Early this month in Washington Heights a.young woman slipped away from the intense People who had beeh crowding her apartment, folded a desperate note into a paper dirplane and sailed it out the living‐room window.
The note twisted down through the winter twilight to the feet of a mother and child out for a walk. While the young woman waved frantically from the window, the mother picked up the note and read it:
“Please help to get ‘me out of here. I am’ being held a prisoner in my own apartment, 9 Cabrini Boulevard, Apt. 4A. They're going to move me soon to some unknown location. will try to leave some clue in my room if the police get here too late.....” The note was signed Alice Weitzman.
By the time the police arrived 40 minutes later, a corner was already being lifted off one of the strangest episodes in the history of the American left.
Progression to Violence
What has emerged is one of the last survivals of the student activism of the nineteensixties—the steady progression of a committed far‐left organization from theoretical writing to repellent descriptions of sadism, from praise of humanism to physical violence against opponents, from hopeful debate about ideas to an embittered conviction that nearly the entire world is engaged in a conspiracy against it.
When the police arrived on Cabrini Boulevard that evening, they found the apartment crowded with well‐dressed militants of a Marxist group called the National Caucus of Labor Committees. Six of the group were arrested and charged with unlawfully imprisoning Miss Weitzman, a member who had been recently expressing skepticism about the organization's views.
Continue reading the main storyThe group explained to the polite that they had been “staying” with their fellow member because she had been brainwashed and “programmed” by what they described as a cabal Including both the Central Intelligence Agency and the K.G.B.; the Soviet espionage organization. The plot, they said, involved assassination of their leader.
Among those arrested, all between the ages of 22 and 30, were the son of a Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia Affairs, the daughter of an Episcopalian priest in Connecticut and the son of the chairman of the electrophysics department at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Other members who.eme.rged later in.. eluded the daughter of the president of Sarah Lawrence College and the son of a vice president of the Ford Foundation.
The six were arraigned the next morning; and released in $1,000 bit The case Is still pending, in the courts, thOugh Miss Weitzman in the meantime has become a reluctant witness against her.former friends. “Whet they need, you can't provide In a court,” she said at one preliminary bearing last week,
The Genesis
This history Of the Labor Committees a seven‐year story in which the, group, now estimated to include between 600 and 1,000 intensely committed members.here and in. Europe, was formed from elements of Students, for a Deinocratic Society, in the waning days, of the student movement, and played a leading role in the Columbia University strike in 1968.
The early phase was a calm time of writing and attempting to organize workers for a world revolution. ,Those Who joined it then ‘say they did so because it was an. intelligent alternative to the Violence of the Weathermen or the inaction of drugs Or communes.
In its jitter period; however, the group’ has lone on to psychosexual speculation about behavior modification, and still further, last year to savage beatings of — by their own count—at least 40 political opponents, principally members of the Communist party and black‐power activists.
Labor Committees disrupted the Senate Watergate hearings one day last summer and ran zealous campaigns for local in New York, Newark and other cities last fall, none of which drew ,more than 2,000 votes.
Target of conspiracy
Now the group is convinced is the target of a vast conspiracy embracing, among many other elements, the C.I.A., the K.G,B., British intelligence, the New York City Police Department, the Rockefeller family and the anthropology department at Columbia University. This conspiracy, they say, has secretly gotten access to various of their members and has “programmed”, them. like computers to invent spurious identities and assassinate their leaders.
Behind all the changes is the founder and present chairman of the caucus, a 51‐year‐old Marxist teacher and theoretician who uses the name Lyn Marcus. Among his current beliefs is that he is the only man in the world capable of “deprogramming” the alleged victims of the brainwashing con. spiracy.
Mr. Marcus hits already subjected several Members of the organization to his techniques, which appear to include hypnotism and deprivation of solid food, and plans to use them on at least several more.
One of those being kept in “isolation” for “deprogramming” is a Member who was sent to Bellevue Hospital last week after being found running on: the streets screaming “Decontrol me! Decontrol me!” Another, until the police extricated her, was Miss Weitzman in Washington Heights.
