The most vivid account of Mike Vale’s activities came from Clancy Sigal, a novelist and critic who, in the late 1960s, ran a safe house for deserters lying low in London. Sigal had been an army observer at the Nuremberg trials, where his plan to assassinate Hermann Göring failed when his service revolver was confiscated on the way to the trial. (Once inside, the Reichsmarschall bested him in a staring competition across the courtroom.) Working in Hollywood after the war—on pictures such as Bride of the Gorilla—he was blacklisted for distributing anti-McCarthy literature. The FBI tapped his phones, heard him refer to himself and his friends as Iranoff, Buljanoff, and Kopalski, and took them to be Russian spies, rather than three men making a joke about Greta Garbo’s Soviet sidekicks in Ninotchka. This misunderstanding propelled Sigal toward London, where by 1968 he was receiving deserters in a flat above the Royal Asiatic Society on Queen Anne Street, and sometimes helping them move on to Paris and Stockholm.
“Nobody knew where Mike Vale came from,” he told me at his kitchen table in West Hollywood. “Nobody. I’d run into his type before and always run a mile.” What was his type? I wondered. “Conspiratorial,” said Sigal. “He breathed conspiracy. Now, when you get guys who are already paranoid, all you have to do is send out that vibe and, right away, you will draw people into your circle. A lot of the guys in Sweden went through the Mike Vale training program. They scared the shit out of me. Much to Mike’s delight.”
Sigal showed me an extract from his diary for January 1969. “Movement protocol,” it read, “demands I kiss the ring of the local Pope, ‘Mike Vail’ (perhaps his real name), the Stockholm stationmaster.”
A small, intense American in his angry forties, he insists on meeting in a gloomy Kungsgatan café whose only other customers at nearby tables appear to be his praetorian guard of young Americans in parkas and sulky expressions. Vail inhabits a world of festering paranoia and factional intrigue. Exile politics, always overheated, boils over in Sweden where there is so little else to do in long winter months. Toward the end of my visit, Vail and some of his boys entice me to a basement apartment in the Gröndal district and refuse to release me until I repent of my petty bourgeois crimes.
It wasn’t the worst experience he had in Stockholm. Another group of deserters, he said, had interrogated him in a second-floor office. “They threatened to kill me unless I confessed to being a CIA spy,” he recalled. “One of them pulled out a gun. So I climbed out of a window and jumped into a snowdrift.”
* * *
WHAT HAD HAPPENED to Michael Vale? Where had he gone? I contacted dozens of deserters, but none seemed to know. The book stacks of the British Library held some evidence. A long trail of translations, leading from his Swedish period to the first decade of the present century. Pristine, unfingermarked copies of Recent Trends in Soviet Psycholinguistics and The Genesis of the Stalinist Social Order. His name listed on the editorial board of Critique, a journal of socialist economic theory published by Glasgow University. (Ralph Miliband, the father of a future British Labour Party leader, was involved in the early days.) I emailed its editor, who replied that he would try to discover whether Vale wished to be contacted. Months passed without an answer. Then I found an address for an American academic who had shared a conference platform with Vale in 2009, where he was described as an “independent scholar.” She said she would forward my message. Vale himself replied within the hour.
His email was sent from Ukraine. A country which was then in turmoil, its president overthrown, tires burning in front of the parliament building, Russian tanks rattling over the border. It was not a place to visit without good reason, and being a spy seemed as good a reason as any. Vale suggested that we meet in London in the autumn. Three weeks later, however, he emailed again to say that he was already in town. I suggested lunch at my workplace, the BBC, but the idea didn’t appeal to him. Instead, he proposed meeting in a park in North London.
“Islington Green. Last bench on the right. I’ll be carrying something red.”
3 / THE TRANSLATOR
WHEN I ARRIVED, the bench had two occupants. One with a greasy blue anorak and street-drinker’s tan; one with a crumpled linen jacket spread over his knees like a seaside blanket. My eye moved from one to the other. “I guess you got the right guy,” said the man with the linen jacket, lifting up his something red—one of those calculator-like gadgets for checking your account when far from the bank.
