THE JERUM DORMITORY rises eight stories above Gärdet, a modernist garden suburb of Stockholm where lawns and footpaths connect concrete apartment blocks, and the odd fat brown rabbit lollops across the grass. The building, an accommodation block built for students of Stockholm University, has undergone some cosmetic changes since the 1960s. White plastic panels now clad its concrete skin. The basement has been transformed, incongruously, into a car dealership. But the student bicycles remain, rowed below the big plastic letters that spell out the name of the block, and memorialize what became the event old deserters still know as the “Jerum Affair.”
It began at breakfast time on Sunday, March 17, 1968, when William Russell received a phone call from a mysterious man named John Armfield. (Actually a mysterious man named Michael Vale.) Armfield said he was a Fulbright scholar staying at a student hostel in Stockholm and had news of an African American deserter staying in the Jerum building who wanted to leave Sweden but lacked the documents to get through customs. Russell assured Armfield that if the deserter came to the U.S. Embassy, then the consul, Merl Arp, could authorize the necessary paperwork. Armfield said that wouldn’t be possible. The man was too nervous. The embassy would have to come to him. Russell agreed to the proposal. He summoned Patton Hunter from her hotel room. He called the embassy and got Merl Arp out of bed. And with a typewriter and a sheaf of blank forms, the three took a taxi out to Gärdet to receive their prize.
The ADC’s own account of the affair, preserved in the personal archive of Hans Göran Franck, contains what purports to be a transcript of the call between Russell and Vale. Russell is allocated lines that might have suited Robert Mitchum in Cape Fear. He talks about putting troublesome deserters in straitjackets, or kidnapping them, or subduing them with the weaponized charms of Patton Lindsley Hunter. “Patton can take care of him,” he says. “She’ll bring a lot of joy to him.”
“Who is the girl?” asks Vale.
“Oh, she’s another agent,” replies Russell.
Vale asks why any deserter would trust an agent.
“Because he’s a nigger,” says Russell.
Vale asks him to repeat the word.
“Ah didn’t say nigger,” reads the transcript. “Ah said negro.”
When I asked Michael Vale about these events, I received a spontaneous dramatic performance. Michael reenacted his version of the phone conversation with Russell, holding an invisible receiver to his ear and adopting the accent of a fastidious Mississippi gentleman. You have a boy for us? We sure would appreciate that. That would be mighty fine. The tone was appropriately stagey. The whole affair was a piece of theater. Jimmy Dotson of Ballinger, Texas, who had recently deserted from his garrison in northern Italy, was cast as the young African American deserter who, like Ray Jones, had grown disenchanted with Swedish society and longed to return home. George Carrano, the fast-talking New York draft dodger with the puzzling visa status, was also a part of the sting. His girlfriend was awarded the role of Dotson’s Scandinavian sweetheart. A photographer and reporter from Tidsignal, a left-wing student newspaper, were directed to hover in the wings, awaiting their cue. Down below, Vale and Carrano watched Russell, Hunter, and Arp ascend the stairs, then indulged in a bit of comic business with the taxi driver. “I did the stupidest thing,” Michael told me. “I should have taken their bags out and looked through them. Carrano suggested it, but I said it was against the rules of the game.” Instead, they sent the car away. It was probably a prudent decision. Photographing a U.S. diplomat was one thing. Stealing his luggage would have been espionage.
* * *
PATTON LINDSLEY HUNTER retired from journalism long ago and is now an artist who paints and teaches in the Tampa Bay region of Florida. She was rather surprised to be contacted about a strange incident in a Swedish dormitory five decades ago, but she had admirable recall of the details. She described William Russell as secretive and self-centered. She knew he had a strained relationship with his family back home in the States, and she recalled his purchase of an armful of out-of-season Christmas gifts, for dutiful dispatch later in the year. She remembered the buildup to the trip: Russell looking pleased with himself and making excited calls from the Army Times office in Frankfurt. She remembered flying back from Sweden with Ray and Gabriele Jones, Russell trying to hide his disappointment when only a handful of journalists turned up to meet them at Frankfurt Airport. She also remembered that when she and Russell came back to Stockholm to fish for more deserters, Merl Arp was not an enthusiastic participant in the plan. “Even though I was right in the middle of it, I didn’t really know what was going on,” she said. “But I guess Bill chose to take me to Sweden out of all his reporters because I was young and single, and these were young boys he was trying to attract.”
