IN OLDER WARS, the refusal to fight led only to the criminal underworld, a defector’s battalion, or a final cigarette in a cold field at dawn. When the Intrepid Four arrived at Arlanda Airport in December 1967, they rewrote that story. Their journey transformed desertion from an individual act of conscience or cowardice to a political step that GIs could take together: one that offered the possibility of a new life in a prosperous, liberal, neutral European country. Nobody planned this. Nobody organized it. It was as spontaneous as a love affair. The Intrepid Four walked from a café in Tokyo and asked for help from a young man with a plausibly countercultural haircut. He took them to Fūgetsudō, a smoky dive in the Shinjuku district where students came to drink bad coffee and talk about Mao. From this, a movement grew.
It may have been inevitable. The Vietnam War was unpopular. Fighting-on-the-streets unpopular. Tear-gas unpopular. Uniformed men could not be insulated from this bad news, no matter how far they were from home. Dissent in America meant dissent on American bases, in American ships, in American barracks. To the gathering dismay of their officers, men learned how to say no. It scarcely mattered whether their objections were conscientious or self-interested: whether they wanted to strike a blow for peace or sidestep military discipline. The exit signs had been illuminated. On the other side, a new generation of political radicals was ready to give support to anyone who passed through—hoping, perhaps, that the deserters might be recruited for a new kind of war. The war against war.
Discreetly, carefully, these tiny groups of activists approached the buzz-cut, hare-eyed young men they spotted loitering in cafés and at railway stations and offered board, lodging, help with paperwork. They secured funds from film stars and intellectuals, from church groups and charities. Clandestine assistance came from enemy governments and shady guys involved with armed struggles in the Third World. Through hand-delivered letters and quiet meetings in flats and farmhouses, they began working with one another, moving deserters over borders, from refuge to refuge. They sometimes worked against one another, too—impelled by the natural forces of left-wing factionalism, or by the mischief of hostile infiltrators. Nobody could be sure about that. But together they laid the tracks of an international underground railroad, built to shuttle dissenting men away from the napalm and razor wire to sanctuary.
Its ghostly infrastructure spanned the globe. Short routes carried deserters and draft dodgers over the American border into Canada. Beheiren managed the transpacific, trans-Siberian branch, on which the Intrepid Four had been shunted westward from Tokyo to Stockholm. Deserters opened up their own lines from bases in Germany, driving or hitchhiking north through Denmark and taking the ferry from Helsingør to Sweden. Some flew from Canada via Reykjavík. Anti-war activists too old for the draft became stationmasters of safe houses in Paris, London, Amsterdam, and Berlin. Underground publishers produced pamphlets to guide men through the system: Baedekers of desertion that listed the phone numbers and addresses of friendly lawyers and welfare groups. Anyone considering migrating to Sweden was directed to the officers of the American Deserters Committee—the organization about which Bertil Svahnström had issued his gloomy warning.
The first time I heard its name, I thought the ADC sounded rather innocuous. I imagined a room of sober young men passing resolutions against the military-industrial complex. Now I think of it as a phenomenon of a different order. Something through which we might read the times, like the psychedelic bus trip undertaken by Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters; or the Stanford Prison Experiment, inside which the psychologist Philip Zimbardo barricaded a group of impressionable boys and watched them sink into barbarism.
To describe the experiences of all those whose lives were touched by the committee would require more than a book. It would require an immense illuminated map of the world, and an army of uniformed croupiers pushing stacks of color-coded tokens in the direction of Sweden. Some tokens would represent deserters and draft resisters. Others would stand for men who looked like deserters or draft resisters but mysteriously fit neither category.
The ADC was always at the center of the argument—with the Swedish government, with the Swedish anti-war movement, with the counterculture, with America, with itself. It could not be conciliatory. It could not form amicable alliances. It had a knack for turning friends into enemies and biting hands that fed. Like many groups on the radical Left, its real talent was for reducing itself to increasingly smaller, purer fractions, until, eventually, it boiled away entirely. I heard it described as a revolutionary brotherhood, a goon squad, and an intelligence service front led by agents provocateurs.
