“He found it difficult to speak, and when he did he spoke English like a Japanese bar girl,” wrote Kret. “He pronounced ‘wife’ as ‘wifu,’ ‘house’ as ‘housu,’ ‘Vietnam’ as ‘Vietnamu.’” Kret advised him to get a lawyer and turn himself in. “Never happen!” exclaimed Kmetz. “Never happen! They’ll put me in the monkey housu until I’m an old man!” After this, Kret reported, a member of Beheiren came to collect Kmetz from the bar and take him to a safe house. He was, said the reporter, “the most unhappy and desperate person that I have ever known.”
Was this story true? Was Virgil Kret for real? Apparently so. But the nature of his reality offered a warning about what awaited some of the deserters further down the line. I found his old stories for UPI and the Los Angeles Times and a mention of his presence at a California charity dinner attended by Mr. and Mrs. Zeppo Marx. But an article from an underground newspaper revealed that Kret had been expelled from Japan in 1969, accused of involvement in revolutionary politics. It also noted that in 1975, a source had warned Kret of an imminent assassination attempt on President Gerald Ford. Unfortunately, the source transpired to be God, who issued the tip, Kret claimed, in the form of a “time poem.”
The trail ended with a long-neglected blog called The Obituary of the World, in which Kret explained that he had received telepathic warning of God’s declaration of war against the Earth, and that the Almighty had already supplied the codes that would enable him to launch nuclear revenge upon those who had wounded him most grievously. The Buffalo Bills football team would be among the first to perish. Nothing new had been posted on the site since 2008. Since when, I couldn’t help noticing, the Bills have consistently failed to reach the NFL playoffs.
* * *
WHEN THE REPRESENTATIVES of the American Deserters Committee turned up at the police station, Mark and his comrades were ready to be suspicious. But the men who came to speak with them didn’t seem to be the dangerous figures described by Bertil Svahnström and the KGB. Their manner was friendly and reasonable. They explained that the Swedish welfare system would provide a modest income and that a network of sympathetic Swedes would be only too happy to offer them temporary accommodation. For many of Stockholm’s activist elite—left-leaning actors, journalists, and academics—a deserter in the spare bedroom had become that season’s most fashionable accessory.
Bill Jones, the chairman of the ADC, was a twenty-one-year-old former seminarian from St. Louis, Missouri, who’d deserted from Germany during his training as an army medic. Earnestness seemed his defining quality. Bill explained that he had hoped to meet the deserters in Leningrad, but Svahnström and the Swedish Committee for Vietnam had declined to pay for the ticket.
Bill’s colleague Michael Vale was older and more self-assured. A short, stocky man with a crinkly smile and unironed clothes, Vale was not a deserter but a professional translator from Cincinnati, Ohio, with an address book full of Swedish intellectuals and an apartment in Stockholm where everyone was welcome. Unlike the patrician figure of Svahnström, Vale talked the language of rebellion and revolt. In that moment, it was not clear how profound a revolution he had in mind. Nor was it possible to know that joining the American Deserters Committee would send some of its members to a prison they would never escape.
2 / THE COMMITTEE
IN OLDER WARS, the refusal to fight led only to the criminal underworld, a defector’s battalion, or a final cigarette in a cold field at dawn. When the Intrepid Four arrived at Arlanda Airport in December 1967, they rewrote that story. Their journey transformed desertion from an individual act of conscience or cowardice to a political step that GIs could take together: one that offered the possibility of a new life in a prosperous, liberal, neutral European country. Nobody planned this. Nobody organized it. It was as spontaneous as a love affair. The Intrepid Four walked from a café in Tokyo and asked for help from a young man with a plausibly countercultural haircut. He took them to Fūgetsudō, a smoky dive in the Shinjuku district where students came to drink bad coffee and talk about Mao. From this, a movement grew.
