“He was a very strange person,” said Olle. “A little paranoiac. A little suspicious and unpredictable. But I really liked him for his energy and charismatic personality. He was a father figure to the deserters, and he gave them protection. He often hugged them. But they were also suspicious of him. It was very tense.” Years later, he said, he watched Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver and saw Mike reflected in Travis Bickle, the film’s intense conspiracist antihero.
To his surprise, the distributors of Deserter USA sent Olle to the Cannes Film Festival, in the hope of securing a deal to screen the film in America. He succeeded, but the picture did not travel far beyond New York, prompting some of his more suspicious acquaintances to suggest that the buyer had acquired the picture in order to fillet it for intelligence of use to the Central Intelligence Agency. “I doubt it, though,” said Olle. “That guy wasn’t clever enough to be CIA. He wasn’t even clever enough to distribute the film.”
When Deserter USA opened at Andy Warhol’s Garrick Theater in Manhattan, the New York Times film critic saved his fastest bullet for the final reel. “A climactic sequence,” he wrote, “is so absurdly staged and played as to be laughable.”
The source of his amusement was a dramatic reconstruction of the Jerum Affair, in which an American expatriate named Rudolph Pastor slipped into a suit like that of William Russell, the shady man from Army Times. (“He was scared,” recalled Olle. “He asked to sign a document saying that he was playing a fictional character and not a real person.”)
His scene with a young African American deserter plays like a seduction. We are in a hotel restaurant in Stockholm. There is wine, salad, a lounge pianist, curls of cigarette smoke. “They want you back,” says Pastor. “They want all you boys back. And I know they’re going to make it easy.” Then we cut to the offices of the ADC, where Bill Jones’s character is receiving news of the elopement. “We’ve gotta do something to stop this man!” he declares.
Bill’s voice-over introduces the ADC’s secret weapon—“John, a crafty New Yorker”—and, like a knight-errant to the rescue, up rides Michael Vale in his Volkswagen Beetle. In an agreeably chaotic apartment, Michael calls the enemy to set up the con. As he speaks, he relieves an itch using a long wooden back scratcher with a candy twist handle. He also has a sidekick. Playing Robin to his Batman is a character named Walt, an effete young man with a Zapata mustache and a tilted beret, who looks on approvingly as Michael ends the negotiation by giving a middle finger to the phone receiver.
Moments later we see the sting carried out. Jim Dotson sits in a student’s room, just as he did on the day. Michael Vale also reenacts his own life, sending away the taxi that has brought the embassy spooks to the green space of Gärdet. When the snapping and shouting and jostling are over, the final strophe of the film depicts the ADC at work: handing out newspapers, recording radio programs for broadcast by the Viet Cong, offering defiant words into the camera.
The film premiered in Sweden on April 14, 1969, to an audience composed mainly of ADC members and their friends. The screening was delayed by a bomb scare. The audience was asked to leave while the police made a fruitless search for explosives. “Some people read about that in the papers,” recalled Olle Sjögren, “and thought we’d come up with a clever way of getting free advertising.” The press also reported that a small knot of protestors got to their feet and shouted, “Long live the USA!” and “To hell with the Communists!” But Olle did not remember this. A different detail stuck in his mind. The premiere of Deserter USA had taken place at the Grand Cinema on Sveavägen. It was the same cinema from which the Swedish prime minister Olof Palme would walk on the night of February 28, 1986, into the path of his assassin.
* * *
WATCHING DESERTER USA in a glass-walled viewing room at the National Library of Sweden, it was hard to judge it as a piece of art. I could see it only as the record of a fragile moment in the lives of the men I was researching. A late summer moment, in which their moral and ideological confidence seemed precisely matched by their anxieties about spies and agents provocateurs. It was hard to say whether hope or fear sustained them more.
Olle Sjögren and Lars Lambert were so keen to speed the film into cinemas that they edited it on an exhausting twenty-four-hour shift system. But the political weather had altered before the film was off the cutting table. On September 15, 1968, the Swedes held a general election in which the Social Democrats achieved a landslide victory. In the year of the barricades, the Swedish electorate gave a firm endorsement to the status quo.