“Whether they were CIA or KGB or just crazy, they were bad news,” said one boy who declined to join the choir. But even he was fascinated by them. As I traveled Sweden and the States, listening to the stories of its former members, it became clear that half a century later they were still computing the experience—whether they looked back on it with nostalgia or anxiety, or were determined not to look back on it at all. Several alumni of the ADC would have preferred not to be mentioned in these pages and told me so. But they were the men at the heart of the story, and as they decided not to fight the Viet Cong, I decided not to fight the story.
* * *
WILLIAM CUTHBERT JONES, the chairman of the ADC, was an early arrival in Stockholm. A good-looking Catholic boy from St. Louis, with a slight frame, soulful brown eyes, and a strong line in radical hep talk. “They call you a man,” he rapped, “and they treat you like an animal. They feed you their line and you think it’s the truth. Remember in basic training: double time, chow line, right face, left face? They wanted you disciplined like a well-running machine, easy to control, easy to handle. Uncle Sam needs you—to stop the bullets, to smother the grenades, to make the world safe for Coca-Cola.”
Right from the start, Bill Jones was the public face of the American Deserters Committee. He led its marches, spoke on its behalf from soapboxes and conference lecterns, wrote editorials for its newspaper, and gave its official interviews to the press—until he decided that those reporters who weren’t intelligence agents were probably going to stitch him up anyway and decided to remain silent. He would go silent for me, too, once he realized that I knew the story of the brainwashing institutes of Sweden, and the stranger story of what happened after. But at first things went swimmingly. We had lunch. We got on so well that he broke his diet and had a piece of pecan pie.
Our venue was the Old Ebbitt Grill, a Washington institution snug beside the White House: padded booths, brass railings, pink-tinged boudoir paintings, like some recently democratized gentlemen’s club. He chose it because it was convenient for his work as Washington bureau chief of a glossy magazine called Executive Intelligence Review. His email warned that he didn’t look like the boy in the pictures anymore, and that I should watch out for someone in a Red Army fur hat. (“Without the star,” he added, unnecessarily.) I knew him straight away, despite the extra weight and the loss of his fuzzy Che beard. People don’t change that much. Except politically.
Although Bill described himself as “very working-class,” this was a matter more of feeling than fact. The family tree was luxuriant and deep-rooted. His father was a real estate broker who dealt in upscale apartment blocks in downtown St. Louis. The first William Cuthbert Jones was a distinguished criminal lawyer who had earned the rank of major in the Civil War and, with something preying on his mind, made a deathbed conversion to Catholicism. Rome’s influence extended to Bill’s generation: a sister and two of his uncles entered religious life, and Bill was educated by Benedictine monks. “The martyrs were my heroes,” he said. “This is how I saw my life.”
Being a martyr for God was one thing. Being a martyr for President Lyndon B. Johnson was another. One night in 1966, at Christian Brothers College High School, Bill decided to do something about it. “I tore up my draft card and put it in the mail. My friends thought I was totally nuts. I thought I’d make a difference. Have an effect.” He shook his head sardonically. “And then I got scared. I went down to the mailbox and waited for the postman to get this damn letter back. Which I did.”
Having silenced his own protest, he enlisted in the army and began training as a medic. First he drove a truck between military hospitals in Germany. Later he took electrocardiograms of wounded soldiers and watched the flickering needles describe the consequences of punctured lungs, shattered bones, buried bullets: a thousand more reasons not to go to Vietnam. But it was the Intrepid Four who pointed the way to Sweden. When Bill saw them on the cover of a magazine, he began plotting a journey north. (“Like Yogi Berra says,” reflected Bill, “when you come to a fork in the road…”)
Another medic in his unit had the same impulse and acted first, selling his car and hitchhiking to Denmark. Bill intended to join him, but didn’t like what he found when he arrived. “He was something in the Copenhagen club scene,” he recalled. “I met some of his friends, and it seemed somewhat seedy.”
