Operation Chaos

by Matthew Sweet

  There was also an internal front in this war. As Michael pursued his campaign against Svahnström, he also took a harder line on his own members, intensifying his hostility toward deserters who failed to live up to the revolutionary values of the ADC.

  “What most upset him,” Bill Jones said, “were the guys who wanted to have a lush life, go to university and become professors. He thought that was something immoral. It pissed me off, too.”

  For Mike and Bill, the most egregious example of this tendency was a deserter who spent ADC meetings lying back in his chair with his glasses on the end of his nose, which made it hard to tell if he was listening, or even awake. Bill and Michael found him infuriating. They alleged that he had used the n-word in an argument with an African American deserter. The charge was flatly denied. But they kicked him out anyway.

  In September, Michael made the declaration that broke his organization in two. A delegation from Students for a Democratic Society visited Stockholm, and Mike announced a merger. Henceforth, he declared, the American Deserters Committee would be an autonomous chapter of the SDS. He had a piece of paper to prove it: a letter of approval signed by Bernardine Dohrn, saluting the ADC as an integral part of the radical American Left.

  An editorial in the Second Front Review explained why no debate was necessary. “The ADC is a working group. When a decision must be made, it is not necessarily to call for a general meeting to vote on it; it is not necessary to have a system of checks and balances to make sure that nobody usurps his authority.” (An interesting Freudian slip.) “All these formalities, even if they do ring of democratic idealism, are impractical and tend to be divisive. A bureaucratic atmosphere creates mistrust among the deserters.”

  Mistrust, however, was already well established. In late October the dissenters raised their voices. Sixty came to a meeting at which the ADC was criticized from every angle. The committee, they argued, had become a zealous clique that had lost touch with its own members. Mike and Bill gave their opponents an ultimatum. They would leave the meeting, and anyone who wanted to work with them should follow. Only six did. And in that moment, the ADC completed its transformation from welfare group to political sect.

  The breakaway faction, the Underground Railway, didn’t object to politics. They liked to talk about Mao. They even acquired a library of Little Red Books. But they were also stirred by nonrevolutionary desires. They wanted to move out of their cold-water flats and student dormitories. They wanted jobs that did not involve dishwashing. They wanted to learn Swedish. They even had a rock band that had been offered an audition by the record company owned by the Beatles.

  The ADC scorned such preoccupations. Vale and the others thought that if the deserters became too comfortable, they might lose their appetite for taking the war back home. It was a tough message to sell to a group of lonely Americans in their twenties. “These power hungry anti-socialist beings are known as opportunists,” raged one loyalist on the pages of Second Front Review. “They are only interested in personal gain. Opportunists are not revolutionaries, they are sly manipulators and enemies of mankind.”

  Gerald Gray’s report to RESIST predicted a bleak future for the ADC. Its hope for continued survival, he argued, lay in the links it had forged with organizations in the United States. “For a while,” Gray wrote, “it can continue as a paper organization, so long as the situation is not known in the U.S.” But the prospects were not good. “My own feeling,” he concluded, “is that ADC is now on the way to collapsing under the weight of Vale.”

  But by the time Gray filed his report, Mike Vale had vanished.

  8 / THE INFILTRATORS

  NINETEEN SIXTY-NINE WAS the year of suspicion. The year of mistrust. The year the traffic reached its peak. Deserters, draft resisters, hangers-on, hacks, sociologists, spies: everybody came to Stockholm. It was the Casablanca of the Cold War.

  Warren Hamerman helped to make it happen. On February 21, the Swedish Ministry of the Interior overruled the decision on his case and instructed the Aliens Commission to grant him humanitarian asylum. Americans opposed to war in Vietnam could now step straight from civilian life into Scandinavian exile, no dog tag required. Another condition was also relaxed. Conviction for a minor crime would no longer be considered grounds for expulsion: a great relief to those deserters who feared their next joint might become a pretext for being sent home.

