page_title: Lyndon LaRouche
section_title: 1973: Political shift; "Operation Mop-Up"
hierarchical_section_title: Lyndon LaRouche / Career / 1970s / 1973: Political shift; "Operation Mop-Up"
context_page_description: Lyndon Hermyle LaRouche Jr. was an American political activist, convicted fraudster, cult leader, and founder of the LaRouche movement, whose main organization was the National Caucus of Labor Committees.
  Born in Rochester, New Hampshire, LaRouche became sympathetic to socialist and Marxist movements and ideals in his twenties during World War Two and by the 1960s became engaged in increasingly smaller and more radical splinter groups. During the 1970s he created the foundation of the LaRouche Movement and became more engaged in conspiratorial beliefs and violent and/or illegal activities. In 1986, his movement reached its height in electoral success when Larouchite candidates won several Democratic primaries for state offices in Illinois. Later in the 1980s, criminal investigations led to convictions of several LaRouche movement members, including LaRouche himself. He was sentenced to fifteen years imprisonment, but only served five years.
  LaRouche was a perennial candidate for President of the United States. He ran in every election from 1976 to 2004 as a candidate of third parties established by members of his movement.
context_section_description: LaRouche wrote in his 1987 autobiography that violent altercations had begun in 1969 between his NCLC members and several New Left groups when Mark Rudd's faction began assaulting LaRouche's faction at Columbia University. Press accounts alleged that between April and September 1973, during what LaRouche called "Operation Mop-Up", NCLC members began physically attacking members of leftist groups that LaRouche classified as "left-protofascists"; an editorial in LaRouche's New Solidarity said of the Communist Party that the movement "must dispose of this stinking corpse." Armed with chains, bats, and martial-art nunchuk sticks, NCLC members assaulted Communist Party, SWP, and Progressive Labor Party members and Black Power activists on the streets and during meetings. At least 60 assaults were reported. The operation ended when police arrested several of LaRouche's followers; there were no convictions, and LaRouche maintained they had acted in self-defense. Journalist and LaRouche biographer Dennis King writes that the FBI may have tried to aggravate the strife, using measures such as anonymous mailings, to keep the groups at each other's throats. LaRouche said he met representatives of the Soviet Union at the United Nations in 1974 and 1975 to discuss attacks by the Communist Party USA on the NCLC and to propose a merger, but said he received no assistance from them. One FBI memo, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, proposes assisting the CPUSA in an investigation "for the purpose of ultimately eliminating him [LaRouche] and the threat of the NCLC." (see image to left)
  LaRouche's critics such as Dennis King and Antony Lerman allege that in 1973 and with little warning, LaRouche adopted more extreme ideas, a process accompanied by a campaign of violence against his opponents on the left, and the development of conspiracy theories and paranoia about his personal safety. According to these accounts, he began to believe he was under threat of assassination from the Soviet Union, the CIA, Libya, drug dealers, and bankers. He also established a "Biological Holocaust Task Force," which, according to LaRouche, analyzed the public health consequences of International Monetary Fund (IMF) austerity policies toward impoverished nations in Africa, and predicted that epidemics of cholera as well as possibly entirely new diseases would strike Africa in the 1980s.
caption: A 1973 internal FBI letter, noting the Communist Party's efforts to eliminate LaRouche, and suggesting submission of a "blind memorandum" to the Communist Party's newspaper.
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