IN SIR ARTHUR Conan Doyle’s short story “The Final Problem,” Sherlock Holmes asks Dr. Watson if he has ever heard of Professor James Moriarty. Watson replies that he has not—and soon learns that his friend has developed an obsession with the man. “His career,” explains the detective, “has been an extraordinary one.” The world knows Moriarty as a gifted academic, but Holmes discerns something darker. “He is the Napoleon of Crime, Watson. He is the organizer of half that is evil and of nearly all that is undetected in this great city.” Holmes is correct in his deductions. Watson travels with him to Austria for a fateful confrontation with his adversary.
In Nicholas Meyer’s Conan Doyle pastiche, The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, Sherlock Holmes asks Dr. Watson if he has ever heard of Professor James Moriarty. Watson says that he has not, but this is a lie. Holmes has been banging on about him endlessly, particularly when under the influence of cocaine. “His career,” explains the detective, “has been an extraordinary one.” The world knows Moriarty as a gifted academic, but Holmes discerns something darker. “He is the Napoleon of Crime, Watson. He is the organizer of half that is evil and of nearly all that is undetected in this great city.” But Moriarty is just a harmless old math teacher. Holmes is madly and spectacularly incorrect in his deductions. So Watson takes him to Austria for psychoanalysis under Dr. Sigmund Freud.
Listening to competing theories about the infiltrator within the American Deserters Committee, I was often reminded of Meyer’s revisionist tale of the detective with a damaging idée fixe. Åke Sandin had exclaimed “CIA!” as soon as I mentioned the name Bill Jones. Thomas Taylor was convinced that Michael Vale had taken a bribe from Hanoi. Mike Vale thought that George Carrano was not what he seemed. So did Mark Shapiro, who swore to keep investigating his suspect until his last breath. But if you were a protagonist in this plot, how would it be possible to tell whether you were in the Doyle story or the Meyer? I asked myself the same question as I tried to understand the motivations of the man around whom my own suspicions began to coalesce.
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THE TRUE STORY of Dr. Clifford Garland Gaddy may be known only to Dr. Clifford Garland Gaddy. It’s possible that even those closest to him have been denied some of the important details. Not that he has been hidden from view. The C-SPAN video library has archived three decades of his conservative wardrobe decisions and impeccably Washingtonian punditry. Political journalists, particularly those with an interest in Russia, have had many opportunities to sit in press conferences admiring his good cheekbones, tight, faintly equine mouth, and gray hair kept in the close cut of his school yearbook photograph. But Cliff Gaddy has never been part of any institution subject to the Freedom of Information Act, and, as most of his work has been done in collaboration, he has barely been obliged to utter a public sentence in the first-person singular. Which means that the official narrative of his life has never done justice to the weirdness of his biography—which incorporates desertion from the army, membership in the ADC, a senior position in a profoundly weird political cult, person-of-interest status in the assassination of Olof Palme, and a dazzling academic career achieved with financial support from the Pentagon. To me, it seemed inexplicable. Not least because he declined to offer any explanation for it himself.
Today, Cliff is known as one of the world’s leading experts on Vladimir Putin, the former KGB man who became the president of Russia. Cliff’s book Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin, cowritten with the British academic Fiona Hill, is the product of intense study of the known details of its subject’s life, and careful deduction about the many strange blank spaces in his history. The book was a joint enterprise during the decade they spent as colleagues at the Brookings Institution, the prestigious think tank in Washington, DC. It offers a portrait of a figure whose primary identity is of an “operative”—a spy—whose instincts are always to conceal his own motives, to keep everybody guessing. It is pointless, Hill and Gaddy argue, to look for patterns in Putin’s behavior. It is pointless to pursue a linear narrative. Putin adapts to any circumstance in which he finds himself, and this is the secret of his enduring power.
Diplomats, intelligence officers, and politicians have used the book to inform their dealings with Moscow. Former vice president Joe Biden and Sir John Scarlett, the former head of MI6, have sung its praises. In April 2017, the book received another flurry of publicity when the White House announced Fiona Hill’s appointment to the National Security Council staff as deputy assistant to President Donald Trump and senior director for European and Russian affairs. Which is why there is a strong public interest case for shining a little light on the murky history of her coauthor.
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CLIFF WAS BORN in Danville, Virginia, in June 1946. His father—also Dr. Clifford Garland Gaddy—ran a thriving medical practice in the city and owned a comfortable home near the bank of the Dan River. Clifford Sr. was a Rotarian and a pillar of his community, but one with a sense of fun—he was also a Golden Gloves state boxing champion and once hosted a rock festival on his twenty-seven-acre tobacco farm.