  These concessions had several effects. The ADC’s campaign for political asylum lost its momentum: deserters felt their situations were less precarious, and most Swedes concluded that an enhanced form of humanitarian asylum was preferable to provoking America by declaring it a tyrant state. Exiles also began arriving in greater numbers. By the end of the year, the official figure edged toward four hundred, and the U.S. State Department was grumbling about the policy of funding the return journeys of men who had developed second thoughts. Perhaps its officials were worrying about their end-of-year accounts. But they may also have spotted something else. As the population of deserters increased, their prestige began to fade.

  In the last days of 1967, the Swedish public had welcomed the Intrepid Four as living symbols of their distaste for American imperialism. But the hundreds who followed were not all quite so attractive. The Defense Department registered this shift in opinion and was keen to catalyze it. The day after Deserter USA opened in Swedish cinemas, a Pentagon press spokesman told the newspaper Expressen about a study conducted by his colleagues at the U.S. Embassy in Stockholm.

  “The American deserters in Sweden are a sad collection,” said the spokesman. “We made the research to pulverize the untruthful picture of the deserter as a young man of high ideals who fled because he detested the war in Vietnam. The facts are that the overwhelming majority chose Sweden for quite other reasons.” The typical deserter specimen, the Pentagon concluded, was “a young man who finds it difficult to adapt, a thief, a drug addict, a cop-out.”

  The Stockholm exiles were accustomed to such insults, but this story brought a worrying new twist. The study had been carried out using data supplied by the Swedish Aliens Commission. Their hosts were cooperating with the enemy. The Swedish press remained sympathetic. The Pentagon’s remarks were reported with skepticism, though as American names began to cluster in the crime columns of the Swedish newspapers, the pressure increased—and the deserters discovered that, like many migrant communities, they had been given collective responsibility for the transgressions of individual members.

  From late 1968, the cases piled up. A Gothenburg judge convicted a pair of former soldiers for possessing forged passports, stealing five motorcycles, and relieving three elderly women of their handbags. Most deserter crimes were drug related, and of variable seriousness. Fred Pavese, a former artilleryman who deserted from Fort Sill, Oklahoma, was arrested by the Stockholm police for possession of marijuana—but the record suggests that he was too busy strumming his guitar and taking modeling assignments to become a menace to society.

  In Malmö, two twenty-year-old Californians, Joseph Norwood and John Dowling, were jailed for dealing marijuana; they told the court they were trying to earn money for air tickets back to the States, but they did not seem particularly delighted to receive deportation notices.

  Dowling, a dandyish young man from San Diego, had a signature trick that broke no laws: selling nonexistent blocks of hashish to credulous Swedish hippies. He and a Hungarian accomplice would take a prospective buyer to a locker at the Centralen railway station and give them a glimpse of the goods stowed inside. He would then sell the locker key for ten thousand kronor and be halfway to Budapest before the buyer discovered that he had purchased a wad of roofing felt wrapped in old newspaper.

  “John Dowling had an excellent knowledge of people’s behavior as well as a true love of being dishonest,” remembered Rob Argento. “He was the Jean Genet of the deserter community.”

  More than one exile I interviewed believed that the American authorities were deliberately rolling bad apples in their di
rection. One summoned the image of an intelligence officer moving through the stockade, doling out plane tickets to the most unsavory inmates, and telling them to follow their desires.

  Certainly, Sweden was the destination for a number of habitual criminals for whom desertion was simply a new way to feed their compulsion. Marshall Zolp, for example, was an air force pilot who ran several bombing raids over Vietnam before absconding to Sweden in early 1969. Having made himself disappear, he then did the same to large and small amounts of other people’s money, aided by his killer charm and disarming resemblance to the film star George Hamilton. (He could, reported a former associate, “sell voodoo dolls to Catholic nuns.”)

  After his Swedish interlude Zolp returned to the United States, where he ran penny stock frauds in collaboration with the New York mafia, attempted to sell shares in a twenty-four-hour Nevada brothel under the pseudonym Archibald Spray, and founded nonexistent companies to deal in nonexistent products. (The most audacious was the Laser Arms Corporation, which made millions by selling worthless shares to investors who thought they were buying a stake in the future of ray guns and self-chilling beverage cans.)

