After the ceremonial burning of a draft card, we follow the deserter delegation out into the street. Bill Jones, looking impossibly boyish and happy, embraces a Vietnamese woman, who presses a red gladiolus into his hand. The ADC members introduce themselves on camera, reporting the details of their desertions as if they were giving name, rank, and serial number.
“We see our act of desertion as a concrete act of solidarity with the Vietnamese people,” says Bill. “Ninety percent of the GIs in Vietnam are innocent,” adds Mark Shapiro. “They were sent there by an aggressive nation, the United States.” Chuck, though, makes the most radical remarks: “When the time comes to return to the States,” he says, “I’ll be ready to go back there and do my part to help others resist the system and fight the system.” I couldn’t help thinking that he had kept his promise—only he now expressed it in the language of the American alt-right.
The deserters enjoyed their visit to Bulgaria. There was something in the air: a new political energy as alien to the Soviet authorities as it was to their opponents in the West. When Bill Jones railed against the criminality of American policy in Vietnam, Soviet journalists scribbled happily. But, Bill recalled, they stopped when he accused the Soviets of using the war in Indochina as an opportunity to occupy the moral high ground. “The Soviet Union,” he said, “is part of the problem, not the solution.” To amplify the point, he walked around the city clutching a copy of Isaac Deutscher’s critical biography of Stalin, enjoying the ripple of scandal it produced.
Once the applause and bouquet exchanging were over, Bill and Mark left Sofia for a ten-day tour of Europe, avoiding NATO countries in which they risked detention. They went to Prague, where Bill strolled through Wenceslas Square and saw a city thriving under Dubček’s liberal reforms. (“It was like walking through Hyde Park,” he said.) They went on to Warsaw, where Bill knocked at the door of the Cuban Embassy to ask if Havana would accept them if Sweden decided to turn them away. (“We could have ended up cutting sugarcane for the rest of our lives,” he guffawed.) On August 16, they boarded a Polish airliner to Stockholm and prepared to face the music.
When they landed at Arlanda, Mark and Bill were taken briefly into custody, then sent on their way with fresh temporary residence permits. They gave an impromptu press conference, in which Bill accused SÄPO, the Swedish security service, of harassing the ADC in order to hamper its campaign against the Vietnam War. Their joint statement was defiant: “The struggle of the Vietnamese people is more important to us than our stay here.” But one reporter caught a more somber reflection from Mark. “I don’t know where to go if I will be expelled,” he said. Four days later, Soviet tolerance of Dubček’s reforms terminated with the arrival of a column of tanks.
* * *
THESE MISADVENTURES DID not halt the travels of the ADC. In the revolutionary summer of 1968, the traffic remained heavy. Oda Makoto, the Beheiren leader who had helped smuggle Mark Shapiro and his comrades out of Japan, came to Sweden in July with news of more deserters ready to travel the high road via Moscow. Ray Sansiviero, a teenage marine from Long Island, and Ou Yang Yotsai, a twenty-four-year-old army sergeant, born in Shanghai, arrived a few days later. Both had seen action in Vietnam—Sansiviero had been wounded at the Battle of Khe Sanh—and both had gone on Soviet television to tell stories of plunder, torture, and rape.
Sansiviero did not remain in Sweden long. After eighteen months of fishing, moodily, on the embankment in front of Stockholm’s Grand Hôtel, he disappeared. The ADC membership thought he had been kidnapped by the CIA. Actually, he’d given himself up to the authorities, to face court-martial and a year’s hard labor. A third man, Randy Coates, had set out with Sansiviero and Yotsai but did not even make it to Sweden. After the usual rituals—museum visits, vodka binges, dinner with Yuri Andropov and Premier Alexei Kosygin—he went to the U.S. Embassy in Moscow and turned himself in. The intelligence men settled Coates down for a nice long chat: all the names he could remember were noted down and filed for future reference.
Routes from the West were also busy. GIs who came to the Club Voltaire in Frankfurt received Hans Göran Franck’s phone number with their cup of coffee. In Britain, Michael Randle, an anti-nuclear activist who in 1966 had helped spring the Soviet spy George Blake from prison, printed thousands of deserter information leaflets and took them to the European mainland stowed in the same hollow section of the camper van in which he’d smuggled Blake into East Germany.
