remember we used to joke about it intern at the
n s A. If someone was listening to us by
this point, we have like an associate producer, or there's
there's somebody that guy's uh, that poor guy or girl,
that poor kid is just so bored, right, maybe it's
a junior officer. Do you think we got? Oh man,
moving on up? All right, you know what, I'll take it.
(42:22):
And hey, if you're listening, I don't know if you
can write in, but I feel free to do so.
We would love, we would love to hear from you.
And also, if you know my internet history, friendly stranger,
you'll see that I'm really into cauliflower recipes, So send
a few my way, cauliflower is amazing. Okay, we're talking
(42:46):
about the food, right, Yeah, the food, not eganism, not
a weird thing. I actually love cooking with cauliflower. No.
Nol does as well. I believe very good. I'm a
broccoli guy, but you know, you know, I'm trying to
get into more vegetables. Man, Rockley is my first love. Dude.
Food wise, this took a third. We're just trying to
(43:07):
prove that we are innocuous to the n s A.
And we have an opportunity to attempt to that because
we are aware that these programs exist. The people being
surveiled had very strong suspicions and in many cases very
strong circumstantial evidence, but for the most part, they had
(43:28):
no proof of what was happening. They had no opportunity
to be like, hey, yeah, you know, and I'm not
great on the war, but have you heard about cauliflower.
They couldn't do any of that endearing stuff, and most people,
even in the modern day, didn't have any idea what
was happening. We learned about this through a book called
(43:49):
Operation Chaos. The Vietnam deserters who fought the CIA brainwashers
and themselves that's a title. Yeah, it's it's pretty specific.
In this book, the author Matthews Sweet outlines the strange
and often contradictory accounts from Vietnam deserters who joined the
a d C that we mentioned there in Sweden, and
(44:09):
he also asked them about their opinions regarding intelligence agencies
from the US, Russia, and Sweden, all of whom infiltrated
their group at some point in some shape fashion re
form and then later infiltrated the subsequent extremist offshoots of
the A d C. Because Operation Chaos, as as you
(44:33):
outlined earlier, matt is an umbrella term domestic monitoring, foreign monitoring,
all sort of for the larger aim. The aspects of
Operation Chaos that Matthew Sweet focuses on our exclusively the
stories of the deserters living abroad, and he tracks them
(44:58):
down those who are still alive, and he asked them
to tell their stories. He also asked members of foreign
intelligence agencies to tell their stories if they can right
and the U s Intelligence Agency, the community in the
US had a sustained effort to not only infiltrate these
deserter organizations, but to repatriate deserters. They're the ones who
(45:22):
would say, hey, no harm, no foul, just to come back,
who can probably get you out of jail in a
year dishonorable discharge. But you can go on with your life.
All you have to do is say that you made
a mistake publicly, that you regret it. Still Team America
and we're all good. Have you seen the show, Barry? Yes? Yeah, yeah, yeah?
(45:45):
Are you a fan? Yeah? You did something just now
that totally reminded me of I forget his name. He's
the super nice guy who's one of the bad guys.
He's bald. Hey, Barry, what's going on? Just let you know?
You know they're gonna kill you, so anyway, be careful.
I love that guy. That's one of my favorite characters
(46:05):
in this shows. What you call alopecia. He's hairless. Yeah,
that that guy is for me a scene steeler because
everyone he meets. And this is not spoiling the show
for you. This guy is a a gangster who does
horrific things. Did he my country? He ever did anything horrific?
(46:28):
I couldn't even tell you. And this is we don't
even have to talk about this man. I just all
I could think about was that for a split second
and then it just reverberated. Yeah, because well, the most
endearing thing about that dude is everyone he meets is
described as a super nice guy. He's a super nice guy,
especially Berry though, Barry, do you want some juice? Yeah,
(46:50):
I've got to go back and rewatch it. If you
haven't watched the do do check it out because it's
it's a fantastic show and it's not Bill Hayters in it,
but it's it's not really a comedy. Is fantastic? Yeah? Yeah,
the comedy parts are pretty much that guy that we
just mentioned. And did you know that other gangster is
(47:11):
the bad guy from Tree Detectives. Yeah, man, now I'm impressed.
Oh yes, anyway, yeah yeah, yeah. So graphic widespread abuse
is a power by the intelligence agencies, not just the US,
also Russian Sweden. So they wanted to the US wanted
to repatriot these deserters, suppress or nullify their anti war messages. Right,
(47:38):
And in this book, Matthew Sweet explores the explores the
facts through statistics, but then primarily through anecdotes and accounts
of the deserters and the other players on the field.