It may have been inevitable. The Vietnam War was unpopular. Fighting-on-the-streets unpopular. Tear-gas unpopular. Uniformed men could not be insulated from this bad news, no matter how far they were from home. Dissent in America meant dissent on American bases, in American ships, in American barracks. To the gathering dismay of their officers, men learned how to say no. It scarcely mattered whether their objections were conscientious or self-interested: whether they wanted to strike a blow for peace or sidestep military discipline. The exit signs had been illuminated. On the other side, a new generation of political radicals was ready to give support to anyone who passed through—hoping, perhaps, that the deserters might be recruited for a new kind of war. The war against war.
Discreetly, carefully, these tiny groups of activists approached the buzz-cut, hare-eyed young men they spotted loitering in cafés and at railway stations and offered board, lodging, help with paperwork. They secured funds from film stars and intellectuals, from church groups and charities. Clandestine assistance came from enemy governments and shady guys involved with armed struggles in the Third World. Through hand-delivered letters and quiet meetings in flats and farmhouses, they began working with one another, moving deserters over borders, from refuge to refuge. They sometimes worked against one another, too—impelled by the natural forces of left-wing factionalism, or by the mischief of hostile infiltrators. Nobody could be sure about that. But together they laid the tracks of an international underground railroad, built to shuttle dissenting men away from the napalm and razor wire to sanctuary.
Its ghostly infrastructure spanned the globe. Short routes carried deserters and draft dodgers over the American border into Canada. Beheiren managed the transpacific, trans-Siberian branch, on which the Intrepid Four had been shunted westward from Tokyo to Stockholm. Deserters opened up their own lines from bases in Germany, driving or hitchhiking north through Denmark and taking the ferry from Helsingør to Sweden. Some flew from Canada via Reykjavík. Anti-war activists too old for the draft became stationmasters of safe houses in Paris, London, Amsterdam, and Berlin. Underground publishers produced pamphlets to guide men through the system: Baedekers of desertion that listed the phone numbers and addresses of friendly lawyers and welfare groups. Anyone considering migrating to Sweden was directed to the officers of the American Deserters Committee—the organization about which Bertil Svahnström had issued his gloomy warning.
The first time I heard its name, I thought the ADC sounded rather innocuous. I imagined a room of sober young men passing resolutions against the military-industrial complex. Now I think of it as a phenomenon of a different order. Something through which we might read the times, like the psychedelic bus trip undertaken by Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters; or the Stanford Prison Experiment, inside which the psychologist Philip Zimbardo barricaded a group of impressionable boys and watched them sink into barbarism.
To describe the experiences of all those whose lives were touched by the committee would require more than a book. It would require an immense illuminated map of the world, and an army of uniformed croupiers pushing stacks of color-coded tokens in the direction of Sweden. Some tokens would represent deserters and draft resisters. Others would stand for men who looked like deserters or draft resisters but mysteriously fit neither category.
The ADC was always at the center of the argument—with the Swedish government, with the Swedish anti-war movement, with the counterculture, with America, with itself. It could not be conciliatory. It could not form amicable alliances. It had a knack for turning friends into enemies and biting hands that fed. Like many groups on the radical Left, its real talent was for reducing itself to increasingly smaller, purer fractions, until, eventually, it boiled away entirely. I heard it described as a revolutionary brotherhood, a goon squad, and an intelligence service front led by agents provocateurs.
“Whether they were CIA or KGB or just crazy, they were bad news,”
said one boy who declined to join the choir. But even he was fascinated by them. As I traveled Sweden and the States, listening to the stories of its former members, it became clear that half a century later they were still computing the experience—whether they looked back on it with nostalgia or anxiety, or were determined not to look back on it at all. Several alumni of the ADC would have preferred not to be mentioned in these pages and told me so. But they were the men at the heart of the story, and as they decided not to fight the Viet Cong, I decided not to fight the story.
* * *
WILLIAM CUTHBERT JONES, the chairman of the ADC, was an early arrival in Stockholm. A good-looking Catholic boy from St. Louis, with a slight frame, soulful brown eyes, and a strong line in radical hep talk. “They call you a man,” he rapped, “and they treat you like an animal. They feed you their line and you think it’s the truth. Remember in basic training: double time, chow line, right face, left face? They wanted you disciplined like a well-running machine, easy to control, easy to handle. Uncle Sam needs you—to stop the bullets, to smother the grenades, to make the world safe for Coca-Cola.”
