MARK SHAPIRO WAS not the only person to warn me off a meeting with Chuck Onan. Chuck, I was told, had a complicated relationship with the truth. But Michael Vale encouraged me to get in touch, curious to know what kind of impact he’d made on the life of his former follower. “I am not so sure,” Michael said, “whether it might not be likened to that of a wrecking ball.” He asked me to send Chuck a book on his behalf. The Birds—a novel by the Norwegian author Tarjei Vesaas. I read it before I mailed it. The protagonist is a naïve man named Matthew, who comes to an unfortunate end in an icy Scandinavian lake.
Chuck’s welcome, however, couldn’t have been warmer. I’d booked myself into a nearby motel, but he insisted that I stay in the spare room of his home, a bungalow beside a gravel pit on the industrial edge of Eugene, Oregon. Sitting in his kitchen, with his agreeably scruffy terrier, Ninja, asleep under the table, Chuck told me his story. He had, he said, once worked as a management consultant. A course in Ayurvedic medicine, however, had so convinced him of the health benefits of the cannabis plant that he took advantage of Oregon’s liberal drug laws and set up a business cultivating and refining medical marijuana. He sold cannabis oil capsules, cannabis watermelon drops, cannabis sour worms.
His commitment to the drug was an article of faith. Chuck, I learned, was the founding pastor of Canna Church Rocks, a group that assigned a sacramental role to the spliff. Marijuana, he asserted, brought spiritual as well as medical benefits. It allowed him access to a higher astral plane. Recently, while in a trance, he had seen a vision of his long-estranged brother, bathed in an aura that indicated his spirit had departed the earth. Tears filled his eyes as he described the experience. Then he pulled back his long steel-gray hair to reveal a scar: marijuana, he said, mixed with black pepper and pink Himalayan sea salt, had cured his stage-four melanoma. I became lost in his explanation of the cancer-killing properties of cannabinoids.
Despite this enthusiasm, Chuck’s business seemed in trouble. His website pictured thriving greenery, but the propagation bays in his garden were empty; the fence used to screen the crop from the street was in a state of disrepair; the car parked outside his house was clearly going nowhere. The dry yield of an older crop, stored in airtight jars on a kitchen shelf, seemed to be his main source of income. Staying with him showed me something of the precarious nature of American life. When we left the house, either to go for burgers at a nearby strip mall or to walk Ninja by the river, we passed a small encampment of homeless men. Faces deformed by poverty and alcohol. It was a picture out of Steinbeck. They sat in folding chairs beneath the trees, waiting for America to be somewhere else. And each time we passed, Chuck gave them a respectful nod.
The 2016 U.S. election was only a few months away. Chuck was voting for Donald Trump. Chuck wanted that wall on the Mexican border, and he scorned those who said it couldn’t be built. Chuck believed that a Muslim invasion of America was taking place and that rape was the enemy’s weapon of choice. He’d been thrown off Facebook for saying so, but that only increased his sense of being in the right. Feminism, too, was a dangerous and unjust force. Chuck played me videos of his favorite alt-right commentators explaining why. I told him I couldn’t concur. But it was easy to see why he was angry. What had America ever done for him?
* * *
CHUCK ONAN HAD a specific reason for giving me an interview. He wanted to defend the reputation of Michael Vale. Before my arrival, they had spoken together on the phone. It was their first contact since the early seventies. “In Vietnam,” he said, “Michael should be a hero.” We discussed the charges against his old mentor. The CIA rumors. The accusations of psychological manipulation. I described Jim McGourty’s account of one-to-one ego-stripping. Chuck dismissed it. I showed him my copy of Lucinda Franks’s book. Chuck’s brow furrowed as he read out those rough quotes about Rasputin and butchery. “It doesn’t make sense,” he muttered. “Michael Vale was a real revolutionary. ‘Ideas are the most important thing,’ he’d say. ‘The revolution will take care of itself.’ He read a lot. He worked a lot. He wasn’t our buddy. We didn’t drink together. But he helped us. To me he seemed selfless. He wanted to change the world. We were prepared for the shit to hit the fan, and when it did, we were going to go back to America like Lenin went back to Moscow.”
Chuck reminisced about their first meeting in the office of the lawyer Hans Göran Franck. It was February 1968, a couple of weeks after the arrival of Bill Jones, three months before the landfall of Mark Shapiro and his comrades.
“We’ll take care of this boy,” said Michael.
“I’m not a boy,” replied Chuck, gruffly. “I’m a man.”
