Was NATO a cause of minister's murder?

The link to NATO was Sweden’s lifeline during the cold war - yet Sweden let it rot away because the socialist prime minister at the time had, for domestic purposes, created a rhetorical picture of Sweden as neutral, aloof - and slightly judgmental, in fact - of the two superpower blocs.
According to new research into Sweden’s often two-faced neutrality policy, the Swedish defence researcher Robert Dalsjo has discovered that the Swedish prime minister Olof Palme thirty years ago barely bothered to inform his successor as PM, Thorbjorn Falldin, a conservative, about the secret agreements, presumably for fear that it would expose the socialist poseur and prominent critic of Nixonian foreign policy to the charges of hypocrisy. While presenting himself as a leader of the non aligned nations, Palme presided over a secret scheme - instituted by his predecessors - that would allow refuelling afacilities to NATO aircraft, over flight rights, and extensive patrol schedule coordination, including radio compatibility with NATO. OPening a flank on Russia for NATO air patrols have the west a formidable advantage over Russia; in return for which NATO had secretly pledged to bail Sweden out in the event of an attack to keep the Oresund straits open for instance, allowing the Baltic fleet out into the open sea. There were also plans for where and how the Swedish army would fall back to positions that could be supplied by the Norwegian ports such as Narvik, and structure of partisan resistance that could be run from London.
But because he didn’t pass this on, Falldin was in the dark, so was the new chief of general staff and the defence relationship with the west lapsed. The rhetoric - or rather lack of it - became the new reality; Sweden had suddenly become naked.
The revelations from Dalsjo, published with the help of the institute of war studies at King’s in London and to appear in bookform later this year are interesting because they help to explain the intense suspicion felt towards Palme by those who knew about the old NATO cooperation when he returned to power in 1982, sharpened by a number of submarine incidents shortly after he was elected.
Navy sonars tracked suspicious objects crawling around the Stockholm archipelago; they were assumed to be Russian subs - one sub had actually run aground a year earlier, appeared on the TV news worldwide, before the sub was set free, amid much Russian apology, and let home. Palme’s failure to condemn what was seen as a sustained campaign of provocations was felt to be worrying by many.
With the benefit of knowledge of the Dalsjo revelations about Palme letting the NATo relationship lapse, it is possible to see that navy insiders who knew about NATO, which the general public didn't, could detect a pattern of nonchalance towards the west and appeasement of the east which clearly seemed to continue after his re-election Would they be worried enough to act on this, and what could have been a catalyst.
Earlier this year I had lunch with a London-based writer/researcher who had once made documentaries.
The documents passed to me by the man I had lunch with earlier this year concerned the agenda of a summit meeting between Gorbachev and Palme in April 1986 that seemed to indicate a switch in Palme’s post election pattern of behavior: from just publicly repudiating the NATO connection to actively doing the USSR’s bidding in northern Europe. The document said
Palme was to discuss Danish and Norwegian neutrality in return for a nuclear free zone and a Finnish-style Soviet security guarantee for northern Europe; the Danes had probably not been consulted but there you go.
Before he died of a heart attack at Houston airport a few years ago, the documentary was probing how far this information travelled from SOPs - Stay Behind’s headquarters in Brussels - and how, if at all, it was acted on.
Like Gladio in Italy, the would be partisan cells contained some dodgy people as well as fervent right wing anti communists - with some overlap with the disaffected Swedish military convinced of Palme's betrayal.
The Dalsjo report is the most complete exposure of Sweden’s far reaching NATO cooperation to be made available to the Swedish public. It has been hinted at before but many Swedes have preferred to think of Sweden as having been completely neutral, aloof by its own efforts. This has informed and continues to inform Sweden’s rather-high handed view of itself, regards Europe and the rest of the world. Last year a majority in a poll opposed NATO membership, presumably because Swedes thought they had looked after that side of things themselves. Further, the revelation of the partisan structures for the first time confirm thiny’s private findings, suggesting he was on the right track. The onion is shedding its layers; if Sweden’s equivalent of Gladio did kill Palme because fear he assisted the communist threat it sets Sweden firmly in the postwar European context, where the counter revolutionary activities of the various stay-behind unit set up to combat Communist infiltration has been called the biggest untold European story since the second world war. In Italy, Gladio is suspected of having killed Aldo Moro, the Christian democrat tprime minister who committed the sin of allowing communists into government. In Sweden they killed Olof Palme