Background on LaRouche

washingtonpost.com

No Joke

Eight-time presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche may be a
punchline on 'The Simpsons,' but his organization -- and the effect it
has on young recruits -- is dead serious

By April Witt

Sunday, October 24, 2004; Page W12

The desperation in her son's voice jolted Erica Duggan fully awake.

"Mum, I'm in big trouble," Jeremiah, a 22-year-old college student,
said into the phone quietly, as though trying not to be overheard.

It was nearly 4:30 a.m. in London. Erica Duggan, a retired teacher,
had been awake even before the phone rang. Restless -- a mother's
instinct, she would later say -- she'd gone down to the kitchen to make
herself a cup of tea.

It was March 27, 2003, the eighth day of the war in Iraq. Antiwar
sentiment was high across Europe. Erica's idealistic son had gone to
Germany to attend an antiwar protest and conference with a group called
Nouvelle Solidarité. All Jeremiah told his mother about the group
before he left was that its views were "extreme" and that it was
affiliated with an American presidential candidate she'd never heard
of, a man named Lyndon LaRouche. Now her son's phone call made it clear
that something had gone wrong.

"This involves Solidarity," Erica recalls her son saying before he
added: "I can't do this. I want out. It is not something I can do.''

Alarmed, she tried to assure her son that he didn't have to do
anything with this group that he didn't want to. Then the line went
dead. Almost immediately, Jeremiah rang back.

"I'm frightened," she remembers him saying, his voice hushed and strained.

"What is it?" his panicked mother demanded. "Tell me!"

Jeremiah seemed to be having trouble speaking. "He sounded
terrified," Erica says. "Because of that I found myself saying, 'I love
you.' It just came out. I thought his life was in danger.

"When I said, 'I love you,' then he said to me in a very, very loud voice, 'I want to see you NOW.' "

"Where are you?" his mother cried.

"Wiesbaden," he said.

She had difficulty making out the name of the German city, and she
asked him to spell it. Erica's father, a German-born Jew, had fled
Hitler's Germany. Most of his relatives perished in the Holocaust. Now
her only son was somewhere in Germany, and was telling her that he was
in peril.

Jeremiah began spelling Wiesbaden. He wasn't halfway through the letters when the line cut off again.

Thirty-five minutes later, Jeremiah was dead. He lay crumpled on a
roadway into town, his arms stretched out before him as if he were a
boy again, reaching to catch a ball.

Jeremiah's death has propelled his parents into the political orbit
of Lyndon LaRouche, a realm of plots, counterplots and apocalyptic
prophesies that they hadn't known existed. Their campaign to learn the
circumstances of their son's death has brought rare scrutiny to an
American politician whose eight presidential campaigns have netted him
two precious commodities: millions in federal matching funds and a
cadre of fresh-faced recruits who, like Jeremiah Duggan, want to help
save the world.

"THIS SYSTEM IS BREAKING DOWN," LaRouche says. "It is crumbling . . . The crisis is here."

LaRouche, 82, is glowering behind outsize eyeglasses. His hair is
wispy on his prominent head. His shoulders stoop. Yet he still projects
supreme self-assurance. It is April 30, 2004, and LaRouche is speaking
at the Marriott at Metro Center in Washington. Important supporters
around the globe, his staff says, are listening via the Internet.
Inside a spacious meeting room, dozens of other followers sit rapt in
folding chairs.

A sinister network of conspirators is about to plunge the world
into a new Dark Age, LaRouche warns, but it's not too late. He can save
mankind. That is why he must be elected president. "I have a
better chance of being elected than you have of surviving if I'm not,"
LaRouche tells the assembly. "And that's a fact. It's not an
exaggeration."

The octogenarian denounces President Bush as a "dummy sitting on
the knee of a Vice President Cheney." Cheney "is controlled by strings
from his wife, who is worse than Cheney is! She's the clever one,"
LaRouche continues. "He's the dumb brute who's holding the strings on
the president, the marionette."

This attack is relatively mild for LaRouche. He frequently refers
to the vice president as "the beast-man." His followers stage noisy
sidewalk protests featuring a man wearing a Cheney mask and a medieval
Crusader's get-up. Now, as LaRouche speaks, a giant photograph of
Cheney snarling is projected on the wall. The audience titters at the
unflattering shot.

To prevent catastrophic, perpetual, worldwide religious warfare --
the ultimate clash of civilizations -- LaRouche demands that Bush adopt
the LaRouche Doctrine for Southwest Asia. Listening to his rambling
talk, it is difficult to make out just what the LaRouche Doctrine for
Southwest Asia is except that it apparently "follows precisely the
guidelines of the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia."

"As a matter of fact, there is going to be no solution to the
crisis in Southwest Asia unless we can adopt it as my doctrine -- by
name!" LaRouche says. "Because nobody else has the credibility to do
what has to be done . . . If they're serious about saving the country
and dealing with the problem, they would talk with me. Why don't they
talk? . . . What does that mean?"

LaRouche, who lives and works behind a curtain of secrecy and
security in Northern Virginia, has been asking that question for much
of his public life. Always, he comes up with the same answer: People
are out to get him. Powerful people -- Zionists, bankers, the British.
People who control the Republican and Democratic parties and ensure his
votes aren't counted. People, according to LaRouche and his followers,
who have plotted to send brainwashed zombies to assassinate him.

LaRouche and his international network of organizations champion an
eccentric mix of issues. They've lobbied the music world to lower the
standard pitch of middle "C" to spare singers vocal strain. They've
advocated quarantining AIDS patients. They want to send manned
fusion-powered spacecraft to establish a permanent colony on Mars.