As her name suggests, Patton Hunter is from a military family. A well-connected one: in 1968, her uncle was the head of Army Intelligence in Heidelberg. (“He took me aside and warned me that I was mixing with some dangerous people,” she recalled.) However, despite this background—and the pro-war editorial line of Army Times—she had a strong personal sympathy for the deserters’ cause. Secretly, Hunter said, she admired their political stand, their articulate speeches, even the intelligence they had shown in setting the trap at the dormitory. “It was a smart thing to do,” she said, “because Bill bit hard on that bait.”
When Hunter, her boss, and the diplomat arrived at the correct room in the Jerum dormitory, they found it occupied by two Swedish women, one of whom introduced herself as the girlfriend of the deserter who wished to return. Moments later James Dotson appeared. They sat down to discuss how to proceed. Russell said he was pushing the authorities to begin the trial of Ray Jones as briskly as possible—so that the other deserters would feel assured about the promise of light treatment. “Light?” Dotson asked. “What do you think is a light sentence?” Russell estimated four months or less. Merl Arp unpacked his portable typewriter and began taking down Dotson’s details. The papers were soon ready to sign.
“Then,” said Hunter, “there was a commotion and three or four guys ran in and started taking pictures of us. Bill said: Smile, Pat, just smile, they won’t hurt you! I remember that I tried to stand in front of the guy who was signing the papers so they couldn’t get a good shot of him. I did that out of pure instinct.” Russell asked the intruders what they wanted. “You can read about it in tomorrow’s paper,” they declared. The camera clicked, bodies jostled, Hunter, Russell, and Arp went skittering back down to the ground floor, and the ADC and its allies had their story. The American consul and two supposedly independent journalists caught in a student bedroom, attempting to cajole a deserter into going home. Jim Dotson saved from the same fate as Ray Jones. A CIA plot foiled.
The Soviet daily Izvestia spoke of a “stormy operation” carried out in neutral Sweden by the U.S. intelligence services. Tidsignal had thunder of its own: “There is evidence for close collaboration between the U.S. Embassy in Stockholm and the secret U.S. agents who are working on the ground in Sweden. They are a threat to political refugees who have been granted asylum in our country. The government should take action against these agents for the security of these refugees.” The ADC handed out a press release bearing the names of seven embassy employees they believed were CIA officers. One deserter proposed that the ADC should petition Merl Arp for office space and a phone line at the U.S. Embassy, saving him the expense of tapping their phones and keeping them under surveillance. “See how we love our country?” he said. “We even save the taxpayer money.”
Was Russell working for the CIA or some other American intelligence service? “I thought that was laughable at the time,” said Patton Hunter. “Bill was such a goofy person. Back then I got the feeling he was doing it because it was a really big story and he wanted to cover it. He wanted the glory.” It was, perhaps, an understandable desire.
William Russell was a man with a great future behind him. At the end of the 1930s he had been working as consular clerk at the U.S. Embassy in Berlin, processing visas for the thousands attempting to leave the country. His well-received account of these years, Berlin Embassy, published in 1941, argued that the majority of Germans were not fanatical Nazis, but politically apathetic—and warned that America might succumb to the same darkness. During the forties he maintained an impressive double career. He spent four years attached to U.S. military intelligence in London, working on battle strategy and liaising with his opposite numbers in the exiled governments of Poland, Norway, Belgium, and Czechoslovakia. At the same time, he produced a steady output of fiction and plays that seem strong evidence against the ADC’s portrait of him as a drawling southern racist.
His novel Robert Cain is about a white Mississippi planter who fails to save his mixed-race friend from a lynching. His play Cellar depicts a gang of thieves who leave their only African American member to die of a bullet wound. (George Orwell read it, tagged him as a writer worth watching.) Once hostilities had ceased, Russell took an apartment in Greenwich Village and enrolled at the Professional Writers Clinic of New York University, where Saul Bellow was his tutor. The result was The Wind Is Rising, a novel so critical of American racism that its publisher felt compelled to expurgate the U.S. edition.
