* * *
OLOF PALME DID not make an explicit invitation to the deserters, but he did plump up the cushions and put on some seductive mood music. At first, these were quiet moves: behind-the-scenes conversations with colleagues that smoothed the fugitives’ progress into Swedish airspace.
Then, on the night of February 21, 1968, something noisier: Palme leading a five-thousand-strong march on the U.S. Embassy in Stockholm, with Nguyen Tho Chan, the North Vietnamese ambassador to Moscow, at his side; Palme addressed the crowd with a flaming torch in one hand and inflammatory speech in the other. “The goal of democracy,” he told them, “can never be reached by means of oppression. One cannot save a village by wiping it out, putting the fields on fire, destroying the houses, captivating the people or killing them.” A continent of people, he argued, thought the same. “The truth is that the overwhelming majority of people in Europe dissociate themselves from this war, want to have an end put to the sufferings, want to give the people of Vietnam the right to decide over their own future. This democratic opinion does not experience the war of the United States in Vietnam as a support for democracy, but as a threat against the democratic ideas, not only in Vietnam but also throughout the world.”
Palme was a rising star in the Social Democratic Party, but those words made him brightly visible everywhere. In December 1967, an unofficial anti-war demonstration in Stockholm had ended with police batons drawing blood outside the U.S. Embassy. Palme’s walk with Nguyen Tho Chan implied a change of policy.
He was denounced in the U.S. press, his audience dismissed as a “leftist mob.” America’s ambassador to Sweden, William Heath, a beady-eyed Texan whose preferred epithet for anti-war protestors was “rattlesnakes,” withdrew to Washington beneath a barrage of hate mail and rotten eggs. American sabers rattled. The U.S. State Department threatened to halt the export of Redeye missiles to Sweden. The International Longshoremen’s Association warned that Swedish goods might be denied entry to American ports. The NBC anchorman Frank McGee suggested that this was the end of Swedish neutrality. And as relations between the two governments cooled, American dissidents registered a rise in temperature and followed its spring warmth north.
* * *
BILL JONES LED the American Deserters Committee. Michael Vale was its guru. But it was Hans Göran Franck, a lawyer and the head of the Swedish branch of Amnesty International, who conjured the ADC into being. Franck had been one of the organizers of the Russell Tribunal and, though he knew Bertil Svahnström and the respectable liberals of the Swedish Committee for Vietnam, he was closer to more radical forces on the left—the Front for National Liberation (FNL), young student activists who were for militancy, Mao, and swift victory for North Vietnam. Franck’s office processed the bulk of the deserters’ asylum claims, and did so tirelessly and for free. Other forms of practical assistance came from volunteers, many of whom were members of Amnesty International: teachers, doctors, and academics who opened up their spare rooms and summer houses, laid extra places at the dinner table.
They were not the only ones providing this help. Only a month after the arrival of the Intrepid Four, more than forty different grassroots groups were doing their bit. Franck reasoned that if the deserters formed their own organization, they might take on some of this work themselves. Old hands would assist new arrivals, advising them how to fill out the forms, negotiate interviews with the police and the social bureau. Together, they might also develop a unified voice, allowing them to make their own representations to the authorities—and to rebut the claims of their enemies.
At the end of January 1968, General Lewis F. Shull, former Pentagon intelligence man and the judge advocate of the U.S. Army in Europe, told the press that the Stockholm deserters were apolitical dropouts. “They are bums,” he said, “not the highest type of soldier.” If the deserters formed their own political organization, then charges like this would be harder to make. All Franck needed was someone to coordinate it for him.
He had already met his candidate six months previously, and in unusual circumstances. On May Day 1967, the first day of the Russell Tribunal, Franck had been out on the streets of Stockholm to show his opposition to American imperialism. The lawyer got caught up in a scuffle. He watched a group of policemen drag a demonstrator down a concrete stairwell into a parking lot and set upon him with their nightsticks. “You don’t have to beat him raw!” Franck shouted. Before he could intervene, the man was loaded into a van and driven away.