In three decades of failed U.S. presidential bids, LaRouche has
never won more than 80,000 votes in any election cycle, never emerged
as more than a fringe figure joked about in late-night television
monologues and on "The Simpsons." He began running for president in
1976 -- the first year presidential elections were publicly financed.
Since then he has run seven more times, and garnered $5.9 million in
federal matching campaign funds. This election cycle alone he has
received more than $1.4 million.

Loyal aides, some of whom have been with LaRouche since their
student days protesting the Vietnam War, accuse the mainstream media of
refusing to cover LaRouche. Yet they limit access to him, often
delivering his message through avenues they control: LaRouche Web
sites, newspapers, paid radio and television advertisements. LaRouche
aides declined to let a Post Magazine reporter follow him on the
campaign trail or interview him in person. LaRouche agreed to field
e-mailed questions, but he answered them selectively, dismissing some
as "silly" and others as "dredging into the garbage-dumps of slanders
and libels against me."

LaRouche calls himself a Democrat, much to the chagrin of the
Democratic National Committee. As he sought the party's nomination
during this year's primaries, his supporters often disrupted Democratic
events. At a Baltimore debate last fall, some candidates froze as
LaRouche activists in the audience heckled them for excluding LaRouche.
Al Sharpton, no stranger to the power of orchestrated confrontations,
won applause when he accused the LaRouche partisans of being phony
liberals. At a New Hampshire town meeting for retired general Wesley
Clark, LaRouche supporters shouted and sang until security personnel
hauled them away.

LaRouche, who expresses loathing for timid conformists, wears
belligerence like a badge. He and his supporters accuse perceived
enemies of slander, crimes, plots and perversions. Osama bin Laden and
al Qaeda had nothing to do with the September 11, 2001, attacks,
LaRouche says. Elements within the U.S. military launched the attacks
as an attempted coup. Defense Undersecretary Paul Wolfowitz was one of
the conspirators, LaRouche claims, along with former secretary of state
Henry Kissinger and the Israeli army.

LaRouche targets usually don't bother responding to such theatrical
accusations. However, a LaRouche follower once baited Kissinger so
mercilessly that his wife, Nancy Kissinger, nearly throttled the woman.
The Kissingers were at Newark airport in 1981, en route to Boston,
where Henry was to undergo triple-bypass surgery, when a LaRouche
activist shouted insults at Henry such as, "Is it true that you sleep
with young boys at the Carlyle Hotel?"

Nancy Kissinger took the woman by the throat and asked, "Do you
want to get slugged?" The woman pressed charges, but a judge acquitted
Nancy of misdemeanor assault.

More than two decades later, LaRouche is still unnerving Henry
Kissinger. At the White House Correspondents' Association dinner last
May a man approached Kissinger and invited him to meet his "nemesis" --
LaRouche, attending the dinner with representatives of his publication
Executive Intelligence Review. Kissinger declined with obvious horror.
LaRouche, appearing pleased with his residual power to alarm, was
jovial. "Keep out of mischief," LaRouche told a reporter who witnessed
the exchange, "unless you enjoy it."

LaRouche is more than a mischief-maker; he's a felon. In 1988,
LaRouche was convicted of mail fraud, conspiracy to commit mail fraud,
and conspiracy to hide his personal income. Prosecutors argued that
aggressive LaRouche fundraisers solicited more than $30 million in
loans from supporters, many elderly, with false assurances they'd be
repaid. While some lenders lost their life savings, the LaRouche
organization spent millions on property, a swimming pool and a horse
riding ring, according to testimony.

LaRouche maintained that the convictions were engineered to silence
him politically and set him up to be murdered in prison. He survived.
One of his cellmates was disgraced televangelist Jim Bakker, who later
described LaRouche as amusing, erudite and convinced their cell was
bugged. "To say that Lyndon was slightly paranoid," Bakker wrote in his
autobiography, "would be like saying the Titanic had a bit of a leak."

In 1992, LaRouche ran for president from his cell, and taxpayers
helped pay his way. The Federal Election Commission reluctantly awarded
him federal campaign matching funds behind bars. Under federal campaign
law, candidates seeking their party's presidential nomination qualify
for matching funds by raising at least $5,000 in each of 20 states. The
law makes no exceptions for felons.

Now, standing in the Washington hotel meeting room, LaRouche
reveals a new plot afoot to deny him his rightful position of
influence. Alluding to the death of Jeremiah Duggan, which has been
covered in the British media, LaRouche suggests it's a hoax concocted
by Cheney and his wife, Lynne, and British Prime Minister Tony Blair to
discredit him.

"This crowd is really coming after me," LaRouche says as his
followers -- many of them in their early twenties -- nod their heads
sympathetically. "They're trying to run an international, fake scandal
through the British press, which they're going to bring into the United
States . . . Because Cheney knows that if I'm not excluded . . . Cheney
would be out."

For all LaRouche's attacks on the "dummy" and the "beast-man," the
Bush-Cheney administration has been good for LaRouche. The nation at
war has been good for LaRouche. It has allowed him to recruit students
who weren't born when he was convicted of multiple felonies. The
LaRouche Youth Movement has "hundreds" of members in the United States
and "perhaps a lesser number abroad," LaRouche says by e-mail.

His new acolytes believe him when he says he can stop the wars in
Iraq and Afghanistan and save the world. They also believe that he's
shaping them to help rule the world. He does so, they say, not merely
by educating them about politics, history and the arts, but by turning
them into authentic geniuses.

"You can actually teach genius," says 21-year-old Ed Hamler, one of LaRouche's new followers.

