Operation Chaos

by Matthew Sweet

  REVEREND HAYES HAD moved among the deserters when they were in their teens and twenties. I was meeting them at retirement age. But I felt a strong sympathy with his position. We were both trying to understand the histories and motivations of these men; we were both trying to evaluate the truth of statements made in an environment that was shaped by threats both real and imagined.

  The most puzzling story I encountered was that of Thomas Taylor, a former army private who spoke to me on the phone from his home in Hawaii. I found Thomas through his art. He is a prodigious producer of brightly colored oil paintings, which he describes as “the greatest body of art created during the first ten years of twenty-first century.” He is also a prodigious drug user, and remains, I suspect, the only person to list all his narcotic experiences on LinkedIn. (His online CV also notes that his marriage ended because he spent the wedding night in bed with the best man.) Our conversations were as untethered as you might expect. “I think the Nazis won the war,” he told me. “They came in through the windows and the doors of perception. All our weapons of war came off their drawing boards. I could go on and on. You know I do spontaneous poetry?”

  It was hard to follow Thomas’s account of himself, but that incoherence seemed to speak to the nature of the deserter experience. This was a life story with a psychedelic filter. During basic training at Fort Jackson, Thomas said, his instructor had tied him up in order to simulate a Viet Cong interrogation. The lesson included a sexual assault. “He passed out,” explained Thomas, “and I kind of robbed him and took all money and gold rings and watches and went AWOL.” His parents in Milwaukee were unsympathetic. “Every time I tried to tell them what happened, they looked at me like I ought to kill myself.”

  Later, at Fort Sheridan, Illinois, he got into a knife fight with a fellow soldier and attempted to make amends by offering him a marijuana joint. The cigarette became a piece of evidence: Thomas was sent to the stockade at Fort Leavenworth and put on a diet of raw potatoes, bread, and water. Never having completed basic training, he was surprised by the army’s next move: shipping him out to Frankfurt and giving him a job as a van driver. His light duties allowed him time to develop a relationship with a young German woman who worked at a record store, and to add heroin and LSD to his narcotic regimen.

  He was in the grip of this habit when he decided to make the journey north to Sweden—which seemed to explain the colorful complexity of the rest of his story. He was a founding member of the ADC, he said, but Michael Vale maneuvered him out of the organization. (“He was CIA,” Thomas said, with confidence.) He did a screen test for Vana Caruso, assistant director of the proposed Carlo Ponti film about the deserters. (“She was also CIA,” he asserted.) He played guitar as support to the visiting U.S. rock band Country Joe and the Fish—whose “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die Rag” became the title music of Deserter USA. He became a medical guinea pig at a clinic in Uppsala, where he took part in a pioneering methadone trial. (Such trials, I learned, did take place.) In an email, he tried to convey the exhilaration of the moment. “We took Mandrax and Preludin crushed & soaked in water, drawn through a cotton or cigarette filter and shot into our veins. We were Rebels against The Machine! We wanted to save The Whole Human Race!”

  From here the story became more dreamlike. Thomas claimed to have been kidnapped in Sweden by a pair of U.S. agents who flew him to Heathrow Airport. He managed to escape and find refuge among the members of an experimental art group who lived in a warehouse in Covent Garden. On a trip to Marseille, he said, he was detained by the French police and was transferred to Frankfurt, where he was reunited with his old company commander, who held him down and force-fed him a jar of confiscated LSD tablets. “I was tripping,” he explained, “for forty-plus years.” These experiences, he said, had convinced him to live as much of his life as possible beyond the purview of the state. He had joined a libertarian movement whose members shared intelligence on the dark web. “I wish I could go back to the America of my youth,” he said, wistfully. “It was a great country then.”