Later that day, Franck received a phone call from his cousin Mirjam. Mirjam Israel was a prominent child psychologist who, in the clinic and from her advice column in the daily newspaper Aftonbladet, advocated the distinctly Swedish permissiveness that made most Americans want to jump on a chair and scream. She had recently separated from her husband, Joachim, a sociology professor and her coauthor on the landmark study There Are No Naughty Children, which discouraged the young from blind obedience to their parents. (Another outrageous Swedish idea.) In Joachim’s absence, Mirjam had taken an American visitor under her wing. He was a sharply intelligent professional translator in his early thirties, Ohio-born, Caltech-educated, much traveled, and now sitting in a police cell, bruised and in need of legal representation. When Franck turned up at the police station, he was surprised to see a familiar face. The man who had been beaten in the parking lot. Michael Vale.
Vale claimed a scientific journal as his main employer. The fees must have been generous, as he seemed to have plenty of time on his hands, much of which he spent enthusing about Trotsky, or hanging out with the teenage Maoists of the Swedish anti-war movement. The May Day incident gave him a taste for action. When a large but unofficial Vietnam demonstration erupted across Stockholm on December 20, 1967, Vale turned his flat into a communications nerve center. His apartment had two telephone lines. One was used to receive incoming reports on police movements from activists calling in from phone booths across the city; the other was used to feed that intelligence back to demonstrators on the street. “We issued orders from there,” one former teenage rebel told me. “Where to reassemble to keep the demonstration together after the police had shattered it. It was like a field battle.” Michael Vale secured its victory.
* * *
THE AMERICAN DESERTERS Committee held its first meeting at the premises of Verdandi, a Swedish temperance society, on the afternoon of Sunday, February 11, 1968. The space was packed with people, though there were, perhaps, only fifteen Americans in the room; activists, hangers-on, and Social Democrat grandees made up the rest. The star attractions were the Intrepid Four, who, six weeks after landing in Sweden, had already acquired luxurious sideburns and Scandinavian girlfriends. Beside them moved a figure with just as strong a claim on history: Ray Jones III, a twenty-one-year-old private from Pontiac, Michigan, officially the first Vietnam deserter to seek asylum in Sweden. He and his German wife, Gabriele, had arrived from Germany via Copenhagen in January 1967 and had been quietly granted leave to stay by the Swedish Aliens Commission. After ten months of unemployment Jones had secured work teaching classes in jazz ballet, but having a regular job did not reduce his appetite for giving a hard political line to reporters who asked about his case. “Vietnamese people,” he declared, “are being treated by Americans like the Negroes in America.” For African American soldiers like him, Jones argued, desertion was “a matter of self-preservation.”
Other strong characters were also making their presence felt. Men who had found their way to Sweden without making much-publicized tours of the Soviet Union. George Carrano was the son of an army colonel from Blauvelt, New York, who quickly emerged as the strategist and amanuensis of the American Deserters Committee. Fast-talking, hyperactive, with a fondness for gangster slang, George was a former merchant marine who had avoided military service on a technicality that nobody could quite understand. He had not put in a claim for humanitarian asylum but instead held a visa that allowed him to work in Sweden as a journalist—secured, he said, through connec
tions made while studying at Columbia University. It was an odd story, but suspicion had yet to infect the body of deserter culture: he had his own apartment, his own typewriter, and an enthusiasm for the radical left. He had helped Michael Vale to draft the ADC’s Statement of Principles and secured a letter of support from Bertrand Russell, the secular saint of the anti-war movement.
Robert Argento, a twenty-three-year-old deserter from Miami Beach, Florida, watched all this, wide-eyed. For him, it had already been an eventful Sunday. That morning he had stepped off the night train clutching a piece of paper slipped into his hand by a friend at the Club Voltaire in Frankfurt: the address of a student anti-war group that might help him claim asylum. When he turned up at their offices with his knapsack, suitcase, and guitar, nobody looked up. They were too busy preparing for a demonstration, writing banners and cranking out flyers from the mimeograph machine. When Rob announced himself as a deserter, the room stopped.
