7
The majority of the LSD manufactured by Tord Svenson at Stark’s Laboratoire Le Clocheton was intended for the Brotherhood. One huge consignment was concealed in a brand-new Jaguar sports car and shipped to Canada, from there to New York, then on to California and into the possession of one of the original Brotherhood members. Since Stark appeared at their Arizona ranch in the summer of 1969, the Brotherhood had changed beyond all recognition. Shortly after Stark’s visit – and the sudden death of their inspirational leader, John Griggs – the key personnel abandoned their base and went in separate directions. Several headed to Hawaii with the aim of constructing their ideal community and growing tons of weed. One went to Oregon, some stayed in southern California, and a few others were constantly on the move from continent to continent and country to country, overseeing the global movement of their goods and capital. While the senior Brothers still controlled and coordinated the flow of international traffic and the output from various production centres, they had almost nothing to do with the street-level supply chain. The Brotherhood had become a franchise: anyone who could claim any kind of association with them could set up as an independent wholesaler, while making use of their brand name and guarantee of quality merchandise.
As a result, the Brotherhood swelled in size; at its peak there were around 750 members with identifiable ties to the early days of the gang, and as many as 3,000 affiliates. Such rapid growth meant it was impossible for the leaders to track what was happening on the ground and made the network hard to control, yet this lack of central planning had its advantages and the Brotherhood’s management system was flexible enough to allow plenty of room for improvisation and innovation, especially when it came to adding new items to their product range. During 1970, Stark managed to score a small amount of THC dimethylheptyl – a synthetic derivative of THC that is far stronger than LSD – from the only Swiss chemical company that made it for experimental purposes. Stark was blown away by its hallucinogenic properties, but put off by the expense and difficulty associated with producing it. However, he had a reasonably good alternative in mind: hashish oil. Though not as brain twisting as THC dimethylheptyl, hashish oil is considerably more psychoactive than its source material. While standard hashish has about 20 per cent THC content, hashish oil contains 85 per cent.
Hashish comes from the resin secreted by the female cannabis plant and is gathered by putting dried buds and leaves through a sieve. The recovered resin is then gently heated until it begins to melt, at which point it’s pressed into blocks and sealed with either cloth or cellophane. Hashish oil, a concentrated liquid, is obtained by mixing the resin with a chemical solvent – such as acetone or petrol – to produce a greasy, sticky residue that can be smoked in a glass pipe or by smearing some on a cigarette paper. To make sure he had everything properly in place before approaching the Brotherhood, Stark went to Afghanistan, met with their main hashish brokers and discussed the practicalities of manufacturing hash oil. Fact-finding mission complete, Stark brought in the Brotherhood, who were easily won over by hashish oil’s potency and retail value. Using Stark’s instruction manual, a lab was set up in Michigan that could churn out 40,000 doses a day: within a year, there were six others up and running.
By 1972, the Brotherhood accounted for 50 per cent of all the weed and acid sold in the US. It had roughly $1.8 million in cash sitting in Swiss banks, and an estimated total turnover of around $200 million. But the Brotherhood’s phenomenal expansion did not go unnoticed. Since 1970, a multi-agency task force had been conducting a major operation against them. Spearheading the investigation – alongside the FBI, the IRS and local police forces – was the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (BNDD, the immediate forerunner of the DEA), which had been formed in 1968 out of several drug-related government agencies. Chief among these was the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, which had policed the legal and illegal trade in drugs both nationally and globally since 1930, dictating policy to other countries and manipulating treaties and agreements made by international bodies like the UN: the war on drugs was very much its creation. Building on this legacy, the BNDD had 1,361 agents – of whom 86 were overseas – at its disposal and a substantial war chest filled to the brim by the Nixon administration. Beginning by concentrating on the Brotherhood’s continued presence in Laguna Beach, the BNDD slowly assembled a detailed picture of the whole network and, bit by bit, they got a clearer picture of where Stark fitted into the Brotherhood’s empire.