  * * *

  FOR THE FIRST half of 1969, the two main deserter groups preserved an uneasy truce. The American Deserters Committee maintained a revolutionary stance appropriate to an overseas chapter of the SDS. It launched a newspaper called the Paper Grenade and waved the flag for the Viet Cong. The Philadelphia deserter Vincent Strollo remembered a comrade crashing into a meeting with a copy of an SDS newspaper that accused the Standard Oil Company of profiting from the carnage in Vietnam. “He had a Molotov cocktail in his hand,” said Strollo, “and he was proposing to blow up the gas station over the road. Everybody ran out to stop him.”

  Cooler heads prevailed in the office of the Underground Railway. Its members organized role-play sessions with a visiting American psychiatrist, drew up a constitution, and designed a cute logo in the shape of a steam train. Some men retained membership in both organizations, though one leader of the Underground Railway told me that he thought George Carrano attended meetings of the more moderate group in order to keep an eye on the opposition.

  * * *

  IN THE SPRING of 1969, the exile community gained a figure who could bridge the gap between the two factions—a mentor whose job it was to listen to worries about drugs, housing, employment, and the folks back home. The Reverend Thomas Lee Hayes was an Episcopalian minister dispatched from the States by an anti-war group called Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Vietnam. He had a wife and two young children, a postgraduate degree in clinical psychology, and a strong track record in the civil rights movement. Around his neck he wore a pendant of his own design that combined the crucifix and the peace sign.

  An impressive triumvirate blessed his mission by laying hands on him on the steps of the U.S. Justice Department: Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, the Reverend Richard Neuhaus, and Coretta Scott King, the widow of Martin Luther King Jr. When Hayes and his family arrived at Arlanda, Hänt i Veckan magazine compared him to Father Flanagan, the Catholic priest whose delinquent-wrangling abilities had earned him the honor of being played by Spencer Tracy in the Oscar-winning movie Boys Town. Except Father Flanagan never quoted Frantz Fanon or enthused about the Black Panthers.

  Swarthmore College near Philadelphia houses the archive of CALCAV and the private papers of Thomas Hayes. Even the hate mail has been carefully archived. Some of its enemies just scrawled “bull” or “nuts” or “c/o Ho Chi Minh” across the envelope. Others were polite enough to enclose a letter. “I am concerned about Vietnam,” wrote one correspondent, “and all the other small countries that are in the path of the ever-grasping tentacles of communism.” Another wrote: “Your propaganda is sickening. Communist autocracy loves your unrealistic DISSENT.” A message signed by a Real Concerned American argued: “Bomb the North Vietnam Commies out. Then complete the job by cleaning up the dirty Commies here in the U.S.”

  But friendly advice also came Hayes’s way. Jim Walch, an American expatriate studying at Stockholm University, wrote to the new boy to sketch out the Swedish scene. It was, he said, one of “internal dissent and mistrust.” “Besides the conflict of personalities, accusations, trumped-up CIA charges, slander, libel and general fear, which are all very real causes of dissension, I see sociological dissension.”

  Walch regarded the split between the ADC and the Underground Railway as a dispute between working-class and middle-class deserters—but he also acknowledged that the majority of men had little interest in politics. “In Sweden, as in contrast to France,” he wrote, “the ‘stable’ persons, who could act as stabilizers on the whole group, get it made and isolate themselves, leaving heads, addicts, activists, paranoids and teen-agers, and the new guys of course.”

  Hayes arrived in Sweden on March 21, 1969, and moved into a modest but comfortable second-floor apartment in the Stockholm suburb of Solna. His papers showed that he wasn’t merely enthusiastic about his new role. He was giddy. He was intoxicated. During his year in Sweden, he lived life with an intensity he spent the rest of his days trying to recapture. He read radical literature, went on marches, argued the deserters’ case to the Swedish social bureau, made strong friendships with exiles of all factions. He stayed up until 1:30 a.m. with Jim McGourty and Bill Jones, discussing the future of the ADC.