But he was eighteen years old, and happy to be taken care of. Paternal figures were in short supply in Chuck’s life. His father, Thomas Onan, loved war more than he loved his family—loved it so much that after spending the early 1940s scudding over the Pacific in a patrol torpedo boat, he enlisted in the air force, which is why Chuck was born on an air base in Wiesbaden, Germany, in August 1949. The family did not remain intact. When a substantial sum of money went missing from the base, Technical Sergeant Thomas Onan’s gambling habit was found to be the cause. In February 1954, he received a dishonorable discharge from the air force.
He also discharged himself from his marriage. Rosemary Onan moved her children to Chicago, where the family rented an apartment in a high-rise block from which many of the internal walls had been removed in order to allow gang members swift passage from apartment to apartment. They were the only white residents, which made Mrs. Onan’s pale little boy an object of intense curiosity: the other kids were always asking him to hold his breath and make his face go red.
Life was tough. After school Chuck shined shoes and gave the money to his mother, who used it to buy the ingredients to bake her own bread. Enlisting in the U.S. Marines was a ticket out of deprivation. But it took him to a place that was worse.
During my visit to Oregon, I sat down with Chuck to watch a 2005 Swedish television documentary that followed Terry Whitmore on a return visit to the battlefields of Vietnam. Chuck translated effortlessly and made the odd affectionately disparaging remark about his old comrade’s clumsy command of Swedish. Whitmore, looking frail and bug-eyed from years of drinking, spoke of being ordered to go into a village and kill everyone there—men, women, children. The film showed him meeting survivors from that day, people who claimed to have seen the bodies piling up.
Chuck wept as he watched. He was reminded, he said, of the brutalities of his own military training, for which he and his fellow marines had run through a mocked-up Vietnamese village, throwing grenades into hidey-holes. Those exercises felt like an extension of his Chicago childhood. “I could beat the shit out of the other boys,” he said. “The most aggressive is always the winner. People don’t do that naturally. But a childhood like mine trained me that way. Thousands of others, too. Boys who believed all that stuff about the evils of Communism and weren’t afraid to shoot.”
Chuck feared he had become one of those boys. He was eloquent about this moment, and had posted a short account of it online, describing how, when he deserted from his base in February 1968, he had abandoned most of his possessions but felt compelled to bring his standard-issue M14 rifle. He recalled breaking the gun down, wrapping the pieces in duct tape, and taking them as hand luggage on board Flight 32 from JFK to Sweden. “I am not indoctrinated,” he muttered, as he placed it under his seat. “I am not wed to my weapon.” As we talked, he supplied an unexpected parallel scene: when Vietnam came around, said Chuck, Thomas Onan, too old to serve, went there all the same, opening a bar in Saigon where he supplied younger men with beer, cigarettes, and prostitutes.
After boot camp and the Chicago projects, Stockholm seemed like paradise to Chuck. He spoke of it as a sunlit world from which he had been banished. (He could not acquire a new passport, he said, until he had paid off his debts.) Back in 1968, he flourished in the language classes and lucked out in the difficult business of finding accommodation, sharing a spacious apartment with an Italian American deserter named John Picciano, which, by coincidence, had just been vacated by Ambassador Heath. (They also inherited his dog.) It sounded unlikely, but Chuck opened up Google Maps and found the building with ease.
Chuck’s relationship with the American Deserters Committee was conducted on his own terms. Sometimes he joined in, sometimes not. His background made him useful to the group. Mike Vale and Bill Jones saw the ADC as a cell of proletarian deserter revolutionaries but found it hard to live up to the image. The core members were impeccably middle class. George Carrano was the son of an army colonel; Bill Jones’s family were a mixture of lawyers and nuns; John Ashley’s mother collected antiques and owned a Siamese cat named Sylvia. Chuck was authentically working class. Which is why he became the star of the ADC’s summer tour of Europe.
* * *
THE WORLD FESTIVAL of Youth and Students was a ten-day jamboree for socialist college boys and girls from all over the globe. In previous years, it had been held in Helsinki, Vienna, and Moscow, where most of the delegates had smiled for the camera and cheered in all the right places. Sofia was the host city for 1968, and in the year of the barricades the Bulgarian authorities had a small taste of student revolution. They confiscated Little Red Books. They took away placards bearing the image of Alexander Dubček, the reformist leader of Czechoslovakia. They kept a wary eye on the German student leader Karl Dietrich Wolff as he led an unofficial demonstration outside the U.S. Embassy. (Once he started disrupting the carefully choreographed political debates, they dragged him from the stage and smashed his glasses.)
