Operation Chaos

by Matthew Sweet

  The story of his defection broke at the end of July 1969, when the Swedish government gave him humanitarian asylum. Cliff wrote to his local newspaper with an account of his actions, perhaps to take some of the heat off his family. “My only excuse is that it takes some people a bit longer to open their eyes to conditions around them,” he wrote. “Then too, when one has been taught to believe for over 20 years that America can only be right, it is rather difficult to abandon that illusion.” He quoted Camus. “I wish I could love my country and love justice too.”

  * * *

  MR. PUTIN: OPERATIVE in the Kremlin offers this advice on how to write about the president of Russia: “Every apparent fact or story needs to be regarded with suspicion,” the authors counsel. “Very little information about him is definitive, confirmable or reliable.” If we take the same approach to Cliff’s life, several pieces of the jigsaw are hard to fit. He took five years to earn his bachelor’s degree, rather than the customary four. During that time he was listed in only two of the Wake Forest University yearbooks, suggesting that he was more absent than present.

  His brothers in the Kappa Alpha fraternity found him oddly hard to remember. One I contacted thought he’d run away to Canada. When pressed a little further, he emailed back a brief profanity. Another said he didn’t know Cliff and that their careers at Wake Forest had not overlapped—but there they were, standing together in a photograph from their freshman year. For a boy whose achievements made national headlines while he was still in high school, his impact on university life was minimal. He seems to have joined no sports teams, triumphed in no quizzes or debates.

  The press interviews with his father also produced an imperfect picture. Dr. Gaddy told the papers that Cliff had gone to Sweden using the passport he’d obtained when he was granted a Fulbright scholarship to study at the University of Würzburg in West Germany. Fulbright, however, could find no record of such a scholarship being offered. Dr. Gaddy also said that his son had boarded a flight from Boston to Stockholm on February 22, 1969. The record shows that he was granted humanitarian asylum on July 18. But the deserter Rob Argento remembered Cliff turning up on his doorstep in September, apparently straight off the plane.

  When I mentioned Cliff to Michael Vale, he sounded a little heartbroken. “I thought of him as a best friend,” he said. “We had intellectual discussions. I encouraged him to learn Russian, and he did.” Michael recommended Cliff to the publisher M. E. Sharpe and brought him in on translation projects for Soviet Psychology and the International Journal of Mental Health. “Cliff was such a strong character,” said Michael, wistfully. “Even at that young age. So thorough. So bright. So upright. He was clean.” He sounded like Falstaff talking about Prince Hal.

  * * *

  DURING VALE’S ABSENCE, the ADC people had been arguing the case for political asylum. They screened Deserter USA to anti-war groups around Sweden, though they had to go without its codirector Lars Lambert, who was in jail for refusing to do his national service. Jim McGourty and Bill Jones went to plead their case to the voters of tomorrow, giving talks to Swedish schoolchildren about desertion. “What would happen if you went home now? Or if you were sent back?” asked a little girl named Ika, in a classroom not far from Stockholm. “We would get several years in prison,” replied Bill. “And deserters in American prisons are treated very badly.”

  Book projects were also under way. Beacon Press, the progressive publishers of James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son and Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man, commissioned the American journalist Susan George to compile a volume of interviews with the deserters. George was based in Paris, where her presence at anti-war meetings earned her a mention in the dispatches of the MHCHAOS asset code-named PETUNIA. Mike Vale was pursuing his own deal with Grove Press, the company that distributed Deserter USA in the States, and arranged for Richard Bucklin, a gaunt and bug-eyed army private from Colorado, who seemed to survive solely on Coca-Cola, to begin conducting taped interviews with his comrades. (“Some of his questions were a little creepy,” recalled Michele.) Neither of these works saw the light of day. However, several of the Swedish deserters did contribute to a book of interviews that was intended to advance their cause, but ended up doing the opposite.

  At the end of 1969, the journalist and lawyer Mark Lane arrived in Stockholm, hungry for stories of atrocity. Lane was a celebrity of the counterculture: his bestselling book on the Kennedy assassination, Rush to Judgment, had founded the JFK conspiracy industry by attacking the view that Lee Harvey Oswald was a lone assassin. In 1968 Lane’s fame had been amplified when he became the comedian Dick Gregory’s running mate in a write-in presidential bid. When Nixon emerged victorious, Gregory denounced the process as corrupt and had himself and Lane sworn in as America’s president and vice president in exile.

