WHEN I ARRIVED, the bench had two occupants. One with a greasy blue anorak and street-drinker’s tan; one with a crumpled linen jacket spread over his knees like a seaside blanket. My eye moved from one to the other. “I guess you got the right guy,” said the man with the linen jacket, lifting up his something red—one of those calculator-like gadgets for checking your account when far from the bank.
He looked down-at-heel, depleted. His face, as cracked as late-period Walter Matthau’s, was shaved carelessly. If Michael Vale was in the pay of a government intelligence agency, then he needed to ask for a raise.
I tried to get some sense of his recent movements. He’d spent many years, he said, in France—so many that he now preferred to use the French version of his Christian name. He owned an apartment in Paris, but that was leased to a pair of Kazakh sisters, both astronomers, whose rent helped to fund his travels. Where had he been? Anywhere but America. There was no way he could go back there. Vietnam was now the place he felt most at home. The people were so friendly. Tactile. He had a theory that their sexuality was subtly different from that of Europeans. He’d coined a word for it: integumental. “Meaning that the skin—the integument—is a very sensuous organ.”
His plans for a summer on the Black Sea coast, he explained, had been cut short. The weather was fine, but the trigger-happy nationalist militias patrolling the roads had not encouraged him to prolong his visit. (Like a Russian patriot, he spoke of “the Ukraine,” subtly erasing its quarter century of independence.) Looking for a safer option, he’d driven to Bucharest and booked himself into a hostel, where his passport and wallet had been stolen by a plausibly charming American. Hotels, he said, were beyond his means, but he preferred it that way. The kids who stayed in cheap dormitories were better conversationalists. “They stop me from becoming fossilized,” he said.
I took him to a restaurant at the top of the green. He looked at the menu as if he’d never seen one before. The place was noisy. So noisy that the waitress, noticing my voice recorder and notepad, moved us to a quieter table. Over fish pie and a bottle of house white, Michael Vale told me the story of his life. He was born on August 17, 1935, into a world of domestic mysteries. One of these was pretty easy for him to crack and concerned his strong physical resemblance to the head of the Garfield Uniform Company of Cincinnati, where his mother made up the bills in the mail-order office. The other concerned Richard Alvin Hug, the cigar store clerk who received undeserved top billing on Michael’s birth certificate. Michael remembers glimpsing him only once, a figure on a brisk visit to his mother’s sickbed. (“That was your father,” said a helpful aunt.)
Mike’s surname was an inheritance from his stepfather, a lawyer named Emil Vale. Emil, too, had lost his original name, on the advice of a judge who told him that Isador Velemirov sounded too Serbian for the Cincinnati circuit. In more painful circumstances, he had also lost his left arm—sheared off in a bus accident. (His buddy in the seat in front suffered the same bloody forfeit.) Michael had no fond memories of Emil. His jaw clicked when he chewed. His favorite movie was Chetniks! The Fighting Guerillas, a gung ho World War II action film about Yugoslavia’s nationalist partisans. He once confined Mike to his bedroom for two and a half days, in a failed attempt to get the boy to call him “Daddy.” The head of the Garfield Uniform Company didn’t like Emil, either, and warned Mike’s mother against the marriage. Eleanor Hug, however, was thirty-four years old and lumbered with the sadly inappropriate name of a husband with whom she had never lived. She made the pragmatic choice. As did her son. After agreeing to address Emil as “Pop,” Mike never spoke another word to him again.
At fifteen, Mike said, he ran away from home and went on the road, selling magazine subscriptions door-to-door. It was, he said “a semi-hobo existence.” He told impressionable farmers that both his parents were dead and he was raising money to go to college. He sometimes slept under railway bridges. He was slammed briefly against the body of a police car when a Pennsylvania housewife called the FBI after mistaking him for the Lipstick Killer, a serial murderer who had dismembered a six-year-old girl and scattered her remains through the Chicago sewer system.
When Mike tired of this species of hustling, he returned to Cincinnati and reenrolled in high school. Not the relatively prestigious one he had abandoned—alma mater of Rosemary Clooney and Doris Day—but a place where his classmates, most two years his junior, were the children of farmers and employees at the Procter & Gamble factory. He thrived there. “In those days,” he said, “the system gave you second chances.”