His eldest son—nicknamed Chip—was a boy whose abilities and achievements were absurdly numerous. He was a high school merit scholar, wrestler, track and field athlete, and champion of Babe Ruth baseball. At fourteen he was initiated into the Danville branch of the Order of DeMolay, a fraternal organization for teenage boys. In his senior year he became president of his school’s chapter of the National Honor Society and won a thousand-dollar prize on a radio quiz show to find America’s smartest high school student.
Though he earned scholarships to the University of Michigan and the University of Richmond, family tradition propelled him to Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, his father’s alma mater. Here, he joined the Kappa Alpha fraternity, a college organization whose local chapter was founded by Thomas Dixon Jr., author of The Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan, the novel from which D. W. Griffith adapted his film The Birth of a Nation. (Even in the 1960s, Kappa Alpha was known for staging Old South week, in which members marched around campus in Confederate uniforms, singing “Dixie” under the Stars and Bars.)
In October 1968, Cliff volunteered for the army. Here, he also dazzled: the assessors declared that he had the highest aptitude for languages they had ever encountered. He was quickly assigned to the Army Security Agency—the branch of the U.S. Army that dealt in intercepted enemy communications—and joined its training regiment at Fort Devens, Massachusetts. For this, there was also a family precedent. An uncle, David Winfred Gaddy, was a signals intelligence genius who monitored and decoded Vietnamese transmissions for the National Security Agency—a highly secretive organization whose existence was not acknowledged by the government until 1975. Anyone who wanted to build an intelligence officer would have been hard-pressed to find brighter and purer material than Clifford Garland Gaddy Jr. So why did he desert?
The reported explanation was a peculiar one. Cliff seems to have been the only man who went into Swedish exile because the army failed to advance his career at the pace it had promised. When the Danville Bee came asking Clifford Sr. why his son had disappeared to Europe, the response was that Cliff had gone because, after several months of waiting, the army had failed to assign him to a language school. A subsidiary claim asserted that Cliff was a “serious conscientious objector”—though not serious enough, it would seem, to have taken part in any protests against the Vietnam War.
The story of his defection broke at the end of July 1969, when the Swedish government gave him humanitarian asylum. Cliff wrote to his local newspaper with an account of his actions, perhaps to take some of the heat off his family. “My only excuse is that it takes some people a bit longer to open their eyes to conditions around them,” he wrote. “Then too, when one has been taught to believe for over 20 years that America can only be right, it is rather difficult to abandon that illusion.” He quoted Camus. “I wish I could love my country and love justice too.”
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MR. PUTIN: OPERATIVE in the Kremlin offers this advice on how to write about the president of Russia: “Every apparent fact or story needs to be regarded with suspicion,” the authors counsel. “Very little information about him is definitive, confirmable or reliable.” If we take the same approach to Cliff’s life, several pieces of the jigsaw are hard to fit. He took five years to earn his bachelor’s degree, rather than the customary four. During that time he was listed in only two of the Wake Forest University yearbooks, suggesting that he was more absent than present.
His brothers in the Kappa Alpha fraternity found him oddly hard to remember. One I contacted thought he’d run away to Canada. When pressed a little further, he emailed back a brief profanity. Another said he didn’t know Cliff and that their careers at Wake Forest had not overlapped—but there they were, standing together in a photograph from their freshman year. For a boy whose achievements made national headlines while he was still in high school, his impact on university life was minimal. He seems to have joined no sports teams, triumphed in no quizzes or debates.
The press interviews with his father also produced an imperfect picture. Dr. Gaddy told the papers that Cliff had gone to Sweden using the passport he’d obtained when he was granted a Fulbright scholarship to study at the University of Würzburg in West Germany. Fulbright, however, could find no record of such a scholarship being offered. Dr. Gaddy also said that his son had boarded a flight from Boston to Stockholm on February 22, 1969. The record shows that he was granted humanitarian asylum on July 18. But the deserter Rob Argento remembered Cliff turning up on his doorstep in September, apparently straight off the plane.
When I mentioned Cliff to Michael Vale, he sounded a little heartbroken. “I thought of him as a best friend,” he said. “We had intellectual discussions. I encouraged him to learn Russian, and he did.” Michael recommended Cliff to the publisher M. E. Sharpe and brought him in on translation projects for Soviet Psychology and the International Journal of Mental Health. “Cliff was such a strong character,” said Michael, wistfully. “Even at that young age. So thorough. So bright. So upright. He was clean.” He sounded like Falstaff talking about Prince Hal.
* * *
DURING VALE’S ABSENCE, the ADC people had been arguing the case for political asylum. They screened Deserter USA to anti-war groups around Sweden, though they had to go without its codirector Lars Lambert, who was in jail for refusing to do his national service. Jim McGourty and Bill Jones went to plead their case to the voters of tomorrow, giving talks to Swedish schoolchildren about desertion. “What would happen if you went home now? Or if you were sent back?” asked a little girl named Ika, in a classroom not far from Stockholm. “We would get several years in prison,” replied Bill. “And deserters in American prisons are treated very badly.”