  When the Pentagon spokesman made his disparaging remarks to Expressen, Hayes held a press conference to rebut them. He felt a kind of envy for the youth and vitality of the deserters, and tried to kindle it in himself. He fell a little in love with Jim McGourty’s wife, Michele, and a little out of love with his own. He did not, like Michael Vale, allow deserters to sleep in his bathtub or roll up in a rug on the hallway floor, but more than three hundred houseguests passed through in the course of the year, and some nights there were eleven hungry young Americans crowded around the table.

  Janet Hayes, whose attitude toward this new life was rather less fervid, had the task of making dinner stretch to feed the extra mouths. Not all these guests were taking advantage of the family’s good nature. Swedish food was expensive. Most deserters were poor. Many subsisted on sacks of unwashed brown rice that could be bought cheap at the side door of the Chinese Embassy.

  The Stockholm exiles had splintered into factions, but even those who scorned Hayes’s liberal politics grew fond of the man. He deserved their respect. Nothing was too much trouble. He calmed the speed freaks. He wrote reassuring letters to parents back home in the States. When a deserter’s car broke down, Hayes collected him—and a new radiator—from the junkyard.

  There were some bitter disappointments. One deserter conned him out of $260 and vanished from Sweden, claiming to have foiled a kidnapping attempt by two CIA agents. Another turned out to be not a deserter at all but a sex offender on the run with his teenage victim.

  But Hayes’s protective attitude gave him common ground with his flock. He was as suspicious as Bill Jones of visitors asking too many questions. The pastor acted as a gatekeeper, performing background checks on reporters hunting for interviews, movie producers looking for script ideas, psychologists in search of experimental material. He dealt with hundreds of these inquiries.

  In April, Gordon McLendon, a pirate radio entrepreneur and producer of the film The Killer Shrews, turned up in Stockholm and invited a group of seven deserters to his hotel suite. Hayes went with them, maintaining a fatherly eye as the visitor offered whiskey, salted nuts, and the company of a Swede named Lisa. (“I hope none of you have to ask why she’s here,” said McLendon.) Another unexpected presence in the room was the American television actor Ron Ely, who had joined McLendon’s entourage after three years of swinging around in a loincloth as the star of NBC’s Tarzan.

  The deserters kept drinking until they discovered a hidden tape recorder whirring in the corner of the room. Someone plucked out the cassette and passed it to Hayes. The deserters demanded money for their stories. McLendon gave a long defensive speech
about not polluting the journalistic process with cash. Ron Ely took McLendon off into the bedroom for a conference that ended with the producer unpeeling $300 from a roll of bills and sending the actor off to the currency exchange. “Five minutes later,” wrote Hayes, “Ron was back and divvying up fifteen hundred crowns among the deserters in front of everyone. Two hundred crowns remained, and with that the group went out to dinner. But not before they had lifted their host’s Scotch and rum.”

  In June 1969 an American sociologist, Michel P. Richard, contacted Hayes to ask for his help with a research project but made the mistake of telling him the title: The Deserter as Political Deviant. (“Ridiculous,” fumed Hayes.) When Richard arrived in Sweden to look for subjects, he found the deserters forewarned. Nobody would speak to him. Crestfallen, he went to see Bertil Svahnström, who expressed his opinion of the ADC with an impromptu film show: his print of Deserter USA and news footage of Philip Callicoat’s bungled bank robbery.

  Toward the end of his two-month trip, Richard managed to persuade a pair of deserters in Uppsala to agree to an on-the-record conversation. But when he arrived at the meeting he found ADC members waiting to denounce him as a spy. Cutting his losses, Richard went home and wrote an article arguing that the old distinction between researcher and subject was breaking down; that the studied were now mobilizing against their interpreters. Half a century later, I found him looking back ruefully on the experience. “I am having trouble forgiving myself for not doing more with that study,” he told me. “I let ego get in the way and failed to think outside the box.”

  * * *