Michael Vale was also on the move, cultivating deserter-friendly contacts in Britain and France. (He visited the campaigning actor Vanessa Redgrave, though this was not without its difficulties: he forgot to put on a belt, which obliged him to keep his hands in his pockets throughout the meeting.)
At 56 Queen Anne Street, headquarters of the Union of American Exiles in Britain, the runaway Hollywood agent Clancy Sigal dispatched deserters to Sweden under the supervision of his fellow expatriate Harry Pincus, a tall, elegant, acid-dropping medical student he’d met while working at R. D. Laing’s radical therapeutic community in the East End. (The two volunteers had bonded when Sigal used a swift blow from a table leg to free Harry from the violent grip of a delusional resident.) They helped the deserving and the undeserving: Sigal remembered a deserter who arrived in London with his girlfriend, asking for funds to get them to Sweden: “We gave them the money—$600—and then we got a postcard from some desert island that said, ‘There’s a sucker born every minute.’”
Paris, though, was the busiest and most dramatic scene. Here, a complex constellation of GI welfare groups flickered into life, offering soft beds and hard Marxist literature to men making landfall in France. The noisiest and most radical was FUADDR, which sounds like something Steve Martin would say in The Man with Two Brains, but stood for the French Union of American Deserters and Draft Resisters. Its prime movers were a law student named Larry Cox—a future head of the American branch of Amnesty International—and a young American activist known as Arlo Jacobs, an expatriate member of Students for a Democratic Society, the most prominent radical youth organization in the States.
FUADDR’s longer lived and more snappily named rival was RITA (Resisters Inside the Army), run by Thomas Schwaetzer, a breathless and disheveled Austrian who used the nom de guerre Max Watts and referred to his work as the “Baby Business.” The hosts of RITA’s safe houses were known as babysitters; the deserters were code-named Baby A, Baby B, Baby C, until four trips through the alphabet had been completed. Not all were easy charges. Baby A was a troubled Texas teenager who had joined the army to get out of a Waco orphanage: he was found a place in a psychiatric hospital in the Loire Valley, where he was classed as either a patient or a gardener, depending on who asked. Baby B had been a heroin addict since the age of twelve. Baby C had joined the army only to escape a prison sentence for stealing his thirty-first car. They both lodged with a Dutch woman in an apartment on the rue Saint-Jacques—from which they were briskly extracted when she disappeared to her bedroom and put a gun to her head.
Paris being Paris, some of RITA’s friends had names worth dropping, and not all these details were shared with Max’s glamorous patrons. His unpublished memoirs, stored in an archive in Amsterdam, furnished the details. Marguerite Duras, the novelist who scripted Mike Vale’s favorite movie, Hiroshima Mon Amour, met Max at a table in Les Deux Magots, bringing a baby she had imported from New York—a hulking young specimen hot with glandular fever. The expatriate American artist Alexander Calder allowed Max’s infants to lie low at his country home, where they gazed in bafflement at the mobile sculptures twisting in the garden. Jane Fonda, hugely pregnant, struggled up the stairs to Max’s second-floor apartment with a carpetbag stuffed with her husband’s cast-off clothes, and she invited the deserters to a preview screening of Barbarella. (They were unimpressed by everything except her zero-gravity nudity.) Max gained another famous sponsor when his downstairs neighbor arrived to complain about his habit of clomping over the flagstone floor in his boots. Cath
erine Deneuve accepted his apologies and was soon supplying him with donations.
France maintained careful neutrality toward the Vietnam War and was tolerant of its first seventy-five or so resident deserters and draft dodgers. Fourteen-day permits were easy to acquire and renew. But the events of May 1968 changed that. Paris became a battleground between riot police and student demonstrators. Barricades were built across the streets. Arlo Jacobs and the deserters of the FUADDR declared themselves allies of the new French revolution and preached the overthrow of de Gaulle. This defiance had consequences. When the smoke had cleared and the tear gas dispersed, all deserters found life measurably more difficult. Those who declined to renounce political activity were refused new paperwork—which meant that they had a choice between living underground in France or seeking humanitarian asylum in Sweden.