The Swedish Social Democrats played the game of 1968 more skillfully than other European governments. In France, the strikes and student demonstrations brought the country to a rancorous halt and sent President de Gaulle scurrying out of the country. Olof Palme, still a year away from becoming prime minister of Sweden, could walk into a hall of angry young protestors and be heard with respect. He may not have shared their relaxed attitude toward revolutionary violence, but he shared their instinct for activism. His uncompromising line on Vietnam demonstrated that. So did the presence of the deserters—the human evidence of the Social Democrats’ opposition to the war in Indochina.
The election result put Michael Vale and his comrades in a delicate position. They had alienated Bertil Svahnström and the Swedish Committee for Vietnam. They had positioned themselves far to the left of potential supporters in the Social Democrats. They began to feel themselves slipping out of fashion.
“Now the initial fascination of desertion has worn off,” wrote John Ashley, in a letter mailed to his mother in October 1968. “The slaps on the back in congratulating our unique protest have been forgotten.… And every time a deserter goes back we can almost hear the Swedish Government hide in a closet and breathe a sigh of relief. Sweden only wanted a few deserters to show her humanitarianism, the same way American suburban socialites want one Negro at a cocktail party.”
Some Swedes, however, were prepared to make more generous gestures. Sven Kempe, the owner of Linum, a successful textiles business in Uppsala, approached the ADC and professed his a desire to help its cause. Jerry Dass, a troubled former Green Beret, was given a live-in job at the Linum warehouse. More grandly, Kempe also gave the ADC the use of forty-four acres of farmland at the end of a long and winding forest road near Torsåker, a settlement best known as the location of a notorious seventeenth-century witch trial. He sank $10,000 into the project, purchasing equipment, seeds, and a pig named Porky.
The farm had been abandoned eight years previously and had no electricity or running water. But repairs and improvements were made, and twelve ADC members took up residence, pinned up their Che posters, played the Hair album very loud, and did their best to make something grow. “The work on the farm,” declared an editorial in Second Front Review, “will provide many deserters with an opportunity for employment, and the feeling of community will form the basis of the therapeutic process that many new deserters need after months of being worn down by the military machine.”
Despite the apparent good intentions, the soil produced nothing, and the farm at Torsåker gained a reputation among the deserters as a place of narcotic psychodrama. When I asked Michael Vale about the place, he remembered the presence of a dartboard bearing the face of Martin Luther King Jr., and a drug-addled deserter arriving in the middle of the night with the carcass of a deer he had caught and slaughtered in the woods. “He wanted to give it to his girlfriend,” Mike told me. “The warmth of its dead body reminded him of her. That’s so primitive, isn’t it?”
* * *
THE WINTER OF 1968–69 was a season of struggle for the ADC—a struggle against the Swedish authorities, who had grown tired of its uncompromising politics, and a struggle against itself. One of the stars of Deserter USA was a principal combatant in both. His name was Warren J. Hamerman, a smallish, round-faced college dropout who discovered radical politics while arranging bouquets at Sewall’s flower store in Baltimore. In the film he is rechristened Walt, and
he is seen storming into the Jerum building armed with a camera. Michael Vale called him Wally, mainly to annoy him. “He was an ass licker in a non-ass-licking environment,” Michael told me. “He always had his tongue hanging out.” In more generous moods, when imagining his closest comrades as their equivalent figures in the life of Trotsky, Michael thought of Warren as the ADC’s answer to Zinoviev, the former shop assistant who helped to found the Bolsheviks and was executed on trumped-up conspiracy charges in 1936.
Warren wouldn’t give me an interview for this book. The reasons for that will emerge in good time. They were the same reasons that several of his relations were so keen to speak to me. I talked to his brother in New York, who was still running the family’s wholesale fabric business on Seventh Avenue. I had a pleasant but mournful dinner in Georgetown with his uncle Harold and aunt Rebecca. “You know the Yiddish word ‘meshugenah’?” asked Rebecca. “That’s what it all was. Crazy.” When they spoke of Warren, it was as if they were describing a boy who had been lost at sea, long ago. “Another thing I remember,” said Harold, “is that he was afraid of the moon.”