  Lane arrived in Stockholm just as one of the great, grim news stories of the Vietnam War was breaking: the My Lai massacre, in which hundreds of unarmed Vietnamese civilians were murdered by U.S. soldiers in March 1968. The investigative reporter Seymour Hersh published the first account of this incident on November 12, 1969. As the world recoiled in horror, Lane hunted for similar stories among the deserters. The result was Conversations with Americans, one of the most incendiary books of the Vietnam period.

  It is a collection of interviews, the first of which is with a Stockholm deserter who talks about his experiences as a member of an elite marine long-range patrol unit. Lane’s interviewee describes how torture methods were high on the syllabus. “We were told to make use of electrical radio equipment,” he said. “They had drawings on the board showing exactly how to clamp the electrodes into the testicles of a man or the body of a woman.” Later classes, he said, included instruction in inserting bamboo sticks into the ears or under the fingernails of a prisoner. And in the case of female captives, other instructions were given: “to strip them, spread them open and drive pointed sticks or bayonets into their vagina.” He adds: “We were also told we could rape the girls all we wanted.”

  The name of this interviewee was Chuck Onan, the weed-loving boy from the Chicago projects, and owner of Ninja the dog. Chuck had not been part of an elite marine squad. He had never received more than basic training. But the record suggested he had strayed from the facts. Dagens Nyheter placed Chuck at a press conference in December 1969, sitting beside Mark Lane and describing his instruction in “helicopter torture.” “We learned how to tie up troublesome prisoners with rope under the helicopter and to then drag them until they confessed.” Thomas Lee Hayes heard the same story. “Chuck,” he wrote, “tells me of his training in various methods of torture as part of his duty with the Special Forces.”

  The veteran war correspondent Neil Sheehan read Lane’s book for the New York Times and called the Defense Department to verify the details. He was told that Chuck’s last job before his desertion was in a marine base stock handing out spare parts for airplanes. Sheehan also relayed official doubts about the massacre described by Terry Whitmore, another Lane interviewee. “Some of the horror tales in this book are undoubtedly true,” wrote Sheehan. “Where there is so much stench, something must be rotting. Mr. Lane succeeds, however, in making it impossible to reach any factual judgment. Nevertheless, the naive and the professional moralists will derive considerable satisfaction from the book, if they can control their intestines.”

  Conversations with Americans was a PR disaster for the anti-war movement. Edwin Arnett had lied to the world about war crimes, but outside the Soviet Union his claims had been reported with skepticism. Lane’s atrocity stories had been published between hard covers by a respected New York publisher, which was now refusing to print a second edition and asking the author to return his $75,000 advance. In Sweden, the deserters felt that their cause had been brought into disrepute. “Lane came looking for lies,” recalled Rob Argento, the deserter from Miami. “That book did us a lot of damage. It cast doubt on other stories that were true.”

  I intended to ask
Chuck about all this during my visit to his home in Eugene, Oregon, but failed to find my moment. On my last morning with him a young man came to the door to buy marijuana. He and Chuck went into the kitchen to do their deal. I sat on the sofa with Ninja, trying to formulate a question and feeling, in that house by the gravel pit, a very long way from home. When my airport taxi arrived, the customer was still mulling over his choice. Chuck and I were obliged to say goodbye in his presence. He hugged me hard, like a man standing on the edge of something.

  Later, by email, Chuck gave his side of the story. He had, he said, never claimed to be part of an elite unit. Mark Lane had confused him with another interviewee. But he insisted that the part about the torture of women was true. “We were talked to about it,” he said, “and told that we could do it.” The drill instructor, he said, had presided over “a brainwashing event.” “The Marines succeeded in turning me (a nice kid) into someone who would torture and kill women and children if ordered to do so. And I was proud of it! I was a terrible person. I was a perfect Marine.”

