The secret war against Sweden

It was a landmark event in modern European history. A secret CIA orchestrated attack by US and British forces on Sweden in the 1980s. It shifted European opinion away from America’s adversary, toppled a government in Germany – and may have contributed to the assassination of a Swedish prime minister.
Every Swede of a certain age remembers the events – though not who was behind them. Fro Swedes, myself included, were only too aware of the menacing presence of the USSR across the Baltic..
It is only recently that studying findings by the academic cold war specialist Ola Tunander has made me realise that these fears appear to have been exploited by NATO. The US-dominated defence organisation carried out on a friendly neutral country one of the most successful “false flag” operations of the cold war.
The goal of the false flag – posing to be the enemy - operation was to serve the US administration’s strategic military and political ambitions. It makes one wonder to what extent, ultimately, it was America and not Russia that was the aggressive party in the cold war.
All propaganda operations must work in a prepared environment. Everyone knew about Stalin; but myths were fed by lack of contact. .Soviets, all east Europeans, were seen as an undifferentiated mass, no different from each other than larvae are, shuffling in an eternal, never-ending queue of bearskin hats invigilated by secret police with burning charcoal eyes; Aged 11, I had nightmares of waking up on the wrong side of the Brandenburg gate. On summer days, I would turn over on the beach and spot a mushroom cloud of impending thunder on the Baltic horizon, slowly advancing to take over the sparkling blue July sky on our side, and wonder: surely atomic explosions were accompanied flashes of brilliant light? They were not rational times and, if you were a boy in his early teens, your reality was often framed by an unhealthy consumption of fantasy and science fiction books; and a liking for Star Wars, with its dichotomous morality and its depiction of the Dark Empire. Another model was provided by Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, which I devoured in the summer of 1981. I imagine many others had their ideas of the USSR
Sweden experienced dozens,, perhaps hundreds, of alien submarine visits into her archipelago in the1980s; many including special forces. Only one submarine was ever visually identified, because it had run aground. It was indeed Soviet. There were a half dozen high profile submarine hunts. In only one, the first, Horsfjarden, was there an in depth commission to determine the nature of the intruders. That commission pointed to the USSR, falsely as we shall see. In other istances the intruder was “assumed”, as often the sightings were often fragmentary.
Even if the first sub hadn’t been Soviet, and the commission hadn’t pointed out the second one, most people were sufficiently badly inclined towards the USSR, the “evil empire”, .– and believe that because of course the submarines were the advance guard of an impending Soviet invasion. And many started to call the Swedish prime minister, Olof Palme, a traitor. Because he was launching peace initiatives, consorting with the enemy, paying visits to the Kremlin, talking of European peace initiatives.
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Shortly after Olof Palme’s assassination in 1986, the cold war ended. In the light of what we didn’t knowo then, the period must be re-examined.. The Soviet Union was not only s colossus with feet of clay, but archives show no plans for conquest of Europe. There were indeed submarines though; only it’s been revealed that they were in the main not Soviet.
They were American, and they were British. And so were the special forces, the US navy SEALS and SBS troops, who seem to have used Sweden as their unauthorised playground. .


U-137 runs aground, sets the scene


The first and only real confirmed submarine sighting in Swedish modern history was of the Whisky class submarine, the U-137, (S-363, in Soviet nomenclature) which ran aground on a reef in the southern Karlskrona archipelago in October 1981, probably after a misnavigation, probably because its crew, or at least its captain, one Piotr Gushchin, was blind drunk. No one then believed the excuse of misnavigation; now it’s generally accepted, according to Rolf Ekeus, the respected (later Iraq WMD active!) diplomat, head of one of the submarine commissions of the 1990s.
It was shortly before the imposition of martial law in Poland two months later. Memories of Soviet tanks in Prague streets were still vivid, the Afghan invasion was just two years old. General western convictions about Soviet expansionism in every direction were uncontroversial.

So, this particular submarine was indeed Soviet: the Whisky on the Rocks episode made worldwide headlines; and the submarine was set free, sent off with a stern diplomatic warning, but the whole situation posed problems for that minority in Swedish public life which argued that it could not be proved prima facie that the hundreds of electronic detections or eye witness accounts in the next ten years were either from NATO or the Warsaw pact: one journalist who begged to differ as early as the mid 1980s, Anders Hasselbohm, who then worked for Expressen, wrote a book [called Ubatshotet - en kritisk granskning] as long ago as 1984 found sources that "asserted that "the submarines were NATO; one was damaged, and was escorted out of the straits of Oresund out of the Baltic two weeks later by another sub". Hasselbohm recently admitted the price to pay for publishing against the received wisdom: his neighbours stopped greeting him in the lift, even his mother in her hometown was shunned, because "pointing out the west; well, that wasn't the done thing." The only public figure to pronounce against the consensus was former army chief Nils Skold, who was accused of being senile.