  * * *

  PARANOIA WAS A strong element in the atmosphere of deserter culture. Some men tried not to inhale; others filled their lungs and let it roar through their bloodstream. The effects could be fatal. They claimed the life of Robert Sylvia, a radio repairman with nine years’ army service, a small part in Deserter USA, and two children back home in Fort Lauderdale. When he arrived in Sweden in March 1968, Sylvia told reporters that any CIA operative planning to take him back to the States might as well shoot him. The following July, sitting alone in a summerhouse belonging to his girlfriend’s parents, he saved them the trouble. A few days before his suicide he had addressed a political meeting in the nearby town of Visby. He claimed that agents were on his tail. “I have,” he said, “lived through a mental hell I hope you people will be spared from.” He left no note. The reality of his fear is now beyond recovery.

  Other anxieties had more visible causes. Mysterious mail began moving between Sweden and the United States. Deserters who had told no one back home of their whereabouts were surprised to get letters from their parents, begging them to return. In April 1969, the families of U.S. soldiers killed in action in Vietnam began receiving letters with a Stockholm postmark. They were purportedly from the offices of the ADC, and urged their recipients to press Congress and the president for the end of the war. Naturally, their recipients were outraged.

  A bereaved mother from Xenia, Ohio, shared the message that she had already mailed to the White House. “If we cannot believe in our country and our merciful God,” she told reporters, “what shall we believe in? Certainly not American deserters.” A mourning father, himself a disabled veteran, declared his disgust for a similar letter received on the stationery of the ADC. “Anybody who can’t serve their country belongs in Sweden or Russia or some place like that.” These letters caused disquiet among the exile community. Who was their author? Nobody knew. And who had given those Swedish addresses to their families? Perhaps the Swedes, as well as the Americans, were spying on them.

  * * *

  MICHAEL VALE RETURNED to Stockholm in June 1969. The letters of Thomas Lee Hayes recorded the event. “Michael Vale is back in town after the word being spread around that the ADC had asked him not to return. I wonder what our meeting shall be like? Already I hear he is asking about me, why I don’t like the ADC (not true), and what I am up to (who knows).”

  Michael had been away on revolutionary business. Traveling Europe, meeting contacts in radical groups in France and Germany, immersing himself in Marxist theory in a library in Amsterdam. Without the knowledge of Hayes and the Underground Railway, he had also made a discreet visit to Stockholm. (“Forgotten but not gone!” said one ADC member who greeted him.) U.S. military bases near Frankfurt and Heidelberg were his new obsession. Perhaps, he reasoned, the men stationed there would turn out to be the foot soldiers of the revolution.

  In Stockholm, his absence had made his legend grow. For many, it confirmed his status as a provocateur: Vale had formed the ADC, led it to extremity, broken it in half, and vanished. One subscriber to that theory, John Takman, a prominent Swedish Communist who had provided medical advice to the Russell Tribunal, encouraged Thomas Hayes to take the same view. “We now know that he was on the payroll of the U.S. Embassy or some agency with a money funnel through the embassy,” Takman wrote. “But it will probably take some time before all the deserters are aware of this fact.” Hayes ignored the accusation. He and Vale were soon on good terms.

  Others could not put their suspicions to rest. Dan Israel, the son of the child psychologist Mirjam Israel, questioned Michael’s financial weightlessness. “He was an enigma to me,” he told me. “He had money. He had a lot of spare time. I never understood how he lived, just translating text for a chemistry journal.” The records of Chemical Abstracts yielded no answers to that. Oddly, though, the journal did have a subtle role to play in Cold War counterintelligence. It employed an army of translators to fill
et Soviet scientific literature for descriptions of freshly synthesized chemical compounds. The results were published in its pages and laid down on magnetic tape in its computer room in Columbus, Ohio. The CIA was an eager subscriber and used the information to monitor technological developments in the USSR. It also kept a keen eye on research that seemed relevant to missile production and looked for evidence of scientific espionage by comparing descriptions of new Russian compounds with those being made in American laboratories.

  Michael Vale, however, was poor casting for a chemical cold warrior. One deserter with a high school science certificate found him ignorant of the basic facts of the field and remembered his bafflement when the subject of plastic polymers came up in the conversation. This, for him, was proof of Michael’s perfidy.