The Swedish Aliens Commission warned the deserters against traveling to Bulgaria. They were free to leave the country, but they might not necessarily be granted permission to return—news that was reported with pleasure by the American press. Mark Shapiro was in a particularly vulnerable position. Most of the ADC delegates held valid American passports. Mark had only the temporary permit that Sweden granted to recent immigrants. But he began the journey all the same, taking the ferry to Helsinki, where George Carrano, the chief fixer of the ADC, proposed a somewhat risky solution.
Carrano advised Mark to go to the U.S. Embassy and apply for a fresh passport like a tourist in a spot of bother. The two men went together and soon found themselves in the middle of a diplomatic farce. An embassy official gave them some forms to complete and told them to wait while he fetched a colleague. Suspecting that they were about to be put in handcuffs, Mark yanked open the office window and jumped out. George followed a moment later. Both men threw themselves over a scrub hedge and scrambled into a taxi. “Floor it, driver!” yelled Carrano, and the car screeched off.
A few days later the ADC representatives arrived in Sofia. A Soviet production company, the Central Documentary Film Studios, committed the evidence to celluloid. A Time to Live opens with images of rosy-cheeked Bulgarian children hunkered down on the pavement, chalking a suspiciously accomplished picture of a Vietnamese mother breast-feeding her baby. We then cut to an immense montage of the world’s anti-imperialist youth, marching through the streets of Sofia and looking optimistically into a headwind. (All except the U.S. delegation, who look like they’ve come for a potluck picnic in Haight-Ashbury.) Fighters from Hanoi parade with bouquets of red roses to chants of “Viet-nam! Viet-nam!” Crowds make way for a fleet of miniature tractors donated to North Vietnam from the citizens of the Bulgarian city of Plovdiv. Delegates from Mozambique and Algeria parade in national costume. After the pageant, the film takes us to a meeting hall draped with a red banner declaring “Vietnam must win” in six languages. Here, Kendra Alexander, a leader of the American Communist Party, is speaking passionately about the war. Some in the audience are weeping. The camera moves along the front row and finds some familiar faces: Mark Shapiro, dressed in a neat jacket and striped tie, his face a mask of concern; Chuck Onan, his eyes unreadable behind shades; beside him, his flatmate John Picciano.
After the ceremonial burning of a draft card, we follow the deserter delegation out into the street. Bill Jones, looking impossibly boyish and happy, embraces a Vietnamese woman, who presses a red gladiolus into his hand. The ADC members introduce themselves on camera, reporting the details of their desertions as if they were giving name, rank, and serial number.
“We see our act of desertion as a concrete act of solidarity with the Vietnamese people,” says Bill. “Ninety percent of the GIs in Vietnam are innocent,” adds Mark Shapiro. “They were sent there by an aggressive nation, the United States.” Chuck, though, makes the most radical remarks: “When the time comes to return to the States,” he says, “I’ll be ready to go back there and do my part to help others resist the system and fight the system.” I couldn’t help thinking that he had kept his promise—only he now expressed it in the language of the American alt-right.
The deserters enjoyed their visit to Bulgaria. There was something in the air: a new political energy as alien to the Soviet authorities as it was to their opponents in the West. When Bill Jones railed against the criminality of American policy in Vietnam, Soviet journalists scribbled happily. But, Bill recalled, they stopped when he accused the Soviets of using the war in Indochina as an opportunity to occupy the moral high ground. “The Soviet Union,” he said, “is part of the problem, not the solution.” To amplify the point, he walked around the city clutching a copy of Isaac Deutscher’s critical biography of Stalin, enjoying the ripple of scandal it produced.
Once the applause and bouquet exchanging were over, Bill and Mark left Sofia for a ten-day tour of Europe, avoiding NATO countries in which they risked detention. They went to Prague, where Bill strolled through Wenceslas Square and saw a city thriving under Dubček’s liberal reforms. (“It was like walking through Hyde Park,” he said.) They went on to Warsaw, where Bill knocked at the door of the Cuban Embassy to ask if Havana would accept them if Sweden decided to turn them away. (“We could have ended up cutting sugarcane for the rest of our lives,” he guffawed.) On August 16, they boarded a Polish airliner to Stockholm and prepared to face the music.
When they landed at Arlanda, Mark and Bill were taken briefly into custody, then sent on their way with fresh temporary residence permits. They gave an impromptu press conference, in which Bill accused SÄPO, the Swedish security service, of harassing the ADC in order to hamper its campaign against the Vietnam War. Their joint statement was defiant: “The struggle of the Vietnamese people is more important to us than our stay here.” But one reporter caught a more somber reflection from Mark. “I don’t know where to go if I will be expelled,” he said. Four days later, Soviet tolerance of Dubček’s reforms terminated with the arrival of a column of tanks.
