^{Left: Swedish King Charles XII (1682-1718) pointing with his hand eastwards, towards Russia that he tried to conquer in early 1700. The statue is from central Stockholm (My photo). Right: Statue of Norwegian Foreign Minister Thorvald Stoltenberg in Kirkenes on the border to Russia to honor him for initiating the Barents Region Cooperation between the Nordic countries and Russia in 1993 (The photo was given to his son, Jens Stoltenberg, by the Major of Kirkenes Rune Rafaelsen and published on Facebook). The father’s policy of developing trust and good relations between the Nordic countries and Russia, was different from his son’s policy as NATO General Secretary 30 years later, when he turned against Russia.}

I have listened to some conversations about Russophobia with Prof. Richard Sakwa, Prof. Glenn Diesen, Prof. Pascal Lottaz and others, but I think that something is missing.

After 1700, Russia was always the main enemy of the Royal Sweden or “Military Sweden”. The Swedish King Charles XII was waging war with Russia in the Great Northern War (1700-21). In 1709, he lost against Tsar Peter the Great in the Battle of Poltava in today’s Ukraine. Russia attacked the Swedish east coast in 1719. Sweden lost its Baltic Sea empire with Estonia, Latvia and the areas around St Petersburg. Sweden attacked Russia in 1788-90. In 1809, after the Swedish–Russian War, Sweden lost the whole Finland, one third of its territory. The many Swedish battles with the Russian great power were remembered by the Swedish military elite. Some people believed that the Ukrainian blue and yellow flag can be traced back to the Battle of Poltava, when Sweden was allied with some Ukrainian Cossacks.

During the Second World War, in 1939-40, Sweden’s Chief of Defense Staff, Major General Axel Rappe, wanted to move 2/3 of the Swedish Army to the Finnish front with the Soviet Union to once again fight the Russians. He did not believe in any threat from Nazi-Germany. The Social Democratic Prime Minister Per Albin Hansson turned him down, but according to the later Chief of Navy Admiral Stig H:son Erikson, Rappe tried to recruit him for a military coup to remove the democratically elected government to open up for a war against the Soviet Union. The coup-plotters hoped to ally with the more pro-German Swedish King Gustav V, but he refused. Lieutenant General Henry Kellgren had regular contacts with the German Defence Attaché, General von Uthmann, and in July 1942, Kellgren signed a Swedish military phrasebook at the Royal Palace prepared for a Swedish Army offensive into the Soviet Union. Later Chief of Army, Lieutenant General Archibald Douglas, was of the same view as Rappe and Kellgren. He believed Sweden would be able to conquer large parts of Soviet territory, territories that Sweden had lost in 18^th and 19^th century. He presented plans for the offensive, but the Government did not support him. In the 1980s, some Swedish officers prepared for a military coup against Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme, who didn’t take the Russian threat “serious enough”. In 1985-86, the “Naval officer’s revolt” claimed that they did not have trust in Prime Minister Palme, because of his dialogue with Moscow and “his weakness towards the Soviets”. They even discussed the possibility of killing him. Olof Palme was shot in central Stockholm shortly afterwards. In Summer 1992, when I participated on strip to Russia with American military historians (primarily with US military intelligence officers), there were also a couple of Swedish officers: a general and a couple of junior officers. They were pre-occupied by the territories Sweden had lost to Russia in the 18^th and 19^th centuries. Sweden has traditionally had an important elite that was very Russo-phobic.

My mother, who had a background from a privileged part of Stockholm, could say about someone who was a bit crazy that “han är nästan rysk” [he is almost Russian], which didn’t mean that he was Russian, but just that he was unacceptable in one way or another. My stepfather, who had gone through the Swedish Naval Academy sang a drinking song that goes like this: ”And now we will follow a Russian to his grave; A Russian has been a crook in all his days; Go to hell; Go to hell; Now, a Russian is going to hell […] And the Russian is dead; And the coffin is red [and then you empty your glass of brandy and continue the song]; But hell knows if the Russian is really dead. […].

Later, my stepfather became more of a Social Democrat, but this song illustrates something of the Swedish Navy tradition, and these views inside the military and industrial elite of Sweden were suppressed during the many years of Social Democratic Government. After Prime Minister Olof Palme was shot in 1986, these people became increasingly visible.