It also recognized talent. In 1954, Mike enrolled at Caltech, where he attended lectures by the physicist Richard Feynman. But the life did not suit him. He quit after a single term and began a bumpy four-college ride through an education system with limited sympathy for his preferred passions: by day, hermit-like occupation of the library among the shelves of Russian and German literature; by night, wandering around campus with a flask of gin and tonic, arguing about Kant and Hegel. Ohio State was the place he finally acquired his degree—by paying a fellow student to go through Reserve Officers’ Training Corps in his place.
Michael might have studied further—the University of Chicago, he said, made him an offer—but in the summer of 1961 he went back on the road, fixing the pattern he follows to this day. Wandering the world, absorbing new languages, supporting himself with translation and teaching assignments, getting into long conversations with strangers.
Why, I asked, had he gone to Sweden? “For love,” he said. But it soon became clear that he meant the opposite. Love was what he wanted to escape. In the summer of 1962 he fell into a relationship with a sculptor from Copenhagen. They met by accident on a hillside near Florence. Mike’s car had broken down; she was sitting at a café table, saw him trudging by, took pity. Like all the girlfriends he would tell me about, she was a young mother with a husband somewhere in the background, out of focus.
The affair was intense. She introduced him to Scandinavian literature. They imagined themselves as the doomed couple in the New Wave film Hiroshima Mon Amour. The sculptor wanted to leave her husband, but Mike had no desire to settle down. He was, he said, in the grip of an existential crisis. “The basic philosophical question for me was: if human problems were caused by Man, then could Man solve them? Because if not, if there was simply some fault in human nature that was impossible to remedy, then the only way out was mysticism.” It was a very Left Bank, Gauloises-smoking, turtleneck-sweater-wearing kind of crisis, but no less overwhelming for that. Which is why, to preserve his lover’s marriage and his own solitary lifestyle, Mike crossed the Öresund strait to Sweden, then entered the radical intellectual circle that would appoint him guru to the deserters.
* * *
THROUGH A SERIES of chances he couldn’t quite reconstruct, Mike found refuge in the household of Mirjam Israel, cousin of the Swedish lawyer Hans Göran Franck. (There was, insisted Mike, no romantic relationship between him and his new mentor.) One thing he recalled very clearly: it was a child of the household who triggered his political awakening—Dan Israel, Mirjam’s twelve-year-old son. He and his schoolmates were passionately opposed to the war in Vietnam and already considered themselves Maoists. “These kids were amazing,” said Mike. “They could summon up a demonstration overnight.” They clamored around the visiting American and bombarded him with questions about Marx, the class struggle, and the aims of the North Vietnamese—none of which he could answer.
Intoxicated by their enthusiasm and embarrassed by his ignorance, Mike immersed himself in the literature of the Left. He read Marx for the first time. (“Holy shit!” he thought. “This guy can solve our problems.”) He read Mao. (“A deviation.”) He read Isaac Deutscher’s three-volume biography of Leon Trotsky, the man who helped to lead the Bolshevik revolution—and, thanks to Stalin and an assassin’s ice ax, its most celebrated martyr. And here the Michael Vale story required a dramatic organ chord and a flash of lightning. Deutscher’s Trotsky—particularly the first volume, The Prophet Armed—was the book that illuminated the landscape and revealed to him his place within it. It was the story of an intellectual who became a revolutionary leader at the age of eighteen, who traveled the world, learning languages, writing for the radical press, and dealing with the chicanery of agents provocateurs. It seemed to speak directly to him, to offer him a blueprint for living.
“The abstract, humanitarian, moralist view of history is barren,” Trotsky asserted. “But this chaotic mass of material acquisitions, of habits, of customs, and prejudices, which we call civilization, had hypnotized us all, giving us the false impression that we have already achieved the main thing. Now comes the war and shows us that we have not even crawled out on our bellies from the barbarous period of our history.” For Trotsky it was the First World War; for Vale, it was Vietnam. When Hans Göran Franck offered him the job of overseeing the welfare of the American deserters arriving in the wake of the Intrepid Four, Mike was armed and ready.
“It was a fluke,” he insisted. “I just happened to have done my homework. But it quite quickly became more than a managerial position. I was struck by the grandness of the task. It wasn’t just about individual men who had come to Sweden for a variety of reasons, some of them pretty comical. These men were existential subjects. And I was responsible for them, because politically speaking, they were in a limbo. On the edge of the abyss.”