Book projects were also under way. Beacon Press, the progressive publishers of James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son and Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man, commissioned the American journalist Susan George to compile a volume of interviews with the deserters. George was based in Paris, where her presence at anti-war meetings earned her a mention in the dispatches of the MHCHAOS asset code-named PETUNIA. Mike Vale was pursuing his own deal with Grove Press, the company that distributed Deserter USA in the States, and arranged for Richard Bucklin, a gaunt and bug-eyed army private from Colorado, who seemed to survive solely on Coca-Cola, to begin conducting taped interviews with his comrades. (“Some of his questions were a little creepy,” recalled Michele.) Neither of these works saw the light of day. However, several of the Swedish deserters did contribute to a book of interviews that was intended to advance their cause, but ended up doing the opposite.
At the end of 1969, the journalist and lawyer Mark Lane arrived in Stockholm, hungry for stories of atrocity. Lane was a celebrity of the counterculture: his bestselling book on the Kennedy assassination, Rush to Judgment, had founded the JFK conspiracy industry by attacking the view that Lee Harvey Oswald was a lone assassin. In 1968 Lane’s fame had been amplified when he became the comedian Dick Gregory’s running mate in a write-in presidential bid. When Nixon emerged victorious, Gregory denounced the process as corrupt and had himself and Lane sworn in as America’s president and vice president in exile.
Lane arrived in Stockholm just as one of the great, grim news stories of the Vietnam War was breaking: the My Lai massacre, in which hundreds of unarmed Vietnamese civilians were murdered by U.S. soldiers in March 1968. The investigative reporter Seymour Hersh published the first account of this incident on November 12, 1969. As the world recoiled in horror, Lane hunted for similar stories among the deserters. The result was Conversations with Americans, one of the most incendiary books of the Vietnam period.
It is a collection of interviews, the first of which is with a Stockholm deserter who talks about his experiences as a member of an elite marine long-range patrol unit. Lane’s interviewee describes how torture methods were high on the syllabus. “We were told to make use of electrical radio equipment,” he said. “They had drawings on the board showing exactly how to clamp the electrodes into the testicles of a man or the body of a woman.” Later classes, he said, included instruction in inserting bamboo sticks into the ears or under the fingernails of a prisoner. And in the case of female captives, other instructions were given: “to strip them, spread them open and drive pointed sticks or bayonets into their vagina.” He adds: “We were also told we could rape the girls all we wanted.”
The name of this interviewee was Chuck Onan, the weed-loving boy from the Chicago projects, and owner of Ninja the dog. Chuck had not been part of an elite marine squad. He had never received more than basic training. But the record suggested he had strayed from the facts. Dagens Nyheter placed Chuck at a press conference in December 1969, sitting beside Mark Lane and describing his instruction in “helicopter torture.” “We learned how to tie up troublesome prisoners with rope under the helicopter and to then drag them until they confessed.” Thomas Lee Hayes heard the same story. “Chuck,” he wrote, “tells me of his training in various methods of torture as part of his duty with the Special Forces.”
The veteran war correspondent Neil Sheehan read Lane’s book for the New York Times and called the Defense Department to verify the details. He was told that Chuck’s last job before his desertion was in a marine base stock handing out spare parts for airplanes. Sheehan also relayed official doubts about the massacre described by Terry Whitmore, another Lane interviewee. “Some of the horror tales in this book are undoubtedly true,” wrote Sheehan. “Where there is so much stench, something must be rotting. Mr. Lane succeeds, however, in making it impossible to reach any factual judgment. Nevertheless, the naive and the professional moralists will derive considerable satisfaction from the book, if they can control their intestines.”
Conversations with Americans was a PR disaster for the anti-war movement. Edwin Arnett had lied to the world about war crimes, but outside the Soviet Union his claims had been reported with skepticism. Lane’s atrocity stories had been published between hard covers by a respected New York publisher, which was now refusing to print a second edition and asking the author to return his $75,000 advance. In Sweden, the deserters felt that their cause had been brought into disrepute. “Lane came looking for lies,” recalled Rob Argento, the deserter from Miami. “That book did us a lot of damage. It cast doubt on other stories that were true.”
I intended to ask Chuck about all this during my visit to his home in Eugene, Oregon, but failed to find my moment. On my last morning with him a young man came to the door to buy marijuana. He and Chuck went into the kitchen to do their deal. I sat on the sofa with Ninja, trying to formulate a question and feeling, in that house by the gravel pit, a very long way from home. When my airport taxi arrived, the customer was still mulling over his choice. Chuck and I were obliged to say goodbye in his presence. He hugged me hard, like a man standing on the edge of something.