By the late 1950s, however, Russell’s lights were not quite so bright. He worked two years as a deck yeoman in the merchant marine, crossing and recrossing the Atlantic on board the USS General A. W. Greely. In 1955, he moved to Frankfurt and found a job as the office manager of a car showroom. By 1957 he was churning out pieces for Army Times Publications and living the uncertain life of a freelance reporter. His personal life also acquired a complexity that would not have endeared him to the Central Intelligence Agency. He began a relationship with a German man, who fathered a child for them to adopt. But Russell’s lover ran off with its mother, leaving the journalist holding the baby—a situation that seemed to suit everyone concerned. “He was,” said Hunter, “a good father to that child.”
Russell’s paternal instincts, however, did not extend to Ray Jones, the deserter he delivered from Stockholm. As the reporter played his part in the Jerum Affair, Ray Jones was cracking up in a cell in Nuremberg. On his first day in the stockade he charged at an armed guard, hoping, it seems, to earn a fatal bullet. A couple of days later he attempted to slash his wrists with a razor blade. Soon, however, some good news came. Despite his fifteen months in Sweden, Jones was not to be charged with desertion. Instead, he would be court-martialed for going absent without official leave, which carried a much milder punishment.
On April 3, 1968, ten officers of the Fourth Armored Division heard the details of his case. Jones had traveled with forged papers from Italy to Denmark to Sweden, and he had come to Frankfurt with William Russell to prove that he was not a political extremist. “I think communism is wrong,” he attested, “and not the answer for the black people.”
Jones’s defense counsel asked the court to consider the political impact of their judgment: too harsh a penalty, and no more men would be coming back from Sweden. The argument stuck. Jones was handed a bad conduct discharge and four months’ hard labor. He managed a weak smile as sentence was passed. Gabriele Jones ran to the barrier that separated spectators from the court. The military police looked the other way to allow the couple an embrace before Jones was taken back to the stockade.
In Stockholm, the deserters computed the news. One, twenty-four-year-old Parker Smith, from Glen Ridge, New Jersey, put his thoughts on paper and sent them to Hans Göran Franck: “Ray will now be free, after he completes his four months of hard labor, to take his white wife and his bad conduct discharge back to the freedom and opportunity of the black ghetto.”
That, more or less, was what Jones did. After four months of rock breaking in the stockade in Germany, he returned to Michigan but was no happier there, failing to find work and complaining of harassment by the FBI. He and his family flew back to Stockholm in May 1969, where Jones made an application for Swedish citizenship. The bureaucratic process ensured that he left another account on the record—a darker and more paranoid picture of his dealings with the American authorities.
In Ray Jones’s deposition to the Swedish Aliens Commission, he claimed that the decision to return was forced upon him by the bullying and threats. General Lewis Shull, Jones claimed, had called him at home to warn that the Swedes might easily be persuaded to revoke Jones’s asylum status, which would force him to relocate to a Communist country. “I was then warned by Mr. Russell that if a word of this was repeated I or my wife and child would end up dead by forces which he did not represent. And that these forces would not hesitate to do so if they thought I was trying to be a hero revolutionary.” Once he had agreed to come quietly, said Jones, Russell used the flight to Frankfurt to coach him in the anti-Swedish sentiments he made to journalists at the airport. Jones also claimed that Russell had offered him a $10,000 advance for a book in which Jones would denounce communism and declare his support for the Vietnam War.
* * *
AS HAPPENED SO often in the history of the deserters, every door seemed to lead to another. Jones’s deposition contained a paragraph that added another mysterious figure to the story. “One of the first days of March I was contacted by Richard Gibson, an American journalist, who expressed to me the fact that I was in danger and received no protection from the Swedish people and police. He threatened me that I could be killed by the American intelligence [services] for playing political games with them. I was frightened by this.… He expressed that he knew of similar situations where people playing politics were harassed or killed.”
Who was Richard Gibson? For once, the archive was bounteous. Richard Thomas Gibson—born Los Angeles, 1931—was the first African American reporter on the CBS staff and the acting executive secretary of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. He was also a man who seemed to have lived his whole life in the shadow of other people’s doubts. His declassified FBI and CIA files were easily available online, and they told a peculiar story.