* * *
HERE, BETWEEN THE main course and the pudding, we had arrived in Rasputin territory. It was time to discuss the story told by everyone who had ever written about him. How he’d become a guru to an army of troubled young men, teenagers and twentysomethings, far from home. How he had dismantled them, psychologically, in order to fit them for the new revolutionary age. Jim McGourty had called it brainwashing. Lucinda Franks had written about butchery. How, I wondered, would Michael describe it?
I showed him the passages from Franks’s book. He smiled as he read it. “Yeah, I did that,” he said. “But that wasn’t the intent. I would harangue them for not wanting to be involved in politics. I would say: you’re in politics now whether you like it or not. If you harangue forcefully, people come around.” It was, he explained, a critical moment in history. “If it was true that the system had reached its end point, and there was going to be chaos, we had to be prepared for that. It’s like you do with kids. You don’t try to shield them from the realities around them. It was not a very nice or pleasant thing to do. But what else could I say to them? You’re safe, you’re in Sweden, you’re all right? I couldn’t tell them that because it wasn’t true.”
I thought Michael would be unwilling to discuss the subject of ego-stripping, but I was quite wrong. He was happy to share the history, theory, and practice. “I was obsessed,” he said, “with trying to work out why we have the values we have.” He had read Freud. He had read Wilhelm Reich. He wanted to use their therapeutic techniques to help the young men in his care. “It was a very serious and legitimate attempt to bring two theories together,” he said. “If you’re a social revolutionary you must do what you can within the domain over which you have power.”
Michael did not require a closed room and a lamp shone in the eyes. He used intense, sustained questioning, either one-to-one or within a group. He was not afraid to interrogate any aspect of a subject’s personality, politics, or emotional history. He was not afraid to shout. If they wept or broke down, that was a healthy part of the process. Those who did not rebel against him bound themselves to him. Sometimes, he said, he was embarrassed by their acts of submission. One man, he recalled, sought to please him by learning German, giving up pipe smoking, and spending his savings having one of Michael’s favorite books expensively rebound.
Middle-class deserters required the most work. They had to be cured of their attachment to liberal concepts and values. (“Oh God,” Michael exclaimed. “I can’t even move my mouth to say these words. Self-realization! Individual creativity!”) They had to learn that their objections to the Vietnam War were not moral, as they believed, but aesthetic. War offended them not because it was wrong, but because it was ugly. “They didn’t like that message,” he said. “But they all listened. Even the ones who didn’t like me.”
Most of all, the deserters had to relinquish their egotism and abandon their sense of themselves as heroic individuals taking a stand. “There was one guy who came over,” said Michael, his mouth twisting in disgust. “A psychologist. A liberal. He brought his kids over. And he was so concerned about the war. He came in to me one day and he told me about a dream that he’d had. He’d dreamt that he was in a tank, driving down Pennsylvania Avenue from the Capitol Building. And he reaches the White House and it explodes. And he wanted me to interpret it. I was embarrassed for him! What ego!”
What, I asked, were the psychological consequences of this treatment? “Human beings have certain principles that we don’t know about until we overstep them,” he told me. “You can violate them, but once you do, you cease, even at the organic level, to be yourself. It exposes so many contradictions that you cease functioning as a human being.” Did he drive people over the edge? “Getting angry with people and raising your voice, that’s just normal,” he said. “But in Sweden, it’s not done.” He started talking about the women who allied themselves to the deserters. “Those girls, those little girls. I would make them cry!” he hooted. “There was this one. She was such an animal. Such a frail little thing. I made her cry so many times!” He was speechless with laughter.
It sounded sadistic. It sounded damaging. It sounded like a Pavlovian experiment designed to produce tears rather than saliva. But Michael insisted that ego-stripping was an essentially harmless process. It could not produce psychological trauma, he argued, because the idea of psychological trauma itself was a myth.
To illustrate his argument, he told me about a thought experiment he once conducted upon himself, using a memory from his childhood in Cincinnati. When he was eight, he said, his grandmother went to a bingo game and left him playing in the street. Another boy, three or four years his senior, proposed that they go out to meet some girls.
“We didn’t find any, of course,” he recalled. “So he took me to a public toilet and tried to hump me from the back. He was totally ineffectual. It didn’t last more than a couple of minutes. And I have that very stark memory, right? I could convert that into a real trauma. So I started thinking about it.” He imagined a choir of people telling him that this older boy was bad and cruel. “And I can find myself in my mind, doing that. Making it into a real event in my life. That’s what the trauma merchants do.” Similar figures in Sweden, he suggested, encouraged the belief that his work with the deserters amounted to a form of moral and psychological torture. “It left me open to charges.”