* * *
THESE MISADVENTURES DID not halt the travels of the ADC. In the revolutionary summer of 1968, the traffic remained heavy. Oda Makoto, the Beheiren leader who had helped smuggle Mark Shapiro and his comrades out of Japan, came to Sweden in July with news of more deserters ready to travel the high road via Moscow. Ray Sansiviero, a teenage marine from Long Island, and Ou Yang Yotsai, a twenty-four-year-old army sergeant, born in Shanghai, arrived a few days later. Both had seen action in Vietnam—Sansiviero had been wounded at the Battle of Khe Sanh—and both had gone on Soviet television to tell stories of plunder, torture, and rape.
Sansiviero did not remain in Sweden long. After eighteen months of fishing, moodily, on the embankment in front of Stockholm’s Grand Hôtel, he disappeared. The ADC membership thought he had been kidnapped by the CIA. Actually, he’d given himself up to the authorities, to face court-martial and a year’s hard labor. A third man, Randy Coates, had set out with Sansiviero and Yotsai but did not even make it to Sweden. After the usual rituals—museum visits, vodka binges, dinner with Yuri Andropov and Premier Alexei Kosygin—he went to the U.S. Embassy in Moscow and turned himself in. The intelligence men settled Coates down for a nice long chat: all the names he could remember were noted down and filed for future reference.
Routes from the West were also busy. GIs who came to the Club Voltaire in Frankfurt received Hans Göran Franck’s phone number with their cup of coffee. In Britain, Michael Randle, an anti-nuclear activist who in 1966 had helped spring the Soviet spy George Blake from prison, printed thousands of deserter information leaflets and took them to the European mainland stowed in the same hollow section of the camper van in which he’d smuggled Blake into East Germany.
Michael Vale was also on the move, cultivating deserter-friendly contacts in Britain and France. (He visited the campaigning actor Vanessa Redgrave, though this was not without its difficulties: he forgot to put on a belt, which obliged him to keep his hands in his pockets throughout the meeting.)
At 56 Queen Anne Street, headquarters of the Union of American Exiles in Britain, the runaway Hollywood agent Clancy Sigal dispatched deserters to Sweden under the supervision of his fellow expatriate Harry Pincus, a tall, elegant, acid-dropping medical student he’d met while working at R. D. Laing’s radical therapeutic community in the East End. (The two volunteers had bonded when Sigal used a swift blow from a table leg to free Harry from the violent grip of a delusional resident.) They helped the deserving and the undeserving: Sigal remembered a deserter who arrived in London with his girlfriend, asking for funds to get them to Sweden: “We gave them the money—$600—and then we got a postcard from some desert island that said, ‘There’s a sucker born every minute.’”
Paris, though, was the busiest and most dramatic scene. Here, a complex constellation of GI welfare groups flickered into life, offering soft beds and hard Marxist literature to men making landfall in France. The noisiest and most radical was FUADDR, which sounds like something Steve Martin would say in The Man with Two Brains, but stood for the French Union of American Deserters and Draft Resisters. Its prime movers were a law student named Larry Cox—a future head of the American branch of Amnesty International—and a young American activist known as Arlo Jacobs, an expatriate member of Students for a Democratic Society, the most prominent radical youth organization in the States.
FUADDR’s longer lived and more snappily named rival was RITA (Resisters Inside the Army), run by Thomas Schwaetzer, a breathless and disheveled Austrian who used the nom de guerre Max Watts and referred to his work as the “Baby Business.” The hosts of RITA’s safe houses were known as babysitters; the deserters were code-named Baby A, Baby B, Baby C, until four trips through the alphabet had been completed. Not all were easy charges. Baby A was a troubled Texas teenager who had joined the army to get out of a Waco orphanage: he was found a place in a psychiatric hospital in the Loire Valley, where he was classed as either a patient or a gardener, depending on who asked. Baby B had been a heroin addict since the age of twelve. Baby C had joined the army only to escape a prison sentence for stealing his thirty-first car. They both lodged with a Dutch woman in an apartment on the rue Saint-Jacques—from which they were briskly extracted when she disappeared to her bedroom and put a gun to her head.