So he kept moving north to Stockholm, arriving on a snowy afternoon in late January 1968 and making his way to the main railway station, where he asked a passerby how to get in touch with one of the Swedish anti-war groups. “It’s Saturday,” he was told. “They’ll all be out marching.” They were. Processing through the street under banners demanding an end to American aggression in Indochina. Bill joined the march, explained who he was, and found himself treated as the hero of the hour. And in that moment he was reconciled to a life in exile. Destiny was calling. “If you think you’re doing something that’s going to have an effect upon history,” he said, “that’s a very powerful force.”
There were, Bill said, several former seminarians in the ADC. They made good revolutionaries. Looking back over his old speeches, it was easy to see how well the rhetoric of sin and redemption mixed with the sixties’ language of struggle and revolution. The present system, Bill argued, was corrupt and stagnant. A new one was required. The wretched of the earth—exploited laborers, Third World guerrillas, Vietnam deserters—would create it with violence.
“And is not,” he asked, “this violent indignation of alienated people one of the highest forms of love? The love of human brotherhood which refuses to abandon one’s fellow man to the scourge of hell on earth?” Bill’s medical background provided more enriching imagery. “It is comparable to a competent surgeon who must excise a malignant organ in order to save a life,” he argued.
And those concerned with man’s spirituality must participate in the operation or be seen for what they are—“hypocrites, whited sepulchers, and the people will vomit them out of their mouths.” We the American Deserters Committee of Sweden have seen clearly our duty faced with the situation of the world today. As members of the U.S. Army we were the prime instruments of these same forces of repression and reaction, and we have excised ourselves from this malignant body. We saw our function and refused to carry it out. We answered a higher call of the people of the world who were crying for help from their brutal oppressors.
If Bill had made this speech in London, he would have risked deportation. If he had made it in Paris, he would have been kissing goodbye to his next fourteen-day carte de séjours. In Stockholm, however, it was fine. In Stockholm, he could make the speech while receiving a free bus pass and $20 weekly welfare payments, attending state-funded language classes, and enjoying the protection of humanitarian asylum—a new diplomatic category created for the benefit of the deserters by a political class that wanted to signal its opposition to the Vietnam War.
But the ADC was in no mood for gratitude. Its members were revolutionaries, and revolutionaries never said please or thank you. “Some people were typically liberal and didn’t want you to go too far,” Bill told me. “We had a lot of fights about that. But there was a feeling that we had been lied to for years, and now we had to try something else.”
* * *
IN THE 1960S and ’70s, Sweden was another word for utopia—particularly in countries afflicted by industrial decline and rising unemployment. The Swedish model, as it was called, with no hint of double entendre, appeared to have delivered the Swedes from anxiety. They had the highest living standards in Europe. They had big cars and tasteful modernist furniture. Their welfare state was a miracle of generosity: this was a country without visible deprivation.
Poised between the two power blocs of the Cold War, Sweden also had political neutrality and moral independence: how many other states would have permitted Bertrand Russell and Jean-Paul Sartre, two foreign intellectuals, to convene a private tribunal to investigate American war crimes in Vietnam? But that’s what happened—witnesses were called, napalm burns examined, testimonies taken from the bombers and the bombed, and in May 1967 a jury of writers, thinkers, and activists announced that they had found the United States of America guilty of genocide against the Vietnamese people. The horrific details were telegraphed around the world.
The Swedes also seemed to enjoy impressive social and sexual liberty. Theirs was the country that exported all those blue movies, all those blond masseuses and au pairs. It was a place where sex education was enshrined in the school curriculum and condoms were dispensed from vending machines on the street. American commentators looked on this from afar with a mixture of envy and horror. Time magazine set the tone as early as 1955, with a notorious article entitled “Sin and Sweden,” which depicted the country as a topsy-turvy zone “where sociology has become a religion itself, and birth control, abortion and promiscuity—especially among the young—are recognized as inalienable rights.” Jaws dropped across America, also a little drool.
For the U.S. press, Swedish sociology was a gift that kept on giving. Its pioneering collection of data on the habits and experiences of its citizens was a rich source of inspiration for American journalists researching their stock shock-horror pieces on Swedish sex. In February 1966, for instance, U.S. News & World Report published a report on the increase of sexually transmitted diseases in the Swedish population. “Ten percent of the infected boys,” it claimed, “had had relations with 200 different girls.” Easy to imagine which part of that statistic burned most fiercely in the mind of the male reader.
