To illustrate his argument, he told me about a thought experiment he once conducted upon himself, using a memory from his childhood in Cincinnati. When he was eight, he said, his grandmother went to a bingo game and left him playing in the street. Another boy, three or four years his senior, proposed that they go out to meet some girls.
“We didn’t find any, of course,” he recalled. “So he took me to a public toilet and tried to hump me from the back. He was totally ineffectual. It didn’t last more than a couple of minutes. And I have that very stark memory, right? I could convert that into a real trauma. So I started thinking about it.” He imagined a choir of people telling him that this older boy was bad and cruel. “And I can find myself in my mind, doing that. Making it into a real event in my life. That’s what the trauma merchants do.” Similar figures in Sweden, he suggested, encouraged the belief that his work with the deserters amounted to a form of moral and psychological torture. “It left me open to charges.”
What charges? I asked.
Mike Vale scanned the restaurant theatrically and replied in a stage whisper: “C … I … A!”
* * *
WE MET MANY times over the next three years. In the British Library. In coffee bars around London. In Paris, when he decided to sell his flat and move permanently to Vietnam. I never turned down one of his invitations. His charisma, I suppose, had begun to exert its effect over me.
Once he summoned me to Edinburgh, where he was registered with an NHS doctor. (Mike Vale must be one of the few International Men of Mystery with a hearing aid paid for by the British taxpayer.) On that occasion, we spent the day together. We had a long brunch at an American-style diner on Trongate, walked down the Royal Mile, and took refuge from the cold in a café, where he ordered soup and a sandwich. (Somehow he always managed to get two meals out of me.) I then accompanied him to the doors of the hospital. I asked him where he was headed next. As usual, it was some international hot spot. “To the Turkish-Syrian border,” he said. “It looks very interesting down there.”
Certain rituals developed. He would encourage me to track down figures from his past, often men whom he thought he might have treated too roughly. If they condemned him, like Jim, he shrugged. If they praised him, he would express satisfaction and joke about his “psychovoodoo skills.”
Between these exchanges, Mike would maintain long periods of silence. Just at the point I’d convinced myself he’d been killed while poking his nose in some skirmish halfway across the world, an email would appear in my in-box: “Just a quick note to let you know I haven’t died yet. Although, like any good lefty I do a bit of dying every day when I read the news.”
We often talked about politics. Michael would usually take the pro-Kremlin line. He doubted that Russia was responsible for the crash of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17. He asked why the BBC was not investigating a building in Ukraine that looked like a chocolate factory on the outside but was probably a Mossad listening post. Did I know that Petro Poroshenko, the president of Ukraine and a vocal opponent of Putin, had made his fortune in the confectionery business and was really a Jew named Valtsman? “It all fits,” he said.
* * *
THERE ARE SOME people in life who become an object of speculation to all who know them. Michael Vale is one of them. If two of his acquaintances happen to meet, he is never far from the conversation. “Michael Vale,” said Rob Argento, the deserter from Miami Beach, “was dedicated to an idea, single-minded, a manipulator who didn’t really care for the consequences for any one individual because the end goal was so significant. And he had a way of attracting people who needed a leader. Or a father figure.”
Perhaps Michael’s own fatherless childhood helped him to understand what was required. Lost boys seemed most drawn to him, and their company amused him. “There was a guy called Hyatt,” he told me, “who left his base in Germany because he was behind in the payments on his Ford Mustang. He only ended up in Sweden because he took a wrong turn on the road to Belgium. I tried to coach him for his interview with the Swedish police. I told him to say that he was opposed to the war in Vietnam. But the kid just looked at me and said, ‘Where’s Vietnam?’”
