The photographs in Folket i Bild depicted Gunnar Ekberg in a groovy turtleneck sweater and corduroy jacket with wide lapels. On the day we met, his dress was more causal. Tight black T-shirt, spectacles on strings, a little silver troll dangling from a chain around his neck. The habits of the old spy, however, remained steadfastly in place. We sat in the farthest corner of the restaurant. The table had a clear view of the street door. He kept a cool eye on my very un-Swedish habit of waving my hands around as I talk. He tailed me through the menu, following my choices, from risotto to espresso to limoncello. He was unobtrusively charming.
Gunnar began fighting the Cold War in 1964, when he was nineteen years old. It began when a friend from his diving club—also named Gunnar—called with some intriguing information. Long Gunnar, as the friend was known, owing to his height, had heard from a coastguardsman that a Russian submarine had sunk in Öresund, the strait that separates Sweden and Denmark. The boys went in a dinghy to locate its remains. They found them. They also found a boatload of Soviet sailors who were attempting to salvage the vessel. The Russians encouraged the boys to swim down into the wreck. The Gunnars emerged from the waves clutching a red flag. When they handed it over, the captain rewarded them with vodka.
Someone, however, was watching from the coast. That night Long Gunnar received a visit from an authoritative stranger. “I come from a certain organization,” he said, “collecting certain information for certain needs.” The next day, under the supervision of these new employers, the boys descended once more into the wreck. They swam through flooded compartments, ignored the corpses of the drowned men, pulled out maps, papers, radio sets. The mission was fruitful. Thanks to the two Gunnars, the Swedish security service learned of the existence of a previously unknown Russian submarine base on the Baltic.
Once he had completed his military service, other missions came Gunnar’s way. “The first thing you have to do,” said his SÄPO handler, “is to qualify yourself for the harpoon fishing world championship in Cuba.” He did, and for a few weeks he was Stockholm’s man in Havana—while resisting the attentions of a female Cuban agent who hoped to seduce him into being Havana’s man in Stockholm. A more substantial assignment was waiting for him on his return. A job with the Information Bureau. Gunnar’s mission was to live undercover in the student anti-war movement and sniff out the influence and money of hostile foreign governments: a Swedish equivalent of Operation Chaos, pursued in co-operation with the CIA. “The Americans wanted to run it,” Gunnar recalled. “But we had to tell them no.”
Gunnar began his new life in early 1968. He moved to Gothenburg with a company Saab and a generous tax-free salary. He read Karl Marx. He read Karl Popper. (Though not in the presence of his Marxist friends.) He went on marches, attended rallies, and joined the Communist Party of Sweden, a Maoist outfit run from premises that used an American flag as a doormat. (“Make sure your feet are really clean,” said a notice.)
He resigned himself to once-a-year contact with his family. (“You couldn’t fool my mother,” he said. “She could see through everything.”) He discarded his old friends, made new ones, and spied on them. It wasn’t so hard. He had little time for the Maoists, who struck him as cultish, humorless, and absurdly middle class—and the job offered a satisfying element of drama. He installed listening devices. He kept a clay-filled matchbox in his pocket and used it to take an impression of the party’s office key. (He remembered licking the key clean to remove suspicious traces.) He copied stacks of Communist Party documents and passed them on to his handlers. As a child, Gunnar had heard his Danish relations talking about their resistance work during the war. He felt as if he were fighting the same fight.
Gunnar had more sympathy for the deserters. “It must have been hell for many of them,” he reflected. “They were people with no education, and they just ended up in a war.” In this, he believed, he was more charitable than many of the Maoists. They had been expecting to meet a group of anti-imperialist heroes of the sort that might be sculpted in marble. Instead they were presented with a bunch of young men who were unkempt, unread, unsophisticated, and politically incorrect. Gunnar knew, however, what some of his radical friends only guessed—that some of these men were undercover agents, just like him.