What sold newspapers also sold films. The Italian director Luigi Scattini had an international hit with Sweden: Heaven and Hell, which depicted the Swedes as lesbian clubbers, married swingers, and space-hopping nudists. (It also premiered Piero Umiliani’s song “Mah Nà Mah Nà,” years before the Muppets made it their own.) Sweden’s own film culture produced I Am Curious (Yellow), the art movie that combined explicit sex scenes with footage of the education minister Olof Palme, sitting in his little back garden in Stockholm and talking about “our dream of a classless, egalitarian society.”
* * *
OLOF PALME DID not make an explicit invitation to the deserters, but he did plump up the cushions and put on some seductive mood music. At first, these were quiet moves: behind-the-scenes conversations with colleagues that smoothed the fugitives’ progress into Swedish airspace.
Then, on the night of February 21, 1968, something noisier: Palme leading a five-thousand-strong march on the U.S. Embassy in Stockholm, with Nguyen Tho Chan, the North Vietnamese ambassador to Moscow, at his side; Palme addressed the crowd with a flaming torch in one hand and inflammatory speech in the other. “The goal of democracy,” he told them, “can never be reached by means of oppression. One cannot save a village by wiping it out, putting the fields on fire, destroying the houses, captivating the people or killing them.” A continent of people, he argued, thought the same. “The truth is that the overwhelming majority of people in Europe dissociate themselves from this war, want to have an end put to the sufferings, want to give the people of Vietnam the right to decide over their own future. This democratic opinion does not experience the war of the United States in Vietnam as a support for democracy, but as a threat against the democratic ideas, not only in Vietnam but also throughout the world.”
Palme was a rising star in the Social Democratic Party, but those words made him brightly visible everywhere. In December 1967, an unofficial anti-war demonstration in Stockholm had ended with police batons drawing blood outside the U.S. Embassy. Palme’s walk with Nguyen Tho Chan implied a change of policy.
He was denounced in the U.S. press, his audience dismissed as a “leftist mob.” America’s ambassador to Sweden, William Heath, a beady-eyed Texan whose preferred epithet for anti-war protestors was “rattlesnakes,” withdrew to Washington beneath a barrage of hate mail and rotten eggs. American sabers rattled. The U.S. State Department threatened to halt the export of Redeye missiles to Sweden. The International Longshoremen’s Association warned that Swedish goods might be denied entry to American ports. The NBC anchorman Frank McGee suggested that this was the end of Swedish neutrality. And as relations between the two governments cooled, American dissidents registered a rise in temperature and followed its spring warmth north.
* * *
BILL JONES LED the American Deserters Committee. Michael Vale was its guru. But it was Hans Göran Franck, a lawyer and the head of the Swedish branch of Amnesty International, who conjured the ADC into being. Franck had been one of the organizers of the Russell Tribunal and, though he knew Bertil Svahnström and the respectable liberals of the Swedish Committee for Vietnam, he was closer to more radical forces on the left—the Front for National Liberation (FNL), young student activists who were for militancy, Mao, and swift victory for North Vietnam. Franck’s office processed the bulk of the deserters’ asylum claims, and did so tirelessly and for free. Other forms of practical assistance came from volunteers, many of whom were members of Amnesty International: teachers, doctors, and academics who opened up their spare rooms and summer houses, laid extra places at the dinner table.
They were not the only ones providing this help. Only a month after the arrival of the Intrepid Four, more than forty different grassroots groups were doing their bit. Franck reasoned that if the deserters formed their own organization, they might take on some of this work themselves. Old hands would assist new arrivals, advising them how to fill out the forms, negotiate interviews with the police and the social bureau. Together, they might also develop a unified voice, allowing them to make their own representations to the authorities—and to rebut the claims of their enemies.