Later, by email, Chuck gave his side of the story. He had, he said, never claimed to be part of an elite unit. Mark Lane had confused him with another interviewee. But he insisted that the part about the torture of women was true. “We were talked to about it,” he said, “and told that we could do it.” The drill instructor, he said, had presided over “a brainwashing event.” “The Marines succeeded in turning me (a nice kid) into someone who would torture and kill women and children if ordered to do so. And I was proud of it! I was a terrible person. I was a perfect Marine.”
* * *
BY EARLY 1970, the migratory patterns of desertion had shifted. The Soviets were no longer willing to smuggle deserters through Russia. Gloomy communications reached Hans Göran Franck about twenty deserters lying low in Beheiren safe houses, with no means of leaving Japan. “The former route to Sweden has been interrupted,” read one plea. “Would it be possible to fly them in someone’s private plane? Or someone’s yacht?”
Old comrades were going their separate ways. Mark Shapiro left Sweden to study in Canada. Some deserters started families; others started college. The broader community gathered itself in less austere environments than Michael Vale’s flat, including the Alternative Stomach, a social club and advice center that hosted poetry readings and vegetarian curry nights. (A magazine, Internal Haemmorrhage, was also produced.) George Carrano founded a group called the Stockholm Research Collective, whose members spent their evenings compiling a lengthy report on the problems of American imperialism, which was never published.
Beyond this warm circle, a substantial minority endured brutal economic hardship. Circumstances were toughest for the colony of deserters in Malmö. “I thought that I’d heard all about the bad scene down there but I still couldn’t believe it,” reported a visiting exile from Stockholm. “It was an American ghetto at its worst, and almost all that that implies.” Among its most desperate inhabitants was John Babcock, a deserter who suffered from a serious kidney complaint. Four months behind in the rent, shoplifting to get food for himself and his pregnant girlfriend, he bought a pistol, took the ferry to Copenhagen, attempted to rob a bank, and got five years. His fate was memorialized in a song by a Swedish folk band.
* * *
MICHAEL VALE WAS now only an intermittent presence in Stockholm, and he concentrated his interests on a small cadre of people he regarded as trustworthy and politically wholesome. Among them were Cliff Gaddy, Warren Hamerman, Bill Jones, and Jim McGourty. They remained attached, nominally, to the American Deserters Committee, which still commanded the attention of a minority of politically minded deserters.
But Michael and his allies were making plans about which the rest of the ADC knew nothing. They were in touch with sympathetic activists in Frankfurt, and Michael had cultivated contacts in Britain, who moved in the orbit of a group called International Socialists.
Michael put a special effort into training Cliff Gaddy, the man who emerged as his most promising pupil. Cliff was smarter than the others and shared Michael’s amazing facility with languages. He was fluent in Swedish and German and, with his mentor’s encouragement, soon mastered Russian. Michael’s contacts brought Cliff work from the publisher M. E. Sharpe and, with it, access to the latest Soviet academic literature.
In the early 1970s, sometimes in collaboration with Michael and sometimes on his own, Cliff translated scholarly articles on the future of Soviet-American relations, Moscow’s view of the arms race, and the treatment of schizophrenia in Russian hospitals. He translated the essays of Yevgeny Preobrazhensky, an economist who had worked alongside Trotsky in the 1920s. Together, Mike’s band of followers were planning a new revolutionary project. One based beyond Swedish borders.
In the summer of 1970, the ADC’s collection of 16 mm news films disappeared from the office. So did Bill Jones. With its principal members absent or otherwise engaged, the organization entered a period of vagueness and lassitude. A small knot of activists kept it running, using modest funds that were still coming in from Thomas Hayes’s CALCAV group. The principal figures were Gerry Condon, a former Green Beret with an impressive red beard and a psychology degree from the University of San Francisco, and Mike Powers, a Brooklyn-born activist keen on nurturing the ADC’s links with North Korea and Albania. They became the voices of the political wing of the deserter movement—the ones to whom the press turned when they needed a quote on the latest crime or deportation case, or material for the customary, slightly Bergmanish piece on the loneliness of the American deserter in the long Swedish winter.
In October 1970, Michael Vale’s faction tossed a paper grenade into their old office: a five-page communiqué entitled “Dissolution Statement of the American Deserters Committee.” “An organization remains politically relevant as long as the situation and goals remain so,” it argued. “As the situation changes or the goals lose their significance, it is also necessary that the organization undergo corresponding changes, or else dissolve as a viable political force, although perhaps retaining its name and form. But in such a case, the organization is a form without content, a mere chimera of political fancy.” After much discussion, the statement said, the ADC had elected to disband. “The decision was based on a growing realization of the increasing political irrelevance of the ADC.” The bottom of the last page bore the names of Bill Jones, Cliff Gaddy, Chuck Onan, and the deserter we know as Jim McGourty.