One academic, Ola Tunander, and one journalist. Lars Borgnas, have recently worked hard through a series of papers and books, and TV documentaries to overturn the enduring consensus in Sweden, and the world inasmuch in that it remembers, that the country was menaced by Soviet submarines and supporting forces for a decade, and the biggest Soviet military action words a western state since the Berlin crisis, it was said.


”America’s undiscovered, underwater U-2 incident”

Consider the Horsfjarden incident, nine months after Whisky on the Rocks, the biggest incursion; the only other occasion when submarines were definitely detected (but not brought up), only other occasion it led to a diplomatic demarche; and the event that established firmly in the public mind the paradigm for subsequent incursions, that the Soviet Union meant business and the U-137 “spy mission” was not a one off: when the regular scrambling of Swedish navy Chinook helicopters and dropping of depth charges was later reduced to mere inside page news.

Like the Whisky incident, it made worldwide headlines.
The official story can be quickly told: the first sighting was, on 29 September 1982, a small submarine sail a couple of kilometres south of Stockholm harbour: a fast moving submarine sail 1.5m wide, 1m high appeared in a pool of boiling water marking its ascent. Second, two observers were travelling in a boat at 12.50 on 1 October, when they observed a periscope entering the waters at Muskö Naval Base, tens of kilometres south of Stockholm. When a huge submarine sail “the size of a wall” passed through a narrow channel in front of coastal defence forces (unarmed), it was game on, and the two week “submarine hunt” following brought 500 journalists from around the world to a press centre near the Musko naval base where a cat and mouse game was played between Swedish helicopters and Anti-submarine warfare (ASW) ships on the world’s TV screens with a number of submarines trapped in Sweden’s fjord system by lines of laid mines that blocked exits to open sea. .

No submarine was brought up; the Swedish navy reported that several had been severely damaged – but escaped. A CIA agent has later said the US narrowly escaped an underwater “U-2 incident”.


Soviets blamed by commission headed by Bildt and admiral secretly working for NATO

A commission was set up to determine the identity of the submarines, and to report proof that they existed, six months later, and it unanimously announced there had been six submarines, including attack submarines in the 60-80 m class, as well as mini submersibles 6 – 30m long, and that they had been Soviet. A Time magazine report of the time under the heading “Red Submarines” wrote that “It read like a chapter of seabed science fiction, but last week Swedes were taking very seriously indeed a report by their government charging the Soviet Union with a spectacular underwater spy effort off the Swedish coast”.

It’s worth looking at this commission. It was led by Sven Andersson, a slightly grey veteran former foreign minister and old hand of the social democrats,; but also had two members whose names are worth remembering, as they play a part in the story: the first is Bror Stefenson, chief of defence staff, who it emerges was in cahoots with NATO; second is Carl Bildt, today 2007 Sweden’s foreign minister; and tipped to become the EU’s newly created foreign minister in 2009 or so; in the 1990s a young prime minister, critic of Russia and sponsor of the Balts’ independence, but back even further, at the time of the submarines, was an up-and-coming young conservative party MP, aged 33, known to be knowledgeable about security issues and for being very pro-American; a frequent visitor to Washington to build links in Pentagon and Reagan’s White House.

These contacts paid off. Before becoming foreign minister in 2006, and after leaving the post of UN envoy to the Balkans he was offered membership of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq by his friend and chair of that right-wing group, Bruce Jackson, who also headed the infamous rightwing think tank Project for the New American Century which advocated a policy of muscular nationalism to assert America’s interests in the world; its members included all the you-know-who neoconservatives. Bildt was promised a senior job in postwar Iraq if he could be the acceptable lobbying face of the neocon organization in Europe, agitating for war on the basis of intelligence estimates of Iraq's threatening intent, intelligence which, as we all know it turned out, proved to be false.


Evidence classified, Swedish PM Palme killed

The commission’s evidence that the subs were Soviet was divided into four parts: visual sightings; underwater photos of keel indentations and tracked submarines tracks on the sea floor; signals intelligence; and sonar records of submarine movement. The proof was taken on trust at the time; now it’s known that the evidence, in Ola Tunander’s words, was “mostly of bluff”.

When the commission’s Backed by public opinion, which “knew” the subs were Soviet anyway, the Swedish government made a strong formal protest to the Soviets. Later several Swedish members of government expressed doubt about the finger-pointing, but felt driven by the Bildt commission and public opinion. They included Anders Thunborg, the defence minister, who complained: “Well, we couldn’t dive ourselves; we have to trust our military leadership, and their experts”; and Lennart Bodstrom, the foreign minister who had to resign after media pressure in 1985 when he said that, after four years of sightings, he said bluntly that it was impossible to protest against an intruder that had not been identified.