Like so many involved in this story, Warren Hamerman endured an unenviable childhood. His father, Norman, had a violent temper, which went unpunished because the family’s livelihood depended on his accountancy skills. Harold remembered a Thanksgiving dinner at which Norman quarreled with his wife and looked ready to settle the dispute with the carving knife. He also recalled that Norman screened blue movies in the home. Warren’s mother, Muriel, could do little to improve the atmosphere: she was diagnosed with schizophrenia and would wander Manhattan, gate-crashing weddings, bar mitzvahs, and gala nights at the Metropolitan Opera. The positive elements of Warren’s upbringing were supplied by Ray Pollack, his maternal grandmother, who had arrived from Ukraine after the 1905 revolution and was part of the generation who were born Orthodox Jews and grew up to be socialists. Her family nickname, “Cooky,” was coined by Warren in recognition of her largesse with baked goods. It stuck so firmly that it was engraved on her tombstone.
Warren was a bright and idealistic boy. Bright enough to earn a place at Johns Hopkins University to study English and history; idealistic enough to join a project that sent volunteer tutors into deprived neighborhoods of Baltimore, then to drop out of college in order to devote his energy to protesting against the Vietnam War—in anticipation, perhaps, of the American socialist revolution of which Cooky also dreamed.
In October 1967, while he was working at the florist and on Prisons and Zoos, a self-published pamphlet of sub-Ginsbergian poetry, Warren was called in for a medical examination at Fort Holabird, the nearest army post, and pronounced fit for duty. His comrades in the local peace group picketed the gates. Knowing that he could be called up at any time, Warren went to France, hoping to claim asylum. His family’s contacts in the rag trade helped him to find somewhere to live in Paris, where he made contact with the French Union of American Deserters and Draft Resisters and was present at a rowdy, foot-stomping meeting at which eight draft dodgers dropped their cards in an envelope addressed to General Lewis B. Hershey, director of the Selective Service System. Jean-Paul Sartre was there, and he identified it as a moment of romantic rebellion.
Someone else who was present supplied me with a more skeptical analysis. “The whole anti-war movement in the United States was filled with people like Warren Hamerman,” said Bo Burlingham, who spent most of 1968 in Paris helping to run the FUADDR. “Intense people who were desperate to find some meaning in their lives through political activism.”
The student uprisings of May 1968 gave Warren as much meaning as he could handle. As demonstrators fought running battles with the authorities, Hamerman felt the tear gas in his lungs; received a blow from a riot policeman’s baton; woke up in hospital with a sore head. On his next visit to the police station to renew his fourteen-day permit of residence, the customary interview turned nasty. He was searched, and when his interrogators found a notebook in which he had written a list of anti-war organizations, they told him to get a job or leave the country. A plainclothes officer was put on his tail to assess his progress. Warren made none. Instead, he persuaded his family to wire him the money to get to Sweden, where he arrived in the middle of August. As he went, he sent a parting shot to the Parisian press: “The French government and its police tried to have us accept silence as the price of our asylum; this was a price we were not willing to pay and that we will not pay.”
By the time his statement appeared in the papers, he was already in Stockholm with the American Deserters Committee and had begun applying for asylum. But there was a snag. The Swedish government had never offered asylum to a draft resister—only to deserters. (The exception was George Carrano, who, somewhat mysteriously, had received his papers in August 1968.) As Warren waited for his claim to be processed, something unwelcome arrived in the mail: an order to report to New York to begin his military service. Then the Swedish Aliens Commission refused his application for asylum.
His response was to go into hiding. And while he moved between the spare rooms and attics of friendly Swedish Maoists, the ADC and its student allies mounted a campaign on his behalf. On February 19, 1969, a rally was held in Stockholm, at which protestors waved placards bearing Warren’s name. They handed out a leaflet that claimed he would be liable for a forty-eight-year prison sentence, as he had “refused to serve in an army committing genocide in Vietnam, as well as being deployed in armed actions in Negro ghettos in the U.S.” (A weird muddled reference, perhaps, to his volunteer teaching in Baltimore.) “SUPPORT WARREN HAMERMAN!” insisted the flyer. “WE DEMAND that Vietnam refusers are granted political asylum in Sweden.”
