The report on Mike’s meeting survives because it was forwarded to Ray Wannall, the FBI’s chief of counterintelligence. His copy bears a covering note: “We would appreciate being advised as to your requirements for pertinent information on North Vietnamese and foreign radical involvement overseas with American deserter/draft evader groups and individuals.” The name of the sender is typed below: Richard Ober, the chief of MHCHAOS. The name of the Next Step, we must presume, was soon punched into HYDRA.
* * *
THE NEXT STEP newspaper launched on July 4, 1970. Three stapled tabloid pages with a hand-drawn masthead above a quotation from U.S. Army Regulation 318-135 (D), which asserted a soldier’s right “to read and retain commercial publications for his own personal use.” Its lead story anticipated a large anti-war rally scheduled to take place that day in Heidelberg. The back page described the nature of the secret war it wanted its readers to join. “On almost every base, in Germany, in the USA, and everywhere else (even Alaska) where there are U.S. troops, there are unnamed groups of GIs quietly and skillfully doing a damned gutsy job. They’re organizing GIs to fight while they’re in the military, but for the people, and not for Nixon.”
Most GI newspapers had a freewheeling, proto-punk aesthetic. They contained cartoons snipped savagely from other publications, pages laid out like ransom notes, expletive-filled copy. The Next Step was much more serious—closer, its makers hoped, to the kind of paper to which Trotsky was contributing in Vienna just before the First World War. It ran a campaign against the army’s attempts to build better relationships among its men. Forums in which GIs could discuss their grievances with superiors were dismissed as “sycophancy” and “dull palaver.” It recorded cafeteria scuffles within bases, the slashing of officers’ car tires, the hurling of a smoke bomb through the window of the officers’ club in Kirch-Göns.
In August 1970, the Next Step brought news that the U.S. Army stockade at Mannheim was “riot ripe”: a white GI had thrown a glass of milk into the face of a black prisoner. Disturbances followed. The guard on the ammunition dump was doubled. Then dozens of men fell ill with food poisoning. The paper believed this was deliberate—that the brass had spiked the stew to ensure that the men were too busy vomiting to smash the furniture or help themselves to guns and grenades. Maybe it was true. Or maybe this reasoning was an indication of the shape of things to come.
* * *
MICHAEL VALE HAD always had his doubts about many of the men who came to Sweden. The exiles, particularly those who were resisting the draft rather than military orders, were too individualistic, too liberal, to submit to the kind of discipline he favored. From 1970, the American Deserters Committee lived on without him, in a much-reduced condition.
Those in its decaying orbit made their feelings known on the pages of its newsletter. “Let me say this as straight as I can,” wrote one deserter who had been in Sweden from early 1968. “The ADC is a shit organization. It pontificates about ‘unity,’ but in practice promotes nothing but discord.” Another longtime member agreed: “Some of the actions of the paper staff and ADC members tend to indicate that they want a monopoly on the action to insure that there won’t be no action.” The objects of this criticism replied with a quote transcribed from Pyongyang Radio, as interminable as a Swedish winter.
Michael Vale was glad to have left this behind. Relocating to Germany to cultivate resistance inside the army seemed a more promising plan. In this, he looked to Lenin and Trotsky rather than Kim Il Sung. Perhaps, he reasoned, another 1917 was coming. Perhaps the military could be forged into an instrument of revolution, as it had been in Russia during the Great War.
The Next Step tried to make it happen. “One of the biggest fears of the Pentagon,” announced an editorial, “is that … it might soon have an army it cannot control.” To that end, the paper developed a conspiracist, catastrophist vibe. Its articles insisted that there would be no jobs for veterans once the war was over: Nixon was closing industry and cracking down on union activity. Images reinforced the argument; the paper’s pages bore photographs of long lines outside factory gates, striking miners in South Carolina, a little girl standing with her father as he signed for his welfare payment.