In December 1971, BNDD agents uncovered a hashish oil lab along with 86,000 doses of Stark’s European-made LSD. From then until next spring, there were three further raids in Laguna Beach and 228,000 hits of his acid were seized. Meanwhile, the IRS was following the money trail and realised that high-ranking Brothers owned 546 acres of land in southern California. When they examined the purchase records they discovered that the real estate had been bought by a Panamanian paper company – the same one that Sam Goekjian, Stark’s Paris-based lawyer, had invested in – and that the titles and deeds to the land were held by a front company in Lichtenstein originally set up by Billy Hitchcock. Determined to get to the bottom of this, IRS officials showed up at Goekjian’s office in March 1972 and quizzed him about Stark’s role in the money-laundering operation. Goekjian pleaded ignorance and the IRS left empty-handed. Nevertheless, by that summer, the BNDD’s chief investigators were certain that Stark was the mastermind behind the Belgian acid lab and responsible for introducing hashish oil to the Brotherhood. According to them, he was near the very top of the organisation: Stark had made it onto the most wanted list.
During 1972, Stark’s ex-partners in crime were settling into their new homes in north-west London. Kemp and Bott were now officially renting a flat at 8 Westbourne Grove Terrace, a four-storey white stucco Georgian villa with an attic and basement, located at the heart of an area synonymous with the counter-culture. Mixing a shabby bohemian grandeur with inner-city grime, and enlivened by its large African Caribbean community, it attracted writers, musicians, artists, radicals and drug dealers. Within a ten-minute radius of their home was Notting Hill Gate, Bayswater and Ladbroke Grove, which was bisected by Portobello Road, the spine that held the whole alternative scene together. Ladbroke Grove played host to a variety of grassroots organisations: there were tenants’ groups fighting for squatters’ rights and against venal landlords; free schools; food co-ops; drug counselling; and community clinics where Bott, who was now a qualified GP, could put her training to good use. Acting as a focal point for all these initiatives was the Notting Hill People’s Association, which had a meeting room and coffee bar, and was just around the corner from Kemp and Bott at 90 Talbot Road.
A typical example of the sort of projects that were springing up in the area was the West London Claimants Union, which accused the current welfare system of keeping people trapped in ‘poverty, under-nourishment, depression, boredom, despondency and anxiety’, and demanded ‘an adequate income for all without condition’ on the basis that any humane ‘welfare system should feed, clothe and provide for all its citizens … with no strings attached’. The union was brought into being by a young activist living in a squat at 25 Powis Square – right next to Portobello Road – who’d been a student in Cambridge at the same time as Kemp and had organised the anti-exam protests. In December 1970, he and some of his flat-mates moved north-east to Islington to pursue a different route to revolution. Seeing themselves as part of an international struggle that stretched from the battlefields of Vietnam to the ghettos of inner-city America and the capitals of Europe, they decided it was time to shake the masses out of their apathy and inspire them to rise up against their masters.
After much debate, they named themselves the Angry Brigade and their first move – firing a machine-gun at the Spanish embassy in London – was intended to demonstrate their solidarity with the First of May Group, who were busy terrorising representatives of Franco’s right-wing dictatorship in Spain, and had given the Brigade access to weapons. From then on, the Angry Brigade pursued a campaign focused on individuals and institutions involved in industrial relations. At the time, the Conservative government was trying to subdue the trade unions and bring workers to heel by managing pay disputes and preventing employees from going on strike. Bitter conflict ensued and the Angry Brigade were determined to exploit these tensions and further aggravate the situation with a string of bomb attacks, each one accompanied by a communiqué sent to the mainstream press explaining their motives and calling on others to follow their example.
On 9 December 1970, they exploded a bomb at the Department of Employment and Productivity. On 12 January 1971, they targeted the home of Robert Carr, the Employment Minister, announcing in the accompanying communiqué that they had ‘started to fight back’ and were confident of victory: ‘the war will be won by the organised working class, with bombs’. This attack thrust the Brigade into the spotlight and whipped the media into a frenzy. Just two weeks after it occurred, the Daily Mirror offered a £10,000 reward to anybody providing information that led to a conviction. Over the next seven months, the Angry Brigade hit the offices of the Ford motor company and the home of its managing director, and the residence of the Minister for Trade and Industry. In a slight deviation from this pattern, they detonated a device outside the trendy Biba fashion store in Kensington, (Communiqué 8: ‘the only thing to do with modern slave-houses – called boutiques – IS WRECK THEM’), and one inside the Metropolitan Police computer room (Communiqué 9: ‘we are slowly destroying the long tentacles of the oppressive State machine’).