At the end of January 1968, General Lewis F. Shull, former Pentagon intelligence man and the judge advocate of the U.S. Army in Europe, told the press that the Stockholm deserters were apolitical dropouts. “They are bums,” he said, “not the highest type of soldier.” If the deserters formed their own political organization, then charges like this would be harder to make. All Franck needed was someone to coordinate it for him.
He had already met his candidate six months previously, and in unusual circumstances. On May Day 1967, the first day of the Russell Tribunal, Franck had been out on the streets of Stockholm to show his opposition to American imperialism. The lawyer got caught up in a scuffle. He watched a group of policemen drag a demonstrator down a concrete stairwell into a parking lot and set upon him with their nightsticks. “You don’t have to beat him raw!” Franck shouted. Before he could intervene, the man was loaded into a van and driven away.
Later that day, Franck received a phone call from his cousin Mirjam. Mirjam Israel was a prominent child psychologist who, in the clinic and from her advice column in the daily newspaper Aftonbladet, advocated the distinctly Swedish permissiveness that made most Americans want to jump on a chair and scream. She had recently separated from her husband, Joachim, a sociology professor and her coauthor on the landmark study There Are No Naughty Children, which discouraged the young from blind obedience to their parents. (Another outrageous Swedish idea.) In Joachim’s absence, Mirjam had taken an American visitor under her wing. He was a sharply intelligent professional translator in his early thirties, Ohio-born, Caltech-educated, much traveled, and now sitting in a police cell, bruised and in need of legal representation. When Franck turned up at the police station, he was surprised to see a familiar face. The man who had been beaten in the parking lot. Michael Vale.
Vale claimed a scientific journal as his main employer. The fees must have been generous, as he seemed to have plenty of time on his hands, much of which he spent enthusing about Trotsky, or hanging out with the teenage Maoists of the Swedish anti-war movement. The May Day incident gave him a taste for action. When a large but unofficial Vietnam demonstration erupted across Stockholm on December 20, 1967, Vale turned his flat into a communications nerve center. His apartment had two telephone lines. One was used to receive incoming reports on police movements from activists calling in from phone booths across the city; the other was used to feed that intelligence back to demonstrators on the street. “We issued orders from there,” one former teenage rebel told me. “Where to reassemble to keep the demonstration together after the police had shattered it. It was like a field battle.” Michael Vale secured its victory.
* * *
THE AMERICAN DESERTERS Committee held its first meeting at the premises of Verdandi, a Swedish temperance society, on the afternoon of Sunday, February 11, 1968. The space was packed with people, though there were, perhaps, only fifteen Americans in the room; activists, hangers-on, and Social Democrat grandees made up the rest. The star attractions were the Intrepid Four, who, six weeks after landing in Sweden, had already acquired luxurious sideburns and Scandinavian girlfriends. Beside them moved a figure with just as strong a claim on history: Ray Jones III, a twenty-one-year-old private from Pontiac, Michigan, officially the first Vietnam deserter to seek asylum in Sweden. He and his German wife, Gabriele, had arrived from Germany via Copenhagen in January 1967 and had been quietly granted leave to stay by the Swedish Aliens Commission. After ten months of unemployment Jones had secured work teaching classes in jazz ballet, but having a regular job did not reduce his appetite for giving a hard political line to reporters who asked about his case. “Vietnamese people,” he declared, “are being treated by Americans like the Negroes in America.” For African American soldiers like him, Jones argued, desertion was “a matter of self-preservation.”
Other strong characters were also making their presence felt. Men who had found their way to Sweden without making much-publicized tours of the Soviet Union. George Carrano was the son of an army colonel from Blauvelt, New York, who quickly emerged as the strategist and amanuensis of the American Deserters Committee. Fast-talking, hyperactive, with a fondness for gangster slang, George was a former merchant marine who had avoided military service on a technicality that nobody could quite understand. He had not put in a claim for humanitarian asylum but instead held a visa that allowed him to work in Sweden as a journalist—secured, he said, through connections made while studying at Columbia University. It was an odd story, but suspicion had yet to infect the body of deserter culture: he had his own apartment, his own typewriter, and an enthusiasm for the radical left. He had helped Michael Vale to draft the ADC’s Statement of Principles and secured a letter of support from Bertrand Russell, the secular saint of the anti-war movement.