“SÄPO placed people among the deserters, and they had a few reasons for it,” said Gunnar. It was particularly interested, he believed, in the loyalties of men who had arrived in Sweden via Moscow. “The KGB are very skilled,” he said. “Very good at reading people’s personalities.” Perhaps, he suggested, some of them had been persuaded to spy for the USSR.
* * *
AND HERE HIS story moved into more sensational territory. Gunnar told me that he had met one of these SÄPO infiltrators, an American who had been recruited to live among a small community of deserters in the Stockholm satellite town Tyresö. (It was, I realized, the group coordinated by Åke Sandin, whose spare room had been occupied by Rick Bailey of the Intrepid Four and Olsson the boa constrictor.) Gunnar showed me his notes on the conversation.
“My task,” his contact claimed, “was to work out the relationships between the real deserters, who were commonly heroin addicts and quarrelsome, and CIA agents who were playing deserter to get into the left-wing movements and parties.” These American operatives, claimed Gunnar’s man, had been tasked with a mission that was much bigger than throwing a spanner in the works of a few exiled radicals. They were using deserter identities as a cover for an operation against the Soviet Union. The KGB, they believed, had placed its own sleeper agents in Sweden. Agents who would awaken in the event of the Cold War turning hot, and smooth the progress of a Soviet invasion by assassinating key figures in the Swedish government and defense establishments.
It was a plot out of a paperback thriller, but Gunnar, a veteran of this world, could not dismiss it. It was well documented that in the 1950s the CIA and NATO had cooperated on a project called GLADIO, a Europe-wide scheme to recruit and train a secret army that would spring into action in the event of communism achieving power, by either invasion or election. The Swedish section had been the responsibility of William Colby, a young CIA officer who would become director of central intelligence in 1973. His memoir Honorable Men describes the intense secrecy in which this work was conducted.
Sweden was a neutral country, which meant that neither NATO nor the CIA could operate openly on its territory. “Obviously,” he wrote, “if the preparations ever leaked to the Russians, they would be in the position to destroy the nets directly after they occupied the country and so the whole point of the work would be lost.” But the existence of this network also had to remain secret from all but a small number of trusted figures in Washington, NATO, and Scandinavia. “Public knowledge that the CIA was building stay-behind nets there in anticipation of a Soviet occupation would oblige the governments to put an end to the project forthwith,” Colby wrote.
Gunnar told me that his contact was an old, sick man who had been part of this army and wanted to make a confession. There was one more detail: if the Soviets had activated their plan, American agents would have armed themselves with weapons stored in secret depots around the country and formed the resistance against the occupying force. “One of my tasks,” Gunnar’s man had told him, “was to pass keys to such a depot outside Stockholm if a critical situation should arise.” He had even given Gunnar the name of the deserter entrusted to hold they keys. Gunnar peered at his notes and read out the name. Frederick Pavese.
Gunnar watched my jaw drop. The name meant nothing to him. But he had not spent several years reading through old newspapers, census records, and street indexes, scrabbling for biographical details about American exiles in Stockholm. I held dozens of these names in my head. Some were major figures, some minor. Fred seemed minor, but I knew I had some notes on him. I pulled my laptop from my satchel and began searching through my documents.
“His dad owned a delicatessen in Westchester, New York, and lost an eye in the war,” I said
. “Or maybe in the delicatessen. Fred played the guitar and smoked pot. He had a small part in a 1976 film called I lust och nöd.” The trail, I told Gunnar, was pretty cold. It ended with Pavese’s 2003 post to a website about insects, on which he shared an anecdote about a Thai neighbor who, by stamping her foot on the linoleum, would summon a cockroach that lived in her bathroom and feed it by hand.
A few days later I tracked down Larry Turk, one of Fred Pavese’s high school classmates. “At the time of his desertion,” he said, “we were more focused on those who saw Vietnam up close and were killed in action. We were very unimpressed with what he did.” Larry sent me a copy of the souvenir brochure for their 1986 reunion. Pavese had supplied a photograph of himself in an open-necked wool jacket that revealed a luxuriant display of chest hair. Beneath this were a few upbeat remarks about his history. “Having the opportunity to live without confinement to work or family has given me the opportunity to partake in all aspects of society in many different parts of the world,” he boasted. “I was in Iran and Afghanistan before their crises. I have known Afghanistan as a wonderful world of men who rode horses and people who were happy; it should have been left that way.”