He looked down-at-heel, depleted. His face, as cracked as late-period Walter Matthau’s, was shaved carelessly. If Michael Vale was in the pay of a government intelligence agency, then he needed to ask for a raise.
I tried to get some sense of his recent movements. He’d spent many years, he said, in France—so many that he now preferred to use the French version of his Christian name. He owned an apartment in Paris, but that was leased to a pair of Kazakh sisters, both astronomers, whose rent helped to fund his travels. Where had he been? Anywhere but America. There was no way he could go back there. Vietnam was now the place he felt most at home. The people were so friendly. Tactile. He had a theory that their sexuality was subtly different from that of Europeans. He’d coined a word for it: integumental. “Meaning that the skin—the integument—is a very sensuous organ.”
His plans for a summer on the Black Sea coast, he explained, had been cut short. The weather was fine, but the trigger-happy nationalist militias patrolling the roads had not encouraged him to prolong his visit. (Like a Russian patriot, he spoke of “the Ukraine,” subtly erasing its quarter century of independence.) Looking for a safer option, he’d driven to Bucharest and booked himself into a hostel, where his passport and wallet had been stolen by a plausibly charming American. Hotels, he said, were beyond his means, but he preferred it that way. The kids who stayed in cheap dormitories were better conversationalists. “They stop me from becoming fossilized,” he said.
I took him to a restaurant at the top of the green. He looked at the menu as if he’d never seen one before. The place was noisy. So noisy that the waitress, noticing my voice recorder and notepad, moved us to a quieter table. Over fish pie and a bottle of house white, Michael Vale told me the story of his life. He was born on August 17, 1935, into a world of domestic mysteries. One of these was pretty easy for him to crack and concerned his strong physical resemblance to the head of the Garfield Uniform Company of Cincinnati, where his mother made up the bills in the mail-order office. The other concerned Richard Alvin Hug, the cigar store clerk who received undeserved top billing on Michael’s birth certificate. Michael remembers glimpsing him only once, a figure on a brisk visit to his mother’s sickbed. (“That was your father,” said a helpful aunt.)
Mike’s surname was an inheritance from his stepfather, a lawyer named Emil Vale. Emil, too, had lost his original name, on the advice of a judge who told him that Isador Velemirov sounded too Serbian for the Cincinnati circuit. In more painful circumstances, he had also lost his left arm—sheared off in a bus accident. (His buddy in the seat in front suffered the same bloody forfeit.) Michael had no fond memories of Emil. His jaw clicked when he chewed. His favorite movie was Chetniks! The Fighting Guerillas, a gung ho World War II action film about Yugoslavia’s nationalist partisans. He once confined Mike to his bedroom for two and a half days, in a failed attempt to get the boy to call him “Daddy.” The head of the Garfield Uniform Company didn’t like Emil, either, and warned Mike’s mother against the marriage. Eleanor Hug, however, was thirty-four years old and lumbered with the sadly inappropriate name of a husband with whom she had never lived. She made the pragmatic choice. As did her son. After agreeing to address Emil as “Pop,” Mike never spoke another word to him again.
At fifteen, Mike said, he ran away from home and went on the road, selling magazine subscriptions door-to-door. It was, he said “a semi-hobo existence.” He told impressionable farmers that both his parents were dead and he was raising money to go to college. He sometimes slept under railway bridges. He was slammed briefly against the body
of a police car when a Pennsylvania housewife called the FBI after mistaking him for the Lipstick Killer, a serial murderer who had dismembered a six-year-old girl and scattered her remains through the Chicago sewer system.
When Mike tired of this species of hustling, he returned to Cincinnati and reenrolled in high school. Not the relatively prestigious one he had abandoned—alma mater of Rosemary Clooney and Doris Day—but a place where his classmates, most two years his junior, were the children of farmers and employees at the Procter & Gamble factory. He thrived there. “In those days,” he said, “the system gave you second chances.”