MEGHAN ROUILLARD, 20, LEFT GEORGE WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY to join the
LaRouche Youth Movement. "Being a patriot means doing everything in
your power to change the country," she says as she and other youths
mill about the Marriott lobby after the Webcast.

LaRouche is preparing them to wage a new American revolution,
Matthew Ogden, 21, says. He was a music student, studying bassoon at
Indiana University, when planes hit the World Trade Center and the
Pentagon. Now, like Rouillard, he spends much of his time trying to
persuade other young people to escape "the whatever generation, the
culture of dullness" and become "historic individuals."

Youth movement members attend LaRouche-sponsored classes where they
learn how great figures of history such as Benjamin Franklin are
similar to LaRouche. "You understand how they were operating in history
and, even though they are dead, now you are actually carrying on their
mission," Ogden explains. Hamler left Philadelphia University, where
he'd been studying graphic design, two years ago to work fulltime for
LaRouche, he says. "Morally , I couldn't not join," says Hamler who
grew up in what he describes as a Philadelphia ghetto.

Hamler's parents didn't object, he says, because they're poor and
understand the need to change the world. Rich people whose kids quit
school to join LaRouche "freak out," Hamler says, "because they are in
the baby boomer fantasy."

To LaRouche followers, baby boomers are a lost cause. Ruined by the
conformity of the 1950s and the nuclear bomb scares and failed idealism
of the '60s, they want to hide inside the cocoon of their mindless
materialism. They expect their kids to do the same. "I can't stress
this enough, baby boomers are insane," Hamler says. "They say: 'Don't
mess with this LaRouche guy. You can't endanger my comfort zone.' They
look at their kids as objects. They look at their kids as an extension
of what they can get in life. But my parents are cool, so I don't have
that problem."

LaRouche, he says, challenges young people to ask the most
important question: What is truth? "LaRouche and the youth movement
have discovered a method where you can discover truth," Hamler says.

What's the method? "We have to double the square," Hamler says, smiling.

LaRouche followers are big on doubling the square. Outside the room
where LaRouche just spoke is a signboard marked with a square and the
teasing question: "Can you double this square?" As Hamler leads a
reporter through trying to double the square, a small crowd gathers.
Young faces light up with encouraging smiles.

"This is from Plato; don't worry," Hamler says. "Let's say you have
a square with an area of one, what are your sides going to be? That's
right, one times one is one. Your area is one. Now, what I'm going to
need you to do is double the area of the square. Physically, how could
I produce a square with the area of two?"

A square where each side is two won't do. Its area would be four.
"Once you investigate things like this, what you automatically run into
is what is called the paradox," Hamler says. "You run into a problem
that lies outside the way you are already thinking . . . You are going
to have to think outside the way you were thinking to make this
discovery, to make a breakthrough."

You could draw a square where each side is the square root of two
-- but that number has an infinite decimal, with numerals stretching on
forever. "How can you have a finite measurement?" Hamler asks. "How can
you have a discrete side?"

So the problem can't be solved?

"No, it's doable," Hamler's friend chimes in. "There is a solution.
But you are coming to see for yourself right now what happens when a
system of thinking is, in itself, not adequate for the creation of
something that you are looking for. When that's the case, if you are
not willing to change the way you are thinking about it, you are
screwed."

"That's what the baby boomers are, screwed," Hamler says.

The cheerful young men clearly relish this exercise. It's an
important recruiting tool on street corners and college campuses across
the United States and Europe. To join forces with LaRouche -- to enter
his world of conspiracies and counter-conspiracies -- you have to
accept that everything you know, even the way you think, is wrong.

THE WEEK OF SEPTEMBER 11, 2001, Jeremiah Duggan, an energetic young
man with a mop of dark curls, moved to Paris to study. He carried an
ambitious double course-load: French at the British Institute and
English at the Sorbonne. He had a sunny personality, an international
array of friends and a broad range of interests, according to his
mother and friends. He wrote poetry. He relished literature, art and
music -- the Beatles most of all. Jeremiah was always softhearted, the
kind of person who believed every homeless person he passed on the
street was his responsibility, his mother says. In Paris, spurred by
world events, he paid attention to politics for the first time. He also
fell in love with a French voice student.

In December 2002, he brought his girlfriend home to London to meet
his family and experience their traditional Friday night Shabbat.
Jeremiah's German-born grandfather lit the candles and sang kiddush.
Later, Jeremiah's girlfriend and his grandfather sang a duet, an aria
from "The Magic Flute." In the flickering candlelight Jeremiah looked
so proud that his mother swore she would never forget the expression on
his face. She hasn't. That visit was the last time she saw her son
alive.

In early 2003, Jeremiah telephoned to say he'd met a LaRouche
activist who wrote for a French-language LaRouche newspaper, Nouvelle
Solidarité. The literature he gave Jeremiah to read in French didn't
always make total sense, but Jeremiah chalked it up to his difficulty
translating unfamiliar political terms, his mother says. The following
March, on the eve of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, Jeremiah phoned
home to say the LaRouche activist had invited him to Germany for an
antiwar conference and protest. Busy cramming for exams, he asked his
mother to search the Internet for information about LaRouche. She
tried, but misspelled the name as Laroche, and found nothing to alarm
her. If she had spelled the name correctly, she might have learned that
LaRouche's campaign Web site champions him as "the only qualified
candidate for U.S. President with a political movement representing
what Franklin D. Roosevelt referred to as the 'forgotten man.' " She
also might have found anti-LaRouche electronic bulletin boards, where
former adherents claim psychological abuse and parents of current
followers seem desperate to extricate their children from the group.
She could have found the Anti-Defamation League Web site, which charges
that LaRouche is anti-Semitic and has ties to radical right Islamic
groups. She might have stumbled across a LaRouche campaign press
release, which lambastes its critics.