The paranoid style crept into the news pages. An early issue picked up a story about Nixon’s psychotherapist Dr. Arnold A. Hutschnecker, author of a confidential report recommending government testing of young Americans for early signs of psychological disorders. Hutschnecker proposed that potential delinquents should be treated in camps. He was a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany and was thinking of the sunny outdoor institutions of his Weimar childhood, but he lived to regret the unfortunate choice of words. The White House recoiled from the plan and the furor. But the Next Step used it to build a picture of an America gathering its energies to use psychiatry and austerity to manage its population. And that was a fantasy by which several of its members—Cliff, Bill, Warren, and Jim—would soon come to live their lives.
* * *
FOR MICHAEL, THIS time in Germany brought enjoyable skirmishes and maneuvers. “Oh God,” he said, snorting with laughter, “it was so easy. I was older than everyone else by about a decade, so I would go in with a briefcase full of Newsreel films opposing the war and about the domestic situation. There’d be a young duty officer on guard, and I’d just say, ‘At ease, Sergeant!’ and walk right on through, and show these anti-war films in rooms filled with marijuana smoke. That was the American army in Germany.” The Next Step was helped, he said, by a sympathetic major who spoke Vietnamese and had worked as an interpreter in Indochina. “He would give us advance warning of any action being planned against us,” he said. “Very nice guy. A Catholic. Catholic kids were the easiest to turn into revolutionaries.”
Not every member of the Next Step came to Germany, or lived there permanently. Cliff Gaddy shuttled between Stockholm and Frankfurt. Chuck Onan was a temporary recruit, passing through Germany after a spell enjoying the sun in Franco’s Spain. Jim McGourty, however, decided to make a more dangerous journey. In the summer of 1970 he went back to the States to be with his wife, Michele. He traveled under his own name without arousing suspicion. The couple found an apartment in Hoboken, New Jersey, and jobs with AT&T, Michele as an overseas operator and Jim as an engineer. They were discreet and had no trouble. That winter, however, Michele became pregnant, and their semi-clandestine American life suddenly seemed less secure. They decided to return to Germany, using new travel documents secured with the help of their friends in the radical underground.
The paperwork was prepared in New York by Norm Fruchter, a novelist and filmmaker who worked for Newsreel. I found him happy to explain the process. A sympathetic doctor would write a letter authorizing a nurse to access death records, ostensibly for a study on child mortality. “We preferred a narrow age range,” said Norm. “Zero to one.” Norm would then use the information to obtain a birth certificate. “I had about a hundred across a whole range of races and ethnicities, so when people came I could offer them a choice about who they wanted to be.”
So, in late 1970, Jim McGourty was born—or born again. In the spring of 1971, he and Michele cashed their savings and boarded an Icelandic Airlines flight to Luxembourg. On arrival they were met by a contact who escorted them to the railway station and bought them tickets for the onward journey to Frankfurt. He then left them sitting at a café while he took their money to the currency exchange. In his absence another man approached the table. He said he was from the U.S. Embassy and wanted to know if everything was okay. Their reply, recalled Michele, was too brisk to be convincing, but the man did not trouble them further. Neither did the figure who had taken their cash. Realizing they had been scammed, Jim and Michele boarded the Frankfurt train, penniless.
At first, the radical life was compensation enough. They gathered material for the Next Step, took the newspaper to army bases, and waited for their baby to arrive. For Michele, their new strategy was about giving active-duty soldiers the means to
resist the war without having to enter the limbo that she and her husband were obliged to occupy.
“It didn’t seem right to push people toward desertion because there was nothing to protect them,” she said. “So why not dissent from within?” What most stuck in her mind from these days, however, was the unglamorous side of domestic life in a small revolutionary organization. The arguments over comic books. The bad cooking. When her son was born prematurely in the summer of 1971, her frustrations intensified—not least because Jim failed to turn up at the hospital, leaving it to Michael Vale to bring mother and baby home. Michael also persuaded a friendly German doctor to furnish the new arrival with a birth certificate unburdened by the fake McGourty name.
This, Michele told me, was the moment she began losing her enthusiasm for her husband and the life they were leading. As soon as she was able, she found a job in a nearby university research laboratory, determined to earn enough money to take her baby home to the United States.