Right from the start, Bill Jones was the public face of the American Deserters Committee. He led its marches, spoke on its behalf from soapboxes and conference lecterns, wrote editorials for its newspaper, and gave its official interviews to the press—until he decided that those reporters who weren’t intelligence agents were probably going to stitch him up anyway and decided to remain silent. He would go silent for me, too, once he realized that I knew the story of the brainwashing institutes of Sweden, and the stranger story of what happened after. But at first things went swimmingly. We had lunch. We got on so well that he broke his diet and had a piece of pecan pie.
Our venue was the Old Ebbitt Grill, a Washington institution snug beside the White House: padded booths, brass railings, pink-tinged boudoir paintings, like some recently democratized gentlemen’s club. He chose it because it was convenient for his work as Washington bureau chief of a glossy magazine called Executive Intelligence Review. His email warned that he didn’t look like the boy in the pictures anymore, and that I should watch out for someone in a Red Army fur hat. (“Without the star,” he added, unnecessarily.) I knew him straight away, despite the extra weight and the loss of his fuzzy Che beard. People don’t change that much. Except politically.
Although Bill described himself as “very working-class,” this was a matter more of feeling than fact. The family tree was luxuriant and deep-rooted. His father was a real estate broker who dealt in upscale apartment blocks in downtown St. Louis. The first William Cuthbert Jones was a distinguished criminal lawyer who had earned the rank of major in the Civil War and, with something preying on his mind, made a deathbed conversion to Catholicism. Rome’s influence extended to Bill’s generation: a sister and two of his uncles entered religious life, and Bill was educated by Benedictine monks. “The martyrs were my heroes,” he said. “This is how I saw my life.”
Being a martyr for God was one thing. Being a martyr for President Lyndon B. Johnson was another. One night in 1966, at Christian Brothers College High School, Bill decided to do something about it. “I tore up my draft card and put it in the mail. My friends thought I was totally nuts. I thought I’d make a difference. Have an effect.” He shook his head sardonically. “And then I got scared. I went down to the mailbox and waited for the postman to get this damn letter back. Which I did.”
Having silenced his own protest, he enlisted in the army and began training as a medic. First he drove a truck between military hospitals in Germany. Later he took electrocardiograms of wounded soldiers and watched the flickering needles describe the consequences of punctured lungs, shattered bones, buried bullets: a thousand more reasons not to go to Vietnam. But it was the Intrepid Four who pointed the way to Sweden. When Bill saw them on the cover of a magazine, he began plotting a journey north. (“Like Yogi Berra says,” reflected Bill, “when you come to a fork in the road…”)
Another medic in his unit had the same impulse and acted first, selling his car and hitchhiking to Denmark. Bill intended to join him, but didn’t like what he found when he arrived. “He was something in the Copenhagen club scene,” he recalled. “I met some of his friends, and it seemed somewhat seedy.”
So he kept moving north to Stockholm, arriving on a snowy afternoon in late January 1968 and making his way to the main railway station, where he asked a passerby how to get in touch with one of the Swedish anti-war groups. “It’s Saturday,” he was told. “They’ll all be out marching.” They were. Processing through the street under banners demanding an end to American aggression in Indochina. Bill joined the march, explained who he was, and found himself treated as the hero of the hour. And in that moment he was reconciled to a life in exile. Destiny was calling. “If you think you’re doing something that’s going to have an effect upon history,” he said, “that’s a very powerful force.”
There were, Bill said, several former seminarians in the ADC. They made good revolutionaries. Looking back over his old speeches, it was easy to see how well the rhetoric of sin and redemption mixed with the sixties’ language of struggle and revolution. The present system, Bill argued, was corrupt and stagnant. A new one was required. The wretched of the earth—exploited laborers, Third World guerrillas, Vietnam deserters—would create it with violence.