I heard many stories about the lost boys of the ADC. Walter Marshall, a reform school runaway who had joined and deserted from the army under a name borrowed from a stolen passport. (The name was unhelpfully exotic: his deception was revealed when the real Jesus Zeus Lorenzo Mungi was killed in action.) Billy Staton from Wichita, Kansas, hooked on speed, who spent an entire winter disassembling and assembling a clock. (He was jailed in 1970 for dealing LSD.) John Ashley, the son of a senior civilian official at the Pentagon, who tried to use a suicide attempt to avoid a Vietnam posting. (The army psychiatrist told him this was a logical response to his situation and declined to recommend a discharge.) A gifted writer who supplied a witty memoir of his desertion to the Washington Post, Ashley incinerated his talent with amphetamines. I’d hoped to track him down for this book. One deserter told me he’d seen Ashley drinking on the street. Others that he changed his name and died under it. The trail led to a homeless hostel in Stockholm and no further.
Another force drew members of the American Deserters Committee tightly together, one that would also eventually split them apart. The fear that there were spies working among them to break up their movement, to persuade, cajole, or blackmail them into returning. Almost all of my interviewees had a story about being followed. Michael Vale could describe the man who watched him take breakfast each morning at the all-you-can-eat buffet in Stockholm’s Central Station. A draft resister from Seattle told me of the time two American eavesdroppers were found hiding in a cupboard in the office of the ADC. Bill Jones, the chief spokesman of the ADC, talked of anonymous threatening letters; the harassment of families back home in the States; calls made to deserters by strangers who asked to meet in out-of-the-way places.
The most insidious threat was that of infiltration. “If someone had a disagreement with somebody, they would accuse them of being a cop or an agent,” said one old comrade of Michael Vale. “That, unfortunately, was absolutely part of the culture.”
* * *
THE FIRST REAL blow came on March 12, 1968, when ADC members opened their newspapers to see a familiar face in an unexpected context. Ray Jones, ballet teacher and Sweden’s first American deserter, was interviewed by reporters in the arrivals lounge of Frankfurt Airport. A pair of military policemen and the U.S. Army’s regional provost marshal had met him at the steps of the plane and allowed him to speak to the press before being driven off to the stockade at Nuremberg—the very facility from which he had deserted. Jones stated that he was not a Communist. He said that he loved America and did not want to run from its problems. The Swedes had used him as a political pawn, and, moreover, they were not as liberal-minded as their reputation suggested. “The Swedes have a natural prejudice against black people,” he said, “and know nothing about Negroes.” How long did he think he would spend in prison? “I figure ten years,” he said.
The photographs showed Jones staring grimly into the middle distance. In the foreground of one picture, his wife, Gabriele, looks apprehensively toward the camera, perhaps because the photographer has swooped in close to get a shot of the object lying between her and her husband—a bassinet containing their three-month-old son, Ray Jones IV.
Two days later, a man and a woman appeared in Stockholm to claim responsibility for wooing Jones back from exile. The man was William R. Russell, a corpulent, middle-aged American journalist from Mississippi, editor of a privately run newspaper for soldiers called Army Times. The woman was his twenty-five-year-old deputy Patton Lindsley Hunter. “I am here,” Russell announced, in a rowdy press conference at the Strand Hotel, “to get in contact with the Americans who have left their military service and set up residence here. I cannot see why these boys should have to live outside their homeland for the rest of their lives.”
Russell accused the Swedish government of exploiting the Am
erican exiles for its own political advantage. He alleged that some of the deserters were criminals on the run, and that others were agents provocateurs stirring up anti-American sentiment on behalf of some foreign power. He knew, he said, that many genuine deserters wanted to return home, but he did not know how. To those men, he offered a deal. He would be leaving Sweden on Sunday night. Anyone who wished to join him would be guaranteed a free flight out of Stockholm and lenient treatment from the military authorities. Those who waited, those who had to be brought in, could expect much rougher handling. Hans Göran Franck, he said, did not understand American law. “All these men are still enlisted, and belong to the army or the navy, and they will remain so for as long as they live.”
The Swedish press was no happier to hear this than Michael Vale and Bill Jones. Reports in the next day’s papers compared Russell to the protagonist of The Quiet American, Graham Greene’s novel about an undercover CIA man in Vietnam. They also expressed puzzlement about who had sponsored his mission. “Despite our concerted attempts,” wrote one journalist, “it was impossible to grasp on whose behalf he was speaking; for himself, for his publication, for his country, or for the army.” The photographers were no more sympathetic: they took shots that depicted Russell as a startled amphibian in pencil tie. Not a man with whom you might elope on a night flight to Frankfurt.