The first Gerry Condon heard about this was when he received a letter from CALCAV informing him that the ADC’s funding would be frozen until the facts were clarified. He wrote straight back. “The statement,” wrote Condon, “written, of course, by none other than our old friend Michael Vale and distributed by an unfortunately misguided Bill Jones, does not represent the opinion of anyone who has had anything to do with the ADC in the last eight months.” Condon went tearing around town in search of the signatories. He found that most of them were no longer in the country. “All that’s left of them here,” he told CALCAV, “is bad memories, bad aftertastes.” He hoped the document would be ignored. “If so, that crew will have given deserters in Sweden their last headache and we can get on with the business in hand.”
* * *
THE CASH-FLOW PROBLEM happened just at the wrong moment. The winter of 1970–71 was a cold season for the ADC. In the summer of 1970, Jerry Dass, the former Green Beret who had become a protégé to their biggest donor, Sven Kempe, committed suicide by dousing himself in kerosene and setting himself alight.
In November, twenty-one-year-old Joseph Parra of New Orleans became the first deserter to experience forcible repatriation to the States. He was serving a prison sentence for smuggling LSD from Copenhagen to Stockholm and scheduled for deportation thereafter. As the moment came nearer, Parra became desperate. He attempted suicide. He married a Swedish woman, Sonja Lundström, in his cell. The ADC organized protests, sit-ins, and a ten-day hunger strike. None of it had any effect. At one of the protests an ADC member was charged with assaulting a police officer, sentenced to one month in jail, and told that he, too, would be deported upon release.
On November 25, 1970, Joe Parra was flown to New York by two plainclothes Swedish officers. His journey ended with a farcical flourish. Two U.S. Army military policemen boarded the plane as it sat on the tarmac at John F. Kennedy International Airport, but the Swedes and their prisoner walked straight past them, obliging the MPs to turn on their heels and dash back to arrest Parra in the arrivals lounge. “It’s kind of tough to get out of jail this morning, fly across the Atlantic, and get picked up again on the other side,” said Parra, before being bundled into a side room.
In the following fortnight, two more deserters were delivered from Swedish prison into the arms of the U.S. military authorities. Dick Fernandez, the head of CALCAV, responded in unclerical language. “We are absolutely blown out of our fucking minds here about these goddam Swedes sending three Americans back to this country to go to jail!” Why, he asked, could they not have been deported to Canada or Algeria? “I’m prepared to see if we can’t really put some screws on Mr. Palme to move in this direction.”
Max Watts, the old Paris stationmaster, observing the situation from Germany, reflected on the cases. “Sure,” he wrote, “Palme wants only ‘nice,’ politically conscious deserters. Sorry, those we need right here in the army. If the Swedish govt is serious in its willingness to help the Vietnamese, it must be willing to take those GIs who can do little except kill, or smoke.”
No killers had emerged from the deserter community. Not quite yet. But those who had joined the burgeoning drug culture now knew that they might be only one pill or cigarette away from deportation. “Generally,” an ADC member wrote to CALCAV, “the situation is getting much tighter and there is much talk of going to Canada or going underground by several who feel themselves threatened.” Some deserters had already made that decision. Among them was one of Sweden’s star exiles—and his case demonstrates how hard the road could be.
* * *
THREE YEARS AFTER arriving from Moscow in a blaze of publicity, Craig Anderson of the Intrepid Four found that his exile had taken a Siberian turn. He was estranged from his American family and drifting away from the new one he’d started in Sweden. His most exciting experience was the hardest to communicate. In the winter of 1969–70, he saw his first UFO: a bright, low-flying object that scudded toward him through the Swedish night. Terrestrial life, however, was hard. Work proved elusive, save for a few odd jobs. But in the summer of 1970, he met a young street musician who had just arrived in Stockholm after a series of wild adventures on the hippie trail. Karen Fabec was good-looking, American, and also professed experience of a close encounter, having once witnessed a UFO hovering above her native Pittsburgh. She and Craig had been a couple for several weeks before she realized that she’d seen him before on the TV news. “I liked his quiet mysterious demeanor,” she said. “I made a lot out of that. Young girls do that, right?”
I met Karen to hear the story of how she and Craig took the tough route home from Sweden—sneaking back into the States via Canada and living a life underground. Karen studies at a college in San Francisco; we had lunch in the cafeteria, surrounded by teenagers, and she told me about her exuberantly misspent youth. She was born a Catholic in Pennsylvania, but then the Beatles released Sgt. Pepper and, at the age of seventeen, she shouldered her guitar and set out for India in search of a guru. She never got there.