‘Hunan Race at Stake’
Mr. Marcus, whom former colleagues described as a brilliant synthesizer of ideas into coherent systems, believes that unless he breaks the “conspiracy,” the world is doomed. “Any of you who say this is hoax—You're cruds! You're subhuman! You're not serious!” he.said.in a speech on Jan. 3. “The human race is at stake. Either we win or there is no humanity. That's the way she's cut.”
People who have left the movement are astonished at the turn it his taken. Where once members talked of nonviolence and human creativity, they now spend their waking hours being harangued in; violent speeches studded with accusations that their enemies are forcing them to eat excrement, perform fellatio on pigs and dogs, and submit to homosexual rape.
At their dingy headquarters in a garment center loft on West 29th Street, Labor Committee youths assigned to “security” sit at the door twirling nunchaku sticks—lethal karate weapons made of two clubs joined by a. chain.. Twenty or 30 red‐eyed men and women rush about answering telephones, operating mimeograph’ machines or doing chores for Mr. Marcus.
Members seem incapable of talking about anything but the brainwashing and the conspiracy; simple questions often require two‐hour answers as proponents marshal fact after fact, some drawn from that day's newspapers, to put forth their theories.
In the ,last two weeks, the movement has put out 41 separate press releases on brainwashing, and has filled its newspaper, New Solidarity, with articles like “Injunction Against C.I.A. Mental Genocide.”
The members of the group, however, are careful not to go beyond the elements of the conspiracy already outlined by the leader; there seems to be anxious expectation about who will be singled out as a brainwashing victim. Mr. Marcus has told them that they are not responsible for their thoughts or actions because of the “programming.”
‘Depth Analysis’
“Don't believe a thing you say,” at least one Labor Committee adherent was told. “Wait till you check it out with competent authority.” The competent authorities are Mr. Marcus and a handful of assistants whom he has certified by “depth analysis” sessions.
“It's the maddest thing I've ever seen,” said one [member who withdrew recently. “The Labor Committee used to say that people have the power to change the world by thinking. Now they have Come to just the opposite conclusion — by thinking, or questioning, you can damage the organization.”
Though a few have left the group in disgust over its latest phase, it has managed to hold most of its members, of whom there are about 180 in New York, perhaps 50 in Boston and the rest scattered through 23 cells in the United States and 11 in Europe and Canada.
Total commitment is required for members. Jobs and families are expected to be secondary to party work; almost all members who are married also have spouses in the movement. Dues are $24 a month, which pay for publications, rents, propaganda and six salaried officials.
The Highest Stipend
Mr. Marcus says he gets $50 a week, the highest stipend. He says that “contributions” also help pay for his frequent trips to Europe and other expenses. It is known that one young member liquidated her trust fund this month to help pay for the blizzard of press releases about brainwashing.
The unimportance of family ties seems to be stressed. In Criminal Court the other day, two of the defendants in the Washington Heights case —Mary Fletcher, daughter of an Episcopal priest, and Khushro Gandhi, whose father is at Rensselaer. Polytechnic — were prodding. a third, Daniel Sneider, about his,refusal to. answer a reporter's question about his father. Though the son refused, another member identified the father as the State Department official.
Former members say it is difficult „for outsiders to imagine the pressures.to believe within the group. Part, they say, is rooted in the militants’ sincere commitment to left political work, and the fact that the Labor Committee presents one of the few opportunities now to exercise it.
Another part they attribute to the gradual development of Mr. Marcus's beliefs, making each small step toward the current brainwashing mania seem logical after what had gone before.
There else) seems to be the attraction of a closed but co herent intellectual system in which there is an answer to every question from marital relations to world war; such system might be difficult to leave‐for the uncertainties of what the Labor Committee calls bourgeois reality.