Bill Jones remembered the crisis. “When ’68 happened they started to crack,” he recalled. He and other ADC members traveled south and escorted new recruits up to Stockholm, sometimes collecting them from Larry Cox’s safe house in the Paris suburb of Pantin, sometimes from a farm conveniently close to the Belgian border. “We got in touch with this guy called Arlo,” he said. He winced as he said the name. “Not a guy to be trusted.” I found Bill’s attitude instructive. It said something about the atmosphere of suspicion that defined the culture of the deserter networks—a suspicion that seemed to swirl most thickly around its leaders and coordinators.
Like Michael Vale, Arlo Jacobs was a figure who inspired doubt that persisted long after he disappeared from the scene. Max Watts, for instance, considered him a villain. Watts’s papers contained page after page of allegations. Arlo, said Max, “did more harm to RITA, us, than any agent, known, before or since.” The two men disagreed on one of the great debates of the anti-war movement—whether GIs should desert their posts or resist the war from inside the army. Arlo’s response, claimed Max, was to start a whispering campaign that RITA was a CIA front and that Max was tricking deserters into returning to base to face rough military justice.
Max had the opportunity to confront Arlo at a meeting of deserters in Paris’s Latin Quarter. “When Arlo found me at the meeting, he became unhappy, wanted to leave,” Max wrote.
Philip Wagner, an extremely pacifistic, but very big GI, 6 foot 4, and, although an intellectual, in very good physical shape, reached over and took Arlo’s ear. He suggested Arlo sit on a table, so we could all hear his version, and when Arlo seemed unwilling, helped him up. It is the only time I have ever seen anybody lifted up by one ear, but I now know it can be done. Asked point blank, Arlo denied that he’d ever said Max was an agent, or that RITA was a CIA plot, and that in any case he wouldn’t say it any more.
Arlo, it seems, failed to keep his promise. RITA had secured the help of the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, who agreed to let Max use his address as a poste restante for deserter mail. Once the CIA rumors reached him, the letters went nowhere. “That Arlo, deprived of an audience, by the evident success of ‘our’ line, turned to bad-mouthing, mongering, personal attacks and eventually sabotage—well, that may have been instructions from CIA Headquarters in Langley or just his own bad character. Unless someone else writes their memoirs, and we get to see them, I doubt we’ll ever know.”
Max Watts died in 2010. But Arlo, I discovered, was very much alive and happy to discuss his colorful past. His real name was Bo Burlingham. He was a California-based business journalist who wrote books with titles such as Small Giants: Companies That Choose to Be Great Instead of Big. I met him for coffee in the flower-filled courtyard of the Berkeley City Club and listened to a wry assessment of his radical years.
After leaving Paris in July 1968, he said, he’d stuck with the faction of Students for a Democratic Society that became the Weather Underground—a revolutionary cadre who were not averse to using explosives to advance their cause. (History shows that they were better at blowing up themselves than agents of U.S. imperialism.) “I didn’t stay long,” he said. “But it was long enough to get my ass indicted.”
Bo was skeptical about the deserters. “There was nothing particularly admirable about them,” he said. “These were not courageous people standing up on principle.” He was also skeptical about Max Watts—and remembered entertaining the idea that he was the real CIA agent in Paris. His most generous thoughts were about Michael Vale. “He was an intellectual, I was an intellectual,” he said. “But that’s really giving us much too much credit. We were failed students is, I think, a better way to put it. We talked philosophical bullshit and ideological bullshit.”
He warned me not to take my research too seriously and suggested that I view these intrigues as a form of 1960s performance art. “There was an awful lot of playacting that was going on,” he said. “I was part of that. We were all sort of playacting, trying to be relevant. Aware that these big events were happening, and wanting to have some part in them.”