"They say things like LaRouche is a leader of a cult or that he is
anti-Semitic, or some other vile epithet," the release says. "Don't be
fooled by these rumors and lies." They originate from Gestapo-style
"thought police," and the families of the financial oligarchy who
"exert control over politics in the U.S., through the top-down
management of 'approved' popular beliefs, and religions, just as the
oligarchy of the Roman Empire administered political control through
the approved pantheon of pagan gods."

But Erica didn't see any of that. Looking back at that moment, when
a keystroke might have altered her son's fate, she starts to weep.

"I AM GOING TO MAKE YOU ORGANIZERS -- by taking your bedrooms away
from you . . . What I shall do is expose to you the cruel act of your
sexual impotence . . . I will take away from you all hope that you can
flee the terrors of politics to the safety of 'personal life.' I shall
do this by showing to you that your frightened personal sexual life
contains for you such terrors as the outside world could never offer
you. I will thus destroy your rabbit-holes, mental as well as physical.
I shall destroy your sense of safety in the place to which you
ordinarily imagine you can flee."

According to Dennis King, author of Lyndon LaRouche and the New American Fascism, that is an announcement LaRouche made to his own followers in an early 1970s memo.

Becoming a faithful follower of LaRouche is like entering the
Bizarro World of the Superman comic books, says Paul Kacprzak, 45, who
joined LaRouche as an idealistic teenager in the 1970s and worked for
him for about a decade. As long as you stay inside the movement,
everything you are told makes a certain sense. But if you try to view
it from the outside, he says, "it's Bizarro World."

Born in 1922, LaRouche spent a painful childhood in New England, he writes in a 1988 version of his autobiography, The Power of Reason.
His parents were fundamentalist Quakers and fierce anti-communists.
When other children taunted him, he writes, his father forbade him to
fight back. He endured years of torment and "numerous beatings," from
bullies.

He was an unsuccessful student, he recalls, because he refused to
believe his teachers' accepted truths. In geometry class, for example,
"I could not accept the axioms and postulates," LaRouche writes. Later,
attending Northeastern University in Boston "enraged" him, he writes.
His instructors "lacked the competence to teach me on conditions I was
willing to tolerate." So he quit.

LaRouche's mother wanted him to become a minister. Instead, he
became a communist organizer. As a leader of the National Caucus of
Labor Committees, LaRouche ordered a series of physical attacks on
rival groups, according to King. The attacks, which King says involved
beatings with metal pipes, clubs and martial arts devices known as
nunchuks, took place in New York and other cities in 1973 and 1974, and
became known among leftists as "Operation Mop-Up." LaRouche's
autobiography maintains that he and his followers were acting in
self-defense.

During this period, LaRouche wrote about psychological techniques
for transforming recruits into faithful organizers. In one treatise,
"Beyond Psychoanalysis," he wrote that organizers should strip recruits
of their egos and reduce them to a state called "little me," in order
to rebuild their personalities around a new socialist identity.
LaRouche opined in another manifesto, "The Sexual Impotence of the
Puerto Rican Socialist Party," that "Sexual impotency is generally the
causal root of Left political impotency." To become politically potent,
he said, leftists must confront their sexual problems, such as their
fear of and desire for their sadistic mothers.

For three decades, LaRouche and his followers have accused enemies,
including American, Soviet and British intelligence agencies, of
sending brainwashed zombies to assassinate him. In December 1973, a
26-year-old British LaRouche associate named Christopher White claimed
that he had been brainwashed as part of a plot to kill LaRouche.
LaRouche activists announced that they'd been forced to put White
through a grueling "de-programming," and offered recordings of the
sessions to a New York Times reporter as proof.

"There are sounds of weeping, and vomiting on the tapes, and Mr.
White complains of being deprived of sleep, food and cigarettes," the
resulting Times story says. "At one point someone says 'raise the
voltage,' but (LaRouche) says this was associated with the bright
lights used in the questioning rather than an electric shock."

"During the intensive questioning on one day, Mr. White complains of
a terrible pain in his arm," the story says, adding that LaRouche can
be heard telling him: "That's not real. That's in the program."

Soon afterward, the Times reported, another LaRouche follower,
Alice Weitzman, wrote a desperate note claiming that she was being held
prisoner, folded her plea for help into a paper airplane, and sailed it
out the window of her New York City apartment. According to the Times,
when police arrived, they found several LaRouche followers who said
they were "staying" with Weitzman because she had been brainwashed as
part of a plot to kill LaRouche.

Brainwashing hysteria quickly spread through the LaRouche
organization, Kacprzak says. He attended LaRouche meetings in the
United States where there were "people writhing on the floor saying,
'I've been brainwashed, somebody de-program me!' "

In 1977, LaRouche married a much younger German woman, Helga Zepp, a
key organizer for his operations in Europe. Their relationship, his
second marriage, had a profound impact on LaRouche organizations in the
United States, Kacprzak recalls. "We basically became a German
organization," he says. "We'd have classes in German. They'd be
teaching German language. We'd be reading German poetry."

At one point, Kacprzak and his colleagues received a memo
announcing that after LaRouche was elected president, he would declare
his wedding anniversary a holiday and give all U.S. workers a week off.
"A couple of things hit me," says Kacprzak. "One, this is frigging
crazy, and, two, how come nobody in this frigging office thinks this is
crazy?"