An Assassin's Lunges
Me Marcus, whose creation the system is, is a lean, closecropped man with intense eyes under jutting brows. In a recent four‐hour interview he talked virtually nonstop about his life and his theories. Only once did his reasoned, pipe. smoking professorial air vanish — when, with an explosion of spittle, he lunged with an imaginary knife to show how a C.I.A.‐programmed assassin might kill him.
He talked expansively about his career. He was born in Rochester, N.H., in 1922 under the name Lyndon Hermyle LaRouche Jr., he said. He adopted Lyn Marcus as a pen name in his early party, work and has used it since.
His parents, still alive, are Active Quakers. His !father was an inventor and administrator for the United Shoe Machinery Company and now does consulting work.
Mr. Marcus described himself as “an egregious child, wouldn't say an ugly duckling, but a nasty duckling.” He says he attended Northeastern University for a while but was “one of those prodigies” who was ahead of his teachers, and so withdrew.
As a conscientious objector at the start of World War II, he was assigned to a service camp in New Hampshire and there, he says, was converted from Kant to Marx by Communist party _members. Realizing the futility of protest, he joined the Army and served as a medical corpsman in India and Burma.
Wed to Psychiatrist
In 1948, Mr. Marcus said, he joined the. Socialist Worker Party, a Trotskyite group, where he remained until 1957. At the same time he worked as a management consultant, systems designer and computer programmer, first with his father and then on his own.
Mr. Marcus was married to a psychiatrist aid has since been divorced; they have a 17‐year‐old son. He left the Socialist Workers with Carol Schnitzer, and later lived with her until she left him in 1972. He now lives with a young woman in her 20's who is in the Labor Committees.
Mr. Marcus said he and Miss Schnitzer tried to found various left movements “from scratch” without success until 1966, when he began giving courses at the Free University iralreenwich Village. There, he said, they founded the Village Committee for Independent Political Action, which had a joint caucus briefly with S.D.S. and the Maoist Progressive Labor movement.
‐Out of the Columbia strike came the [National Caucus of S.D.S. Labor Committees with Mr. Marcus at its center; it attracted a number of important strike leaders, including Tony Papert, still a member. “S.D.S.” was dropped from the title in 1969.
The movement early started work toward what are now its professed goals: control of the American labor, movement within two years', and establishment of a world workers government within five.
The Labor Committees sup ported the United Federation of Teachers in the 1968 school strike. It has consistently opposed community control as “pacification” program designed to fragment the power of poor people. The position has brought it into conflict with black power groups like that of Irnamu Baraka in Newark, whom Mr. Marcus calls C.I.A. agent.
A Parting of Ways
The movement stressed human creativity as a way of freeing workers from the hold of capitalism. It also attempted. with little success, to gain influence in labor unions. One source estimates that only about 2 or 3 per cent of the group's membership has been recruited from the working class.
In mid‐1972, Miss Schnitzer and Mr. Marcus parted. Early members say that she had served as a target of his wrath at meetings, providing at least a semblance of debate about theories. After she left, they said, Mr. Marcus increasingly insisted on one‐man rule, calling dissenters C.I.A. agents or accusing them of having a “mother problem.”
The summer of the parting, Mr. Marcus advocated selfdefense training for members, citing harassment by the Communist party in labor organizing. Last March, the Labor Committees announced “Operation Mop‐Up” against opponents on the left; through the summer the party paper gloatingly described how many had been “sent to the hospital” after clashes., Previously, the group had shunned violence as “politically stupid.”
At the same time, Mr. Marcus was developing a theory of psychology to go along with his Marxist economics, which he taught in adult education courses at the New School for Social Research. Among his many ideas on the subject are that most women are lesbians, and that women marry men to hurt them.
Last summer, Mr. Marcus did his first “deprogrtuning,” of a member in Germany named Konstantin George who had left his wife and the movement to live with a psychiatrist in East Germany. When he returned to the West, Mr. Marcus said he discovered elements of a vast assassination plot against him implanted in Mr. George's’ mind.