  When I raised these matters with Michael, he waved them away. His work for Chemical Abstracts had dried up, he said, with a speed that indicated official disapproval of his political activities in Sweden. The patronage of M. E. Sharpe, the publishers of Soviet Psychology and Soviet Education, had saved him from poverty. The story checked out: Sharpe’s catalog contained dozens of his credits. Moreover, I had seen enough of him to know that he needed very little money to get by. He was entirely content with the cold comforts of revolutionary asceticism. In Sweden, he took his meals at the railway station snack bar. His whole life now fit in one rucksack. Michael was a loner and a wanderer. His reasons for being so might not all have been good, but the more time I spent with him, the more I doubted that he was something as simple as a CIA snoop. As for Thomas Taylor’s story about a bag of Vietnamese cash handed over in a lavatory—I felt ashamed to have entertained it.

  Perhaps I had been duped. Perhaps he’d done a Svengali number on me. But when old deserters told me they liked Michael but didn’t trust him, I knew what they meant. Clancy Sigal offered some advice. “Don’t worry whether Mike is helping or hindering,” he said. “He’s a character out of Dostoyevsky and himself probably doesn’t know. He loves, or used to love, chaos.”

  One day, over lunch in the British Library, I asked Michael to name the man he thought most likely to be a plant within the American Deserters Committee. He, like Mark Shapiro, was putting his money on George Carrano. “A New York hustler. He was constantly advising us to do provocative things. Carrano said he’d been contacted by the Vietnamese to bring two hundred deserters to Sweden from Phnom Penh. If we’d announced that, it would have wrecked our situation.” Might it have been an honest mistake? Mike shrugged. “At the time I didn’t have the necessary paranoia that would have enabled me to dwell on it.”

  Michele, Jim McGourty’s first wife, also had a story about George Carrano’s reckless behavior. She told it with arresting clarity. She and her husband were visiting friends—a Swedish woman and her boyfriend, a former policeman from Algeria. Throughout the evening, their host kept refilling Jim’s glass. “He got him really, really drunk,” Michele recalled, “and then he came after me.”

  While Jim was unconscious in the next room, Michele suffered a violent assault. Fortunately the sounds of the struggle awoke others in the apartment. “The guy just slithered off,” she said. The following day, as she was about to report the incident to the police, Carrano advised another course of action. “He wanted to go out and take charge of the situation. I just said, ‘Look, we will just handle this through the police. What you are proposing is only going to make things worse and get everybody else into trouble, so leave it alone.’ I remember screaming, yelling at him about all of that. I just said, ‘This guy will get what is coming to him.’” He did. She reported it to the police, and her attacker was deported.

  Right or wrong, theories about George Carrano’s behavior were much discussed among his peers. They even inspired the plot of Deserter USA. Its featured infiltrator is a charming figure called Fabian, who supplies the exiles with cigarettes and alcohol and is later discovered rifling through papers in the ADC offices. Another member—played by Terry Whitmore—catches him in the act and administers a vigorous punishment beating. Carrano himself is a conspicuous absence from the picture.

  “But they talked about him,” said Olle Sjögren, the film’s codirector. “They told me he was suspected. Mike said this, and some of the others.” Olle felt around for the correct English expression. “They thought he was a guinea pig.”

  “A guinea pig?” I queried.

  “A scapegoat,” he said.

  “A mole?” I asked.

  “A mole,” he replied.

  * * *

  MAPS OF THE Old Scandinavian world describe two kinds of territory. A known geographical space in which Vikings raided and traded, through which a captain could plot the course of his longship and expect to find, at the end of the journey, something he already had words to describe. And another space, where trolls and half-trolls watched and waited, where the backs of dragons broke the ice sheet. This space was not a void. Not an inconvenient blank patch filled with the mapmaker’s monstrous doodles. It was geographical. It could be navigated. And as I tried to understand the story of the Stockholm deserters, the more they seemed to me like voyagers on these strange and hazardous seas. Some drowned; some reached the shore in safety. Some welcomed me and shared their sagas; others sat by the fire and refused to open the door. Many of the talkers, I discovered, could not give sure and certain accounts of their experiences. Much remained mysterious and unreadable to them—not least the true natures of old comrades who stayed silent about the past.