Instead, she wound up in the Moroccan city Essaouira, sharing a sprawling courtyard apartment with some sprawling hippie musicians. They meditated, smoked hashish, played drums all night. “Then,” she explained, “somebody got the bright idea to go to Fez and get a bunch of kif and take it across Africa and sell it to Peace Corps workers in Tunisia. So we did it and we got busted and thrown into jail on a ten-year sentence.” She was obliged to bribe her way to freedom, and after an interlude on a houseboat in Amsterdam she moved north until she met Craig in Stockholm.
In the warm summer months, she sang. People were generous with their coins. But the winter of 1970–71 was unkind to Karen and Craig. They squatted in a disused puppet theater down a Stockholm alley with a name that meant “the end of the world.” They warmed themselves at a wood-burning stove, talked about raising the airfare to go to India. A difficult proposition, when the only employment they could find was delivering newspapers. Neither of them had much enthusiasm for the four a.m. starts, trudging uphill, loaded with copies of Dagens Nyheter. Then an infected cut on Karen’s thumb brought their efforts to an end. The doctor who prescribed antibiotics sent her to the visa office for paperwork that would secure her free treatment. The authorities decided that she had already overstayed her welcome and deported her.
She wasn’t sure that Craig would follow. “I loved him,” she said, “but I don’t think I was really his type. I think he was with me because I was so emphatic.” In her absence, however, he formulated a grand strategy—one that aimed to be as eye-catching as his decision to desert from the Intrepid. He would return to the States, make amends with his family, and give himself up to the authorities. He would turn his inevitable court-martial into a political act, use the dock as a pulpit to preach against the war. Perhaps that would be the end of it, and the end of President Nixon, too.
Rather than jetting straight back home to California, Craig chose a soft landing in Canada. In May 1971 he flew from Stockholm to Montreal and was reunited with Karen. She wasn’t alone. On her return to the States, Karen had bought an old milk truck and converted it into a motor home. Four friends were on board for the ride. They crossed the entire breadth of the country to Vancouver Island, where they built an encampment out of driftwood, picked berries, harvested mussels, smoked dope, and watched for unidentified flying objects. When the weather cooled, they moved south to Seattle. At the border checkpoint, the guard demanded to see Craig’s draft card. Someone made a joke about him being a notorious outlaw. The guard laughed and waved them through.
Their new underground life did not endure the winter. In February 1972, Karen went to the doctor with flu symptoms and discovered that she was pregnant. This, and the Seattle cold, sent them south to California. They sold the van and made the journey by Greyhound bus. Trouble followed them to new lodgings in San Francisco. Coming home early one day they found their apartment being used for a porn shoot.
“There were all these naked people and the man of the house was walking round in a jockstrap,” Karen remembered. “Craig was really appalled. He had it out with the guy. I didn’t want to be militant about it.” Later that night, a more serious altercation took place. Karen was woken by sounds from the next room—one of the porn actors beating up his girlfriend. “At first it was arguing. Then I heard him punching her. I jumped out of bed and ran in, and he turned on me and pushed me down the stairs.”
Shortly after this incident, the couple went to San Jose to see Craig’s family. When her son and his pregnant fiancée visited, Irene Anderson said little. Once the couple had left, she picked up the phone and reported her son to the FBI. “I suppose,” said Karen, “she was thinking of me and the baby. She wanted everything to be good for her grandchild, for Craig to take care of business and get it over with.” On the morning of March 30, 1972, Anderson went to buy a newspaper and found the men from the bureau lying in wait.
They took him to the naval correctional center on Treasure Island, a rubble platform constructed in San Francisco Bay. When his fellow inmates realized who he was, the beatings and the threats began. When he protested, the guards set him scrubbing the cement floors with a toothbrush, then placed him in solitary confinement. When he went on a hunger strike, the prison doctor prescribed antipsychotic drugs.
On August 24, 1972, Karen Fabec had a memorable twenty-second birthday—a cloudless day that she spent in downtown San Francisco. At eleven o’clock, she was standing outside city hall, cradling her three-month-old baby, Shandra. At midday her fiancé turned up in a van from military prison, handcuffed, sedated, and accompanied by two guards, who helped him struggle up the steps and into the presence of Judge Joseph Kennedy.
The judge asked Karen if she took Craig W. Anderson to be her lawful wedded husband. “Sure,” she said. Craig proved unable to muster a reply. Perhaps it was the lithium in his bloodstream. Perhaps it was the distracting sound coming from the street outside: the amplified voice of Jane Fonda, newly returned from Hanoi, telling a crowd of demonstrators about what she’d seen in North Vietnam—bombed schools, bombed churches, bombed theaters, bombed factories. The judge took silence for assent and pronounced Craig and Karen man and wife. The couple embraced, handcuffs were snapped on the wrists of the groom, and the van sped back to Treasure Island. Baby Shandra had slept all the way through the ceremony. A reporter asked the bride for a quote. “It’s a drag,” she said.