LaRouche had led his followers to the political right by the time
Ronald Reagan reached the White House. He added environmentalists to
his list of enemies, talked about having connections in the
intelligence world, championed nuclear energy and the Strategic Defense
Initiative, and sought donations from retirees and disaffected farmers
in the heartland.

LaRouche also relocated his headquarters from New York City to
Leesburg, then a sleepy semirural town of about 12,000 people. Many
followers moved with him, along with business enterprises such as
printing operations. Corporations operated by LaRouche associates
bought property worth millions.

LaRouche moved into a rented mansion patrolled by heavily armed
guards. According to a 1985 Washington Post series, there were
sandbag-buttressed guard posts and metal spikes in the driveway. The
gun-toting guards alarmed the locals. So did LaRouche's rhetoric.
LaRouche said he needed the security because teams of assassins were
gunning for him and just might start slaughtering people on the streets
of Leesburg.

Civic leaders who criticized LaRouche were denounced by followers
and in LaRouche literature as commies, homosexuals, drug pushers or
international terrorists. According to one published report, LaRouche
denounced the Leesburg Garden Club as a "nest" of Soviet sympathizers.
One lawyer who opposed LaRouche on a zoning matter went into hiding
after what she told the New York Times were menacing phone calls and a
death threat. In October 1986, more than 275 armed officers from
federal, state and local law enforcement agencies staged a dawn raid on
LaRouche's Leesburg operations. LaRouche and six followers were later
arrested and convicted of multiple felonies stemming from their
aggressive fundraising operations. As a result, the Federal Election
Commission, which had sparred with LaRouche over the years, tried to
stop funding his presidential aspirations while he was in jail, but
LaRouche challenged the decision in federal appeals court and won in
1993. LaRouche was released from prison the following year, but his
operations have never fully recovered from the criminal convictions,
former members say. Many followers left the organization. One of
LaRouche's former vice presidential candidates is mixing paint and
stocking shelves at a Virginia hardware store.

Yet by his own reckoning LaRouche has had a "cumulatively large and
probably permanent" impact on American politics. Government
prosecutions of him, he writes in his e-mail, ultimately made him "a
folk hero" in the United States and around the world. He doesn't rule
out the possibility of making a ninth presidential bid in 2008. "My
ghost will not be laid," he writes. According to federal financial
disclosures, LaRouche reported in 2003 that he earns a salary of
$26,451 from his Executive Intelligence Review News Service Inc. and
lives in a rented home in Round Hill, Va. The remote estate is on an
unpaved road, a mile off the blacktop. At the foot of LaRouche's
driveway, stone dogs sit sentry. There is a metal security gate and a
phone box visitors must use to gain entry. From the crotch of a nearby
tree, a security camera is trained on the phone box.

Neighbor John Ross says he is glad to have the heavily guarded
LaRouche living next door because "nobody is going to break into my
house." Strolling his pasture one night, Ross spotted LaRouche security
patrols wearing night-vision goggles. Once, Ross's scanner picked up
their chatter as they communicated with each other with hand-held
devices, he says. They were speaking German.

THERE WERE PROTESTERS ALL OVER THE NATIONAL MALL the spring day in
2002 when Michael Scott Winstead stopped to chat with a LaRouche
organizer from Baltimore. Winstead gave the organizer his phone number
and said he wanted to help stop the war in Afghanistan.

Winstead, a dark-haired former actor who'd once had a role in the
touring company of Up With People, was at low ebb. He'd left college
without a degree. He had dreamed of a career in the theater but was
working as an office temp. Soon after his chance meeting on the Mall,
Winstead attended a LaRouche speech and then a "cadre school" to learn
how to be a LaRouche Youth Movement organizer. The cadre school, held
at a Virginia state park, was a taxing series of lectures and
discussions that "scared you to death" about the state of the world,
says Winstead, now 28. "He tells these kids 'You have no future, you
are finished, the economy is collapsing. It's going to be famine and
flood . . . unless you find not God, but find me, or support me, or we
win.' In times like this someone could look around and believe that.
Things are bad, right?"

He joined the youth movement without hesitation. Soon, he was
living in a house with other LaRouche followers and working fulltime at
the Baltimore field office, a red brick building in an industrial park.
He'd been promised a salary of $300 a week, but his paychecks dwindled,
he says. When he asked why, he recalls, "They said, 'Well, you know we
have to send Lyn all over Europe.' "

There were some benefits to the job. He was exhilarated when youth
movement members stormed a political gathering shouting slogans, or
showed up en masse without an appointment at some congressman's office.
It made Winstead and his cohorts feel powerful, he says, and it was a
group bonding experience. Bonding with the group was important because,
they were told, they had a crucial mission.

The group's leaders, Winstead says, "were constantly asking us if
we would die for these ideas." At one retreat of about 100 young
people, a LaRouche organizer asked for a show of hands. "Most of the
group raised their hands," Winstead says. "I think I did. The thing is,
they frame it along the lines of Martin Luther King's [notion that] a
man who hasn't found anything to die for isn't fit to live."

Visits home were frowned upon, he says. Parents were derided as
"brainwashed baby boomers" or agents of the worldwide conspiracy
against LaRouche.

LaRouche followers were expected to work six days a week, he says,
beginning at 8 a.m., when a few dozen activists would gather at the
office to sing -- typically old slave spirituals. Then they'd listen
via speakerphone to an organization leader give a news briefing
highlighting events that, Winstead says, "support their view that the
world is crumbling basically and the economy is collapsing."