A Norwegian admiral told me that he was shocked while visiting his opposite number in Sweden. The way the Swedish officers spoke about their Prime Minister had been impossible in Norway. Norway or the Kingdom of Denmark-Norway (1380-1814) had never been at war with Russia and nor had Norway under Swedish rule (1814-1905). Norwegian tension had been with Sweden. Denmark-Norway had, for a long-time, close ties to Russia, and the Norwegians had up to the Russian revolution 1917 had trade and close collaboration with Russians in the far North. Before the Second World War, many Norwegian officers were worried about the Soviet Union, and their views were colored by the British or the Germans, but this is nothing compared to the fanatic Russophobia that you would find among some Swedish officers.

After the Cold War, the close cooperation with Russia, the Barents Region initiative between the Nordic countries and North-western Russia, was a Norwegian initiative. It was initiated by Foreign Minister Thorvald Stoltenberg, who brought up the idea with Russian Foreign Minister Andrey Kozyrev at a breakfast meeting in Oslo in early 1992. I co-edited a book in 1993-94 about the Barents Region initiative, about its ambition to handle practicalities after the Cold War and to reduce the tension between two sides of the east-west divide (the book had a foreword by Thorvald Stoltenberg). Perhaps even more important for the understanding of the mindset in Norway, the Soviet Union liberated north Norway (East Finnmark) from Nazi Germany in October 1944 half a year before the rest of Norway was liberated, and this was very important for the Norwegian, and particularly for the north Norwegian feelings about Russians in general. At the 75-years anniversary for the liberation of Finnmark in October 2019, King Harald of Norway gave a speech in Kirkenes close to the Russian border:

“It was here, in Finnmark, that the liberation started. On 25 October 1944, the first Soviet forces advanced into Kirkenes and liberated the first parts of Norway. [The Soviet forces] came to villages and streets that were burnt to the ground. From the mine close to here, people came out [from their hiding] to greet their liberators. Norway has never forgotten and will never forget the great contribution our Russian neighbor made when our freedom mattered the most. In more than a thousand years, Norway and Russia have been living as good neighbors. Between our two countries, there has never been a war. Not many neighbors can refer to such a heritage. The only time when the war came to us, we were standing together.” And King Harald continues: “To our guests, I will remined you about what is written at the Western Graveyard in Oslo: ‘Norway thanks you’. This is carved in stone. […].”

This is less than seven years ago. It is remarkable. The Norwegian TV aired a three hours’ program about the Russian liberation of northern Norway. They interviewed witnesses that told us about the Russian forces liberating Finnmark. Up to 4000 locals had been hiding in the mine. Ten children were born in the dark tunnel. When the Russians came, there were joy and singing. The film shows how Norwegians are embracing their liberators. Of course, during the Cold War, many Norwegians (military officers journalists and political leaders, who all were close to the Americans and the British), mistrusted the Soviets, but this mistrust was not against the Russians as people, and the Russian liberation was celebrated as late as 2019. Now a couple of years later, everything has changed. The British and American media have played a major role. For the political leadership, for Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre, a book by the anti-Russian Yale Professor, Timothy Snyder, has been most important, and Støre has given the book to his friends. But Snyder’s presentation of a historical speech by Putin is directly false, and it has led to a biased interpretation of Russia. For Foreign Minister Espen Barth Eide, the UN Charter, the International Law, is most important, but he was not aware of what actually happened in Kiev in 2014. That is my understanding. He believed that Russia entered Ukraine to regain lost territories of the Soviet Union or Imperial Russia. The Russian war was interpreted as a war of aggression like Hitler’s war against Poland or against the Soviet Union.

I believe that Ivan Katchanovski’s analysis is most important. Probably all the shots or almost all the shots against the demonstration on 20 February 2014 came from buildings controlled by Svoboda and the Right Sector. The killings forced President Yanukovich to flee, or rather Biden asked him to leave, because of all the killings. Biden told him that he “had lost the confidence of the Ukrainian people”. When we now know that the mass shooting was organized by people linked to the Americans, and when we also know about the telephone conversation of U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland two weeks before this event, when she instructed her ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt to put together a new government, it became very clear that it was U.S. coup d’état. She instructed her ambassador about who should be the new Prime Minister, who the Prime Minister should talk to, and who he couldn’t bring into the Government.