Paris being Paris, some of RITA’s friends had names worth dropping, and not all these details were shared with Max’s glamorous patrons. His unpublished memoirs, stored in an archive in Amsterdam, furnished the details. Marguerite Duras, the novelist who scripted Mike Vale’s favorite movie, Hiroshima Mon Amour, met Max at a table in Les Deux Magots, bringing a baby she had imported from New York—a hulking young specimen hot with glandular fever. The expatriate American artist Alexander Calder allowed Max’s infants to lie low at his country home, where they gazed in bafflement at the mobile sculptures twisting in the garden. Jane Fonda, hugely pregnant, struggled up the stairs to Max’s second-floor apartment with a carpetbag stuffed with her husband’s cast-off clothes, and she invited the deserters to a preview screening of Barbarella. (They were unimpressed by everything except her zero-gravity nudity.) Max gained another famous sponsor when his downstairs neighbor arrived to complain about his habit of clomping over the flagstone floor in his boots. Catherine Deneuve accepted his apologies and was soon supplying him with donations.
France maintained careful neutrality toward the Vietnam War and was tolerant of its first seventy-five or so resident deserters and draft dodgers. Fourteen-day permits were easy to acquire and renew. But the events of May 1968 changed that. Paris became a battleground between riot police and student demonstrators. Barricades were built across the streets. Arlo Jacobs and the deserters of the FUADDR declared themselves allies of the new French revolution and preached the overthrow of de Gaulle. This defiance had consequences. When the smoke had cleared and the tear gas dispersed, all deserters found life measurably more difficult. Those who declined to renounce political activity were refused new paperwork—which meant that they had a choice between living underground in France or seeking humanitarian asylum in Sweden.
Bill Jones remembered the crisis. “When ’68 happened they started to crack,” he recalled. He and other ADC members traveled south and escorted new recruits up to Stockholm, sometimes collecting them from Larry Cox’s safe house in the Paris suburb of Pantin, sometimes from a farm conveniently close to the Belgian border. “We got in touch with this guy called Arlo,” he said. He winced as he said the name. “Not a guy to be trusted.” I found Bill’s attitude instructive. It said something about the atmosphere of suspicion that defined the culture of the deserter networks—a suspicion that seemed to swirl most thickly around its leaders and coordinators.
Like Michael Vale, Arlo Jacobs was a figure who inspired doubt that persisted long after he disappeared from the scene. Max Watts, for instance, considered him a villain. Watts’s papers contained page after page of allegations. Arlo, said Max, “did more harm to RITA, us, than any agent, known, before or since.” The two men disagreed on one of the great debates of the anti-war movement—whether GIs should desert their posts or resist the war from inside the army. Arlo’s response, claimed Max, was to start a whispering campaign that RITA was a CIA front and that Max was tricking deserters into returning to base to face rough military justice.
Max had the opportunity to confront Arlo at a meeting of deserters in Paris’s Latin Quarter. “When Arlo found me at the meeting, he became unhappy, wanted to leave,” Max wrote.
Philip Wagner, an extremely pacifistic, but very big GI, 6 foot 4, and, although an intellectual, in very good physical shape, reached over and took Arlo’s ear. He suggested Arlo sit on a table, so we could all hear his version, and when Arlo seemed unwilling, helped him up. It is the only time I have ever seen anybody lifted up by one ear, but I now know it can be done. Asked point blank, Arlo denied that he’d ever said Max was an agent, or that RITA was a CIA plot, and that in any case he wouldn’t say it any more.
Arlo, it seems, failed to keep his promise. RITA had secured the help of the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, who agreed to let Max use his address as a poste restante for deserter mail. Once the CIA rumors reached him, the letters went nowhere. “That Arlo, deprived of an audience, by the evident success of ‘our’ line, turned to bad-mouthing, mongering, personal attacks and eventually sabotage—well, that may have been instructions from CIA Headquarters in Langley or just his own bad character. Unless someone else writes their memoirs, and we get to see them, I doubt we’ll ever know.”
Max Watts died in 2010. But Arlo, I discovered, was very much alive and happy to discuss his colorful past. His real name was Bo Burlingham. He was a California-based business journalist who wrote books with titles such as Small Giants: Companies That Choose to Be Great Instead of Big. I met him for coffee in the flower-filled courtyard of the Berkeley City Club and listened to a wry assessment of his radical years.
After leaving Paris in July 1968, he said, he’d stuck with the faction of Students for a Democratic Society that became the Weather Underground—a revolutionary cadre who were not averse to using explosives to advance their cause. (History shows that they were better at blowing up themselves than agents of U.S. imperialism.) “I didn’t stay long,” he said. “But it was long enough to get my ass indicted.”