What charges? I asked.
Mike Vale scanned the restaurant theatrically and replied in a stage whisper: “C … I … A!”
* * *
WE MET MANY times over the next three years. In the British Library. In coffee bars around London. In Paris, when he decided to sell his flat and move permanently to Vietnam. I never turned down one of his invitations. His charisma, I suppose, had begun to exert its effect over me.
Once he summoned me to Edinburgh, where he was registered with an NHS doctor. (Mike Vale must be one of the few International Men of Mystery with a hearing aid paid for by the British taxpayer.) On that occasion, we spent the day together. We had a long brunch at an American-style diner on Trongate, walked down the Royal Mile, and took refuge from the cold in a café, where he ordered soup and a sandwich. (Somehow he always managed to get two meals out of me.) I then accompanied him to the doors of the hospital. I asked him where he was headed next. As usual, it was some international hot spot. “To the Turkish-Syrian border,” he said. “It looks very interesting down there.”
Certain rituals developed. He would encourage me to track down figures from his past, often men whom he thought he might have treated too roughly. If they condemned him, like Jim, he shrugged. If they praised him, he would express satisfaction and joke about his “psychovoodoo skills.”
Between these exchanges, Mike would maintain long periods of silence. Just at the point I’d convinced myself he’d been killed while poking his nose in some skirmish halfway across the world, an email would appear in my in-box: “Just a quick note to let you know I haven’t died yet. Although, like any good lefty I do a bit of dying every day when I read the news.”
We often talked about politics. Michael would usually take the pro-Kremlin line. He doubted that Russia was responsible for the crash of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17. He asked why the BBC was not investigating a building in Ukraine that looked like a chocolate factory on the outside but was probably a Mossad listening post. Did I know that Petro Poroshenko, the president of Ukraine and a vocal opponent of Putin, had made his fortune in the confectionery business and was really a Jew named Valtsman? “It all fits,” he said.
* * *
THERE ARE SOME people in life who become an object of speculation to all who know them. Michael Vale is one of them. If two of his acquaintances happen to meet, he is never far from the conversation. “Michael Vale,” said Rob Argento, the deserter from Miami Beach, “was dedicated to an idea, single-minded, a manipulator who didn’t really care for the consequences for any one individual because the end goal was so significant. And he had a way of attracting people who needed a leader. Or a father figure.”
Perhaps Michael’s own fatherless childhood helped him to understand what was required. Lost boys seemed most drawn to him, and their company amused him. “There was a guy called Hyatt,” he told me, “who left his base in Germany because he was behind in the payments on his Ford Mustang. He only ended up in Sweden because he took a wrong turn on the road to Belgium. I tried to coach him for his interview with the Swedish police. I told him to say that he was opposed to the war in Vietnam. But the kid just looked at me and said, ‘Where’s Vietnam?’”
I heard many stories about the lost boys of the ADC. Walter Marshall, a reform school runaway who had joined and deserted from the army under a name borrowed from a stolen passport. (The name was unhelpfully exotic: his deception was revealed when the real Jesus Zeus Lorenzo Mungi was killed in action.) Billy Staton from Wichita, Kansas, hooked on speed, who spent an entire winter disassembling and assembling a clock. (He was jailed in 1970 for dealing LSD.) John Ashley, the son of a senior civilian official at the Pentagon, who tried to use a suicide attempt to avoid a Vietnam posting. (The army psychiatrist told him this was a logical response to his situation and declined to recommend a discharge.) A gifted writer who supplied a witty memoir of his desertion to the Washington Post, Ashley incinerated his talent with amphetamines. I’d hoped to track him down for this book. One deserter told me he’d seen Ashley drinking on the street. Others that he changed his name and died under it. The trail led to a homeless hostel in Stockholm and no further.
Another force drew members of the American Deserters Committee tightly together, one that would also eventually split them apart. The fear that there were spies working among them to break up their movement, to persuade, cajole, or blackmail them into returning. Almost all of my interviewees had a story about being followed. Michael Vale could describe the man who watched him take breakfast each morning at the all-you-can-eat buffet in Stockholm’s Central Station. A draft resister from Seattle told me of the time two American eavesdroppers were found hiding in a cupboard in the office of the ADC. Bill Jones, the chief spokesman of the ADC, talked of anonymous threatening letters; the harassment of families back home in the States; calls made to deserters by strangers who asked to meet in out-of-the-way places.