* * *
TODAY, WHEN THE Internet allows us to participate in every turn and tick of political argument across the world, it is hard to appreciate how difficult it was to follow a story like that of the American Deserters Committee in Stockholm. RESIST, for instance, the organization that put Jim McGourty in touch with deserter groups in Sweden, had only a vague sense of what it was propelling him toward. At the end of 1968, it sent Gerald Gray, an American postgraduate student at the London School of Economics, to find out. Gray’s report remains a useful account of where the ADC stood at the end of a revolutionary year.
In December 1968, Gray flew to Stockholm to spend time with the deserters and their allies. It wasn’t exactly a holiday. Bertil Svahnström gave him the evil eye for arriving late to a meeting. A weary Hans Göran Franck told him that he was sick of dealing with the deserters and wished they would stop coming. Michael Vale was sour and unfriendly and accused the visitor of being a snoop for U.S. intelligence. This was pure paranoia. But paranoia has its uses. Gerald Gray was not a spy, but everything he observed on his mission to Stockholm was relayed straight back to the CIA.
Just like the report on Bill and Chuck’s Bulgarian adventure, the evidence has survived because the Nixon Library saved it from the shredders. The relevant document, “Swedish Deserters,” is Langley’s précis of a conversation with an informer who clearly enjoyed Gray’s confidence, and it paints a portrait of a community in trouble. The Swedish government, Gray noted, had quietly decided to cap its grants of humanitarian asylum. Black deserters were faring less well than their white counterparts, and they were finding it hard to secure even the most menial employment. The big news, however, was the split in the American Deserters Committee.
The ADC, an organization still several months away from celebrating its first birthday, had wrenched itself into two unequal parts. A faction led by Michael Vale and Bill Jones had kept the name, the pure political aims, and a small core group of members. The overwhelming majority had decided to form a more moderate, less Isaac Deutscher–fixated organization called the Underground Railway—the faction that Gray thought deserved the financial help of RESIST.
Gerald Gray was easy to find. As founder of the Center for Justice and Accountability, an organization dedicated to putting torturers on trial and giving co
unsel to their victims, he was still in the anti-war game. I emailed him a scan of the CIA document. He sounded shocked to see it. Not least because it suggested that one of his friends had informed on him. Did he know who? He did, but he wouldn’t say.
When your job involves investigating human rights abuses committed by your own country, you come to accept that the government will take a beady interest in your activities. Once, he said, he’d requested his personal files from the FBI. Between the redacted sections was a reference to his membership in the American Communist Party. Gray had never been a member. The closest he’d come, he said, was during his time as a student at Berkeley, when he’d gone along to hear a speech by the party’s candidate in the 1960 presidential election.
“I suppose,” Gerald reflected, “it was either a mistake somebody made, or it was an attempt to set a mark against me that would get in my way in later life.” During the course of our conversation, he referred several times to changes of volume on the line. Evidence, he speculated, that his phone was still tapped. Just in case, we offered a cheery greeting to any silent party.
* * *
THE SPLIT IN the ADC was a revolt against Michael Vale. It was so clearly a consequence of his actions that some read it as a deliberate act of sabotage. All summer, he had been building bridges with radical organizations in Europe and the States, conducting meetings about which most ADC members knew nothing. He had been doing much the same in Sweden, cozying up to the young Maoists and increasing his opposition to more moderate figures. “The government didn’t want us involved in political activity but had no way of neutralizing us legitimately,” he told me. “But the [Maoist] groups were unpolluted. They were lovely. Sweet kids! They were so clean.”
As he courted them, he went on the offensive against Bertil Svahnström. When Svahnström expressed disquiet about the ADC’s support for a Viet Cong victory, Mike went to the public library to dig for dirt. He found articles filed by Svahnström when he was a foreign correspondent in wartime Berlin, and by wrenching quotes out of context Vale managed to suggest that he had expressed pro-Nazi views.
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