* * *
SOME RELISHED THE recklessness that attended this kind of activism. Chuck Onan spoke warmly about his time with the Next Step. We were sitting in a diner in Eugene, Oregon, where the waitress had assumed that he was my dad. Chuck was much more interested in sharing his stories about Germany than he was in the burger on his plate.
“We were very disruptive on those bases,” he told me. “After a while we became known and they started sending troops after us. We were chased in cars and on foot, but it was pretty easy to get away. It was dark, and we all ran in different directions.” They had help, too, from local and American supporters. The journalist Mark Lane supplied them with a car to drive between bases. (It was lost in action and impounded by the authorities.) Chuck recalled a German woman who helped out for reasons of her own. “She was a cougar,” he said, his eyes crinkling in nostalgia. “Michael and I stayed with her and that lady wanted both of us.”
Michael Vale went more coolly over the same ground. He remembered a woman named Lynn who had convinced herself that a radio-controlled bomb had been inserted into her skull. “And,” said Mike, “there was this guy called Engdahl. He was pretty unbalanced. He really needed a guru.”
William Engdahl was a Minneapolis-born Princeton graduate who was at Stockholm University writing a thesis on social housing policy. He had attached himself to Michael’s group in Sweden and traveled to Germany to be with them. Most people liked him. He was a good-looking, gentle soul with huge, burly arms and chest, pumped up by his reliance on crutches, a consequence of childhood polio. His family background also made him a good fit for a cell of radicals: the Minnesota Engdahls had produced Walfrid Engdahl, the secretary of the East of the Rockies subcommittee of the Industrial Workers of the World, and John Louis Engdahl, the first editor of the Communist Daily Worker, who was indicted on espionage charges for agitating against American involvement in the Great War. William’s fate, as we will see, was much stranger.
Warren Hamerman’s draft resister status made his visits to Germany less fraught with danger than those of the deserters in the group. He took responsibility for printing the newspaper in Stockholm and bringing copies south to Frankfurt, and he wrote pompous letters home about his revolutionary life. They produced a response. Michael remembered the day when Hamerman’s grandmother arrived from New York to bend her grandson’s ear. A tiny figure marched from the plane with a hand raised. “You don’t have to say anything,” she declared. “I know it already!”
In Warren’s little apartment in Frankfurt, packed with deserter revolutionaries, Cooky Pollack told stories of pre-war radicalism. She spoke of her flight from Russia after the failed 1905 revolution. How she’d done political organizing among the cloth cutters and prostitutes of New York. She told the story of the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, in which 146 New York garment workers, mostly Jewish immigrants like her, were burned or choked to death; how some had jumped to their deaths because the owner had locked the exits to prevent workers taking unauthorized breaks.
She told them of the optimism she had felt in the 1920s and ’30s. (“We thought we had it in our hands!” she said.) And she told them of the great blow that came in the late 1940s, when the FBI indicted the leadership of the American Communist Party, and she and her husband went to a CP meeting in the Adirondacks, where a rented mob attacked the delegates. (“Max,” she said, “it’s going to be a long time.”) Michael remembered Warren’s astonished reaction to this speech. He knew almost nothing of her radical past. “Well,” she said, “you never asked the right questions.” Michael did not escape a tongue lashing, but he didn’t mind: he was already a fan. “Cooky went round telling us all what to do,” he said. “She transformed the organization.”
As the months went by, however, the purpose of the Next Step fell into doubt. It was putting out its paper, screening its films, preaching revolution and resistance to the GIs. But the effects were hard to measure, and no battleship Potemkin moment seemed about to materialize in Europe or America.
The campus movement was in disarray. Students for a Democratic Society had, like the ADC, torn itself apart. A fundamentalist faction, the Weather Underground, had broken from the main body of the organization, and neither had survived the trauma. The Weathermen—whose number included Michael’s old friend Bo Burlingham—were on the run, hunted by the FBI. On March 6, 1970, three members were killed in New York City while preparing a nail bomb they planned to detonate that evening at a dance for noncommissioned officers and their girlfriends at the Fort Dix army base in New Jersey. The explosion brought down the Greenwich Village town house they were using as a base. The actor Dustin Hoffman, who lived next door, escaped unhurt. The outrage altered the political climate. Revolution, violent or nonviolent, did not seem quite so proximate as it had in 1968.