I’d hoped to find Fred Pavese. To ask him whether he was a guitar-strumming actor or a sleeper agent primed to break out the guns when Soviet tanks rolled over the border, or both. The Swedish Death Index revealed that my inquiries were a decade too late; Fred Pavese had died in Stockholm in March 2004. But the National Library of Sweden, I discovered, held a copy of what Google considers his most significant contribution to posterity, I lust och nöd. After a little throat clearing, the library agreed to make it available for viewing. It turned out to be a soft porn variant of Ingmar Bergman’s 1966 film Persona. A faux-earnest psychodrama starring Elona Glenn as a woman tormented by her sexual appetite—which we observe her attempting to satisfy on a yacht, in a cinema, and at the Chat Noir club in Stockholm, where her partner is the British blue movie star Mary Millington. The credits compiled by the Swedish Film Institute list Pavese as “The Mechanic,” but his scenes were missing from the library’s print. It wasn’t hard to guess where they should have been. At one point the heroine’s car refuses to start. A little later the problem seems to be resolved. The services provided by Fred Pavese are lost to history.
9 / OUT OF LOVE
IN SIR ARTHUR Conan Doyle’s short story “The Final Problem,” Sherlock Holmes asks Dr. Watson if he has ever heard of Professor James Moriarty. Watson replies that he has not—and soon learns that his friend has developed an obsession with the man. “His career,” explains the detective, “has been an extraordinary one.” The world knows Moriarty as a gifted academic, but Holmes discerns something darker. “He is the Napoleon of Crime, Watson. He is the organizer of half that is evil and of nearly all that is undetected in this great city.” Holmes is correct in his deductions. Watson travels with him to Austria for a fateful confrontation with his adversary.
In Nicholas Meyer’s Conan Doyle pastiche, The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, Sherlock Holmes asks Dr. Watson if he has ever heard of Professor James Moriarty. Watson says that he has not, but this is a lie. Holmes has been banging on about him endlessly, particularly when under the influence of cocaine. “His career,” explains the detective, “has been an extraordinary one.” The world knows Moriarty as a gifted academic, but Holmes discerns something darker. “He is the Napoleon of Crime, Watson. He is the organizer of half that is evil and of nearly all that is undetected in this great city.” But Moriarty is just a harmless old math teacher. Holmes is madly and spectacularly incorrect in his deductions. So Watson takes him to Austria for psychoanalysis under Dr. Sigmund Freud.
Listening to competing theories about the infiltrator within the American Deserters Committee, I was often reminded of Meyer’s revisionist tale of the detective with a damaging idée fixe. Åke Sandin had exclaimed “CIA!” as soon as I mentioned the name Bill Jones. Thomas Taylor was convinced that Michael Vale had taken a bribe from Hanoi. Mike Vale thought that George Carrano was not what he seemed. So did Mark Shapiro, who swore to keep investigating his suspect until his last breath. But if you were a protagonist in this plot, how would it be possible to tell whether you were in the Doyle story or the Meyer? I asked myself the same question as I tried to understand the motivations of the man around whom my own suspicions began to coalesce.
* * *
THE TRUE STORY of Dr. Clifford Garland Gaddy may be known only to Dr. Clifford Garland Gaddy. It’s possible that even those closest to him have been denied some of the important details. Not that he has been hidden from view. The C-SPAN video library has archived three decades of his conservative wardrobe decisions and impeccably Washingtonian punditry. Political journalists, particularly those with an interest in Russia, have had many opportunities to sit in press conferences admiring his good cheekbones, tight, faintly equine mouth, and gray hair kept in the close cut of his school yearbook photograph. But Cliff Gaddy has never been part of any institution subject to the Freedom of Information Act, and, as most of his work has been done in collaboration, he has barely been obliged to utter a public sentence in the first-person singular. Which means that the official narrative of his life has never done justice to the weirdness of his biography—which incorporates desertion from the army, membership in the ADC, a senior position in a profoundly weird political cult, person-of-interest status in the assassination of Olof Palme, and a dazzling academic career achieved with financial support from the Pentagon. To me, it seemed inexplicable. Not least because he declined to offer any explanation for it himself.