The new Kiev regime suppressed the majority’s revolt. The majority forces were attacked all over Eastern Ukraine. This was the minority’s coup against the majority that had elected Viktor Yanukovich in 2010. But it was also very much a U.S. coup. The U.S. military and the CIA arrived in Kiev almost immediately after the coup. It was an illegal takeover of Kiev and Western Ukraine using just a few hundred bullets, and then, in the coming months, the coup plotters took over most of Ukraine. A million Russian speakers fled to Russia, but still the resistance was strong in Yanukovich base area of Donbass. The new Kiev regime was not a legitimate regime, while the retreating East Ukrainian majority, what was left over from the democratically elected regime of Yanukovich, retreated to Donbass and its new regime should accordingly be understood as Yanukovich’s legitimate “successor-regime”. It should be understood as the new legitimate regime of Ukraine. Russia’s military support for this regime was accordingly not be in breach of international law, while the support of the coup regime in Kiev certainly was. In praxis, the legitimacy of the Russian versus the Western intervention in Ukraine boils down to who was responsible for the mass shooting in Kiev on 20 February 2014. The following presidential election, which elected Petro Poroshenko, cannot be considered legitimate, because the voter turnout in the Yanukovich-dominated Eastern and Southern Ukraine was very low.

I think there are a couple of reasons why the Norwegian Foreign Ministry believes that the Russian invasion was in breach of International Law. Firstly, they believe that the Maidan demonstrations 2013-14 represented the Ukrainian majority and that these were more or less peaceful demonstrations. But the Ministry seems to have been unaware of the fact that these demonstrations became extremely violent and that they were organized by a fascist elite, celebrating the Second World War fascist leaders, Stepan Bandera and Roman Sjuchevitj, as their heroes. They mobilized the West-Ukrainian minority in violent clashes against the legitimate regime. Over the entrance to the Maidan headquarters, there was a huge portrait of Stepan Bandera, which disconfirms the Western narrative. Bandera had been fighting for a pure “Ukrainian” Ukraine, and “millions of victims have to be sacrificed in order to realize it”, he said. Sjuchevitj led a battalion under Nazi-German command, and he was responsible for the massacre of a hundred thousand Poles, Jews and Russians. Secondly, the Norwegian Foreign Ministry, like the Western media in general, believes that Yanokovich police forces were responsible for the massacre on 20 February 2014. This, they believe, discredited him as a President, and he had to leave. There had to be new elections and a new government, they argued. However, this argument has been totally disconfirmed by the study of Ivan Katchanovski and by a hundred of witnesses that has shown that the shots came from Hotel Ukraine and from a couple of other buildings, all controlled by the extreme rightwing parties Svoboda and Right Sector that had collaborated closely with the Americans. The legitimacy of the new leadership in Kiev was never questioned by the Ministry. Accordingly, the Republics of Donetsk and Lugansk in Donbas were perceived as illegitimate breakaway regions.

Of course, the understanding inside the Ministry was colored by the general Russophobia in the West, not least in Britain, and by the tragic experience of the Baltic peoples. The British initiated the Joint Expeditionary Force (JEF) in 2014 led by London included the Scandinavians and the Baltic states. This was very important, because it tied the traditionally détente-oriented Nordic countries to the Russo-phobic axis of Britain and the Baltic States. However, even more important: The Norwegian Foreign Ministry and the Norwegian media were fooled by a sophisticated deception operation run by primarily the Americans. The Minsk Agreement I and II from 2014 and 2015 was not just an instrument to postpone the war for eight years, in order to build-up the Ukrainian military forces, it was also an instrument to fool the Russians to accept the coup government in Kiev, while also fooling the Europeans to look at this government as legitimate.

I think that Russophobia may explain much of Western behavior in recent years, but Russophobia has not been dominating in Norway. Different from Sweden, Norway has, historically speaking, not been Russo-phobic. In recent years, Russophobia has had a major role in Norwegian media, but it could have had this role because of a major deception operation orchestrated by the Americans and perhaps also by the British to present the coup in 2014 as legitimate and to present the invasion in 2022 as a “full-scale invasion” and an “unprovoked invasion”. This deception is a more important explanation than the traditional Russophobia. The history of Russophobia, as a form of propaganda, is, of course, significant. The histories of the British, Baltic, Polish, Swedish and French Russophobia have been important, but without a major deception, it wouldn’t have had that impact, particularly in Norway. What you could speak about just a few years ago, you cannot speak about any longer.