The head of the government was Olof Palme, a well-known peacemaker with 15 years of mediation in third world conflicts behind him: the kind of man after whom congress centres in developing countries are named. His initiative, launched earlier in the year to bring Soviets out of the diplomatic cold now sank as fast as a depth charge. How could argue that the USSR had no hostile intents in Europe when the country was clearly showing aggressive intent designed to humiliate and show domination over his country?

Abroad, Europe’s leaders no longer took Palme seriously, as his détente initiatives through the Palme commission suffered. At home, things were almost as bad. After Horsfjarden (sometimes spelt Hårsfjärden), the number of Swedes who thought the USSR was a threat the country’s existence rose from 25% to 88% of the population.

Now Swedes speculated whether his frequent visits to Moscow, to visit soviet leader Juri Andropov, were really the trips of a mole in consultation talks for Sweden’s accession to the Soviet Union, under a bloodless coup which would take place with the assistance of special spetsnaz tip: was Palme expecting to become the Swedish Soviet socialist republic’s first premier, Sweden as the USSR’s sixteenth member, just another Estonia or Ukraine? The atmosphere is hard to recall now; people said it after a few drinks. Hans Hofsten, a senior admiral in the Swedish navy, widely believed to be the figurehead of a movement of disaffected naval officers, wrote a series of articles in the Swedish press warning about the dangers of a "Soviet republic of Sweden".
The fact that it seemed clear that a damaged submarine in 1982 had actually been let out, spared, rather than brought to the surface, pointed to his possible true Moscow loyalties, did it not? In March 1986 Palme was assassinated in an open street in Stockholm. The murder was never solved.

Yeltsin dismisses Bildt “evidence”

THERE IS A STATUE in Stockholm of king Charles XII, the warrior king who gave had an extensive northern and eastern empire in the 18th century (he was the first of the great, failed western invaders of Russia) The statue features him pointing rather imperiously to the east: for him, there were no doubts as to where the enemy lay, and he could command peasant armies of Swedes at a whim to follow him into the cold wastes of the Ukraine. But in this case, would it be fairer to point the finger in the other direction, towards the west?
As the eighties turned into the nineties, and the now almost routine reports of low grade incursions fizzled out, people started to ask questions again about Horsfjarden.

Where was the evidence: how could the government exclude the possibility that NATO subs were not also transgressing. Carl Bildt, now 41 and prime minister, took time out from building friendships with the now independent Baltic states’ new leaderships to visit Yeltsin with irrefutable evidence of Soviet incursion: a hydrophone tape recording (still secret from Swedish public) of Soviet submarine propeller sounds.

Yeltsin’s technical people were not impressed: their best experts said Soviet subs had five propellers, and this was a three propeller sound characteristic of NATO submarines. They also said it could have been a surface vessel from the Swedish navy. Could the Swedes guarantee the surface was free of ASW vessels at the time? Bildt told Yeltsin he could; even though there was no time indication on the tape, and Swedish conscript witnesses later said the area had full of Swedish ASW vessels during the day.

The Russians offered the tape up for third party international verification. Bildt refused, and continued to press for a Russian admission of Soviet incursions. When Yeltsin made the offer of third party mediation again a year later, Bildt’s office didn’t even bother to send a reply.
He had a second tape, dating from 1992; however experts later believed this to have come from a swimming mink. By then, long held doubts had begun to surface from politicians and military men who had never been convinced by the Bildt commision’s findings in the first place. A new government, social democratic, appointed a new submarine commission; yet another followed in 2001, chaired by Sweden's top diplomat, the former ambassador Rolf Ekeus, who had ceased being the UN's chief inspector on WMDs in Iraq, in 1997. The report, which said with diplomatic finesse NATO subs could not have been excluded resulted in furious denunciations by Bildt, the only commission member still active in public life. He never addressed the evidential refutations; the focus of his criticism was that Ekeus didn't understand the security sitation in Sweden in the 1980s or Palme's decision to "anchor" the report "more broadly in the political system".

Bildt's bluster failed to convince at least one man, the main scientific adviser to the Ekeus report, Ola Tunander.
A slight, quiet spoken man in his fifties, professor Ola Tunander, the star academic of Oslo’s Peace Research Institute (safely distant one could say from the Swedish establishment), is one of the world’s leading experts on the cold war in Scandinavia: he has long headed the institute’s Foreign and Security Policy Programme. His book on US Maritime Strategy and Scandinavian geopolitics, , was used as one of two major textbooks for the Swedish Military College. He has published several books on the Cold war with the leading academic publisher Routledge. He has lectured at the centre for naval analysis in Washington and at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey. Ekéus invited Tunander as an expert to this investigation, which gave Tunander access to archival material.
When the Ekeus report was finished, Tunander continued his work, drawing on written resources and on and hundreds of interviews and chats with western and naval officials, resulting in the book The Secret War Against Sweden – US and British Submarine Deception in the 1980s


The real story

Just before the start of the submarine hunt there was a public “good-will” visit by three US ships led by the US cruiser Belknap to Stockholm, after a NATO exercise in the Baltic. The ships welcomes many curious members of the Swedish public; several said they saw a small periscope near the ships, just metres from Stockholm castle,
When the US navy ships departed, they left behind these minisubs, from the depot ship the USS Monongahela to “exercise their way out” of the Swedish archipelago and to provoke Swedish defences into a reaction, which duly occurred.