“And is not,” he asked, “this violent indignation of alienated people one of the highest forms of love? The love of human brotherhood which refuses to abandon one’s fellow man to the scourge of hell on earth?” Bill’s medical background provided more enriching imagery. “It is comparable to a competent surgeon who must excise a malignant organ in order to save a life,” he argued.
And those concerned with man’s spirituality must participate in the operation or be seen for what they are—“hypocrites, whited sepulchers, and the people will vomit them out of their mouths.” We the American Deserters Committee of Sweden have seen clearly our duty faced with the situation of the world today. As members of the U.S. Army we were the prime instruments of these same forces of repression and reaction, and we have excised ourselves from this malignant body. We saw our function and refused to carry it out. We answered a higher call of the people of the world who were crying for help from their brutal oppressors.
If Bill had made this speech in London, he would have risked deportation. If he had made it in Paris, he would have been kissing goodbye to his next fourteen-day carte de séjours. In Stockholm, however, it was fine. In Stockholm, he could make the speech while receiving a free bus pass and $20 weekly welfare payments, attending state-funded language classes, and enjoying the protection of humanitarian asylum—a new diplomatic category created for the benefit of the deserters by a political class that wanted to signal its opposition to the Vietnam War.
But the ADC was in no mood for gratitude. Its members were revolutionaries, and revolutionaries never said please or thank you. “Some people were typically liberal and didn’t want you to go too far,” Bill told me. “We had a lot of fights about that. But there was a feeling that we had been lied to for years, and now we had to try something else.”
* * *
IN THE 1960S and ’70s, Sweden was another word for utopia—particularly in countries afflicted by industrial decline and rising unemployment. The Swedish model, as it was called, with no hint of double entendre, appeared to have delivered the Swedes from anxiety. They had the highest living standards in Europe. They had big cars and tasteful modernist furniture. Their welfare state was a miracle of generosity: this was a country without visible deprivation.
Poised between the two power blocs of the Cold War, Sweden also had political neutrality and moral independence: how many other states would have permitted Bertrand Russell and Jean-Paul Sartre, two foreign intellectuals, to convene a private tribunal to investigate American war crimes in Vietnam? But that’s what happened—witnesses were called, napalm burns examined, testimonies taken from the bombers and the b
ombed, and in May 1967 a jury of writers, thinkers, and activists announced that they had found the United States of America guilty of genocide against the Vietnamese people. The horrific details were telegraphed around the world.
The Swedes also seemed to enjoy impressive social and sexual liberty. Theirs was the country that exported all those blue movies, all those blond masseuses and au pairs. It was a place where sex education was enshrined in the school curriculum and condoms were dispensed from vending machines on the street. American commentators looked on this from afar with a mixture of envy and horror. Time magazine set the tone as early as 1955, with a notorious article entitled “Sin and Sweden,” which depicted the country as a topsy-turvy zone “where sociology has become a religion itself, and birth control, abortion and promiscuity—especially among the young—are recognized as inalienable rights.” Jaws dropped across America, also a little drool.
For the U.S. press, Swedish sociology was a gift that kept on giving. Its pioneering collection of data on the habits and experiences of its citizens was a rich source of inspiration for American journalists researching their stock shock-horror pieces on Swedish sex. In February 1966, for instance, U.S. News & World Report published a report on the increase of sexually transmitted diseases in the Swedish population. “Ten percent of the infected boys,” it claimed, “had had relations with 200 different girls.” Easy to imagine which part of that statistic burned most fiercely in the mind of the male reader.
What sold newspapers also sold films. The Italian director Luigi Scattini had an international hit with Sweden: Heaven and Hell, which depicted the Swedes as lesbian clubbers, married swingers, and space-hopping nudists. (It also premiered Piero Umiliani’s song “Mah Nà Mah Nà,” years before the Muppets made it their own.) Sweden’s own film culture produced I Am Curious (Yellow), the art movie that combined explicit sex scenes with footage of the education minister Olof Palme, sitting in his little back garden in Stockholm and talking about “our dream of a classless, egalitarian society.”
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