Robert Argento, a twenty-three-year-old deserter from Miami Beach, Florida, watched all this, wide-eyed. For him, it had already been an eventful Sunday. That morning he had stepped off the night train clutching a piece of paper slipped into his hand by a friend at the Club Voltaire in Frankfurt: the address of a student anti-war group that might help him claim asylum. When he turned up at their offices with his knapsack, suitcase, and guitar, nobody looked up. They were too busy preparing for a demonstration, writing banners and cranking out flyers from the mimeograph machine. When Rob announced himself as a deserter, the room stopped.
“Suddenly it was like one of those Twilight Zone episodes where everyone is frozen in their places,” he told me. “It seemed like time stood still.” Only for a moment, though. The next few hours were a blur of activity. Smiles broke out; coffee and pastries appeared. Good-looking young Maoists vied for Rob’s attention, then whisked him off to an anti-war rally beside the ice rink in Kungsträdgården park. Rob listened to the speeches, declined the offer to give one of his own, and was then driven to the offices of Verdandi, where Hans Göran Franck shook him by the hand, welcomed him in a soft, mumbling voice, and invited him to join the meeting.
Michael Vale chaired. “He gave a rather disheveled impression,” remembered Rob, “but was, at the same time, a man of authority and purpose with some sort of pent-up anger. At that time none of us knew who he was, except that he adeptly took over the meeting. We each assumed, individually, that the others knew him and that his assuming the leadership was through some sort of previous consensus.” Looking back, Rob recalled the meeting as a series of fait accompli. Michael Vale taking charge; the committee called into existence; the skinny, elfin figure of Bill Jones, enthroned as spokesman. “Who were these guys?” he wondered. “All this time later, I’m still not sure.”
* * *
IN THE STORY of the Vietnam deserters and war resisters who sought refuge in Sweden, no single figure looms larger than Michael Vale. He was not a big man. Not physically imposing. He seemed to wear the same clothes every day, and the cold Swedish weather gave him a permanent snuffle. When reporters turned up at the office of the American Deserters Committee, Vale declined to give interviews. When cameras clicked, he found ways to avoid their gaze. But he exerted a powerful influence upon those around him. He did it with twinkling charm and well-timed bursts of anger. He did it with an unforced interest in the opinions of young people and a strong grasp of their psychology. Some deserters to whom I spoke suspected there was a sexual element in his attachment to them, though if that was the case he never tried to steal a kiss. They respected him. Even the ones who didn’t like him. An inner core of members developed such loyalty to him that it aroused comment. “I don’t know what Michael did to them,” one witness told me, “but he had power over them.” That power earned him a nickname. The Gray Eminence—a title he rejected, though not perhaps too firmly.
Once the ADC was formed, Michael Vale’s apartment became the hub of deserter life. A set of rooms where everyone was welcome, if they could bear the fog of cigarette smoke and the revolutionary disregard for cleanliness. Open one door and you might see Bill Jones sitting on the bed, a clattering typewriter on his knee, or George Carrano, arranging for deserters to give interviews to the press. (If the journalist was not sufficiently radical, a fee was levied.) Open another and you might discover a pair of copulating Swedish Maoists, or one of the drug-addled deserters to whom Vale gave space if they were trying to wean themselves from their habit. There was always somewhere to sleep, if you didn’t mind the bathtub, or sheets waxy with dirt. And there was always something to read, if you liked Marx, Émile Durkheim, or Isaac Deutscher’s three-volume life of Trotsky.
So much about Vale seemed questionable. He was not a deserter but the guardian of the deserters. He was not an anti-war campaigner but saw the war as an engine of revolutionary change. He devoted most of his time to political activity, and yet he was never short of cash. He told people that Chemical Abstracts paid his bills, but the ground between politics and psychology seemed to be his real enthusiasm. Michael Vale despised liberalism, individualism, the hippie counterculture. He wanted ADC members to peel away their attachment to these things in order to discover their true revolutionary selves. “Political dry-cleaning” was the term he favored. “Ego-stripping” was the one that would acquire currency in the group that surrounded him.