In one interpretation, this was an exercise to test Swedish defences in which a few senior Swedish officers were informed of and were in collusion with the NATO exercise, ready to pull the plug if event spiralled out of control and NATO subs started getting sunk. A charitable explanation is that NATO was testing Swedish defences to be more on guard against the next Soviet incursion. (A less charitable motive relates to the so called “strategy pf tension“, in which NATO was trying to scare a neutral country into the embrace of the United States, given credence that the ships were quite public about their provocations, more than the next Soviet ones would be,) Tunander says the NATO-informed insiders were rear-admiral Bror Stefenson, chief of the Coastal Fleet, in charge of the submarine hunt that followed, who later the chief military expert on the Bildt committee that named and shamed the Soviets. Another was Per Rudberg, , who was NATO’s liaison man in Sweden and had close personal ties with Admiral Bobby Inman, former Chief of US Naval Intelligence, former Chief of the National Security Agency and, in 1981, became deputy director of the CIA.

The government, the rest of the military, and the Swedish public had no idea.

But it was an exercise that almost went wrong, as the Swedish naval defences were ignorant of the subs’ true origin, as they were exactly meant to be or they wouldn’t try hard enough, were a bit too successful and thorough.

Depth charges of the kind used were almost harmless, had to be within a metre of the submarine to do any damage whatsoever; but the 600 kilo TNT mines strung out across the fjords when the response to the sights were underway were another proposition, and one NATO sub was almost sunk when it made contact and the mine was set off: there was a back-up system where the senior informed officials were to intervene when the dangers of real sinkings were likely, but it seems the system failed.

This near sinking produced an emergency signal: a liquid was released from the sub that spread out on the surface to alert friendly satellites and circling aircraft of a U-boat in emergency: its colour was yellow/green, the US standard, Warsaw pact submarines in contrast issued smoke signals. (The testimonies on the subject from conscripts never became part of the body pf the original commission's work, and both chemical analyses made by a small craft and photos taken by helicopter shortly disappeared)
The Swedish naval forces on the hunt thought their adversary on the ropes: there were hydrophone recordings later of knocking and repair sounds as the submarine lay on the floor of the fjord; but then a strange order came from Stefenson’s naval headquarters: there was to be a “fire prohibition” the next evening from 7pm to 1am; no mine detonations on contact, the reason was “in case there were civilian boats out on the fjords”; but there hadn’t been civilians at night throughout the hunt, had been no ceasefire orders on the nights; and the local navy guards had been equipped with night vision so that even the smallest rowing boat was visible.Local officers said so at the time, and verified this, afterwards

When night fell, the mine trip wires indicated a submarine as on its way out, local commanders, eager to attack the sub, rang Stefenson, who refused to rescind his order, and the wounded submarine escaped. (the others had slipped out earlier; untrapped.) The hunt continued for next six days –there were no ceasefires on subsequent nights – but the trail had gone cold: no more subs were detected, and the journalists, and the navy, eventually went home. Helped by their contact inside Swedish military, Bror Stefenson, who had ordered his ceasefire at the critical moment, just before they were about to bombed, the US navy subs escaped – and the scene was set for Soviets to take the blame

Original evidence cooked up

But what about the Bildt commission’s “four pillars of evidence”; Tunander says that "Every statement by the commission...seems to have been bluff."

Point one, optical evidence. On the submarine commission’s optical evidence, which included civilian sightings of submarines estimated at “two thirds the length” of the 19th century ferries that ply the 24,000 island archipelago, ie 25-30 metres long; well says Tunander, no Warsaw pact submarine then or since has that length (the nearest in size is the 56metre Soviet Quebec class sub) but it fits well on the Cosmos submarine SX-756 used by Italian and western special forces. Other sightings of submarine sails taller than they are wide also suit NATO submarines: Any naval expert wil tell you that Warsaw pact submarine sails were short and stubby.

Second bit of evidence: we don’t know that NATO uses tracked minisubs, so they must be Warsaw pact. The fact, Tunander shows, is that both NATO and the Warsaw pact had tracked minisubs: the US had the DSV Turtle. For instance.