  * * *

  BY EARLY 1970, the migratory patterns of desertion had shifted. The Soviets were no longer willing to smuggle deserters through Russia. Gloomy communications reached Hans Göran Franck about twenty deserters lying low in Beheiren safe houses, with no means of leaving Japan. “The former route to Sweden has been interrupted,” read one plea. “Would it be possible to fly them in someone’s private plane? Or someone’s yacht?”

  Old comrades were going their separate ways. Mark Shapiro left Sweden to study in Canada. Some deserters started families; others started college. The broader community gathered itself in less austere environments than Michael Vale’s flat, including the Alternative Stomach, a social club and advice center that hosted poetry readings and vegetarian curry nights. (A magazine, Internal Haemmorrhage, was also produced.) George Carrano founded a group called the Stockholm Research Collective, whose members spent their evenings compiling a lengthy report on the problems of American imperialism, which was never published.

  Beyond this warm circle, a substantial minority endured brutal economic hardship. Circumstances were toughest for the colony of deserters in Malmö. “I thought that I’d heard all about the bad scene down there but I still couldn’t believe it,” reported a visiting exile from Stockholm. “It was an American ghetto at its worst, and almost all that that implies.” Among its most desperate inhabitants was John Babcock, a deserter who suffered from a serious kidney complaint. Four months behind in the rent, shoplifting to get food for himself and his pregnant girlfriend, he bought a pistol, took the ferry to Copenhagen, attempted to rob a bank, and got five years. His fate was memorialized in a song by a Swedish folk band.

  * * *

  MICHAEL VALE WAS now only an intermittent presence in Stockholm, and he concentrated his interests on a small cadre of people he regarded as trustworthy and politically wholesome. Among them were Cliff Gaddy, Warren Hamerman, Bill Jones, and Jim McGourty. They remained attached, nominally, to the American Deserters Committee, which still commanded the attention of a minority of politically minded deserters.

  But Michael and his allies were making plans about which the rest of the ADC knew nothing. They were in touch with sympathetic activists in Frankfurt, and Michael had cultivated contacts in Britain, who moved in the orbit of a group called International Socialists.

  Michael put a special effort into training Cliff Gaddy, the man who emerged as his most promising pupil. Cliff was smarter than the others and shared Michael’s amazing facility with languages. He was fluent in Swedish and German and, with his mentor’s encouragement, soon mastered Russian. Michael’s contacts brought Cliff work from the publisher M. E. Sharpe and, with it, access to the latest Soviet academic literature.

  In the early 1970s, sometimes in collaboration with Michael and sometimes on his own, Cliff translated scholarly articles on the future of Soviet-American relations, Moscow’s view of the arms race, and the treatment of schizophrenia in Russian hospitals. He translated the essays of Yevgeny Preobrazhensky, an economist who had worked alongside Trotsky in the 1920s. Together, Mike’s band of followers were planning a new revolutionary project. One based beyond Swedish borders.

  In the summer of 1970, the ADC’s collection of 16 mm news films disappeared from the office. So did Bill Jones. With its principal members absent or otherwise engaged, the organization entered a period of vagueness and lassitude. A small knot of activists kept it running, using modest funds that were still coming in from Thomas Hayes’s CALCAV group. The principal figures were Gerry Condon, a former Green Beret with an impressive red beard and a psychology degree from the University of San Francisco, and Mike Powers, a Brooklyn-born activist keen on nurturing the ADC’s links with North Korea and Albania. They became the voices of the political wing of the deserter movement—the ones to whom the press turned when they needed a quote on the latest crime or deportation case, or material for the customary, slightly Bergmanish piece on the loneliness of the American deserter in the long Swedish winter.

  In October 1970, Michael Vale’s faction tossed a paper grenade into their old office: a five-page communiqué entitled “Dissolution Statement of the American Deserters Committee.” “An organization remains politically relevant as long as the situation and goals remain so,” it argued. “As the situation changes or the goals lose their significance, it is also necessary that the organization undergo corresponding changes, or else dissolve as a viable political force, although perhaps retaining its name and form. But in such a case, the organization is a form without content, a mere chimera of political fancy.” After much discussion, the statement said, the ADC had elected to disband. “The decision was based on a growing realization of the increasing political irrelevance of the ADC.” The bottom of the last page bore the names of Bill Jones, Cliff Gaddy, Chuck Onan, and the deserter we know as Jim McGourty.