Bo was skeptical about the deserters. “There was nothing particularly admirable about them,” he said. “These were not courageous people standing up on principle.” He was also skeptical about Max Watts—and remembered entertaining the idea that he was the real CIA agent in Paris. His most generous thoughts were about Michael Vale. “He was an intellectual, I was an intellectual,” he said. “But that’s really giving us much too much credit. We were failed students is, I think, a better way to put it. We talked philosophical bullshit and ideological bullshit.”
He warned me not to take my research too seriously and suggested that I view these intrigues as a form of 1960s performance art. “There was an awful lot of playacting that was going on,” he said. “I was part of that. We were all sort of playacting, trying to be relevant. Aware that these big events were happening, and wanting to have some part in them.”
* * *
THE LINE BETWEEN life and art is sometimes blurred. In my conversations with Michael Vale, he too played down the genuinely subversive nature of his activities, but it was easy to see why they might have given rise to official anxiety. Michael and his friends were building relationships with organizations dreaming of revolution: the SDS, British Trotskyists, Greek radicals living in exile after the military coup of 1967, a shadowy organization known as the Phoneless Friends—an underground network led by the Egyptian revolutionary Henri Curiel, who wanted the American deserters to live in the provinces and train as a guerrilla force. Some of these people only fantasized about taking up arms against the authorities. Some, like Curiel’s followers, kept rifles under their beds.
Chuck Onan became an accessory to this plotting. After the Sofia festival he and the smooth-tongued draft dodger George Carrano went to Budapest to attend a conference with representatives of the American New Left, the North Vietnamese government, and the National Liberation Front. “The purpose of the meeting,” said Chuck, “was to come up with strategies to create disruptive demonstrations in the United States that would create difficulties for the army.” Vietnamese delegates made heartfelt speeches thanking American deserters and draft resisters for their support. Chuck offered a speech in reply, scripted for him by George Carrano. Everybody sang “We Shall Overcome.”
Less formal contacts also took place. The Vietnamese asked for an explanation of a slogan then popular among U.S. radicals—“Up against the wall, motherfucker.” At the bar of the Hotel Ifjúság, the founder of the Cornell University chapter of the SDS led the house band in a version of the Beatles song “Money (That’s What I Want),” hoping that the audience would understand the irony. One of the Viet Cong’s chief military strategists responded to some bad service in the hotel restaurant by announcing: “Next time, we attack.”
The star of the show, Chuck recalled, was Bernardine Dohrn, a charismatic young lawyer from Whitefish Bay, Wisconsin, who had been elected to the leadership of the SDS in June. American radicals, she declared, had much to learn from the methods of the National Liberation Front. A thrilling image took shape: a U.S. version of the Viet Cong that would take up arms in New York, in Los Angeles, in Washington, DC, and bring revolution to the streets of America. A global movement in which deserters, students, and Indochinese guerrillas might all play their part. “In effect,” Chuck said, “we were collaborating with the enemy.”
The American authorities had already come to the same conclusion. They knew about the contacts among these radical groups. They knew about the ADC’s trip to Sofia. President Johnson had been briefed on Bill Jones’s Bulgarian plans ten days before the World Festival of Youth and Students began. Obtaining the intelligence was easy. Somebody close to the American Deserters Committee was reporting everything back to Langley, Virginia.
* * *
IN A COMMUNITY of radical exiles like the Stockholm deserters, the presence of spies was a constant source of speculation. “If someone new arrived and there seemed to be something a little out of place in their story, you always thought there might be something else going on,” said Bill Jones. It wasn’t said with regret. The ADC considered paranoia a useful weapon of self-defense. As the Jerum Affair had demonstrated, a sense of the enemy could keep members serious and vigilant. “I’m sure the CIA were running all kinds of operations,” said Bill. “Interfaces to try and get a better picture of what was going on in the Soviet Union. Sweden has been a hotbed of intrigue since before World War Two.”
To me, it seemed unenviable psychological territory: being nineteen, twenty, twenty-one, a long way from home, in a place where it was perfectly reasonable to suspect that one of your friends was probably also your enemy. Vincent Strollo, a deserter from Philadelphia, remembered the ADC leadership encouraging this thinking. “Michael Vale and Bill Jones propagated that kind of paranoia,” he recalled. “Or maybe it wasn’t paranoia. Maybe it was the truth.”
Clancy Sigal observed its effects. “All deserters believed all other deserters were CIA,” he said. “You could take that as a given. What they felt for each other was a curious mixture of brotherhood and mistrust.” Clancy thought only a handful of real spies had slept on the beds and sofas administered by him and his collaborator Harry Pincus, and that most betrayed themselves with crude attempts to encourage the deserters to acts of violence. Most CIA talk, he suspected, was fantasy. “There was this sixteen-year-old from Tennessee who called himself ‘Kid Blue,’” he said. “I had a call from him. He said he was in the U.S. Embassy and that the CIA had kidnapped him and were torturing him. He was making all this noise on the phone. ‘Help! They’re murdering me! Aaaarrgggh!’ That was the last I heard from him.”