Here, in cables and cuttings, was an account of his dismissal from Révolution Africaine, a Marxist magazine funded by the Chinese government, whose editor believed him to be an agent sent “to penetrate the ranks of the international revolutionary movement.” Here was an FBI report from August 1961, speculating how Richard Gibson’s affinity for prostitutes might be used to disrupt his political activism. Here was a letter typed by Gibson the following summer, offering the CIA his cooperation in exchange for “expenses.” (It was signed “A Friend,” and invited a discreet reply.) Here was paperwork demonstrating that, a few months later, Gibson had made similar overtures to the FBI, which sent a pair of special agents to meet with him and pump him for background data on Cuba.
Files of this kind are not customarily released until after the death of the subject. One source suggested that Gibson had succumbed to cancer in Belgium in the early 1980s. I was surprised, therefore, to see his name in the London phone book. And more surprised when he agreed to meet me.
* * *
I FOUND RICHARD Gibson in an agreeably shabby flat two floors above Little Venice, where the Regent’s Canal flows toward the gardens of London Zoo. A neatly dressed octogenarian with a Peter Lorre giggle, he had forgotten our appointment but invited me up all the same; he put coffee on the stove, gave me the tour. He showed me brittle editions of his old books, the bed given to him by John Kerry’s great-aunt Clara, the space on his shelves that once housed his personal archive, now administered by George Washington University. A retired air force colonel, he explained, had brokered the deal but was now failing to return his emails. To demonstrate, he wheeled over to the computer and invited me to inspect his in-box, which was stacked with pornographic spam. “I have a cousin in the CIA,” he twittered as he clicked through the files, “and she’s always saying to me—remember, there’s such a thing as freedom of information. You don’t know what things they’re going to pull out about you.”
We sat at the kitchen table, beside which was a huge sack of rice, the property of his lodger. Richard poured coffee, and I spread copies of Ray Jones’s documents in front of him. At first he ignored them, preferring to rehearse some of his favorite stories. A jaunt in Mozambique with Robert Mugabe. The day he took Fidel Castro to the Hotel Theresa in Harlem for a meeting with Malcolm X. His trip to the Cuban frog farm owned by William Morgan, the “yanqui comandante” who helped bring Castro to power and was later executed for plotting against him. Other anecdotes, numerous and wistful, laid their scene in brothels from Santiago to Copenhagen.
Prostitution was a leitmotif of our conversation: the streets of Richard’s memory were thronged with call girls. Gradually, however, we inched closer to Stockholm, and the trips he made in 1967 and 1968 to report on the proceedings and aftermath of the Russell Tribunal. His employer, in this instance, was Tuesday, a black interest supplement slipped into newspapers across America and, it turned out, secretly funded by the CIA through a front organization, the Congress for Cultural Freedom. The spooks, it seems, settled Richard Gibson’s bill for his trips to Sweden.
Sex, he suggested, was what had attracted the deserters to radical politics. Trotskyists, he said, “always had girls who would lie down for you. That is true. I remember one very attractive young lady. I certainly took advantage of her. Or she took advantage of me…” He loosed another giggle.
Richard picked up Ray Jones’s deposition and read it aloud. He seemed unhappy to see his name in the first paragraph. The story, he said, was all wrong. He had not contacted the deserter, still less threatened him. Instead, Jones and his German girlfriend had turned up outside his hotel and asked for help. “So I gave my advice. I said to him if he didn’t want to go to the States maybe he should go to China.”
Richard had contacts at the Chinese Embassy in Cairo and experience of using this route out of trouble—the previous year he had helped Robert F. Williams, an activist and the author of Negroes with Guns, to leave Cuba and acquire asylum in Peking. The two men remained in touch by letter. Williams, said Richard, was having an interesting time in China, where he lived a comfortable life, had regular meetings with Chairman Mao, and made revolutionary broadcasts to African American soldiers serving in Vietnam. Perhaps Jones could join him there? But Jones didn’t fancy a new life in Red China. Perhaps Sweden was far enough from home. Perhaps he feared entrapment.
With this, Richard’s recollections ran dry. He asked me—not for the first time—whether Ray Jones was alive or dead. The question seemed to be gnawing at him. I couldn’t supply him with an answer.