By 9 a.m., older members, some of whom had followed LaRouche for
decades, were working the phones to raise money. Younger recruits
loaded card tables and literature into cars, then fanned out to troll
for new members. Everyone was given a daily quota of money to raise,
Winstead recalls. If they hadn't made quota by late afternoon, they'd
stake out intersections with long red lights and work the left-turn
lane. "There's a horrible war," Winstead would tell anyone who'd roll
down the window. "Lyndon LaRouche is going to stop it. Here's the
paper; make a donation."

By 5:30 p.m., Winstead and his colleagues returned to the field
office for another news briefing before dinner. Then they'd launch a
new round of work: telephoning potential recruits. "That generally goes
on until 10 at night," he says. "If it's not done, then you are pretty
much in trouble."

Winstead was pretty much in trouble. He turned out to be not much
of a true believer after all. He thought meetings where members
professed that they were unworthy to follow LaRouche were like parodies
of tent revivals. He wondered why, for all their talk of saving the
world, LaRouche activists didn't seem to accomplish much other than
raising money and recruiting new members.

He was stunned, at first, to find out what happened when he asked
questions or complained. "Maybe you are too [expletive] busy
[masturbating] thinking about your mother to go out and organize," he
recalls one of the leaders barking at him. "How much money did you
raise today?"

"I'm caught off-guard, like, what the hell just happened?" Winstead
recalls. "The yelling goes on for maybe five or 10 minutes while I'm
furiously backpedaling."

Eventually, he became accustomed to the humiliating insults and
tirades. "They call it making somebody a self-conscious organizer," he
says. "It is about getting somebody to break down and cry, just to have
an emotional collapse. Once you do that, then people are malleable."

LaRouche declined to discuss how members of his youth movement are
treated, characterizing a series of questions about those practices as
"simply garbage."

According to Winstead, attacking someone for having "mother issues,"
being homosexual or sexually perverse seemed to be a common strategy
for controlling members in the office where he worked. Leaders directed
the group to gang up on colleagues for minor infractions, a phenomenon
Winstead calls "wolf-packing." It was effective, he says.

Once he witnessed organizers surround and berate a woman, he says.
The sobbing woman tried to leave, but one organizer wrestled her back
into a chair, Winstead says. She didn't resist again, he says.

Another time, Winstead says, a member having second thoughts about
the group asked him for a ride to the bus station so he could visit
relatives. Winstead obliged, infuriating movement leaders. "That whole
week I just got pounded [by] everyone in the organization. It was
comments like . . . 'Mike, you've been driving people away from this
movement! You are an agent, aren't you?' "

One day a member of LaRouche's inner circle of advisers was giving a
lecture when he touched upon a favorite topic in the movement --
brainwashing. He mentioned a 1957 book on the subject, Battle for the Mind. Curious, Winstead tracked down the book at a library.

"Various types of belief can be implanted in people, after brain
function has been sufficiently disturbed by accidentally or
deliberately induced fear, anger or excitement," the author, William
Sargant, wrote. "Of the results caused by such disturbances, the most
common one is temporarily impaired judgment and heightened
suggestibility."

Chinese communists "spread their gospel," the author noted, through
psychological conditioning: inventing enemies, isolating trainees in
special locations, keeping them exhausted by performing demeaning tasks
and learning difficult new terminology, using informers to keep people
tense and uncertain, and forcing them to sever ties with family and
friends, even encouraging their recruits, as Hitler had, to denounce
their parents.

Winstead felt ill, he says. "I sat there and I read exactly what I
had been going through for the last six months," he says. "It
definitely had worked on me quite a bit, more than I'd like to admit to
myself then or now."

Now Winstead wanted out. He was scared, he says.

That night Winstead returned to the house he shared with LaRouche
organizers. Before he went to bed, he piled furniture in front of his
bedroom door. Next to the bed he placed a chef's knife, just in case he
had to defend himself.

He repeated that ritual for several nights, he says, while he
compiled an "intelligence report" outlining what he'd read about
brainwashing techniques. The day he left the LaRouche Youth Movement,
he says, he stuffed the memo into the mailboxes of other members,
packed up his car, drove to his mother's house and hid.

THE MOOD WAS APOCALYPTIC AS PEOPLE GATHERED AT A LAROUCHE CONFERENCE
in Bad Schwalbach, Germany, on March 21, 2003. After tense weeks of
international debate, the air assault on Baghdad was underway.

The conference was sponsored by the Schiller Institute, an
organization founded by LaRouche's wife and named for the 18th century
German poet Friedrich von Schiller. The institute is dedicated to
reviving the spirit of the American Revolution and the German classical
period, according to its official Web site, which lists its address as
a Washington, D.C., post office box.

As LaRouche claimed the floor for his keynote address, he denounced
Bush as an "unreformed drunk." Corruption in the White House is
pervasive and long-standing, LaRouche informed his listeners, some of
whom had come from as far away as Russia and Nigeria. Woodrow Wilson
founded the Ku Klux Klan from the White House, LaRouche charged.
President John F. Kennedy "was not killed by Oswald; he was killed by a
special operation, inside our country, called the Special Warfare
Section, which does these kinds of things."

Now the United States is using Iraq to ignite catastrophic global
warfare, said LaRouche, according to the official transcript of his
speech posted on his campaign Web site. The Bush Administration "is
totally committed to worldwide fascist imperialism," LaRouche warned,
adding that North Korea, Iran and China are already targets.

If anyone in the audience found this scenario too fantastic,
LaRouche had an answer: It was not safe for them to trust their own
thoughts. They needed to be retrained to recognize the truth. "Don't
trust your own independent thinking," LaRouche said. "You probably
don't have any independent thinking. But you delude yourself that you
do."

Jeremiah Duggan dutifully took notes on unlined sheets of paper,
which his parents later found in his suitcase. "Question your own false
assumptions," he wrote.