It also recognized talent. In 1954, Mike enrolled at Caltech, where he attended lectures by the physicist Richard Feynman. But the life did not suit him. He quit after a single term and began a bumpy four-college ride through an education system with limited sympathy for his preferred passions: by day, hermit-like occupation of the library among the shelves of Russian and German literature; by night, wandering around campus with a flask of gin and tonic, arguing about Kant and Hegel. Ohio State was the place he finally acquired his degree—by paying a fellow student to go through Reserve Officers’ Training Corps in his place.
Michael might have studied further—the University of Chicago, he said, made him an offer—but in the summer of 1961 he went back on the road, fixing the pattern he follows to this day. Wandering the world, absorbing new languages, supporting himself with translation and teaching assignments, getting into long conversations with strangers.
Why, I asked, had he gone to Sweden? “For love,” he said. But it soon became clear that he meant the opposite. Love was what he wanted to escape. In the summer of 1962 he fell into a relationship with a sculptor from Copenhagen. They met by accident on a hillside near Florence. Mike’s car had broken down; she was sitting at a café table, saw him trudging by, took pity. Like all the girlfriends he would tell me about, she was a young mother with a husband somewhere in the background, out of focus.
The affair was intense. She introduced him to Scandinavian literature. They imagined themselves as the doomed couple in the New Wave film Hiroshima Mon Amour. The sculptor wanted to leave her husband, but Mike had no desire to settle down. He was, he said, in the grip of an existential crisis. “The basic philosophical question for me was: if human problems were caused by Man, then could Man solve them? Because if not, if there was simply some fault in human nature that was impossible to remedy, then the only way out was mysticism.” It was a very Left Bank, Gauloises-smoking, turtleneck-sweater-wearing kind of crisis, but no less overwhelming for that. Which is why, to preserve his lover’s marriage and his own solitary lifestyle, Mike crossed the Öresund strait to Sweden, then entered the radical intellectual circle that would appoint him guru to the deserters.
* * *
THROUGH A SERIES of chances he couldn’t quite reconstruct, Mike found refuge in the household of Mirjam Israel, cousin of the Swedish lawyer Hans Göran Franck. (There was, insisted Mike, no romantic relationship between him and his new mentor.) One thing he recalled very clearly: it was a child of the household who triggered his political awakening—Dan Israel, Mirjam’s twelve-year-old son. He and his schoolmates were passionately opposed to the war in Vietnam and already considered themselves Maoists. “These kids were amazing,” said Mike. “They could summon up a demonstration overnight.” They clamored around the visiting American and bombarded him with questions about Marx, the class struggle, and the aims of the North Vietnamese—none of which he could answer.
Intoxicated by their enthusiasm and embarrassed by his ignorance, Mike immersed himself in the literature of the Left. He read Marx for the first time. (“Holy shit!” he thought. “This guy can solve our problems.”) He read Mao. (“A deviation.”) He read Isaac Deutscher’s three-volume biography of Leon Trotsky, the man who helped to lead the Bolshevik revolution—and, thanks to Stalin and an assassin’s ice ax, its most celebrated martyr. And here the Michael Vale story required a dramatic organ chord and a flash of lightning. Deutscher’s Trotsky—particularly the first volume, The Prophet Armed—was the book that illuminated the landscape and revealed to him his place within it. It was the story of an intellectual who became a revolutionary leader at the age of eighteen, who traveled the world, learning languages, writing for the radical press, and dealing with the chicanery of agents provocateurs. It seemed to speak directly to him, to offer him a blueprint for living.
“The abstract, humanitarian, moralist view of history is barren,” Trotsky asserted. “But this chaotic mass of material acquisitions, of habits, of customs, and prejudices, which we call civilization, had hypnotized us all, giving us the false impression that we have already achieved the main thing. Now comes the war and shows us that we have not even crawled out on our bellies from the barbarous period of our history.” For Trotsky it was the First World War; for Vale, it was Vietnam. When Hans Göran Franck offered him the job of overseeing the welfare of the American deserters arriving in the wake of the Intrepid Four, Mike was armed and ready.