The third pillar of proof, the electronic signals – well, they were completely made up. The Swedish signal intelligence agency FRA stated in a letter to the Defence Minister in 1995, and which Tunander reveals, is that they had no information on signals linked to Soviet activities during this submarine hunt, and the Navy’s signal intelligence had received a couple of signals from Swedish waters, but they were believed to originate from the west.
It’s interesting to note that these signals, which were never made public, were fetched from the FRA by Bildt and Stefenson, and which they said constituted the strongest of their evidential reports against the Soviets.

Finally, the hydrosonar tape records; there were two, one from the 12 October which indicated a submarine travelling at 1-2 knots out of the archipelago, vibrating at 80MHz. This tape was brought to Norwegian experts – the best in NATO as they monitored the Svalbard-Norway gap for the Murmansk outbound Soviet nuclear subs– on the 14th of October; the Norwegians told the Swedes that the evidence points neither to a conventional nor nuclear submarine but rather at the “west”; this observation never incorporated into the Bildt report; American officials confiscated the Norwegian copy of the tape. A Swedish copy of the same time meanwhile that remained in Stockholm had its submarine sounds removed, so that all that can be heard is the voice of the hydrophonist in one channel saying “This is a certain submarine” while just the crash of the sea in the other; convenient if the embarrassing signals turned out to be NATO, as indeed the Norwegians said.

Then there was there famous 3.47minute sonar signals from the next day, where no time was announced on the tape by the observer, which Bildt and his technical adviser purported were the gold standard proof, but which the Soviets said were either NATO subs or Swedish surface vessels and which the Swedish government will neither release to the public nor allow to be tested independently; though Tunander has managed to get hold of the printed analysis of the sound pattern, sent it to Jarl Johnson of the Norwegian defence research institute, who confirms the Russian assertion that, whether it’s a surface vessel or submarine it has three propellers, meaning NATO.

US officials confirm NATO incursions

Sometimes some astonishing revelation will be made public, but will never bite in the public mind, and kind of sink into obscurity, at least among the man on the street. (It also mustn’t be forgotten that, the fact that Saddam didn’t have WMD is the singular fact about the Iraq war, frequently recited in the world’s media and a staple basis for post-2002 international political discourse, yet surveys show that an astonishing half the America population haven’t got this message, still thinks he did have WMDs..) One such astonishing revelation was indeed made public in this submarines story, by America’s leading defence official in the 1980s, the horse’s mouth as it were. Given the US experience just quoted, this single airing, and subsequent wire reports in what follows, not having lodged in the Swedish public’s mind may not be all that surprising.
For in fact, Caspar Weinberger, US defence secretary 1980 –87, has said that Western submarines operated ‘regularly’ and ‘frequently’ in Swedish waters in order to ‘test’ the Swedish coastal defences.
After the Weinberger interview was broadcast on the programme Striptease (despite its name, a serious current affairs show), and the then Swedish commander of land forces Bengt Gustafsson (clearly not in the loop) commented that he felt like a “useful idiot”, Former British navy minister Sir Keith Speed and former head of naval intelligence John Walker confirmed the existence of these operations to an international wire service; Speed talked about penetration dive exercises deep in neutral waters; The British prime minister’s office was briefed regularly about the risks, and these were regarded as even more secret than penetrations into Soviet waters. Sir Keith speaking about surfacing almost in Stockholm harbour. “It was a question of: How far could we get before you Swedes were aware of it,” he told the Associated Press.

After the interview with Weinberger, a US senior official told Tunander

I don’t know why Weinberger said what he did. Covert submarine operations is the most secret thing we have.… The decisions were taken by a committee of DIA and CIA people [most likely the National Underwater Reconnaissance Office (NURO)], “

Tunander said another official said he was never himself involved in these operations in Swedish waters, but he knew the people responsible for them
British involvement
Later,. British Oberon class submarine captains admitted to Tunander in his further researches with intelligence officers that they would travel submerged under the Danish straits and up and around the Baltic sea areas as far north as Lapland, on which they briefed select Swedish officials. One sub may have been present in the deeper parts of Horsfjarden – the Oberon is .88m long. They carried out expeditions involving depositing Special Boat service troops (naval equivalents of the Special Air Service) into this neutral country, generally making mockery of Sweden’s neutrality. When one of the clearest signs of submarine activity since, in 1988,a very clear sonar recording was played to NATO officials, Tunander reports, a British commander said: “My God, that’s one of ours!”

Need more admissions? Tunander was told by the head of the Norwegian foreign ministry’s political division, Ainar Ansteensen, that he was told by a CIA agent while the Horsfjarden incident happening that the submarines were mainly American. He reported about the damaged US submarine to his Commander-in-Chief General Sven Hauge, but he did not inform General Ljung and the Swedes. Also a Norwegian intelligence officer spoke about a damaged Western submarine in 1982, and he pointed to the USA and said that ‘Caspar Weinberger knew about it’ And when Tunander was sharing a car ride back in 1993 with former US secretary of defence James Schlesinger and told him about the US submarines, Schlesinger said: “I remember the incident, but not the details.”