  The official paper record both helped and hindered. The officers and operatives who kept it—or didn’t keep it—were not the allies of posterity. They made records disappear and did their best to make themselves disappear. They bequeathed us a small percentage of the documents they generated, most dark with the ink of redaction. But that dangerous thing, a little knowledge, can be acquired from the surviving material.

  In the records released by the American and Swedish intelligence agencies, evidence exists that a broad coalition of spooks was profiling individual members of the American Deserters Committee. A heavily censored FBI file shows that the Office of the Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence produced a substantial report on Mike and Bill’s organization—though the Pentagon seems to have mislaid its copy. The same record notes that more information, and requests for information, were received from Stockholm by the FBI’s Washington field office and its outposts in London, Paris, and Tokyo. The file also contains a bureau memorandum bearing five fat bands of censor’s ink—beneath which clearly lurk the biographies of five ADC members. The list is preceded by the caveat “classified confidential to protect a source of continuing value.”

  The archives of SÄPO, the Swedish security service, yielded more explicit information. I saw one uncensored surveillance report from an undercover agent who noted the presence of Warren Hamerman and fifteen other deserters at a political meeting in Gothenburg. A much longer file contained information about the ADC that could only have been supplied by a member, or someone with intimate knowledge of its members. The names were blanked out, but it was possible to guess what the censor had obscured. One leading figure was “two-faced if not triple-faced … an intellectual opportunist who is generous out of pure vanity.” Michael Vale seemed to fit that description. A deserter who risked arrest in late 1968 by coming out of hiding to attend a political meeting was surely Warren Hamerman—accompanied by a woman who was clearly Jim’s wife, Michele. Another deserter was said to be “psychologically completely exhausted and … sitting with a gang of sympathetic sorts at the office smoking opium.” John Ashley, perhaps, the doped-up son of a senior Pentagon official?

  Most powerfully, the document recorded the climate of suspicion in which the exiles lived. “It is clear,” said one, “that the American government has agents among the deserters. One must therefore protect oneself and the honest deserters. The Americans have two goals with their agents—in the first instance it is to gather intelligence and speed the breakup of the grou
p, and for the second part to scare the others to silence with the mere knowledge that there are agents among them.” It was easy to imagine a room full of marijuana smoke and young men looking into one another’s eyes, scanning for loyalty or treachery.

  At the beginning of 2016, I asked the Swedish National Archives if it held any documents relating to the ADC. It did. They were all classified, and too numerous to process in one batch. Perhaps, it was suggested, I could request the files of specific individuals, which could then be assessed on a case-by-case basis? Off went emails naming the deserters prominent in this story. Which is how I came to receive copies of heavily weeded dossiers on Warren Hamerman and Jim McGourty. How I discovered that SÄPO documents on Michael Vale and Bill Jones could not yet be released “for reasons of national security.” How I learned that a file on George Carrano once existed, but had, at some stage, been removed from the archives. By whom, the archivist could not say. And with that, I was told that my requests would no longer be accepted.

  * * *

  FORTUNATELY, A REAL-LIFE SÄPO operative was happy to give me his angle on the story. He is Gunnar Ekberg, and he has the firmest handshake of anyone in this book. Eye-wateringly, bone-crunchingly firm, as befits someone who called his memoirs They Would Have Died Anyway. As the book explains, Gunnar’s career in espionage came to a sudden end in December 1973, when a pair of investigative journalists from the magazine Folket i Bild exposed him as an operative of the Information Bureau, a SÄPO subdepartment so secret that the public had no knowledge of its name, still less its cozy relationships with the American, British, and Israeli intelligence services.

  The story was a kind of Watergate: it showed that Olof Palme’s fiery opposition to American foreign policy did not extend to the secret state. It also revised deserter history. Among the figures caught in the long lens with Gunnar was Sven Kempe, the textiles importer who had spent thousands of crowns encouraging the deserters to grow turnips at the farm near Torsåker. He was, said Folket i Bild, on the Information Bureau’s “permanent staff of spies.” To those who had turned its undernourished soil, the project now seemed rather less altruistic than it had appeared.