Richard sent me on my way with a friendly warning. In 1985, he recalled, he’d successfully sued an author who’d accused him of being a CIA agent. It produced a nice little check from his British publisher. There might have been more, had he decided to pursue it. I took the hint, but he need not have worried. A few days after my visit I read the CIA file in which the agency expressed its feelings about my interviewee. Gibson, the agency decided, was not good informant material, but “a weasel-like character, evasive, opportunistic, with very little or no moral fiber at all.”
A full two years later, I discovered the fate of Ray Jones III. He had been expelled from Sweden in 1979 and was alive, if not well, in his hometown of Pontiac, Michigan. His wife, Gabriele, had taken her own life in 1986. The information was supplied by Ray Jones IV, the baby in the bassinet, who wanted to impress a point on me. You don’t need to be in combat to suffer the traumas of war.
* * *
THE JERUM AFFAIR was a famous victory for the ADC, but it also produced a subtle poison. It demonstrated that the deserters’ anxieties about agents, surveillance, and infiltration were not entirely irrational. It proved that paranoia had its uses. But it made the limits of those uses much harder to perceive. Now everyone was a potential spy. Journalists who wanted to report deserter stories. Liberal Swedes who offered the spare bedroom to a fugitive in need. The Swedish Committee for Vietnam and its vice chairman, Bertil Svahnström, above all. For Mike Vale and Bill Jones, Svahnström became a dragon to be slain. Fifty years on, the mention of his name caused both of them to wince. “That awful man!” Mike exclaimed. Bill’s old speeches revealed his position: “A prominent Swedish figure,” one said, “tried to infiltrate our organization and made offers of financial assistance if we would become politically silent.” His words bent the meaning of infiltration beyond recognition, but his listeners were the young student Maoists who prayed for the victory of the Vietnamese National Liberation Front over America—and they liked what they heard.
“Bill Jones was the type of guy who would say ‘damned fascist swines’ and that kind of rhetoric,” said Mats Widgren, a former spokesperson for these radical groups who sat beside Bill at many press conferences in early 1968. “But we were very happy to hear his accusations against Svahnström. We were embracing that ultra-leftist thinking even though we sometimes thought that he went too far.” Bill poured scorn on the Swedish Committee for Vietnam and attacked Svahnström’s campaigns for peace in Indochina. Peace implied compromise, settlement, a recognition of American influence in the region. The ADC favored complete victory for the forces of Ho Chi Minh. “We have chosen a side in the struggle and abide by the choice,” said Bill, “and lest we be accused by bigoted minds of cowardice, let them know that we shall continue to act, and that our enemies will continue until they silence us with their guns.” Talk like this was thrillingly un-Swedish.
* * *
COLD WAR BETWEEN the ADC and the Swedish Committee for Vietnam. Hot rhetoric from Bill Jones. Mutterings about spies and infiltrators. This was the background noise in May 1968 as Beheiren’s second batch of smuggled exiles sat in their Stockholm police cells, waiting for their paperwork to be completed. Mark Shapiro, Terry Whitmore, and the four other men who’d made that terrifying jump from a Japanese fishing boat to a Soviet trawler had no knowledge of the fevered conversations going on beyond the room. They did not know that their arrival had been anticipated for weeks and had scant sense that they had become glittering trophies for whichever faction they decided to favor.
Their luster was a product of their combat experience. Bill Jones was a hospital technician. Mike Vale and George Carrano weren’t even deserters. But the six coming from Leningrad had seen action, and this made them assets of tremendous value.
Military officials had always insisted that the kind of men who deserted were the “rotten few” who would be unlikely to be trusted with active duty. “We’d rather not take a chance on foul-ball soldiers under battle conditions,” said an army spokesman in January 1968. “It wouldn’t be fair to GIs whose lives are at stake.” But a month before those remarks were made, Terry Whitmore had been on patrol near Con Thien, just a thousand yards below the demilitarized zone that separated North from South Vietnam. His platoon stumbled into the crosshairs of an enemy company three times its strength. Men were cut down around him. As the bullets flew, Whitmore pulled his wounded commanding officer to safety, then did the same for a second soldier. But the bomb crater in which he’d taken refuge came under mortar attack, leaving a hundred pieces of hot shrapnel fizzing in his flesh. For these actions, Whitmore had earned his Purple Heart. If he joined the ADC, then the arguments about “foul-ball soldiers” would be much harder to make.