If details were what were wanted,. Tunander continued digging, in US congressional and military records, as well as as past TV transcripts: has managed to piece together a plausible picture involving American forces: A former commander of SEAL team three, who operated in the Baltic, though officially only off the west German coast, has written that he carried out operations not looking like the US navy (ie posing as another nationals, flase flag operations that actually contravene the Geneva conventions) and doing “other things the US navy was not supposed to do”..

At a congressional hearing in the 1980s, the House of Representatives’ Subcommittee on the Department of Defense, Rear-Admiral John L. Butts, Chief of Naval Intelligence, responded that –unlike the 1982 incident – the Soviet submarine in Karlskrona in 1981 was ‘genuine’. In 1982 ‘the Swedes had several submarine contacts’ close to Muskö Naval Base, but then - his following paragraph on the national origin is classified. However, later in the text he speaks about a well known US navy research submarine, NR1, as if it had been used in Swedish waters.

Soon afterwards, John McWethy, the Pentagon correspondent for ABC , said:
“American submarines are repeatedly violating territorial waters of other nations while gathering intelligence. Most of the top-secret missions are
into the waters of the Soviet Union, but according to both active duty and retired military sources, some missions have been run into the
territorial waters of those nations considered friendly to the US.”

The Pentagon correspondent added:
“The missions are conducted by specially equipped nuclear ,inisubmarines powered attack submarines and in some cases by a nuclear powered mini-sub called NR-1 (MINI-SUB). It has a seven-man crew, wheels on its underside for crawling along the bottom and is described by the Navy as a research vessel.”

During the 1982 incident, the length of the submarine measured with an echo ranger on 5 October and the description of a submarine sail observed on 7 October fit both with the NR-1, which of course, being American, emitted yellow dye in an emergency.

Tunander also said that the ships participating in the Horsfjard incident included the Seawolf, which had operated in Libyan waters with NR1 in the 1971s, and had a specially built compartment for seal divers; and a mini-submarine called the Turtle; and several Italian minsubmarines, such as the Cosmo SX-756/.

The Americans were rewarded for their escape. According to his research in US military records, the crew of all these ships won awards for exceptional bravery for their activities in European waters between 30 August and 5 November 1982.


Top level US and UK authorisations

The characteristic of these operations, Tunander says, was the extreme secrecy, the direct links between the transgressing submarine commanders, their top military commanders, and tsome high officers of the Swedsih navy, (while excluding Sweden’s political leadership.)
The Royal Navy Oberon captain told Tunander that ministerial approval had to be given for every single operation; that there was a direct link between him and the commanding officer of submarines, and the prime minister, Margaret Thatcher.

In the US, one submarine commander, called Richard Marcinko, reported directly to chief of naval operations James Watkins. The SEAL – US special forces – operators were in the direct command of the head of allied NATO forces in Europe, while William Casey himself, erstwhile head of the CIA, flew to Stockholm personally to liaise with the handful of Swedish officers aware of the secret incursion. That some liaison was necessary was proved at the Horsfjarden emergency incident.

A CIA officer Tunander spoke to say that the near sinking in 1982 was almost an underwater “U-2” – with reference to the episode when the Soviets shot down a U2 spyplane pilot, Gary Powers, in 1960

The navy diary of the day’s events that could give one official insight into the background of Stefenson’s decisions have disappeared from the Swedish Navy’s diary, ripped out of both copies of the book, as well as a type written version.

As all this testimony indicates, although the Horsfjarden incident was the most high profile incursion – journalists never returned in such numbers, nor were findings made or presented with such fanfare again, it was far from the only one. In fact, one month before the report was presented a submarine hunt took place close to Karlskorona and yet another hunt went again in the Musko area near Horsfjarden. The day after the report was represented another submarine hunt took place on the Sundsvall coast in mid-northern Sweden. an event that dominated the newspapers A month later, on the evening of 27 May 1983, three journalists saw the tip of a small submarine sail similar to the observations made in Stockholm harbour the year before, just a few hundred metres from Stockholm castle. Now, too, important western ships were visiting Stockholm, this time Royal Navy frigate Minerva. By now, fuelled by the neverending sequence of sightings, the USSR had already been named and shamed.
Yet, when Sweden's defence minister visited his counterpart in Moscow in the mid-1980s, he was asked by his Sovet counterpart why they didn't sink the subs; and Andropov told the Finnish president Koivisto to pass on to the Swedes this piece of advice: "Just bomb them; we would be very happy if they used live amunition"; hardly the kind of advice you'd expect of the submarines were Soviet.
Thage G Peterson, a former defence minister and close associate of Palme, said: “In late 1996, I was visited by the US Secretary of Defence, William Perry…. I brought up the submarine intrusions. My American colleague smiles and looks at me with sympathy: ‘It may be other things than submarines in the water, and if there is a submarine, it doesn’t have to be Russian.”