By that summer, however, the authorities were closing in on the main Angry Brigade unit. Their hunt had gained momentum at the beginning of the year when an associate of the group – who’d lived with them in the Powis Square squat – was stopped on Talbot Road by two coppers. They went through his pockets and found a tiny amount of cannabis and three stolen cheque books. Held on remand, he couldn’t resist bragging to his cell mates about his connections to the notorious Angry Brigade. Unfortunately, one of the prisoners was a police informer. From February onwards, the police descended on anybody even vaguely connected to this big-mouthed revolutionary, and Ladbroke Grove was badly affected. Two properties in Talbot Road were given a thorough going over. The one in Powis Square was searched from top to bottom, and another four addresses in the area received the same treatment. But it wasn’t until 20 August, when the police hit a house in Stoke Newington, that they caught the alleged ring-leaders. Eight arrests were made and an automatic pistol, two machine-guns and a stock of dynamite and detonators were found at the scene.
In January 1972, four men and four women – dubbed the Stoke Newington Eight by their supporters – were indicted under Section 3(a) of the Explosive Substances Act 1883 and charged with plotting to blow things up. During their lengthy trial, which started on 30 May 1972, a benefit gig for the Stoke Newington Eight was held not far from Kemp and Bott’s flat. The headline act was the local band Hawkwind, a free-wheeling motley crew who’d placed LSD at the heart of their music from conception to rehearsal to performance: combining long free-wheeling jazz influenced improvisation with heavy rock rhythms, they reached levels of intensity that either propelled them into orbit or degenerated into noisy chaos. Lyrics came from the acid-saturated brain of another Ladbroke Grove resident, a South African poet who regularly contributed to the experimental and ground-breaking sci-fi magazine New Worlds, whose long-term editor was the author Michael Moorcock. In New Worlds, Moorcock hoped to steer the genre towards ‘the strange new countries of the mind which will exist tomorrow’ and build ‘a new mythology’ by exploring the frontiers of inner-space rather than the frontiers of outer space.
When Kemp and Bott moved to Ladbroke Grove, Moorcock had already been living there for nearly a decade – first in Colville Terrace and then at 51 Blenheim Crescent – and used the area in his fiction; a series of books about Jerry Cornelius, a time-travelling, ultra-hip, rock star secret agent, were set in the streets and squares near Moorcock’s home. With his thick mane of unkempt hair and flowing beard, Moorcock looked like an urban druid, and his friend and fellow writer J.G. Ballard called him ‘the resident guru of Ladbroke Grove’. Moorcock could be seen in any of the area’s popular pubs or cafes; or selling copies of New Worlds from a Portobello market stall; or on stage with Hawkwind, who were big fans of his work and had formed an alliance with him after he’d organised a gig for them under the Westway flyover. Moorcock would occasionally appear during Hawkwind’s shows dressed in outlandish robes and recite his poetry, dance and bang percussion.
As a young anarchist, Moorcock had enthusiastically embraced the counter-culture and began experimenting with LSD in the early 1960s. Its impact on his work was considerable, and in the years that followed these experiences he almost single-handedly reinvented fantasy fiction and dragged it into the psychedelic era. Yet Moorcock was no wide-eyed convert. He understood that hallucinogens had the power to rewire society, but not necessarily for the better. In his 1963 novella The Deep Fix, Moorcock envisioned an apocalyptic near future in which the well-meaning efforts of psychiatrists ‘to help with the work of curing mental disorders of all kinds’ ends in disaster. While the previous generation used ‘the old hallucinogenic drugs such as … Mescaline and Lysergic acid’ to achieve insights into their patients’ suffering, clinicians at Hampton Research go a step further and design a machine – the Hallucinomat – which can produce the same results but much more efficiently and effectively. The Hallucinomats are called into service when the world is seized by an epidemic of mental illness, ‘a dark tide of madness’. Hoping to reverse this disturbing trend, leaders position the Hallucinomats around the globe and turn them full on. But instead of soothing nerves, the machines reduce ‘the greater part of the human race’ to a catatonic state and cause ‘a great many others, who were potentially inclined to melancholia, manic depression and certain kinds of schizophrenia’ to commit suicide.
The corner of north-west London Moorcock called home had its fair share of acid casualties: a music journalist remembered seeing people ‘in the Ladbroke Grove underground community who’d just taken too much LSD and were just floating around and not making much sense’ and were ‘headed for self-destruction’. Exactly how much of the acid swilling round the neighbourhood was coming from Kemp’s labs is hard to gauge. The Microdot Gang’s distributors took in London, but at some remove from them personally. Kemp never sold any directly to customers, though he may have shared some with friends. Solomon, on the other hand, was in the habit of dishing it out wherever he went, and he was now living only fifteen minutes’ walk away at 39b Randolph Avenue, Maida Vale, in a similar style house to Kemp and Bott.