LaRouche told his audience that this plot to launch a new world war
has been intellectually influenced by people who, like Hitler, admire
Nietzsche, but "being Jewish, they couldn't qualify for Nazi Party
leadership, even though their fascism was absolutely pure! As extreme
as Hitler! They sent them to the United States."

"Now are these guys the cause of the war?" LaRouche asked. "No. They're only lackeys.

"If Israel goes to war in the Middle East, Israel will be
destroyed, like a hand grenade which has been thrown. When it reaches
its destination, it explodes. It does the job, and then it fragments.
It doesn't exist anymore.

"So, is Israel behind this? No. Israel is a hand grenade being
thrown at the Arab world . . . George Bush hasn't got the brains to be
behind it. Who's behind it? . . . The independent
central-banking-system crowd, the slime-mold. The financier interests."
The very same people, LaRouche explained, who brought Hitler to power
in 1930. Forces must be mobilized to crush this terrible plot, LaRouche
said.

"Leadership means one thing," he concluded. "It means people who,
like Jeanne d'Arc" -- Joan of Arc -- "are willing to put their lives on
the line to get the job done."

Speakers at the three-day conference returned again and again to
the martyrdom theme, LaRouche-posted transcripts of their speeches
show. Elodie Viennot, a LaRouche leader in France, asked the young
people present if they could be as brave as Joan of Arc if they were
taken to Guantanamo Bay and interrogated mercilessly "because you are
associated with Lyndon LaRouche?"

She urged her audience to heed LaRouche's call to take Joan of Arc
as their role model and make their bid for immortality: "They burned
her alive, and she didn't flinch at all . . . Are you willing to put
your life on the line? Because your life might actually never die if
you accomplish those matters . . . If you know you are fighting for the
good, nobody can touch you. They can't get you to flicker."

Jeremiah was critical of much of what he was hearing at the
conference, a French university student who befriended him there later
told his mother. But he and the French student decided to stay on
together for a much smaller cadre school, where LaRouche organizers
would be trained. After that, there would be an antiwar protest in
Berlin. The cadre school was held at a youth hostel in Wiesbaden. There
were about 50 people there, one participant said.

Jeremiah stood out. Not only was he Jewish, he was British.
According to Jeremiah's written notes, at least one speaker described
the Tavistock Institute, a public health research center in London, as
a brainwashing center. Jeremiah, as it happened, had firsthand
experience with Tavistock. When he was 7 and his parents were
divorcing, they took the family to Tavistock for counseling. At the
cadre school, Jeremiah discussed his experience at Tavistock with
LaRouche organizers, participants later told his mother. His parents
wonder if Jeremiah's nationality, religion and comments about attending
Tavistock marked him as an "agent" or special target.

Late the night of Tuesday, March 25, Jeremiah telephoned his
girlfriend, Maya, in Paris to say he couldn't get a ride home until
Sunday and didn't have the money to take a train or bus, she recounted
in a written statement for a British inquest. Very serious things were
happening, he told her, but he indicated that he couldn't talk just
then and would have to explain later. The next day some cadre school
participants handed out LaRouche literature in nearby Frankfurt.
Afterward, they visited an art museum. A Frenchwoman in their group
asked Jeremiah what he thought of the exhibit. He didn't answer. He
started to cry.

The Frenchwoman, who has since left the LaRouche organization and
didn't want to be identified because she fears reprisals, asked why he
was crying.

"I don't trust LaRouche," she recalls him saying nervously. Jeremiah, she says, wanted to go home.

The Frenchwoman told him that he was free to go, she says. "I said,
well, you are not forced to do anything you do not want," the woman
recalls. "If you want to just go back, you can. I tried to reassure
him. He embraced me very strongly and thanked me for listening to him."

She got the impression that he was going to leave for home immediately.

THE FIRST THING JEREMIAH SAID when he telephoned his girlfriend
early Thursday, March 27, 2003, was that he was under "too much
pressure."

"I asked him what kind of pressure, but he didn't explain himself
coherently," she recounted in her written statement to British
authorities. "His voice was very small and weak."

Jeremiah's limbs hurt and his mouth was dry, he told her. "He said
they were doing experiments on people with computers . . . and magnetic
things . . . the government," his girlfriend recalled in her statement.
"I was very worried, but wondered if he hadn't started to imagine
things because of information overload . . . He also told me he no
longer knew what reality was, what was truth and what was lies."

Jeremiah's girlfriend begged him to take a train to Paris right
away. He promised he would, though in their disjointed conversation
they didn't talk about where he might get money for a ticket. Not long
afterward, Jeremiah placed the two desperate phone calls to his mother,
both of which ended abruptly. Frantic and confused, his mother made
predawn calls to law enforcement agencies in Britain, telling them that
she believed her son had stumbled into a terrorist organization in
Germany and needed help.

It was too late.

Just before 6 a.m. in Wiesbaden, the driver of a BMW saw a
pedestrian run into the roadway. He swerved, he later told police, but
clipped the young man with his side-view mirror, knocking him down.
Jeremiah got up and ran. Minutes later, two more cars came into view,
moving fast. A red Peugeot swerved. Jeremiah leapt forward, the driver
later said. His arms were raised. His mouth was open. The windshield
and a passenger door window of the car shattered. Jeremiah went down.
The driver of a blue Golf ran him over. Jeremiah had massive head
trauma and died on the road.

German police quickly concluded that Jeremiah had committed suicide
by leaping into traffic. They concentrated their investigation on the
accident scene. They talked to drivers and measured skid marks, but
didn't probe deeply into how Jeremiah spent his final hours or
investigate alternatives to suicide, police records indicate. LaRouche
activists brought Jeremiah's luggage and passport to the police station.