Motives

Why did NATO carry them out over the course of 15 years, and why did elements of the Swedish navy, possibly in collusion with Bildt, let them?
First let’s analyse Swedish motives.
Doubtless one motive is to test Sweden’s defences. Another is that Swedish NATO conspirators may also have had opportunistic national motives: The London-based Peter Wallenberg, scion of Sweden's business dynasty and owner of Saab, was believed to back Swedish engagement with NATO, and may have been involved in any exile movement in the event of occupation. In return for allowing the Americans to orchestrate the Swedish public's psychology against the Soviets, the Swedish military and financial establishment may have received something in return. When Caspar Weinberger visited Sweden in 1981 (and seen often in the company of Stefenson and Rudberg) the offer could have been sweetened by offering Saab the General electric engine for its new Gripen fighter. Weinberger also offered the navy a much more advanced naval ship, the Orion, than the Swedish government then possessed.


And what about NATO's motives? The Oberon submarines started spying on Sweden in 1977; and the last observation was in 1990. One reason, the one offered at all times to the Swedish navy itself, and which then may give its consent to is: to keep Swedish defences on their toes, to make sure that NATO’s crucial Nordic flank was covered’ and so that the Danes and Norwegians, who had close political affinities to the Swedes but were in NATO could assure sceptical NATO colleagues in the defence organisation: “Well, you know now you can trust the Swedes.”

Another possible internal motive might have been: to give NATO subs practice both in Sweden’s unusually rich and complex archipelago system, a sort of perfect obstacle circuit for captains. Also: in the case of Soviet attack, a new strategy developed in the 1980s said Soviet reinforcements would arrive by sea in the captured Baltic west German ports for the final push on France, NATO submarines could be expected to lurk in Swedish waters to be able to intercept the ships.

Gladio and the strategy of tension

A third reason is psychological operations: aimed at increasing a neutral country’s support for the western powers by making them afraid of the Warsaw pact adversary. Here the efforts were extremely successful.

Even more sinister are the fifth and sixth reasons, says Tunander, and they relate to Palme.

One of NATO’s least known operational structures was Gladio, Italian for “shield”: the system of “Stay Behind” partisans that were to be organised from London or Washington behind enemy lines in the event of Soviet attack and occupation of the continent. They were established in the 1950s, through, alas, partly criminal networks, and figures with links to both the military and to deeply anti communist movements.

In Italy especially, the movements took a very broad view of their role to oppose the USSR: not only to defend after occupation, but to pre-empt communist and left wing sympathies in the country that might assist the invader – or even invite him,. To this end, in what has been called the biggest untold story in Europe since the second world war, a strategy of tension was carried out in Italy (and other European countries, especially Belgium) in the 1970s and 80s, intended to discredit that country’s strong Communist and socialist party in every way possible, sometimes by carrying out terrorist attacks in the left’s name: the Milan terror bombing at the Piazza Fontana comes to mind. In 1998, Guido Salvini, a judge in Milan, indicted David Carrett, an officer of the U.S. Navy, on charges of political and military espionage and for his participation to the Piazza Fontana bombing, among other events. Judge Guido Salvini also opened up a case against Sergio Minetto, an Italian official for the US-NATO intelligence network, and "collaboratore di giustizia" Carlo Digilio, who was suspected as a CIA informant

Prime Minister Aldo Moro’s kidnapping and killing in 1978 by groups allegedly linked to Gladio are another possibility: Moro, a Christian democrat, was thought to want to bring the Italian communists into government; the party wanted Italy out of NATO and the US navy to leave Italian ports.

Was something similar carried out in Sweden: to discredit Palme and his social democrats, trying to defuse tension in Europe and talk to the USSR on level terms? Carried out not by Italian terrorists (and some US naval officers) but by US, British and Italian submarine and amphibious forces? There was an understandable and some a fair cold war “ethic” to this:
Palme’s policy of wishing to form a nuclear-free zone in Northern Europe, including NATO members Denmark and Norway went 180 degrees against Reagan’s hawkish naval secretary John Lehman’s ambitious plans for a 600 ship navy and to station huge naval capabilities in Norway with the view to carry out a first strike against the Soviet nuclear armed fleet in Murmansk, a move that would cancel danger of mutually armed nuclear destruction and allow the US to unilaterally threaten the USSR with obliteration, thus allowing the States to stop the USSR ever thinking of using its superior conventional forces to launch a successful invasion of central Europe.