* * *
MIND GAMES WERE popular among radical groups of the period. If you followed the ideas of Wilhelm Reich, you could purge yourself of fascistic impulses by confessing your moral errors and having more orgasms. If you were a Maoist, you could achieve ideological purity by submitting to the brutal assessments of your peers. Michael Vale’s methods involved the intense examination of his subject’s class and family background, their political motivations, their dreams and fantasies. Those who had endured the treatment did not always want to discuss the experience. “It was personal and it doesn’t belong in anybody’s publication,” said one old associate I met, staring angrily into the middle distance as I attempted to probe further.
A full and dramatic description was provided by the man with whom we began this story, Jim McGourty, the California marine with the false passport. “Ego-stripping,” he explained, “meant to take people and tell them that they were really nothing. That they were pretentious and spoiled. Not cadre material. Not working-class. And on and on. To strip away the positive structure that person represented in terms of their mind, ego, and spirit. It was done one-on-one by Michael Vale, to people he wanted to get under his control.”
I asked what Vale did and was struck by the raw, present-tense nature of Jim’s reply. “He degrades you. Tells you that you’re worth nothing. Unless you do what he says. When all the defenses are down, he imposes.” It sounded like classic psychological manipulation: a long session of criticism and self-criticism, confession and humiliation, leading the subject to a state of submissive gratitude. Jim saw it as a form of brainwashing. There was a time, he said, when he and others at the core of their group would have done anything that Michael Vale asked.
Looking for clues to the view of the human mind that emerged in that crowded, smoky flat in central Stockholm, I ordered copies of all the translations for which Michael Vale had been credited during 1968 and 1969. Most were articles for the journal Soviet Psychology. Their emphasis was on research into the conditioned reflex—a phenomenon first recorded in 1902 by the Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov, when he noticed that his dogs salivated at the sound of the dinner bell, even if no dinner was provided. The translations showed that by the 1960s researchers had upgraded from dogs to apes and monkeys. One experiment Michael rendered into English involved an attempt to induce neurosis in laboratory apes by passing an electric current through the milk they were given to drink. Another observed the effects of “conflict situations” on captive baboons and langurs. The scientists disrupted their sleeping and feeding routines, kept them physically restrained, then released them into an outdoor enclosure and observed the change in their behavior.
Michael had also toiled on a much longer work. Forensic Psychiatry, a textbook edited by Dr. Georgi Morozov, director of the Serbsky Central Scientific Research Institute of General and Forensic Psychiatry in Moscow. This book, with its lurid green psychedelic cover, was a landmark in the literature. But its significance was more political than medical. By early 1969, the Serbsky had begun to acquire a reputation as a psychiatric gulag, a place where doctors examined dissidents, diagnosed them with schizophrenia, and kept them docile with psychotropic drugs. Michael’s translation gave English readers one of the earliest accounts of the methods used by Soviet doctors to manage rebellious minds.
* * *
IN 1973, LUCINDA Franks, a twenty-seven-year-old Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist, went to Sweden and interviewed deserters who had passed through Michael Vale’s orbit: her book Waiting Out a War depicted men who were still smarting from the experience. “You’ve got to admire him, though,” said one. “He’s like a Rasputin and he’s got technique. He browbeats new guys for the first few days and lets up and they end up loving him because it feels good when you stop banging your head against the wall.” A comrade agreed. “Yeah, you’ve got to admire him … like you admire the work of a butcher.”
Following the same trail four decades later, I found the quotes had barely changed. One old acquaintance bristled at the mention of Vale’s name. He was, she told me, “a nasty piece of work … a monster.” Another suggested that he might have been a creature of the U.S. Army Security Agency, employed to spy on the deserters.