* * *
THE LINE BETWEEN life and art is sometimes blurred. In my conversations with Michael Vale, he too played down the genuinely subversive nature of his activities, but it was easy to see why they might have given rise to official anxiety. Michael and his friends were building relationships with organizations dreaming of revolution: the SDS, British Trotskyists, Greek radicals living in exile after the military coup of 1967, a shadowy organization known as the Phoneless Friends—an underground network led by the Egyptian revolutionary Henri Curiel, who wanted the American deserters to live in the provinces and train as a guerrilla force. Some of these people only fantasized about taking up arms against the authorities. Some, like Curiel’s followers, kept rifles under their beds.
Chuck Onan became an accessory to this plotting. After the Sofia festival he and the smooth-tongued draft dodger George Carrano went to Budapest to attend a conference with representatives of the American New Left, the North Vietnamese government, and the National Liberation Front. “The purpose of the meeting,” said Chuck, “was to come up with strategies to create disruptive demonstrations in the United States that would create difficulties for the army.” Vietnamese delegates made heartfelt speeches thanking American deserters and draft resisters for their support. Chuck offered a speech in reply, scripted for him by George Carrano. Everybody sang “We Shall Overcome.”
Less formal contacts also took place. The Vietnamese asked for an explanation of a slogan then popular among U.S. radicals—“Up against the wall, motherfucker.” At the bar of the Hotel Ifjúság, the founder of the Cornell University chapter of the SDS led the house band in a version of the Beatles song “Money (That’s What I Want),” hoping that the audience would understand the irony. One of the Viet Cong’s chief military strategists responded to some bad service in the hotel restaurant by announcing: “Next time, we attack.”
The star of the show, Chuck recalled, was Bernardine Dohrn, a charismatic young lawyer from Whitefish Bay, Wisconsin, who had been elected to the leadership of the SDS in June. American radicals, she declared, had much to learn from the methods of the National Liberation Front. A thrilling image took shape: a U.S. version of the Viet Cong that would take up arms in New York, in Los Angeles, in Washington, DC, and bring revolution to the streets of America. A global movement in which deserters, students, and Indochinese guerrillas might all play their part. “In effect,” Chuck said, “we were collaborating with the enemy.”
The American authorities had already come to the same conclusion. They knew about the contacts among these radical groups. They knew about the ADC’s trip to Sofia. President Johnson had been briefed on Bill Jones’s Bulgarian plans ten days before the World Festival of Youth and Students began. Obtaining the intelligence was easy. Somebody close to the American Deserters Committee was reporting everything back to Langley, Virginia.
* * *
IN A COMMUNITY of radical exiles like the Stockholm deserters, the presence of spies was a constant source of speculation. “If someone new arrived and there seemed to be something a little out of place
in their story, you always thought there might be something else going on,” said Bill Jones. It wasn’t said with regret. The ADC considered paranoia a useful weapon of self-defense. As the Jerum Affair had demonstrated, a sense of the enemy could keep members serious and vigilant. “I’m sure the CIA were running all kinds of operations,” said Bill. “Interfaces to try and get a better picture of what was going on in the Soviet Union. Sweden has been a hotbed of intrigue since before World War Two.”
To me, it seemed unenviable psychological territory: being nineteen, twenty, twenty-one, a long way from home, in a place where it was perfectly reasonable to suspect that one of your friends was probably also your enemy. Vincent Strollo, a deserter from Philadelphia, remembered the ADC leadership encouraging this thinking. “Michael Vale and Bill Jones propagated that kind of paranoia,” he recalled. “Or maybe it wasn’t paranoia. Maybe it was the truth.”
Clancy Sigal observed its effects. “All deserters believed all other deserters were CIA,” he said. “You could take that as a given. What they felt for each other was a curious mixture of brotherhood and mistrust.” Clancy thought only a handful of real spies had slept on the beds and sofas administered by him and his collaborator Harry Pincus, and that most betrayed themselves with crude attempts to encourage the deserters to acts of violence. Most CIA talk, he suspected, was fantasy. “There was this sixteen-year-old from Tennessee who called himself ‘Kid Blue,’” he said. “I had a call from him. He said he was in the U.S. Embassy and that the CIA had kidnapped him and were torturing him. He was making all this noise on the phone. ‘Help! They’re murdering me! Aaaarrgggh!’ That was the last I heard from him.”
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