The ADC struck swiftly back with its own press conference the next day. Russell’s offer, it said, was a publicity stunt intended for an audience back home in the States, who might conclude that deserters who did not accept his generous terms were Communist sympathizers or Soviet agents. With impressive confidence, the committee accused Russell of being part of a CIA operation against them, which meant that the deserters must be near the top of the White House agenda and should expect the full force of the agency’s firepower. It was a story of harassment, coercion, conspiracy—and Bill Jones could not resist a melodramatic flourish: “This is a clear indication that the U.S. government intends to abduct people who are seeking political asylum.” Russell and Hunter were present to hear the statements. When they were spotted in the audience, they were asked to leave. One of the deserters pursued them down the street and asked Hunter out to dinner. She declined.
“We were sure that Russell and that girl weren’t really journalists,” said Michael Vale, as we sat drinking coffee at a café under the arches of St. Pancras station. “They were intelligence agents who’d come to Sweden to make a big propaganda ploy to get the deserters to go back.”
“So what did you do?” I asked.
“The idea was a natural,” he said. “It just flowed from the situation. We set a trap for them. And used a deserter as bait.”
4 / THE JERUM AFFAIR
THE JERUM DORMITORY rises eight stories above Gärdet, a modernist garden suburb of Stockholm where lawns and footpaths connect concrete apartment blocks, and the odd fat brown rabbit lollops across the grass. The building, an accommodation block built for students of Stockholm University, has undergone some cosmetic changes since the 1960s. White plastic panels now clad its concrete skin. The basement has been transformed, incongruously, into a car dealership. But the student bicycles remain, rowed below the big plastic letters that spell out the name of the block, and memorialize what became the event old deserters still know as the “Jerum Affair.”
It began at breakfast time on Sunday, March 17, 1968, when William Russell received a phone call from a mysterious man named John Armfield. (Actually a mysterious man named Michael Vale.) Armfield said he was a Fulbright scholar staying at a student hostel in Stockholm and had news of an African American deserter staying in the Jerum building who wanted to leave Sweden but lacked the documents to get through customs. Russell assured Armfield that if the deserter came to the U.S. Embassy, then the consul, Merl Arp, could authorize the necessary paperwork. Armfield said that wouldn’t be possible. The man was too nervous. The embassy would have to come to him. Russell agreed to the proposal. He summoned Patton Hunter from her hotel room. He called the embassy and got Merl Arp out of bed. And with a typewriter and a sheaf of blank forms, the three took a taxi out to Gärdet to receive their prize.
The ADC’s own account of the affair, preserved in the personal archive of Hans Göran Franck, contains what purports to be a transcript of the call between Russell and Vale. Russell is allocated lines that might have suited Robert Mitchum in Cape Fear. He talks about putting troublesome deserters in straitjackets, or kidnapping them, or subduing them with the weaponized charms of Patton Lindsley Hunter. “Patton can take care of him,” he says. “She’ll bring a lot of joy to him.”
“Who is the girl?” asks Vale.
“Oh, she’s another agent,” replies Russell.
Vale asks why any deserter would trust an agent.
“Because he’s a nigger,” says Russell.
Vale asks him to repeat the word.
“Ah didn’t say nigger,” reads the transcript. “Ah said negro.”
When I asked Michael Vale about these events, I received a spontaneous dramatic performance. Michael reenacted his version of the phone conversation with Russell, holding an invisible receiver to his ear and adopting the accent of a fastidious Mississippi gentleman. You have a boy for us? We sure would appreciate that. That would be mighty fine. The tone was appropriately stagey. The whole affair was a piece of theater. Jimmy Dotson of Ballinger, Texas, who had recently deserted from his garrison in northern Italy, was cast as the young African American deserter who, like Ray Jones, had grown disenchanted with Swedish society and longed to return home. George Carrano, the fast-talking New York draft dodger with the puzzling visa status, was also a part of the sting. His girlfriend was awarded the role of Dotson’s Scandinavian sweetheart. A photographer and reporter from Tidsignal, a left-wing student newspaper, were directed to hover in the wings, awaiting their cue. Down below, Vale and Carrano watched Russell, Hunter, and Arp ascend the stairs, then indulged in a bit of comic business with the taxi driver. “I did the stupidest thing,” Michael told me. “I should have taken their bags out and looked through them. Carrano suggested it, but I said it was against the rules of the game.” Instead, they sent the car away. It was probably a prudent decision. Photographing a U.S. diplomat was one thing. Stealing his luggage would have been espionage.