“Suddenly it was like one of those Twilight Zone episodes where everyone is frozen in their places,” he told me. “It seemed like time stood still.” Only for a moment, though. The next few hours were a blur of activity. Smiles broke out; coffee and pastries appeared. Good-looking young Maoists vied for Rob’s attention, then whisked him off to an anti-war rally beside the ice rink in Kungsträdgården park. Rob listened to the speeches, declined the offer to give one of his own, and was then driven to the offices of Verdandi, where Hans Göran Franck shook him by the hand, welcomed him in a soft, mumbling voice, and invited him to join the meeting.
Michael Vale chaired. “He gave a rather disheveled impression,” remembered Rob, “but was, at the same time, a man of authority and purpose with some sort of pent-up anger. At that time none of us knew who he was, except that he adeptly took over the meeting. We each assumed, individually, that the others knew him and that his assuming the leadership was through some sort of previous consensus.” Looking back, Rob recalled the meeting as a series of fait accompli. Michael Vale taking charge; the committee called into existence; the skinny, elfin figure of Bill Jones, enthroned as spokesman. “Who were these guys?” he wondered. “All this time later, I’m still not sure.”
* * *
IN THE STORY of the Vietnam deserters and war resisters who sought refuge in Sweden, no single figure looms larger than Michael Vale. He was not a big man. Not physically imposing. He seemed to wear the same clothes every day, and the cold Swedish weather gave him a permanent snuffle. When reporters turned up at the office of the American Deserters Committee, Vale declined to give interviews. When cameras clicked, he found ways to avoid their gaze. But he exerted a powerful influence upon those around him. He did it with twinkling charm and well-timed bursts of anger. He did it with an unforced interest in the opinions of young people and a strong grasp of their psychology. Some deserters to whom I spoke suspected there was a sexual element in his attachment to them, though if that was the case he never tried to steal a kiss. They respected him. Even the ones who didn’t like him. An inner core of members developed such loyalty to him that it aroused comment. “I don’t know what Michael did to them,” one witness told me, “but he had power over them.” That power earned him a nickname. The Gray Eminence—a title he rejected, though not perhaps too firmly.
Once the ADC was formed, Michael Vale’s apartment became the hub of deserter life. A set of rooms where everyone was welcome, if they could bear the fog of cigarette smoke and the revolutionary disregard for cleanliness. Open one door and you might see Bill Jones sitting on the bed, a clattering typewriter on his knee, or George Carrano, arranging for deserters to give interviews to the press. (If the journalist was not sufficiently radical, a fee was levied.) Open another and you might discover a pair of copulating Swedish Maoists, or one of the drug-addled deserters to whom Vale gave space if they were trying to wean themselves from their habit. There was always somewhere to sleep, if you didn’t mind the bathtub, or sheets waxy with dirt. And there was always something to read, if you liked Marx, Émile Durkheim, or Isaac Deutscher’s three-volume life of Trotsky.
So much about Vale seemed questionable. He was not a deserter but the guardian of the deserters. He was not an anti-war campaigner but saw the war as an engine of revolutionary change. He devoted most of his time to political activity, and yet he was never short of cash. He told people that Chemical Abstracts paid his bills, but the ground between politics and psychology seemed to be his real enthusiasm. Michael Vale despised liberalism, individualism, the hippie counterculture. He wanted ADC members to peel away their attachment to these things in order to discover their true revolutionary selves. “Political dry-cleaning” was the term he favored. “Ego-stripping” was the one that would acquire currency in the group that surrounded him.
* * *
MIND GAMES WERE popular among radical groups of the period. If you followed the ideas of Wilhelm Reich, you could purge yourself of fascistic impulses by confessing your moral errors and having more orgasms. If you were a Maoist, you could achieve ideological purity by submitting to the brutal assessments of your peers. Michael Vale’s methods involved the intense examination of his subject’s class and family background, their political motivations, their dreams and fantasies. Those who had endured the treatment did not always want to discuss the experience. “It was personal and it doesn’t belong in anybody’s publication,” said one old associate I met, staring angrily into the middle distance as I attempted to probe further.
