THE LASH OF LAROUCHE

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00806R000100640006-4
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: August 5, 2010
• Sequence Number: 6
• Publication Date: April 7, 1986
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

WASHINGTON POST
7 April 1986
The Lash of LaRouche
Perennial Candidate Sees Worldwide Plots
By John Mintz
Washington Post Staff Writer
B'nai B'rith is a terrorist organ-
iza nto that kidnaps children, Henry
A. Kissinger is "a faggot," the In-
ternational Monetary Fund is com-
mitting genocide, Walter F. Mon-
dale is a KGB "agent of influence,"
and a Jewish spy for Britain helped
assassinate Abraham Lincoln, but
"he`was not acting as a few,"
Welcome to the unsettled world
of Lyndon H. LaRouche Jr., the pe-
rennial presidential candidate who
has spent much of the last 13 years
making these and other scurrilous
and-totally unsupported allegations.
LaRouche, 63, is a political cha-
meleon. In the 1960s he was a
Marxist theoretician who lectured
followers in Greenwich Village
about economics. Now he is the
leader of a worldwide sect with up
to 1,000 members that lustily em-
braces many of President Reagan's
programs, including the U.S. mil-
itary buildup and the "Star Wars"
missile defense system.
Two weeks ago LaRouche pulled
perhaps his most unlikely outflank-
ing movement. Two supporters
won Democratic nominations for
lieutenant governor and secretary
of state of Illinois, prompting guber-
natorial nominee Adlai E. Steven-
son III to say that he would not run
on the Democratic ticket with
them.
The Illinois primary sent the na-
tional Democratic Party into a panic,
although during the last few years
the LaRouche organization has been
sharpening its political skills and
reaching a growing audience.
In the 1970s, LaRouche support-
ers ran for office under the banner
of his U.S. Labor Party, but their
electoral efforts did not take off
until 1980, when they formed a new
electoral arm, the National Dem-
ocratic Policy Committee.
The group runs several hundred
candidates a year. Some, at various
times, have received 30 percent to
40 percent of the vote in congres-
sional districts around the nation.
They have won local seats and
Democratic Party posts.
LaRouche's group has moved
quickly to take advantage of the
Illinois primary outcome, making
available some articulate members
to reporters and modifying its rhet-
oric as it seeks mainstream status.
But the movement is anything
but mainstream and has been de-
nounced from many quarters for
years. LaRouche "leads what may
be one of the strangest political
groups in American history," the
conservative Heritage Foundation
said. "LaRouche has managed to
attract a small but fanatical follow-
ing to his conspiratorial view of the
world."
The AFL-CIO said, "Mostly, he
confounds people in various circles,
but he also works hard to gain re-
spectability out in front of his shad-
owy empire."
LaRouche runs his organization
from a heavily guarded mansion on
170 acres in rural Loudoun County,
Va. Two years ago, LaRouche
moved his national headquarters,
including hundreds of followers,
from Manhattan to Leesburg, up-
setting his new neighbors, who say
they cannot understand his state-
ments and are afraid of his body-
guards carrying semiautomatic
weapons.
His people have been sinking roots
in Leesburg, buying prime real es-
tate, joining the Chamber of Com-
merce and starting a local newspaper
with, among other folksy features, a
gardening column.
It is a long journey from where
he started.
Apparently rebelling against his
New England Quaker background,
LaRouche joined the Socialist
Workers Party in the 1940s. By the
late 1960s in New York, he had
gathered around him a loyal group
of a few hundred leftists. He took
the name Lyn Marcus, and called
his group the National Caucus of
Labor Committees (NCLC). In
1968 it briefly took over a student
strike at Columbia University, but
was kicked out of the radical Stu-
dents for a Democratic Society
(SDS) for ideological differences.
Followers from that period de-
scribe him as a brilliant lecturer,
although one found him "eccentric
and odd."
Things started to change in 1973,
when he ordered supporters to study
karate and street-fighting. In De-
cember of t nt willift- he __ _
that the Central Intelligence AQ ncv
kidnaped a British follower and
LaRouche. In-long and emotional
sessions, Rouche accused follow-
ers of disloyalty and berated them
about their supposed,,,,~~eexual prob-
lems and political weaklsses.
During this period LaRouche also'
elaborated on the numerous sup-
posed plots against him and human-
ity by a shifting pantheon of ene-
mies. He has been constantly sur-
rounded by armed guards since
then, and today maintilins that the
KGB and the Libyans are after him.
The group went onto a kind of
war footing in 1974, with many sup-
porters quitting jobs and cutting
family ties. The authoritarian at-
mosphere established then contin-
ues, fed by fear of imminent attack
by evil outsiders, according to for-
mer LaRouche followers, experts
on, the group and published reports.
It's a seven-day-a-week, 24-
hour-a-day total immersion," said
one dropout who, like others inter-
viewed, declined to be identified for
fear of retribution. "People wouldn't
have any private lives any more
Everyone's got to march to
the same tune."
LaRouche and his supporters
deny that the NCLC is a cult, saying
he has no control over supporters.
By the mid-1970s, the group
could be described less as Marxist
than as conspiracy-minded, allying
itself with neo-Nazi and extreme
rightist individuals who shared its
conspiratorial world view.
This was the period when
LaRouche and his followers began
making statements widely de-
scribed as anti-Semitic. They said
f
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Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2010/08/05: CIA-RDP90-00806R000100640006-4