* * *
PATTON LINDSLEY HUNTER retired from journalism long ago and is now an artist who paints and teaches in the Tampa Bay region of Florida. She was rather surprised to be contacted about a strange incident in a Swedish dormitory five decades ago, but she had admirable recall of the details. She described William Russell as secretive and self-centered. She knew he had a strained relationship with his family back home in the States, and she recalled his purchase of an armful of out-of-season Christmas gifts, for dutiful dispatch later in the year. She remembered the buildup to the trip: Russell looking pleased with himself and making excited calls from the Army Times office in Frankfurt. She remembered flying back from Sweden with Ray and Gabriele Jones, Russell trying to hide his disappointment when only a handful of journalists turned up to meet them at Frankfurt Airport. She also remembered that when she and Russell came back to Stockholm to fish for more deserters, Merl Arp was not an enthusiastic participant in the plan. “Even though I was right in the middle of it, I didn’t really know what was going on,” she said. “But I guess Bill chose to take me to Sweden out of all his reporters because I was young and single, and these were young boys he was trying to attract.”
As her name suggests, Patton Hunter is from a military family. A well-connected one: in 1968, her uncle was the head of Army Intelligence in Heidelberg. (“He took me aside and warned me that I was mixing with some dangerous people,” she recalled.) However, despite this background—and the pro-war editorial line of Army Times—she had a strong personal sympathy for the deserters’ cause. Secretly, Hunter said, she admired their political stand, their articulate speeches, even the intelligence they had shown in setting the trap at the dormit
ory. “It was a smart thing to do,” she said, “because Bill bit hard on that bait.”
When Hunter, her boss, and the diplomat arrived at the correct room in the Jerum dormitory, they found it occupied by two Swedish women, one of whom introduced herself as the girlfriend of the deserter who wished to return. Moments later James Dotson appeared. They sat down to discuss how to proceed. Russell said he was pushing the authorities to begin the trial of Ray Jones as briskly as possible—so that the other deserters would feel assured about the promise of light treatment. “Light?” Dotson asked. “What do you think is a light sentence?” Russell estimated four months or less. Merl Arp unpacked his portable typewriter and began taking down Dotson’s details. The papers were soon ready to sign.
“Then,” said Hunter, “there was a commotion and three or four guys ran in and started taking pictures of us. Bill said: Smile, Pat, just smile, they won’t hurt you! I remember that I tried to stand in front of the guy who was signing the papers so they couldn’t get a good shot of him. I did that out of pure instinct.” Russell asked the intruders what they wanted. “You can read about it in tomorrow’s paper,” they declared. The camera clicked, bodies jostled, Hunter, Russell, and Arp went skittering back down to the ground floor, and the ADC and its allies had their story. The American consul and two supposedly independent journalists caught in a student bedroom, attempting to cajole a deserter into going home. Jim Dotson saved from the same fate as Ray Jones. A CIA plot foiled.
The Soviet daily Izvestia spoke of a “stormy operation” carried out in neutral Sweden by the U.S. intelligence services. Tidsignal had thunder of its own: “There is evidence for close collaboration between the U.S. Embassy in Stockholm and the secret U.S. agents who are working on the ground in Sweden. They are a threat to political refugees who have been granted asylum in our country. The government should take action against these agents for the security of these refugees.” The ADC handed out a press release bearing the names of seven embassy employees they believed were CIA officers. One deserter proposed that the ADC should petition Merl Arp for office space and a phone line at the U.S. Embassy, saving him the expense of tapping their phones and keeping them under surveillance. “See how we love our country?” he said. “We even save the taxpayer money.”
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