A full and dramatic description was provided by the man with whom we began this story, Jim McGourty, the California marine with the false passport. “Ego-stripping,” he explained, “meant to take people and tell them that they were really nothing. That they were pretentious and spoiled. Not cadre material. Not working-class. And on and on. To strip away the positive structure that person represented in terms of their mind, ego, and spirit. It was done one-on-one by Michael Vale, to people he wanted to get under his control.”
I asked what Vale did and was struck by the raw, present-tense nature of Jim’s reply. “He degrades you. Tells you that you’re worth nothing. Unless you do what he says. When all the defenses are down, he imposes.” It sounded like classic psychological manipulation: a long session of criticism and self-criticism, confession and humiliation, leading the subject to a state of submissive gratitude. Jim saw it as a form of brainwashing. There was a time, he said, when he and others at the core of their group would have done anything that Michael Vale asked.
Looking for clues to the view of the human mind that emerged in that crowded, smoky flat in central Stockholm, I ordered copies of all the translations for which Michael Vale had been credited during 1968 and 1969. Most were articles for the journal Soviet Psychology. Their emphasis was on research into the conditioned reflex—a phenomenon first recorded in 1902 by the Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov, when he noticed that his dogs salivated at the sound of the dinner bell, even if no dinner was provided. The translations showed that by the 1960s researchers had upgraded from dogs to apes and monkeys. One experiment Michael rendered into English involved an attempt to induce neurosis in laboratory apes by passing an electric current through the milk they were given to drink. Another observed the effects of “conflict situations” on captive baboons and langurs. The scientists disrupted their sleeping and feeding routines, kept them physically restrained, then released them into an outdoor enclosure and observed the change in their behavior.
Michael had also toiled on a much longer work. Forensic Psychiatry, a textbook edited by Dr. Georgi Morozov, director of the Serbsky Central Scientific Research Institute of General and Forensic Psychiatry in Moscow. This book, with its lurid green psychedelic cover, was a landmark in the literature. But its significance was more political than medical. By early 1969, the Serbsky had begun to acquire a reputation as a psychiatric gulag, a place where doctors examined dissidents, diagnosed them with schizophrenia, and kept them docile with psychotropic drugs. Michael’s translation gave English readers one of
the earliest accounts of the methods used by Soviet doctors to manage rebellious minds.
* * *
IN 1973, LUCINDA Franks, a twenty-seven-year-old Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist, went to Sweden and interviewed deserters who had passed through Michael Vale’s orbit: her book Waiting Out a War depicted men who were still smarting from the experience. “You’ve got to admire him, though,” said one. “He’s like a Rasputin and he’s got technique. He browbeats new guys for the first few days and lets up and they end up loving him because it feels good when you stop banging your head against the wall.” A comrade agreed. “Yeah, you’ve got to admire him … like you admire the work of a butcher.”
Following the same trail four decades later, I found the quotes had barely changed. One old acquaintance bristled at the mention of Vale’s name. He was, she told me, “a nasty piece of work … a monster.” Another suggested that he might have been a creature of the U.S. Army Security Agency, employed to spy on the deserters.
Margareta Hedman, a Swedish Maoist who hung around Mike’s apartment and married Bill Jones just after her eighteenth birthday, had a different suggestion for me: “We assumed he was KGB.” On the phone from a beachside apartment in Hawaii, a deserter named Thomas Taylor told me that his life in Stockholm had come unraveled after he spotted Vale in the lavatory at Verdandi, receiving a bag of cash from a representative of North Vietnam. “I thought that was treasonous,” said Taylor. “Accepting money from the fucking enemy. Michael is lucky he’s alive. My friend Paul wanted to kill him, but I talked him out of it.” Another veteran told me: “I don’t know exactly what Michael Vale was up to, but I do know that he was like the guy in the jungle in Apocalypse Now.”
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