So well, who, what's our Who's who? If we were
(48:03):
to do Who's who? What are some of the main
players in this well one is well. One of the
deserters is Chuck on en O N A N and
he he joined the the U. S. Marines when he
was a bit younger than He ended up deserting to
Sweden via Iceland with this a d C. And um
(48:24):
the other information that was in the book. There's a
little section at the front of this book that gives
you kind of a rundown of the characters, and it
said he's a now a big fan of medical marijuana. Right. Yeah.
If you read sweets initial encounters with the guy when
he gets to his house, uh, he's The author spends
(48:46):
some time describing how this dude thinks marijuana is going
to save the world, and how he's going to start
this growing operation, and how he's extremely uncomfortable because I
think at some point while Matthew Sweets is talking to
this guy, a drug deal occurs. It's like, I think
someone comes to buy marijuana, and this is this is
(49:11):
one guy. There's there are other ones. One of the
big players, and one of the most controversial, is a
fellow named Michael Vale. Yes, this is I guess the
leader of the the a d C, the American Deserters Committee,
and he was considered by some to be the resputant
(49:32):
of the a d C. And this guy was suspected
of being a CIA infiltrator. He used interrogation and breakdown
techniques on people, so he was known for breaking down
would be members of the a d C or people
trying to join the a d C. These are people
(49:53):
who have already deserted on the basis of their politics
or their beliefs, reducing them to tears uh winnowing way
their personalities so he could remake them a new and
a lot of people followed him. He had disciples, you know,
a lot of people hated the guy. And using those
sorts of techniques, of course, lends some credence to the
(50:16):
idea that someone is a CIA infiltrator works for an
intelligence agency. But what becomes apparent very quickly here is
that these people were all accusing each other. No one
was dedicated enough to the cause, no one was ideological enough.
Everyone could be a mole. The paranoia was definitely running
(50:37):
high because there was another gentleman named Bob Burlingham, he
went by Arlo Jacobs. For part of that time, he
was a student radical, a weatherman if you will, part
of the Weather Underground, and he was suspected of being
a CIA infiltrator as well by other members of the group.
It's the hip new thing to do, yeah, um. And
(50:59):
then we get into the actual spies, the people who
are confirmed intelligence officers like Richard Ober who was pretty
much the head of Operation Chaos, or at least in
some ways the functional head of it, right, And he
was considered by a lot of others to be paranoid
and secretive in his own workings, which again, you know,
(51:20):
if you're running an operation like that that's full of
secrecy and lies, you've got to be pretty paranoid, right, right.
And he expected the same out of the people who
worked with and for him, you know. And for his part,
he will argue, and he does argue in the book.
I believe that the mission was entirely meant to surveil
(51:43):
and collect information, not to do any sort of skullduggery
or wet work or kidnapping or assassination or any of
that black bag hoopla. I mean, the state of goals
are just that just vacuum up the information, right, who's
sending who notes, who's calling who? That's the official story. Yeah,
(52:07):
there's a there's another member of the intelligence community that
pops up in the book. Oh yeah, there's a gentleman
named Frank Rofalco, and he was he was working on
the Black Panther detail of Operation Chaos because they were
looking at what they considered to be extremist groups, and
they considered sections of the Black Panthers to be just that.
(52:27):
Um And this guy was the only officer so far,
at least according to Matthew Sweet that has spoken publicly
about Operation Chaos so far, and the stories continue. It's
it's just strange to learn that not only to this
operation go on successfully on a global scale for what
(52:50):
six years, more than half a decade, but there were
no repercussions for the US, right, A lot of the
deserters found their way back to the States or found
their way to a friendly country, and many of their
I mean, regardless of whether someone from the outside looking
(53:10):
in we call their lives successful or unsuccessful, the truth
is that their lives were tremendously affected by this program
right in ways that we probably still don't fully understand,
and there's still questions there. We don't know for sure
who was or wasn't a mole, who did or did
(53:32):
not provide information. Many of these people had torturous personal lives,
drug addiction, right, heavy debt, childhood's full of abuse, and
it's very difficult to speculate what motivated them and how
deep they got. We know something happened because the information
got out there, but we have to ask ourselves what
(53:57):
did this mean in the long run. Did it change
to the course of the Vietnam War? Probably not, probably not.