Margareta Hedman, a Swedish Maoist who hung around Mike’s apartment and married Bill Jones just after her eighteenth birthday, had a different suggestion for me: “We assumed he was KGB.” On the phone from a beachside apartment in Hawaii, a deserter named Thomas Taylor told me that his life in Stockholm had come unraveled after he spotted Vale in the lavatory at Verdandi, receiving a bag of cash from a representative of North Vietnam. “I thought that was treasonous,” said Taylor. “Accepting money from the fucking enemy. Michael is lucky he’s alive. My friend Paul wanted to kill him, but I talked him out of it.” Another veteran told me: “I don’t know exactly what Michael Vale was up to, but I do know that he was like the guy in the jungle in Apocalypse Now.”
The most vivid account of Mike Vale’s activities came from Clancy Sigal, a novelist and critic who, in the late 1960s, ran a safe house for deserters lying low in London. Sigal had been an army observer at the Nuremberg trials, where his plan to assassinate Hermann Göring failed when his service revolver was confiscated on the way to the trial. (Once inside, the Reichsmarschall bested him in a staring competition across the courtroom.) Working in Hollywood after the war—on pictures such as Bride of the Gorilla—he was blacklisted for distributing anti-McCarthy literature. The FBI tapped his phones, heard him refer to himself and his friends as Iranoff, Buljanoff, and Kopalski, and took them to be Russian spies, rather than three men making a joke about Greta Garbo’s Soviet sidekicks in Ninotchka. This misunderstanding propelled Sigal toward London, where by 1968 he was receiving deserters in a flat above the Royal Asiatic Society on Queen Anne Street, and sometimes helping them move on to Paris and Stockholm.
“Nobody knew where Mike Vale came from,” he told me at his kitchen table in West Hollywood. “Nobody. I’d run into his type before and always run a mile.” What was his type? I wondered. “Conspiratorial,” said Sigal. “He breathed conspiracy. Now, when you get guys who are already paranoid, all you have to do is send out that vibe and, right away, you will draw people into your circle. A lot of the guys in Sweden went through the Mike Vale training program. They scared the shit out of me. Much to Mike’s delight.”
Sigal showed me an extract from his diary for January 1969. “Movement protocol,” it read, “demands I kiss the ring of the local Pope, ‘Mike Vail’ (perhaps his real name), the Stockholm stationmaster.”
A small, intense American in his angry forties, he insists on meeting in a gloomy Kungsgatan café whose only other customers at nearby tables appear to be his praetorian guard of young Americans in parkas and sulky expressions. Vail inhabits a world of festering paranoia and factional intrigue. Exile politics, always overheated, boils over in Sweden where there is so little else to do in long winter months. Toward the end of my visit, Vail and some of his boys entice me to a basement apartment in the Gröndal district and refuse to release me until I repent of my petty bourgeois crimes.
It wasn’t the worst experience he had in Stockholm. Another group of deserters, he said, had interrogated him in a second-floor office. “They threatened to kill me unless I confessed to being a CIA spy,” he recalled. “One of them pulled out a gun. So I climbed out of a window and jumped into a snowdrift.”
* * *
WHAT HAD HAPPENED to Michael Vale? Where had he gone? I contacted dozens of deserters, but none seemed to know. The book stacks of the British Library held some evidence. A long trail of translations, leading from his Swedish period to the first decade of the present century. Pristine, unfingermarked copies of Recent Trends in Soviet Psycholinguistics and The Genesis of the Stalinist Social Order. His name listed on the editorial board of Critique, a journal of socialist economic theory published by Glasgow University. (Ralph Miliband, the father of a future British Labour Party leader, was involved in the early days.) I emailed its editor, who replied that he would try to discover whether Vale wished to be contacted. Months passed without an answer. Then I found an address for an American academic who had shared a conference platform with Vale in 2009, where he was described as an “independent scholar.” She said she would forward my message. Vale himself replied within the hour.
His email was sent from Ukraine. A country which was then in turmoil, its president overthrown, tires burning in front of the parliament building, Russian tanks rattling over the border. It was not a place to visit without good reason, and being a spy seemed as good a reason as any. Vale suggested that we meet in London in the autumn. Three weeks later, however, he emailed again to say that he was already in town. I suggested lunch at my workplace, the BBC, but the idea didn’t appeal to him. Instead, he proposed meeting in a park in North London.
“Islington Green. Last bench on the right. I’ll be carrying something red.”