“It was a fluke,” he insisted. “I just happened to have done my homework. But it quite quickly became more than a managerial position. I was struck by the grandness of the task. It wasn’t just about individual men who had come to Sweden for a variety of reasons, some of them pretty comical. These men were existential subjects. And I was responsible for them, because politically speaking, they were in a limbo. On the edge of the abyss.”
* * *
HERE, BETWEEN THE main course and the pudding, we had arrived in Rasputin territory. It was time to discuss the story told by everyone who had ever written about him. How he’d become a guru to an army of troubled young men, teenagers and twentysomethings, far from home. How he had dismantled them, psychologically, in order to fit them for the new revolutionary age. Jim McGourty had called it brainwashing. Lucinda Franks had written about butchery. How, I wondered, would Michael describe it?
I showed him the passages from Franks’s book. He smiled as he read it. “Yeah, I did that,” he said. “But that wasn’t the intent. I would harangue them for not wanting to be involved in politics. I would say: you’re in politics now whether you like it or not. If you harangue forcefully, people come around.” It was, he explained, a critical moment in history. “If it was true that the system had reached its end point, and there was going to be chaos, we had to be prepared for that. It’s like you do with kids. You don’t try to shield them from the realities around them. It was not a very nice or pleasant thing to do. But what else could I say to them? You’re safe, you’re in Sweden, you’re all right? I couldn’t tell them that because it wasn’t true.”
I thought Michael would be unwilling to discuss the subject of ego-stripping, but I was quite wrong. He was happy to share the history, theory, and practice. “I was obsessed,” he said, “with trying to work out why we have the values we have.” He had read Freud. He had read Wilhelm Reich. He wanted to use their therapeutic techniques to help the young men in his care. “It was a very serious and legitimate attempt to bring two theories together,” he said. “If you’re a social revolutionary you must do what you can within the domain over which you have power.”
Michael did not require a closed room and a lamp shone in the eyes. He used intense, sustained questioning, either one-to-one or within a group. He was not afraid to interrogate any aspect of a subject’s personality, politics, or emotional history. He was not afraid to shout. If they wept or broke down, that was a healthy part of the process. Those who did not rebel against him bound themselves to him. Sometimes, he said, he was embarrassed by their acts of submission. One man, he recalled, sought to please him by learning German, giving up pipe smoking, and spending his savings having one of Michael’s favorite books expensively rebound.
Middle-class deserters required the most work. They had to be cured of their attachment to liberal concepts and values. (“Oh God,” Michael exclaimed. “I can’t even move my mouth to say these words. Self-realization! Individual crea
tivity!”) They had to learn that their objections to the Vietnam War were not moral, as they believed, but aesthetic. War offended them not because it was wrong, but because it was ugly. “They didn’t like that message,” he said. “But they all listened. Even the ones who didn’t like me.”
Most of all, the deserters had to relinquish their egotism and abandon their sense of themselves as heroic individuals taking a stand. “There was one guy who came over,” said Michael, his mouth twisting in disgust. “A psychologist. A liberal. He brought his kids over. And he was so concerned about the war. He came in to me one day and he told me about a dream that he’d had. He’d dreamt that he was in a tank, driving down Pennsylvania Avenue from the Capitol Building. And he reaches the White House and it explodes. And he wanted me to interpret it. I was embarrassed for him! What ego!”
What, I asked, were the psychological consequences of this treatment? “Human beings have certain principles that we don’t know about until we overstep them,” he told me. “You can violate them, but once you do, you cease, even at the organic level, to be yourself. It exposes so many contradictions that you cease functioning as a human being.” Did he drive people over the edge? “Getting angry with people and raising your voice, that’s just normal,” he said. “But in Sweden, it’s not done.” He started talking about the women who allied themselves to the deserters. “Those girls, those little girls. I would make them cry!” he hooted. “There was this one. She was such an animal. Such a frail little thing. I made her cry so many times!” He was speechless with laughter.
It sounded sadistic. It sounded damaging. It sounded like a Pavlovian experiment designed to produce tears rather than saliva. But Michael insisted that ego-stripping was an essentially harmless process. It could not produce psychological trauma, he argued, because the idea of psychological trauma itself was a myth.
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