But Palme was assassinated. One fairly common theory circulating about this, is expressed in Lars Borgnas’s En iskall vind drog igenom Sverige, (“An ice cold wind blew through Sweden”). Borgnas is one of Sweden’s top reporters, and has spent twenty years making documentaries about the assassination; and his theory is that the murder was carried out by a conspiracy of mid level “out of the loop” naval officers and the Stockholm police, who feared that Palme was a traitor.

Nato’s Nordic Gladio could then be held indirectly responsible; it could be held more directly responsible if Swedish officers connected to Stay Behind through a project called Yggdrasil, consisting of high-ranking businessmen in London with connections to NATO in Brussels, carried out the killing, as some stories have circulated.

The reasoning behind this thesis that Stay Behind's people knew about the true NATO nature of the incursions, but that they might still wanted to finish off the threat from Palme, forever. At about the same time, William Taylor, a US military analyst and psychological operations expert with work in Vietnam and China, started to specialise on Sweden, which he advised was providing a poor model for the rest of Europe:
West Germany in particular was heading towards "Swedenisation” and was in danger of being over conciliatory towards the USSR. In order to change the European mentality, he advocated threats at the lower level to shift support to the USA, relying on the media to the scaremongering job on its behalf. He said that there could not be a hot war in western Europeans, but psychological and undercover operations to change the perceptions of the United States, then taking flak for the installation of cruise missiles in Europe. Shortly after the submarine incidents, German politics shifted when the Free democrats deserted their social democrat coalition partners - which had close ties of affinity with the Swedish social democrats - to form a coalition with the CDU, led by the pro American Helmut Kohl.
Taylor was a great admirer of the British, in the second world war, using the German submarine campaign to get the United States on to her side.
As another potential psyops operation, he mentioned the assassination of a leader of a democratic country.

There might even have been an element of personal pay-back in all this: many US senior officials might have recalled the way Palme was one of the most aggressive critics in the world, against the Vietnam war, comparing the Hanoi bombings at Christmas 1972 to the holocausts of Treblinka and Guernica. (On a personal , individual level though, Palme, who took his postgraduate degree in the states, remained a warm admirer of the country and people.)

Two years ago I met a Swedish man in London who gave me a sheaf of papers; he said the British press were not interested; we looked at each other wryly, and I offer it in that spirit: there is a lot of disinformation and fantasy circulating in the world of intelligence; but it was typewritten memo and photocopies of telegrams with NATO stamps indicating topics of discussion at a Stay Behind meeting in Brussels in early February 1986 (Palme was assassinated on 28 February that year): hot subject was Palme’s expected discussions with Gorbachev on then nuclear free zone in April; it had arrived via the MI-6 office in Stockholm. There were various other documents, all of which pointed to deep NATO concern about Palme’s eastern rapprochements.

What next?

When a Swedish TV documentary was aired, pworking with the same records and same interviewees Tunander used, Bildt refused to be interviewed. One commentator ssaid it was “humiliating for Bildt to have got it so wrong about the submarines. Did he misread the intelligence about Soviet submarine indications, which many social democrat ministers were later sceptical about, in good faith. Or did he deliberately distort the facts: was he inside the NATO loop.
Swedish commentator PM Nilsson likes to remark how Bildt powerfully and successfully uses his own beliefs to shape realities, a sort of Scandinavian Tony Blaiir: like the best liars, he believes them himself - especially if they help his career, as the submarine commission report obviously did. He always struck me as the gawky guy with glasses whose bulging school briefcase was always knocking his spindly legs as he wiped his nose and harried the girls in class walking home with a mile-a-minute sequence of facts about, say, the sex life of snails - or perhaps the order of battle of the Soviet navy
The submarine incursions must have represented the moment when his sense of personal destiny and that of his country came together; reality mattered less perhaps than to lift the most dramatic mythology to serve his purposes.

NUMEROUS other leads that Tunander has given us deserve to be followed up: Sir Keith Speed, John Walker (former head of british naval intelligence, who backed up Sir Keith’s remarks to the wire services) And who in NATO can tell us about the extent of Gladio; and whether other countries were exposed to psychological operations? Bror Stefenson would be good to talk too: he later became King Carl Gustaf's chief of staff, but is now retired and refuses to give interviews. Where did the SEAL and special boat service frogmen land, and how often?
Is this sort of thing still going on? One theory I have heard is that the lessons the Americans learnt from the “strategy of tension” activities in Italy and Sweden were applied in the aftermath of the 9-11 period by Bildt’s neoconservative chums: false flag operations against the United States itself by US-backed forces pretending to be an Islamic enemy, as a means for the US Bush administration to strengthen its domestic base and discredit America’s ideological and great power opponents in 2001- 2007.
Imputing America’s enemies with hostile intent to reassert its hegemony over the world. In the same way that the submarine incidents served US domination interests by subordinating its drifting allies, based on false fears of Soviet aggression..