One of Solomon’s regular hang-outs on Portobello Road was the offices of the alternative magazine Frendz. Launched in 1969 as Friends – it became Frendz in May 1971 – its editor wanted it to have a more political agenda than main competitors The International Times and OZ, so alongside the sex and drugs and rock ’n’ roll were issues dedicated to gay liberation; women’s rights; the green movement; the 1926 General Strike; and the Angry Brigade, whose aims and methods the Frendz team endorsed and supported from beginning to end. Solomon killed many hours soaking up the atmosphere at their HQ and may well have crossed paths with Moorcock and Hawkwind, who were heavily involved with the magazine. The November 1971 edition included a two-page comic strip written by Moorcock and starring Hawkwind as the Sonic Assassins, a ‘band of dedicated men’ who are called into action when Void City comes under attack from a deadly onslaught of mainstream pop. Recognising the seriousness of the situation, they fly their Omnipod to Void City. On landing, they find a discarded ‘plastic grin’ belonging to their sworn enemy – a BBC radio DJ – who suddenly appears in a flying machine that resembles a cross between a submarine and an antique gramophone, leading a fleet of similar vessels that are blasting out waves of easy listening music. Before it’s too late, our heroes deploy their Sonic Wall, repel the invaders and save Void City from destruction.
In the end, even the Sonic Assassins couldn’t stop Frendz from collapsing. Dwindling sales and the constant strain of having to beg, borrow and steal just to get from one edition to the next had taken its toll, and the magazine folded in August 1972; the last issue featured Hawkwind and William Burroughs. Its demise added to the feeling of defeat and disappointment that hung in the air after the numerous arrests, constant raids and police harassment that were inflicted on this tight-knit community because of its links to the Angry Brigade. On 2 December 1972, the trial of the Stoke Newington Eight finally finished. Two days later, a divided jury delivered its verdict. Four of them were found guilty of conspiracy to cause explosions and possession of the means to do so, and were sentenced to ten years. The other four were acquitted. Summing up, the judge regretted the fact that ‘such educated people’ had ended up in his courtroom, and blamed their ‘warped understanding of sociology’ for leading them down such a dangerous path.
On 5 August 1972, agents from the BNDD dealt the Brotherhood an almost fatal blow. In dozens of raids across America, fifty-three arrests were made. Of those detained, sixteen were prominent Brotherhood figures. Over the subsequent months, another forty-seven Brothers were seized, along with four LSD labs and over a million tabs; 30 gallons of hashish oil and 6,000 pounds of hashish; plus 104 grams of peyote, 8 pounds of amphetamines and nearly 14 pounds of cocaine. Yet, some of the main players were still at large, including Stark. That November, his Paris lawyer, Sam Goekjian, got another visit from the IRS, this time with the BNDD in tow, and they removed a stack of documents relating to the Laboratoire Le Clocheton. Then, on 13 August, the same team appeared on the campus of Louvaine-la-Neuve University, headed for the Science Park and entered Stark’s lab, only to find the regular staff still there but no sign of their boss or his mystery chemist or any LSD-making equipment. Further enquiries went nowhere. Stark had slipped the net.
Ever since, those familiar with Stark’s career have claimed that he evaded capture because he’d been tipped off by his contact at the US embassy in London – who’d helped him secure the site for his Belgian lab. More significantly, the suspicion remains that the diplomat was actually working for the CIA, whose agents were always given innocuous embassy job titles as cover for their clandestine activities. If so, Stark’s ally would have been privy to the BNDD’s investigations, as the CIA liked to keep track of what they were up to. According to an internal memo, BNDD operations were a source of ‘valuable information to the agency’ and ‘for this reason, they will be followed closely’.