  The first Gerry Condon heard about this was when he received a letter from CALCAV informing him that the ADC’s funding would be frozen until the facts were clarified. He wrote straight back. “The statement,” wrote Condon, “written, of course, by none other than our old friend Michael Vale and distributed by an unfortunately misguided Bill Jones, does not represent the opinion of anyone who has had anything to do with the ADC in the last eight months.” Condon went tearing around town in search of the signatories. He found that most of them were no longer in the country. “All that’s left of them here,” he told CALCAV, “is bad memories, bad aftertastes.” He hoped the document would be ignored. “If so, that crew will have given deserters in Sweden their last headache and we can get on with the business in hand.”

  * * *

  THE CASH-FLOW PROBLEM happened just at the wrong moment. The winter of 1970–71 was a cold season for the ADC. In the summer of 1970, Jerry Dass, the former Green Beret who had become a protégé to their biggest donor, Sven Kempe, committed suicide by dousing himself in kerosene and setting himself alight.

  In November, twenty-one-year-old Joseph Parra of New Orleans became the first deserter to experience forcible repatriation to the States. He was serving a prison sentence for smuggling LSD from Copenhagen to Stockholm and scheduled for deportation thereafter. As the moment came nearer, Parra became desperate. He attempted suicide. He married a Swedish woman, Sonja Lundström, in his cell. The ADC organized protests, sit-ins, and a ten-day hunger strike. None of it had any effect. At one of the protests an ADC member was charged with assaulting a police officer, sentenced to one month in jail, and told that he, too, would be deported upon release.

  On November 25, 1970, Joe Parra was flown to New York by two plainclothes Swedish officers. His journey ended with a farcical flourish. Two U.S. Army military policemen boarded the plane as it sat on the tarmac at John F. Kennedy International Airport, but the Swedes and their prisoner walked straight past them, obliging the MPs to turn on their heels and dash back to arrest Parra in the arrivals lounge. “It’s kind of tough to get out of jail this
morning, fly across the Atlantic, and get picked up again on the other side,” said Parra, before being bundled into a side room.

  In the following fortnight, two more deserters were delivered from Swedish prison into the arms of the U.S. military authorities. Dick Fernandez, the head of CALCAV, responded in unclerical language. “We are absolutely blown out of our fucking minds here about these goddam Swedes sending three Americans back to this country to go to jail!” Why, he asked, could they not have been deported to Canada or Algeria? “I’m prepared to see if we can’t really put some screws on Mr. Palme to move in this direction.”

  Max Watts, the old Paris stationmaster, observing the situation from Germany, reflected on the cases. “Sure,” he wrote, “Palme wants only ‘nice,’ politically conscious deserters. Sorry, those we need right here in the army. If the Swedish govt is serious in its willingness to help the Vietnamese, it must be willing to take those GIs who can do little except kill, or smoke.”

  No killers had emerged from the deserter community. Not quite yet. But those who had joined the burgeoning drug culture now knew that they might be only one pill or cigarette away from deportation. “Generally,” an ADC member wrote to CALCAV, “the situation is getting much tighter and there is much talk of going to Canada or going underground by several who feel themselves threatened.” Some deserters had already made that decision. Among them was one of Sweden’s star exiles—and his case demonstrates how hard the road could be.

  * * *

  THREE YEARS AFTER arriving from Moscow in a blaze of publicity, Craig Anderson of the Intrepid Four found that his exile had taken a Siberian turn. He was estranged from his American family and drifting away from the new one he’d started in Sweden. His most exciting experience was the hardest to communicate. In the winter of 1969–70, he saw his first UFO: a bright, low-flying object that scudded toward him through the Swedish night. Terrestrial life, however, was hard. Work proved elusive, save for a few odd jobs. But in the summer of 1970, he met a young street musician who had just arrived in Stockholm after a series of wild adventures on the hippie trail. Karen Fabec was good-looking, American, and also professed experience of a close encounter, having once witnessed a UFO hovering above her native Pittsburgh. She and Craig had been a couple for several weeks before she realized that she’d seen him before on the TV news. “I liked his quiet mysterious demeanor,” she said. “I made a lot out of that. Young girls do that, right?”