After two days of custody, Mark and his comrades were allowed to walk free. Five went to the ADC offices in a large, scruffy Volkswagen bus with Mike Vale at the wheel. Kim Jin-Su, who had already decided that any life in a Communist society was preferable to being part of a left-wing group in a capitalist one, took a more radical path. Looking for clues to what became of him, I found a Japanese TV documentary in which a former Beheiren activist went to the States with the same question on his mind. The filmmakers visited Mr. and Mrs. Philip Griggs, the white couple who had adopted Kim after his parents were killed in the Korean War. In the living room of a modest bungalow, Philip Griggs wept as he watched old footage of his lost boy denouncing the imperial ambitions of the United States. “He was wrong,” said Mr. Griggs. “My gut feeling says that he was one scared GI who found a way out.” The old man had his own denunciation to make—of Beheiren and the Soviets, for using his boy as a political pawn.
Kim’s old friend Mark Shapiro, who had traveled with him in the hold of a Russian trawler, knew the next part of the story. As we barreled through the San Diego traffic, he told me what he knew. “He went to North Korea,” Mark said. “He’s still there. I believe he’s a major in the army.” Mark spoke wistfully of his lost comrade. He was trying to contact him, but the process was complicated. “It’s like doing a crossword puzzle in a dark room,” he said.
The others in his party did not travel so far. Having boarded the ADC bus, most found berths with anti-war activists among Hans Göran Franck’s circle. Mark was billeted in the spare bedroom of the sociologist Joachim Israel—a lively household in which Soviet diplomats were sometimes to be found sleeping off their hangovers on the settee. Phil Callicoat lodged with an Aftonbladet journalist and her psychologist husband in an apartment in central Stockholm. Joe Kmetz was taken in by a couple of pacifists in the Södermalm district, who turned out to be swingers of the sort depicted in Sweden: Heaven and Hell. Terry Whitmore slept in a makeshift bed in the kitchen of Jay Wright, a New Orleans deserter who, he discovered, had also come to Sweden via Moscow, but with rather less ballyhoo. The pair became fast friends. A furious Bertil Svahnström accused the ADC of kidnapping the men, but he need not have worried. Kmetz and Arnett soon drifted away from the group. Phil Callicoat moved in with a Swedish girlfriend and then went to the coastal town of Oxelösund to find work on the docks. (He managed a week before he was laid off.) Only Mark Shapiro and Terry Whitmore remained faithful to the ADC project.
In May 1968, that project was gathering momentum. Volunteers were needed to give speeches on campuses and at anti-war rallies and to talk to journalists asking for interviews. (Student publications got the deserters for free; American papers were charged a hefty administration fee.) Copy was required to fill the pages of the Second Front, a newspaper distributed to potential deserters on bases in West Germany and printed for the ADC by an anti-war press in Paris.
New arrivals wrote up the story of their desertion and exhorted readers to acquire one of their own. The tone was friendly and foul-mouthed. “The man with the guts is the one who tells Uncle Sam to fuck himself,” declared Don McDonough, a deserter from Boston who, like Bill, had been educated in a Catholic seminary. “The more shit you will take, the better the officers like it,” argued former petty officer Ray Krzeminski, late of the aircraft carrier USS Wasp. “The more you suffer, the more those sadistic bastards enjoy it.” The paper also carried poetry, graphic pictures of U.S. soldiers posing with the severed heads of National Liberation Front fighters, and travel tips for fugitives coming north to Sweden. (Legal entry with a passport was preferable to more exuberant strategies, such as screaming up in a stolen jeep or arriving by hijacked plane.) A sister publication, the Second Front Review, featured longer, less demotic pieces, and was eventually published in both English and Swedish.