Of course, there is another possibility: Stark was protected because he was on the CIA’s payroll. Many who encountered Stark over the years were convinced he was working for them; at one point, Stark openly declared that he was a CIA asset. Yet nothing he said can be taken at face value. Implying he was CIA only added to his legend, while the paranoia that circulated among his LSD-addled counter-cultural comrades meant they saw its agents hiding round every corner. But even if Stark’s claim was true, the question remains as to why the CIA would deliberately sabotage such a large-scale anti-narcotics operation involving various arms of its own government so that Stark could walk free? The area of espionage most suited to Stark’s talents and way of life was counter-intelligence; one CIA veteran called it a ‘highly complex and devious activity’ that ‘depends on cunning entrapments, agent provocateur, spies, and counter-spies’ and ‘double and triple crosses’. Much of the CIA’s counter-intelligence machine rested on many dozens of informal sources who, in exchange for money and protection, fed them information – anything from inconsequential scraps to more meaty offerings – during a casual drink in a bar or a walk in the park. In this shadowy world, Stark could have performed the same sort of function as a Paris-based agent – code name QRPHONE-1 – who was hired in 1965 and paid $900 a month to spy on ‘his extensive contacts among leftist, radical, and communist movements in Europe and Africa’.
Since the 1950s, CIA stations on foreign soil had monitored resident and visiting Americans with left-leaning views and/or connections to Communist bloc countries. On the domestic front, the FBI kept its eyes and ears on any potential subversives and tracked their movements in and out of the US. In 1967, faced with what intelligence mandarins feared was an escalating threat from the radical movement, discussions were held about how best to confront it. The immediate priority was to assess the scale of the problem, especially its international dimension. In the autumn of that year, two reports were commissioned; one studied ‘Overseas Coverage of Subversive Student and Related Activities’, the other examined the ‘International Connections of the United States Peace Movement’. Their contents convinced the CIA that there needed to be a coordinated effort to collect together in one place all the data ‘concerning foreign contacts with US individuals and organisations of the radical left’ such as ‘students, anti-Vietnam war activists, Draft resisters and deserters, Black nationalists, Anarchists, and assorted new Leftists’. On 25 June 1968, all the CIA’s European stations received a cable about this ‘sensitive high priority program’, which was called Operation Chaos.
A small team was secreted away in a suite of windowless rooms in the basement at Langley, hidden behind a steel door. Here, they began collating the information streaming in from their CIA brethren round the world, the FBI, and from intercepted mail and cable communications – a voluminous amount of material that was stored in HYDRA, an IBM System/360 mainframe computer. Over the course of the next six years, HYDRA consumed the details of 300,000 people, organisations and publications, out of which the Operation Chaos analysts created 13,000 files on 7,200 US citizens. Of particular interest were the young men dodging the Vietnam War draft and seeking refuge in Europe and, even more worrying, the increasing number of deserters fleeing the killing fields of south-east Asia. For many of them, Sweden was the destination of choice, where the American Deserters Committee was ready to greet them. Paris was the next most popular port of call. Two groups, both sponsored by luminaries from the city’s cultural elite, ran safe houses for the runaways to shelter in. Resisters Inside the Army owned several properties, while the French Union of American Deserters and Draft Resisters had one in Pantin, a suburb on the north-eastern fringe of Paris.
For all the goodwill shown by their hosts, the deserters were a constant source of grief. Cut off from home, often hooked on drugs, and lacking any clear direction, many of them simply fell apart. The local CIA station were given an insight into this strange world by one of its informers – code name PETUNIA – who mixed with the deserter crowd. At 5.30 p.m. on 8 July 1969, PETUNIA met his handler in the Café Bavaria near Dupleix Metro station and briefed him about the latest developments at the Pantin safe house. According to PETUNIA, most of the fugitives living there were ‘apolitical bums’, though one had written to Chairman Mao to tell him that there were ‘1,000 men in Canada, 15,000 in Alaska and others in France who were preparing to take over the US’. Otherwise, there was one ex-soldier who regularly pulled a knife on visitors, one who went on starvation diet and another who ‘got thrown out because he was an acid-head’.
There’s no doubt that Stark was at home in these kinds of environments, and if he had been employed at any time to spy on US citizens abroad – whether it was a radical intellectual or a desperate deserter – then it’s conceivable that the CIA would have thought it necessary to intervene on his behalf. Whatever the truth, Stark was still a marked man. The US was out of bounds. Paris was no longer safe. Nor Belgium. For the rest of that year and most of 1973, Stark flew under the radar, almost invisible, leaving only the faintest traces of his movements. One of the places his footprints made a discernible imprint was London, where his compatriots in the Microdot Gang were proving more than capable of filling his shoes.