Today, Cliff is known as one of the world’s leading experts on Vladimir Putin, the former KGB man who became the president of Russia. Cliff’s book Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin, cowritten with the British academic Fiona Hill, is the product of intense study of the known details of its subject’s life, and careful deduction about the many strange blank spaces in his history. The book was a joint enterprise during the decade they spent as colleagues at the Brookings Institution, the prestigious think tank in Washington, DC. It offers a portrait of a figure whose primary identity is of an “operative”—a spy—whose instincts are always to conceal his own motives, to keep everybody guessing. It is pointless, Hill and Gaddy argue, to look for patterns in Putin’s behavior. It is pointless to pursue a linear narrative. Putin adapts to any circumstance in which he finds himself, and this is the secret of his enduring power.
Diplomats, intelligence officers, and politicians have used the book to inform their dealings with Moscow. Former vice president Joe Biden and Sir John Scarlett, the former head of MI6, have sung its praises. In April 2017, the book received another flurry of publicity when the White House announced Fiona Hill’s appointment to the National Security Council staff as deputy assistant to President Donald Trump and senior director for European and Russian affairs. Which is why there is a strong public interest case for shining a little light on the murky history of her coauthor.
* * *
CLIFF WAS BORN in Danville, Virginia, in June 1946. His father—also Dr. Clifford Garland Gaddy—ran a thriving medical practice in the city and owned a comfortable home near the bank of the Dan River. Clifford Sr. was a Rotarian and a pillar of his community, but one with a sense of fun—he was also a Golden Gloves state boxing champion and once hosted a rock festival on his twenty-seven-acre tobacco farm.
His eldest son—nicknamed Chip—was a boy whose abilities and achievements were absurdly numerous. He was a high school merit scholar, wrestler, track and field athlete, and champion of Babe Ruth baseball. At fourteen he was initiated into the Danville branch of the Order of DeMolay, a fraternal organization for teenage boys. In his senior year he became president of his school’s chapter of the National Honor Society and won a thousand-dollar prize on a radio quiz show to find America’s smartest high school student.
Though he earned scholarships to the University of Michigan and the University of Richmond, family tradition p
ropelled him to Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, his father’s alma mater. Here, he joined the Kappa Alpha fraternity, a college organization whose local chapter was founded by Thomas Dixon Jr., author of The Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan, the novel from which D. W. Griffith adapted his film The Birth of a Nation. (Even in the 1960s, Kappa Alpha was known for staging Old South week, in which members marched around campus in Confederate uniforms, singing “Dixie” under the Stars and Bars.)
In October 1968, Cliff volunteered for the army. Here, he also dazzled: the assessors declared that he had the highest aptitude for languages they had ever encountered. He was quickly assigned to the Army Security Agency—the branch of the U.S. Army that dealt in intercepted enemy communications—and joined its training regiment at Fort Devens, Massachusetts. For this, there was also a family precedent. An uncle, David Winfred Gaddy, was a signals intelligence genius who monitored and decoded Vietnamese transmissions for the National Security Agency—a highly secretive organization whose existence was not acknowledged by the government until 1975. Anyone who wanted to build an intelligence officer would have been hard-pressed to find brighter and purer material than Clifford Garland Gaddy Jr. So why did he desert?
The reported explanation was a peculiar one. Cliff seems to have been the only man who went into Swedish exile because the army failed to advance his career at the pace it had promised. When the Danville Bee came asking Clifford Sr. why his son had disappeared to Europe, the response was that Cliff had gone because, after several months of waiting, the army had failed to assign him to a language school. A subsidiary claim asserted that Cliff was a “serious conscientious objector”—though not serious enough, it would seem, to have taken part in any protests against the Vietnam War.
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