Not all their propaganda was printed. It also came in the form of radio programs. Vincent Strollo, a mechanic’s son from Philadelphia who deserted from a military hospital near Landstuhl, told me how these came about: “At one point very early on I was so disgusted with the war that I said, ‘Well, I can go to North Vietnam and fight for the North Vietnamese.’ So we went for a meeting at their mission in Stockholm.” This generous offer was declined, but the officials proposed another idea. “So myself and a number of other people made tapes, with a lot of music, encouraging men to desert.”
These programs—many featuring a jive-talking Terry Whitmore—were recorded on a reel-to-reel tape deck at the ADC offices, hand-delivered to the North Vietnamese mission, and sent on to Hanoi, where they were played on Second Front Radio, along with demoralizing sentimental music and the admonishing voice of a female announcer nicknamed Hanoi Hannah. By 1970, the mix included Steppenwolf’s “Draft Resister,” Bob Dylan’s “I Threw It All Away,” a Mandarin version of “The Internationale,” and sardonic patter that was the unconscious house style of propaganda stations throughout the twentieth century: “Hello, all you happy defenders of freedom out there in Viet Cong land. This is Second Front Radio prepared by the American Deserters Committee here in Stockholm, Sweden, and broadcast to all you schmucks and peons in Southeast Asia over Liberation Radio, South Vietnam. The National Liberation Front urges you to form local cease-fires with the local Viet Cong units. You form your own peace talks. Only you can end this war. Demand to be sent home immediately. Kidnap an airplane, go home anyhow!”
* * *
THE DESERTERS PUT on a special performance for Independence Day 1968. Its leading man was Chuck Onan, a marine from the Chicago projects—an eighteen-year-old boy with long curly hair and a short temper, who had arrived in Sweden in February and had become one of Michael Vale’s most loyal lieutenants. Its unwitting host was Ambassador William Womack Heath, newly returned from Washington and protected by a pair of armed security men.
Heath decided to coax some warmth back into Swedish-American relations with a Fourth of July garden party on the embassy lawn. Hundreds of guests, a mixture of U.S. tourists and diplomatic families, turned up. Hot dogs and bottles of Coca-Cola were handed out. A band played “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
But just as Heath was about to begin his speech, twenty deserters—among them Chuck Onan, Bill Jones, and Mark Shapiro—leapt over a rope barrier and sat cross-legged under the flagpole. George Carrano, standing on the sidelines, started up a chorus of “U.S. out of Vietnam!” A knot of outraged guests tore the wooden stakes from the grass and steamed into the cordoned area to confront the protestors. One hundred fifty Swedish police officers followed. Chuck Onan shinnied up the flagpole. A security guard dragged him down, got him in a headlock until he lost consciousness, and threw him into the back of a paddy wagon with six of his comrades. George Carrano was too slow and felt the hand of the law on his shoulder. The rest of the ADC contingent melted into the crowd.
As the police van screeched off, Gunnar Helén, the governor of the county of Kronoberg and heir to the leadership of the liberal Folkpartiet, stood on the lawn and gave a speech about how Swedes were too sensible to listen to the sloganeering of the New Left.
That night, his words acquired a measure of irony. A hundred-strong crowd from the ADC and the radical student groups stood outside the police station and chanted their demand for the release of Bill, Mark, Chuck, and their fellow prisoners. “And inside,” Mark Shapiro told me, “all the Swedish prisoners started banging their tin cups against the wall and shouting, ‘We don’t want the Americans in here!’” The duty officer, fed up with the noise and unable to locate the correct paperwork, unlocked the cell doors and propelled Bill, Mark, Chuck, and the others back out on the street, much to the delight of the demonstrators.
Mark Shapiro looked back on that day with pride. So much that on July 4, 2007, he went back to Stockholm, put on his best suit, and attempted to gate-crash the Independence Day garden party at the U.S. ambassador’s residence. “Sir, what are you here for?” asked the security guard. “I’m here to protest peacefully,” replied Mark. The old deserter enjoyed telling me the story. Half a century on, his radical credentials were still intact. “You could almost see the smoke coming out of his ears,” he said.
We began chatting about the people who had accompanied him to the cells on that afternoon in 1968. “Who are you talking to next?” he asked. I told him that I was about to fly to Eugene, Oregon, to see his old comrade Chuck Onan. The look on Mark’s face was pretty unambiguous. He thought this was a terrible idea. All the same, I got on the plane.