“The levels of paranoia were ridiculous,” said Steve Kinnaman, a deserter who came to Sweden on a false passport after months spent living incognito in Laos. “You could become a suspect for the slightest thing.” The loyalties of a prominent ADC member named Desmond Carragher, Steve recalled, were questioned because he smoked dope without ever seeming to get high. At twenty-three, Steve was a little older than most deserters, and he firmly refused to play the game of hunt-the-infiltrator. “My attitude from the beginning was: Who gives a fuck? Spy on me all you want. I am in the newspaper. I am being interviewed on television. I am not going to hide what I think. We are the revolutionary forces that will go back to the States and set the country right!”
Others, though, could not resist the temptation to speculate. Half a century later, suspicions still smoldered. Most former members of the ADC were convinced that the CIA had a man inside their group. Many had theories about the identity of the infiltrator—or infiltrators. Chuck Onan was doubtful about Ou Yang Yotsai, whose Maoist ballyhoo sounded strained and overrehearsed. Bill Jones put the dope-smoking-but-clearheaded Desmond Carragher at the top of his list of suspects. The reason? Carragher wanted the ADC to take a more conciliatory attitude toward liberal Swedes.
A few weeks after seeing Bill I met up with Åke Sandin, an old Swedish peace campaigner who in 1968 had given his spare room to one of the Intrepid Four. Sandin’s thinking ran in precisely the opposite direction. Bill Jones was his pick for the agency’s inside man. The reason? Bill did all he could to prevent cooperation between the ADC and the Swedish anti-war movement.
Mark Shapiro, however, nursed the strongest suspicions. Ever since our meeting in a hotel parking lot in San Diego, he had been expressing them by phone and email. “George Carrano has been my friend for nearly fifty years,” he said. “But I’m convinced that he was a member of an intelligence agency.” Mark had spent many hours looking for inconsistencies in his old comrade’s education and employment records, and had shared his doubts with other contemporaries. More surprisingly, he had also shared them with the subject of his inquiries. In 2005 Mark had challenged George to produce paper evidence of his draft resister status. But George had not risen to the bait. “It’s only in response to personal attacks on my integrity,” he wrote, “my ‘credentials,’ so to speak, that I’m even looking back on this.”
Over the years, the mistrust between the two men never quite destroyed their friendship. Instead, it evolved into an uneasy running gag. Mark even stayed at George’s home on Long Island, where, in long late-night conversations, Mark insisted that he was determined to crack his friend’s shell and discover the truth about his Stockholm years. “I’ll be hunting him down to my last dying breath,” Mark told me. But it was impossible to know if the scent of guilt was genuine.
* * *
NEAR MY HOME in London is a public park with a thriving population of concrete dinosaurs. They were poured and painted in the 1850s by naturalists who wanted to give the nineteenth-century public a glimpse of a lost prehistoric world. Two iguanodons loom above the ferns and water: gigantic lizards with muscular bodies and sharp rhinoceros horns. The first models of their kind. In 1878 the discovery of several complete skeletons in a Belgian coal mine exposed an error in the London paleontologists’ reckoning. The iguanodon horn was actually an iguanodon thumbnail—a bone stiletto protruding from a scaly reptile paw. My dinosaur neighbors were sharp in the wrong places.
Historians of espionage and surveillance are more like Victorian fossil hunters than they would choose to be. The secret state is under no obligation to preserve its own remains. Those who carry out its work may be answerable to God, but they are not answerable to historians. Suspected spies are not obliged to answer our letters or return our calls. So we work with what evidence we can turn over, spreading out the spare and scattered fragments, doing our best to deduce the shape of the monster.
The CIA has always had a passionate attachment to the shredder. Its habit of destroying documents was developed in compliance with U.S. legislation on data protection, but it has also obliterated evidence that would have been useful to anyone investigating its more serious transgressions of the law. Most of the extant CIA files on the deserters are accidental survivals—documents that escaped destruction because copies were made and dispatched to less amnesiac institutions.