Through the fall the talk of conspiracies and brainwashing grew in the movement. Mr. Marcus found his second victim at the annual meeting of the Labor Committees here on the last three days of December. He was a 26‐year‐old English member named Christopher White. Mr. White was married last year to Miss Schnitzer, 10 years his senior.
Mr. Marcus has taped the deprograming and to a layman it appears obvious that the elements of the conspiracy he claims to extract from Mr. White's mind are either harmless bits of personal history or ideas suggested by Mr. Marcus himself.
When Mr. White resists the questioning at one point, Mr. Marcus shouts at the obviously disturbed youth:
“You don't have to communicate a goddamn thing. II know what your mind is.”
At another point when Mrs. White is in the room and Mr. White has confirmed one of Mr. Marcus's suggestions, Mr. Marcus says “Now do you see Carol? Do you believe?”
‘Raise the Voltage’
There are sounds of weeping and vomiting on the tapes, and Mr. White complains of being deprived of sleep, food and cigarettes. At one point someone says “raise the voltage,” but Mr. Marcus says this was associated with the bright lights used in the questioning rather than an electric shock. There is also what appears to be an attempt to hypnotize Mr. White by someone, not Mr. Marcus, in the room.
Mr. Marcus denies that Mr. White was mistreated in any way. He says a physician, Dr. Gene Inch, also a member of the group, was in attendance throughout.
Mr. Marcus uses a combination of computer terminology and sexology to describe the “programming.” He describes Mr. White as “being reduced to an eight‐cycle infinite loop with look‐up table, with homosexual bestiality.” A computer expert who examined Mr. Marcus's contentions says his terms went out of date around 1962 —about the time Mr. Marcus's associations with the industry tapered off.
Mr. Marcus also says that
For some parents of young people in the Labor Committees, the last phase of its activities has been a wrenching experience. Two of them, Dr. Charles DeCarlo of Sarah Lawrence and W. McNeil Lowry of the Ford Foundation, were publicly identified by the Labor Committees as members of a “commission of inquiry” into brainwashing though neither is serving on it.
Several men spoke of difficult family situations because of the movement, with the children unable to stop talking about conspiracies and brain
washing and the wives impatient and fretful.
“A young person can adopt an intellectual father in addition to his own, and perhaps that's what's happened here,” said the father of a young man in the movement.
The other day two people who had left the Labor Committees and were speaking harshly of it were asked how they could have stayed so long In a movement they considered corrupted. One thought a while and said:
“Because we had no place else to go.” certain kind of drug which his research is as yet unable to specify is used in the “programming.” One of the iron rules of the Labor Committees is that members who use drugs are instantly expelled.
During the intensive questioning on one day, Mr. White complains of a terrible pain in his arm.
“That's not real,” Mr. Marcus says. “That's in the program.”
“The pain is real in my arm,” Mr. White screams. “I have to tell you what's real and stop this crazy fantasy world. Because it's not my fantasy...”
For some parents of young people in the Labor Committees, the last phase of its activities has been a wrenching experience. Two of them, Dr. Charles DeCarlo of Sarah Lawrence and W. McNeil Lowry of the Ford Foundation, were publicly identified by the Labor Committees as members of a “commission of inquiry” into brainwashing though neither is serving on it.
Several men spoke of difficult family situations because of the movement, with the children unable to stop talking about conspiracies and brain“A young person can adopt an intellectual father in addition to his own, and perhaps that's what's happened here,” said the father of a young man in the movement.
The other day two people who had left the Labor Committees and were speaking harshly of it were asked how they could have stayed so long In a movement they considered corrupted. One thought a while and said:
“Because we had no place else to go.” certain kind of drug which his research is as yet unable to specify is used in the “programming.” One of the iron rules of the Labor Committees is that members who use drugs are instantly expelled.
During the intensive questioning on one day, Mr. White complains of a terrible pain in his arm.
“That's not real,” Mr. Marcus says. “That's in the program.”
“The pain is real in my arm,” Mr. White screams. “I have to tell you what's real and stop this crazy fantasy world. Because it's not my fantasy..”
Continue reading the main story