Jeremiah's parents arrived in Wiesbaden the next day. There, they
met with German police, who told them LaRouche officials claimed that
Jeremiah had suffered from suicidal impulses and had been a mental
patient at the Tavistock Institute.

Erica and Hugo Duggan were stunned at first, then outraged.
Jeremiah had no history of mental illness or suicide attempts,
according to evidence later offered at a British inquest.

A British coroner convened a court hearing last year to determine
how Jeremiah died. According to a transcript of the inquest, he found
no evidence to support a ruling of suicide. "I could not accept the
investigators' bald conclusion that Jeremiah Duggan intended to take
his own life," the coroner, a magistrate, concluded. He noted that,
based on the evidence he'd heard, Jeremiah had been "in a state of
terror." He lamented that he lacked authority to compel German
witnesses to answer his lingering questions. "What was it that turned
that young man into a terrified young man?" the coroner asked. "Sadly,
we might never know . . ."

Jeremiah's parents are campaigning for German authorities to reopen
the case, and the British government has provided them with a lawyer to
help. Meanwhile, the Duggans are conducting their own investigation.
They want to know if their son was trying to find someone to help him
when he ran into the road.

"How do you try to flag down a speeding car?" Erica Duggan asks
softly. Wouldn't you jump forward, arms raised and mouth open --
screaming?

MICHAEL WINSTEAD WAS SO SHAKEN AFTER HE QUIT the LaRouche Youth Movement that he barely spoke to anyone for weeks, he says.

Eventually, he sent anti-LaRouche letters to local newspapers and
colleges where he'd tried to recruit for the movement. He chatted in
anti-LaRouche Internet discussion groups, trading war stories with
former followers, sparring with current devotees. In May, he mentioned
on one electronic bulletin board that he had given an interview to a
reporter asking about LaRouche and Jeremiah Duggan.

Soon afterward, the New Federalist, a LaRouche newspaper, ran a
photo of Winstead on its front page under the headline: "The Washington
Post's Latest Pervert: Michael Winstead." The accompanying article
suggested that Winstead and The Post are part of the worldwide
conspiracy against Lyndon LaRouche.

The June 25 issue of LaRouche's Executive Intelligence Review
suggested that Jeremiah's death was not only part of a U.S.-British
conspiracy to "get LaRouche," it was also linked to the failed search
for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and the suicide of British
weapons expert and senior civil servant David Kelly. Though the
publication doesn't explain the connection, it lists them on the same
timeline as if they are part of the same unfolding anti-LaRouche plot.

In his e-mail, LaRouche declined to answer questions about
Jeremiah's time in Germany or his death, noting that the matter is
addressed in one of his latest pieces of campaign literature, "Children
of Satan III: The Sexual Congress for Cultural Fascism." That
publication contends that Jeremiah was mentally ill and points out that
German authorities continue to stand by their finding of suicide. It
portrays Jeremiah's grieving mother as a dupe who has been pressured
into joining the worldwide conspiracy to get LaRouche: "The objective
of the media smear campaign, linking LaRouche-affiliated organizations
to the Duggan suicide, is to build pressure in several Continental
European countries, and eventually launch a major disruption of the
LaRouche campaign . . . to assure that if there is a John Kerry
Presidency, LaRouche will be nowhere near the premises."

FOR MORE THAN A YEAR NOW, Erica Duggan has been possessed by the
very question that young LaRouche activists say they burn to answer:
"What is truth?"

With her gentle voice, cascade of soft red curls and open manner,
the 58-year-old mother makes an unlikely agitator. She spent her career
helping immigrant children adjust to London schools. She is spending
her retirement and savings pursuing clues to her son's death. She sold
her home and is using the proceeds to investigate. She is meeting with
human rights lawyers and maintaining a Web site called
Justiceforjeremiah.com to publicize and fund her cause.

She has moved into her parents' cozy home on the outskirts of London
and turned an upstairs room into her command center. It is crammed with
bulging files. From the window there is a view of the lush garden
below. She gazes instead at her computer screen, downloading
literature, researching LaRouche organizations, trading e-mail with
former members and critics who are trying to help her. Not long ago,
she obtained the phone number of the LaRouche activist in Paris who had
invited her son to attend the German conference from which he never
returned. She called. He pretended to be someone else, she says. She
rang back. He hung up. She called again. Three times. Four times. He
told her she was harassing him. She told him that he was the reason her
son went to Germany, so he owed it to her to tell her what happened.

"I found myself raving and crying," she recalls. "I said, 'Do you want to see a photo of how he ended up?' "

It is an irony not lost on Erica that LaRouche, veteran weaver of
conspiracy theories involving the British and Zionists, is being
pursued by a Jewish mother from Britain. She has become an accidental
but determined traveler in his realm of plots and apocalyptic
fantasies. She even wonders if LaRouche partisans are tracking her
movements, hacking into her e-mail.

Sometimes she thinks about showing up at one of LaRouche's speeches
and disrupting it the way LaRouche activists disrupt other people's
events. She'd like to pose some hard questions from the audience: How
dare he dismiss her son's death as a hoax? How dare he talk about
saving the world when he doesn't have the humanity to help a grieving
mother find the truth?

It is very late, almost midnight in London. She is very tired. And
dark fantasies are infectious. "I suppose he has security people who
have guns, and they might try to shoot me," she says, speaking softly.
"Then the world would know the truth, wouldn't they?"

April Witt is a Magazine staff writer.

© 2004 The Washington Post Company