It's you know, in comparison to two point seven million soldiers,
it's not that many people. Were there any large movements
from groups that were helping out dissidents, I mean, it
doesn't seem to there's no at least there are not.
(54:18):
There aren't many. No. I can't think of a single
one where the United States took any kind of action
against a civilian group in another country because they were
aiding dissidents, at least not overtly. No. I mean, yeah,
that we would know about right, right, And it's common
to work through proxy groups and so on. But we
(54:40):
have to think beyond the events of Vietnam that still
have many unexplained things. Agent Orange is an example that
recurred during the Iraq War, at least allegations of exposure
to it. Is it possible that programs like this exist
now in the current wars the US is embroiled in
(55:00):
or I guess, since we don't call them wars anymore,
the current conflicts? Right, who is a the situation? Yeah?
Who is monitoring? Uh? These interactions? Why are people deserting
in the numbers that occurred during the Vietnam War? Probably not?
Probably not because there's not a draft. Yeah, but that
(55:24):
could change. Oh, that could absolutely change. It just takes
an act of Congress. Right, so we we wonder. We
have to wonder if there's more stuff they don't want
you to know, if there's an Operation Chaos two point
oh out there somewhere, and if so, what's it called. Currently,
the US military is comprised of volunteers, meaning that no
one is conscripted or drafted, and there are no laws
(55:48):
that compel a U. S citizen to serve mandatory time
in the armed forces. And that's that's not the same
in other countries. South Korea and Israel, for example, have
laws requiring sit aison's to serve in the military for
X amount of time. Absolutely, the one thing I would say.
In the US, it is still compulsory for all male
(56:08):
citizens to submit their information to the Selective Service system
within thirty days of their eighteenth birthday. And that's just
to make sure the Selective Service system remains in case
a draft is necessary. In Congress like puts the hammer
down and makes it happen, because, as Malcolm Gladwell so
eloquently explains in the Tipping Point, nothing seems like it
(56:30):
will ever happen until suddenly it does. Yeah, great point, Malcolm,
great point, Great point. Mr g Uh. Today we end
our episode with this, the this important point. Yes, there
is no draft going on now. There is no Operation
Chaos that we are aware of, even though the technological
(56:50):
abilities to do so are far and beyond what they
ever were before. In Vietnam. You know, we're all carrying
the average person is carrying a tiny spy in their pockets.
Two cameras at least, right, and how tough is it
to get in there? Who watches the watchman? All that jazz,
all that slow jazz, And what about on your wrist
(57:11):
if you got a smart watcher, who knows what? What
if you got a Google Home or an Amazon Echo
in your house, or a couple of security cameras. Don't please,
it's too late. Your TV have a camera on it?
Does your PlayStation have a microphone? You know what? Maybe
if they did, I would take better care of myself.
I'd eat more healthy food, you know I would. Uh,
(57:35):
that's where you'd start. That's where it'd started, the base level.
Check it out, I mean and kale, thank you please state.
But one other important thing to hit on here is
that in many cases, these deserters live on today somewhere right,
and they're real people. Are they perfect? No? Who is?
(57:56):
Some folks would consider them straight out traders. Other folks
would consider them the equivalent of freedom fighters. And there
are people who will make the argument that if they
broke the rules, the rules no longer apply to them.
But that goes into what sort of importance we place
on the rule of law, And it goes into, perhaps
(58:19):
even more importantly, what importance we place on the lawmakers
obeying the laws they create. Wow, So what do you
think about Operation Chaos? Do you have you read the book?
Do you know anything about it? Have you ever encountered
anyone who was a dissonant an American or otherwise. We'd
(58:41):
love to hear your stories. We'd love for you to
contact us and just talk to us about it. You
can find us on Twitter. You can find us on
Facebook where a conspiracy stuff on Instagram or conspiracy stuff Show.
You can find our website Stuff they Don't Want You
to Know dot com. You can also call us at
one eight three three st d w y t K
(59:02):
do it call us you might get on the error
after we get enough messages. We need more messages, honestly,
so like, stop what you're doing. Call us? Uh, I
don't know. If we sing we can sing a song
together or something, it will go to voicemail. Get weird
with it, yeah, get weird. We we We would love
you too. Um. If you don't want to do any
of that stuff, please send us an email. We are
(59:25):
conspiracy at how Stuff Works dot com
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United States of Kennedy is a podcast about our cultural fascination with the Kennedy dynasty. Every week, hosts Lyra Smith and George Civeris go into one aspect of the Kennedy story.
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