* * *
CRAIG NEVER MADE his speech about the war and Nixon. At the preliminary hearing for his case, he suffered a catatonic seizure and was rushed to the hospital. The intervention proved beneficial: the psychiatrists took the view that further confinement might cause irreparable damage to his sanity. Craig walked from the court with a three-year probation order and a dishonorable discharge from the navy.
Eight months in the brig, however, had already done their work. His mouth was a mess of abscesses. His skin broke out in boils. Noise and crowds distressed him—so much so that Karen allowed herself to be persuaded to move with him to a tent in the mountains of northern California. “He was becoming a recluse,” she recalled. “He didn’t want to see or talk to anybody. He always acted angry and bitter.” Eventually, Karen lost her appetite for this life. The couple separated in 1975 and have barely seen each other since. Karen now lives modestly in San Francisco with her grandchild and her dog, catching up on the education she missed when she went on the trail to North Africa.
Craig’s path, however, has been much weirder, and it demonstrates that even those deserters who were not interested in politics could end up living their lives by strange, conspiratorial ideas. A decade ago he adopted the pseudonym Will Hart, under which he writes books that mix biblical scholarship with speculation about the relationship between the American state and extraterrestrial intelligences. The Apollo missions, he thinks, encountered something sentient on the moon. The moon, he suspects, is an artificial object. He has no doubt that the CIA has alien bodies and alien equipment hidden in its labs, and that the last half century of U.S. foreign policy has been determined by these secrets.
He and I exchanged a few emails on these subjects. I was surprised that he seemed not to know that a coauthor of The Roswell Incident, the foundational text of UFO conspiracies, had identified Harry Rositzke of Operation Chaos as the head of Langley’s aliens division. Craig was more expansive, I discovered, when the questions were asked by a true believer. One of his favorite interlocutors is a clairvoyant called Dr. Rita Louise, who offers “intuitive health readings” over the phone. (“Dr Louise,” says her website, “infuses every engagement with both credibility and content.”) She also hosts an Internet radio show on which Craig, in the person of Will Hart, is an occasional guest.
On one of these podcasts he described a visit he’d made to Mexico shortly after he had separated from Karen. Here, he made measurements that proved the ancient Mayans had access to alien laser technology. However, “very powerful forces” were preventing this information from emerging. Archaeologists were being discouraged from publishing their findings. Those who tried to add these details to Wikipedia found their revisions weeded out. “The power elites,” he said, “don’t want you to know about this.”
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IF THE CIA was doing its work with equipment borrowed from the inhabitants of the Zeta Reticuli system, then no surveillance technology was salvaged from the saucer. The agents of Chaos had to make do with making phone calls and knocking on doors. In April 1972, as Craig Anderson languished in the brig, the CIA asset code-named MHYIELD was sniffing around the offices of the ADC in Stockholm.
MHYIELD was on a tour of radical groups in Europe, with an itinerary that included Frankfurt, Copenhagen, and Belfast. In Stockholm, Mike Powers told his visitor that the organization was going through an identity crisis. The flow of deserters and resisters had slowed, men were returning to their bases in Germany, and the ADC, by now a tiny organization, had suffered another split. Two members had objected to Powers’s growing enthusiasm for Maoism and had formed an even smaller group, the Revolutionary American People’s Party. Those who remained included Mark Worrell, a California GI who had started a Kim Il Sung study group, and Mike Bransome, a deserter whose colorful past included time in the Baltimore city jail, an alarming interlude with the Moonies, and the donation of a pint of blood to a group who broke into a draft board office and spilled it over a cache of draft cards.
MHYIELD was trying to work out if the ADC was still plugged into radical networks that extended over international borders. He discovered that not only did they know little about what was happening on the army bases in Germany, or among deserters living underground in the States, they seemed barely aware of what was happening elsewhere in Sweden. They hadn’t, for instance, talked to the ADC’s representative in Malmö for over a month.
The depleted state of the ADC reflected a shift in public attitudes toward the deserters. The romantic enthusiasm that had greeted the arrival of the Intrepid Four was long exhausted. Every few weeks seemed to bring a fresh piece of bad publicity. In May 1971, a deserter was convicted of killing the three-year-old daughter of his Swedish girlfriend. The details shocked the public. Ten days later, Earl Pennington, a deserter who had lived in Malmö for seven months, took his girlfriend to Bulltofta Airport, where he pressed a knife to her throat, burst through the gate, and climbed the steps of a DC-9. Pennington ordered the pilot to fly to the United States, but the captain told him that a DC-9 would never make it across the Atlantic. “Fly to Stockholm,” said Pennington. “Or anywhere.” The police moved in; Pennington was dragged away.