One of the most tantalizing survivals is filed at the Nixon Presidential Library, in the personal archive of John W. Dean, one of the White House officials jailed for his role in the Watergate scandal. In a box of Dean’s papers is a twelve-page report on the 1968 World Festival of Youth. Its writer, who was apparently a member of the American delegation, preserves some rich firsthand details. Border guards, he notes, ordered U.S. visitors to shave off their hippie beards before entering Bulgarian territory. The Laotian delegation presented their U.S. counterparts with rings forged from the remains of downed air force bombers. In addition to Kendra Alexander’s speech about peace and unity, a young North Vietnamese woman spoke of killing eighteen Americans with twenty-six bullets, and another told how she had been captured by the U.S. Army and tortured by having acid poured down her throat.
The CIA’s inside man also gives an account of an awkward meeting between the American delegates and the ADC: “The deserters seemed to have their own individual psychological and behavioral problems,” he wrote. “They appeared generally agreed that they had never felt so clear in their thinking; that they found it impossible to kill; were pacifists; believed that war in general was immoral and that American participation in the war in Vietnam was illegal; and that they had no immediate plans or goals but wanted to return to the United States eventually, either under an amnesty or after a revolution.”
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TWO OTHER CIA documents demonstrated that the agency was using undercover operatives to inform on the deserters. A report from July 1969 included a CIA officer’s account of a meeting with an informer inside the deserter movement who had been given the fragrant code name PETUNIA. PETUNIA met his handler at the Café Batavia by the Dupleix metro station in Paris and laid his blossoms on the table. Most of his information had been obtained at the deserter safe house in the suburb of Pantin, rented by Larry Cox with funds supplied by the film star Catherine Deneuve and the Left Bank stars Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre. I knew that both Michael Vale and Bill Jones had visited the place, and PETUNIA mentioned that he had also been up to Stockholm to meet the ADC. (“Said nobody likes Sweden,” reported the spy. “Lousy weather, no work, lousy people.”)
By PETUNIA’s account, Michael and Bill had completed their mission of the summer. All deserters with revolutionary potential had been spirited out of Paris. Those who remained were “apolitical bums.” He described their shortcomings with relish. One, he reported, amused himself by pulling a knife on visitors. Another had gone on a starvation diet to pay for false documents to get him out of France, then changed his mind and spent his savings on a pet monkey. A third spent his time writing letters to Mao Zedong, informing him that an army of Americans—one thousand exiles in Canada, fifteen thousand activists in Alaska, and others in France—were in training to take over the United States. Would the chairman, he wondered, care to contribute a few divisions to ensure the success of the invasion?
“Everyone displays the usual paranoia on the subject of CIA,” PETUNIA added. “Larry and others are positive that there is an agent in the house. They are very suspicious of each other and play games trying to trip each other up.” In an email Cox confirmed the basic accuracy of the report, and his own presence in Sweden. “Our main contact there was a shady guy called Michael Vale,” he recalled. “There were a lot of shady guys.”
Another report, from April 1972, clearly the work of someone trusted by the deserters, described a visit by a source code-named MHYIELD to the ADC offices in Stockholm. MHYIELD noted the committee’s latest internal disagreements, its new enthusiasm for the ideas of the North Korean dictator Kim Il Sung, and the contents of its mailbag, which contained seventy-one typed anti-war statements purporting to be from American prisoners of war in Vietnam, as well as a letter from Harry Pincus in London, asking for information on a U.S. Army deserter who was causing panic in the States by planting time bombs in safety deposit boxes.
The informer observed that the ADC leadership knew nothing of this terror campaign, but a reply would have been pointless in any case. Harry Pincus hanged himself the following month. He had money worries and was perhaps in some deeper kind of crisis. He had spent much of the previous year living in a commune in Primrose Hill, North London, under the supervision of David Cooper, a therapist who advocated the disarticulation of the family and the establishment of new social groups through bed therapy—“going to bed with the girl or guy—or child—you are most interested in.”
These two documents bore the mark of the CIA operation that brought them into being: a project whose existence was known to only a handful of intelligence officers, secretarial staff, and government officials. The investigative journalist Seymour Hersh was the first beyond this circle to discover its existence. He observed its effects but could not name it, like an astronomer who suspects the presence of a black hole after noticing the distortion of the starlight. His sources told him about wiretaps and break-ins, about CIA infiltrators in anti-war organizations at home and abroad. Serious stuff, in contravention of the agency’s own charter. Details, though, were scant. Even within the walls of Langley, this work was kept dark. “Despite intensive interviews,” Hersh conceded, when he broke the story for the New York Times in December 1974, “little could be learned about the procedures involved in the alleged domestic activities except for the fact that the operation was kept carefully shielded from other units inside the CIA.”
Now, though, we know its name. Its name was Operation Chaos.