The most insidious threat was that of infiltration. “If someone had a disagreement with somebody, they would accuse them of being a cop or an agent,” said one old comrade of Michael Vale. “That, unfortunately, was absolutely part of the culture.”
* * *
THE FIRST REAL blow came on March 12, 1968, when ADC members opened their newspapers to see a familiar face in an unexpected context. Ray Jones, ballet teacher and Sweden’s first American deserter, was interviewed by reporters in the arrivals lounge of Frankfurt Airport. A pair of military policemen and the U.S. Army’s regional provost marshal had met him at the steps of the plane and allowed him to speak to the press before being driven off to the stockade at Nuremberg—the very facility from which he had deserted. Jones stated that he was not a Communist. He said that he loved America and did not want to run from its problems. The Swedes had used him as a political pawn, and, moreover, they were not as liberal-minded as their reputation suggested. “The Swedes have a natural prejudice against black people,” he said, “and know nothing about Negroes.” How long did he think he would spend in prison? “I figure ten years,” he said.
The photographs showed Jones staring grimly into the middle distance. In the foreground of one picture, his wife, Gabriele, looks apprehensively toward the camera, perhaps because the photographer has swooped in close to get a shot of the object lying between her and her husband—a bassinet containing their three-month-old son, Ray Jones IV.
Two days later, a man and a woman appeared in Stockholm to claim responsibility for wooing Jones back from exile. The man was William R. Russell, a corpulent, middle-aged American journalist from Mississippi, editor of a privately run newspaper for soldiers called Army Times. The woman was his twenty-five-year-old deputy Patton Lindsley Hunter. “I am here,” Russell announced, in a rowdy press conference at the Strand Hotel, “to get in contact with the Americans who have left their military service and set up residence here. I cannot see why these boys should have to live outside their homeland for the rest of their lives.”
Russell accused the Swedish government of exploiting the American exiles for its own political advantage. He alleged that some of the deserters were criminals on the run, and that others were agents provocateurs stirring up anti-American sentiment on behalf of some foreign power. He knew, he said, that many genuine deserters wanted to return home, but he did not know how. To those men, he offered a deal. He would be leaving Sweden on Sunday night. Anyone who wished to join him would be guaranteed a free flight out of Stockholm and lenient treatment from the military authorities. Those who waited, those who had to be brought in, could expect much rougher handling. Hans Göran Franck, he said, did not understand American law. “All these men are still enlisted, and belong to the army or the navy, and they will remain so for as long as they live.”
The Swedish press was no happier to hear this than Michael Vale and Bill Jones. Reports in the next day’s papers compared Russell to the protagonist of The Quiet American, Graham Greene’s novel about an undercover CIA man in Vietnam. They also expressed puzzlement about who had sponsored his mission. “Despite our concerted attempts,” wrote one journalist, “it was impossible to grasp on whose behalf he was speaking; for himself, for his publication, for his country, or for the army.” The photographers were no more sympathetic: they took shots that depicted Russell as a startled amphibian in pencil tie. Not a man with whom you might elope on a night flight to Frankfurt.
The ADC struck swiftly back with its own press conference the next day. Russell’s offer, it said, was a publicity stunt intended for an audience back home in the States, who might conclude that deserters who did not accept his generous terms were Communist sympathizers or Soviet agents. With impressive confidence, the committee accused Russell of being part of a CIA operation against them, which meant that the deserters must be near the top of the White House agenda and should expect the full force of the agency’s firepower. It was a story of harassment, coercion, conspiracy—and Bill Jones could not resist a melodramatic flourish: “This is a clear indication that the U.S. government intends to abduct people who are seeking political asylum.” Russell and Hunter were present to hear the statements. When they were spotted in the audience, they were asked to leave. One of the deserters pursued them down the street and asked Hunter out to dinner. She declined.
“We were sure that Russell and that girl weren’t really journalists,” said Michael Vale, as we sat drinking coffee at a café under the arches of St. Pancras station. “They were intelligence agents who’d come to Sweden to make a big propaganda ploy to get the deserters to go back.”
“So what did you do?” I asked.
“The idea was a natural,” he said. “It just flowed from the situation. We set a trap for them. And used a deserter as bait.”