Firstly: the enlargement of NATO and the transfer of U.S. forces eastwards towards the Russian border were clearly in breach of International Law, with the Western agreement with President Gorbachev in 1990-91 (and oral agreements are no less binding than a formal treaty). That this enlargement would lead to a catastrophe was obvious for the founder of the NATO Containment strategy, George Kennan, and the American elite were well aware of the fact that the inclusion of Ukraine in NATO would provoke a major war.

Secondly, the coup against President Yanukovich and a violent takeover of most of Ukraine, was a blatant breach of International Law. The U.S. support for the Western Ukrainian killing of many of their own people in February 2014 was definitely in breach of International Law, because it was used to justify a coup d’état. It was the minority’s coup against the majority. It was a Western military takeover of large parts of Ukraine that equals any invasion.

Thirdly, in 2014, the Western supported Kiev forces started a war against what was leftover of the Yanukovich regime in Donbas. This war led to 14,000 dead in Donbas, according to UN figures. One million Russian-speakers fled to Russia. It was an ethnic cleansing in breach of International Law. The killings of civilians in Donbas had the same role as the Israeli killing of civilian Palestinians in Palestine in 1948. It led to a major ethnic cleansing.

Fourthly, in 2019 the Ukraine parliament took a decision to change the constitution to be able to join NATO. In 2021, Ukraine signed an agreement with the U.S. to open for joining NATO. This was definitely in breach of the 2015 Minsk II Agreement signed at the UN Security Council. It was in breach of International Law. The extreme rightwing Security Chief in Ukraine, Oleksij Danilov, said that the Minsk Agreement “means the country’s destruction”.

Fifthly, two RAND reports in 2019 later became U.S. policy using a war in Ukraine to “destabilize” Russia. The argument for the US war in Ukraine was “to weaken Russia”, to quote US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. One wanted to destabilize Russia, but the UN Charter does not only forbid an invasion into another country, it also forbids the threat to peace in the region. The US policy was definitely in breach of International Law.

Sixthly, the Russian invasion in 2022 was described as in breach of International Law, but if Donbas was a legitimate “successor state” to Yanokovich democratic state (as stated above), the Russian intervention would be in accordance with International Law, while the Western support of the illegal Kiev regime would be in breach of International Law. The responsibility for the war would be turned upside-down. Who is in breach of International Law or not boils down to who was responsible for the mass shooting on 20 February 2014.

For the Norwegian Foreign Ministry as well as for many in the Western community, their support for Ukraine is not primarily about Russophobia but about deception. One has been fooled to believe that Russia, not the West, has been in breach of International Law. British and others’ Russophobia has a role, but most important has been a very deliberate deception operation that has fooled not just large parts of the population in the West but also Western ministries.

This article was first published in German, in the German magazine Hintergrund, in July after the documentary film “Nordstream – Die Sprengung” was aired in Berlin in early July 2026. The film was made by Moritz Enders and Gunther Merz, and Moritz Enders interviewed me for the magazine Hintergrund to make me articulate some of my arguments in the film. The interview was originally made in English, but in this version below I have added a few lines and a section on U.S. covert operations to make some arguments clearer. (Photo is from the film). For an advertisement for the film, see: “Nordstream - Die Sprengung (Dokumentation, 2026) | Exklusive 35-Minuten Vorschau”

HINTERGRUND: Mr. Tunander, you argue that the events surrounding Nord Stream cannot be viewed in isolation. Why do you believe that looking back at the history—particularly the 1980s—is essential to understanding the present?

OLA TUNANDER: U.S. Secretary of Energy, Bill Richardson, said in 1998 that “it’s very important that both the pipeline map and politics come out right”. He spoke about Central-Asia, but it could have been a U.S. statement about pipelines in general. Pipelines tie one state to the other. They are bridges that creates a mutual dependency, which can open-up for close cooperation and peaceful coexistence. Like the Coal and Steel Community in the 1950s (and later the EU) that had created trust and mutual dependency between the former World War enemies, France and Germany, the Soviet-West German pipeline in the 1970s and 1980s, opened-up for a German–Soviet interdependency. It created trust between the Cold War enemies. It contributed to ending of the Cold War around 1990. From 1985, President Mikhail Gorbachev opened for talks with the Germans, and then with the British and the U.S. But there was a significant power elite, particularly in the United States that wanted to keep Russia as an enemy.