“I’d got myself into a very existential situation,” Michael told me. “Here I was, the leader of a group of people who depended on me, but who were still unproven in any political battle. We were primed, but we weren’t part of any bigger organization. What could we do? Who could we join up with?”
* * *
THE ANSWER CAME from New York: the National Caucus of Labor Committees. It was a boring name for one of the few radical political organizations that seemed to Michael to be gathering energy rather than losing it. Its members were bright young people who had moved, like Mike, in the orbit of Students for a Democratic Society. Its leader, known by the pseudonym Lyn Marcus, was a charismatic economics lecturer whose free classes had been received with enthusiasm by the student Marxists of Greenwich Village.
“This guy Marcus was presenting some good theoretical analysis,” said Michael. “And he’d gathered around him some real minds. In the law, physics, chemistry, the whole academic panoply. He’d formed a committed group around him. It was the only show in town.”
The organization was looking to expand. It had explored alliances with British Trotskyists, with Greek socialists living in exile after the generals seized control of Athens, with a group of left-wing medical students who were making a noise in Düsseldorf. A delegation traveled from New York to Frankfurt to talk terms with Michael and his comrades. It was agreed that the Next Step would dissolve and its members would join the Labor Committees. Some would stay in Germany, others would return to Sweden to recruit more members there, and still others would be assigned to local groups in American cities. Cliff Gaddy and Bill Jones went north to Stockholm. Warren Hamerman returned home to Baltimore, though he retained a flat in Frankfurt. William Engdahl went to Chicago. Michele and Jim moved to Charlotte, North Carolina, and Michael to New York. The sympathetic major who had helped the Next Step evade detection paid for Michael’s car to be shipped to the States.
In a modest apartment in Greenwich Village, Michael Vale met Lyn Marcus for the first time. A lanky figure in his early fifties, with thinning hair and a bow tie as prim and proper as his New England accent. A pipe smoker, whose tobacco habit also gave him a useful rhetorical prop. He smiled beneath a
pair of dark glasses and welcomed Michael into the Labor Committees. Michael accepted. It was the biggest mistake of his life.
“Often I don’t catch the signals of danger, or if I do I don’t heed them,” said Michael. “But I saw that one coming. It’s a pretty eerie feeling to be in the presence of a psychopath.”
“How do you detect a psychopath?” I asked.
“Ever heard of Pavel Câmpeanu?” asked Michael. I hadn’t. “He was a Romanian sociologist. In the war, he was sharing a prison cell with someone else who had been fighting the Fascists. To pass the time, the two men played chess. Whenever Câmpeanu’s cellmate lost a game, a strange expression would pass across his face. An alarming smile. The name of this bad loser was Nicolae Ceaușescu.” Michael enjoyed my expression of surprise. “When they break down, people like this, they smile. They disintegrate. They go back to their true violent nature. Because they’ve been exposed. And Marcus would give that smile. It’s horrible.” He demonstrated with a flash of his teeth.
I knew the next part of the story, and the shadow that it had cast upon Michael’s life. I knew that the man he called Lyn Marcus, and had once regarded as a potential political ally, was the villain of his biography. I also realized, as we spoke, that Michael Vale believed his old enemy was dead. We were sitting in a café at St. Pancras station in London. I flipped open my laptop and used the sluggish public Wi-Fi to load a website I thought Michael needed to see. The site had a red, white, and blue livery and the logo of an eagle rampant. After a few moments of waiting, the clip came up: a balding, bespectacled nonagenarian standing at a lectern flanked by blue curtains and patriotic flags. There were three large scabs on his forehead, as though he had recently recovered from walking into a door. In patrician, New England tones, he was giving a speech on one of his favorite subjects.
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