In June, Ray Jones III, deserter number one, surfaced again, in a maxi coat and silk shirt, imploring King Gustaf VI Adolf to protect him from the Swedish police, who, he believed, were harassing him on behalf of the U.S. government. “It is a hidden fact that the United States puts pressure on this country,” he said. “I have had constant threats of physical violence against my wife and kids.”
His examples were hard to interpret. The police, he said, had forced his car off the road, charged him with negligent driving, and assaulted him and his wife. They had allowed his creditors to remove property from his home in lieu of rent. “My two children sat naked eating a bowl of cornflakes,” he said. “After one spoonful the authorities burst into our home and removed every piece of furniture we owned.” Stories like this produced little public sympathy. The most common response in the press was to suggest that the Swedish benefits system was too generous toward American exiles.
One of many low points came in the small hours of October 10, 1972, when two deserters, Wayne Ellis and Rudolph Mitchell, began causing an uproar in a room at the Rex Hotel in Malmö. The assistant manager, Sven Persson, discovered the two men in a state of insane agitation. Believing there was a bomb in the room, they had cleared it of all flammable objects, hurling blankets and pillows out into the corridor. They had also removed their clothes, fearing that the imminent blast would ignite their plastic buttons and zippers. LSD was to blame, but so was their unusual relationship.
Ellis, the son of a middle-class Chicago family, had deserted his unit when his bank account was cleared of $3,000 by a woman he met on leave in Copenhagen. Mitchell, who had deserted via Amsterdam after a failed attempt to secure a false passport in Paris, promised to help his friend take revenge. Instead, they took drugs, began pimping, and became lost in a bizarre narcotic delusion. Mitchell decided that he was a prophet whose word was divine law. Ellis accepted this idea and began following his commandments. When Sven Persson came into the hotel room, Mitchell ordered Ellis to kick the man six times in the head with his bare feet. The attack proved fatal. With their victim lying senseless on the floor, master and disciple threw a mattress over the body and ran, naked and holding hands, out into the streets of Malmö, where they were quickly arrested.
Ellis and Mitchell were both African American, which added a racial dimension to the hostility provoked by the case—particularly when it emerged that they were living off the immoral earnings of Ellis’s Swedish girlfriend, a hotel receptionist named Candy. The two-day trial was a circus. Ellis was too drug-addled to speak. Mitchell was adamant that the murder had been “necessary.” A group of deserters who came to attend were arrested. A rumor spread around the city that some Yugoslav gangsters were planning to spring them from custody, after which the Yugoslav Embassy received a bomb threat. Both men were found guilty and told they would be deported after serving their sentences.
As if this wasn’t bad enough, Vernon Boggs, a hip young sociology PhD from the City University of New York, turned up in Malmö to write an academic paper claiming that Ellis and Mitchell were typical cases. In “Black American Deserters in Sweden: From Desertion to Drugs to Despair,” Boggs wrote of men who’d earned a “degree in ‘pimpology’ in Copenhagen and then sought asylum in Sweden, where the racket was much easier to pursue.” Like Michael Vale, Boggs had been reading the theorist Émile Durkheim. The deserter, he wrote, “is powerless, homeless, and very often despondent; he is truly living in a state of anomie. His anomic existence spirals downwards until he reaches rock bottom: drug addiction, desperation and imprisonment.” Like Vale, he was fingered as a government spook. One interviewee taunted him: “You resigned from the CIA now, huh?”
Boggs may not have been a creature of Langley, but he did have help from a shadowy source: an enemy of Olof Palme in the Swedish civil service who, disgusted by what he saw as the “fondling and cringing position” toward the deserters, supplied Boggs with a secret report that toted up their crimes, from traffic offenses and smuggling to burglary and rape. The report asserted that only 3.7 percent of Sweden’s new American residents were in any danger of being sent to Vietnam, and concluded that their presence was detrimental to Swedish society.
For Boggs, this was an academic question. At the beginning of 1973, that’s what it became for the Swedish state. On January 27, America’s war in Vietnam came to an end. America would send no more unwilling troops to Indochina. On April 2, the Swedish government announced that it had withdrawn its offer of humanitarian asylum to deserters and draft resisters.
But for many of those living in the moral and political space opened up by these changes, the struggle was far from over. Michael Vale and his band of allies had already decided that desertion had outlived its usefulness as a political act. For them, revolution was a goal now best pursued by those inside the army. They had to go where the GIs were and get the message out to them. And as soon as that decision was made, it was relayed back to Langley and to the head of Operation Chaos.