The new Reagan Administration realized already in 1981 that the Soviet-West German pipeline would create dependencies between the Europeans and the Russians that would weaken U.S. influence in Europe, and according to the national security advisor Dick Allen and then deputy security advisor Tom Reed, the U.S. actually had been able to bomb the pipeline already in 1982. While President George H.W. Bush and his State Secretary James Baker promised Gorbachev not to extend NATO, Bush’s national security advisor Brent Scowcroft and Defense Secretary Dick Cheney were pushing for NATO enlargement towards Moscow and for stopping the pipelines. In 2006, as Vice President Cheney tried to undermine the building of the Nord Stream pipeline, and in 2014 his Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Scowcroft’s protégé, said on German TV that Germany had to change its energy dependency. Germany had to replace its Russian gas with U.S. gas. And you have to “act as quickly as possible”, she said. The German reliance on cheap Russian gas was unacceptable to the Americans. From 2016-17, the U.S. started with massive LNG production to make Germany able to replace its Russian gas with U.S. gas. Rice’ Ambassador to the UN and President Trump’s national security advisor in 2018-19, John Bolton, said that Trump was to decide about the Nord Stream pipeline, but he didn’t do anything: “We should have cut it off in the Trump Administration” [2018-19], Bolton claimed. The top people in the Congress and in the Administration said that the pipeline had to be taken out. President Biden said in February 2022 that “there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it” and “I promise you. We will be able to do it.” However, Trump said both in 2024 and in 2025: “I am the one that stopped the pipeline”. “When Biden came in, almost the first week, he approved [my decision]”, Trump said.

President Reagan with his CIA Director Bill Casey, Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger and national security advisor Dick Allen and President H.W Bush with Defense Secretary Dick Cheney and national security advisor Brent Scowcroft, and President W. Bush with Vice President Cheney and Scowcroft’s protégé, State Secretary Condoleezza Rice, were all against the pipeline. And now, in recent years, President Biden with Cheney’s protégé Victoria Nuland and Rice protégé John Bolton and with President Trump himself, they have all tried stop the pipeline to prevent mutual dependencies between Europe and Russia. What should surprise us is rather that they didn’t succeed to cut it off earlier.

HINTERGRUND: Can the current conflict over energy in Europe only be understood by looking back at the final phase of the Cold War?

OLA TUNANDER: Since the 1980s, a significant U.S. power elite has tried to undermine, stop or even destroy the German–Russian pipelines, because of the dependencies they would create in Europe. The pipelines created mutual trust and possibilities for a European–Russian peace. For the U.S. neoconservative power elite, however, this was unacceptable. The U.S. influence in Europe depended primarily on Europe’s perception of Russia as an enemy. The United States entered Europe as a “protecting power”, and this was the only way that U.S. military superiority could be translated into political influence. The mutual trust between Europeans and Russians – after building the pipeline – would reduce U.S. influence. The United States would become a “normal country”. The U.S. would be reduced to an economic power like any other large state. There have been different administrations in the U.S., but since the 1980s, important U.S. power elites have all pushed for the same general strategy: to decouple Europe from Russia. But in the final analysis, this attempt of decoupling goes back to early 20^th century, to the British-American geopolitics with Halford Mackinder (1919) and with Nicholas Spykman (1942), who claimed that it was necessary for the Sea Power (the U.S. and the British) to control the “Rimland” (the European countries) to contain the “Heartland” (Russia, later the Soviet Union). Russia was believed to be expansionist and an alliance between Germany and Russia should be prevented at all costs. The U.S. geopolitical analyst and STRATFOR Chairman George Friedman argued in 2017 that “Russia is historically a most dangerous option for Germany” and a Russian–German alliance had to be prevented at all costs. This was actually what Brent Scowcroft argued already in 1989. The U.S. should place itself in-between Germany and the then Soviet Union, he argued, and accordingly, the U.S. had to expand NATO. A similar idea was also brought up by U.S. former national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski (1998). He argued that the Western control of Central Europe and not least of Ukraine was vital to prevent a Russian Empire. Historically, the ambition of the U.S. and Britain have always been to decouple Europe from Russia and particularly decouple Germany from Russia. With the German–Russian pipelines from the beginning in the 1970s, then from the 1980s and particularly with the Nord Stream pipelines from after 2000, this appeared no longer to be possible.

HINTERGRUND: In the 1980s, large-scale gas cooperation between Western Europe and the Soviet Union emerged. Political leaders such as Helmut Schmidt supported this approach as part of a broader strategy of stability. What made this energy relationship strategically significant at the time?

OLA TUNANDER: For Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, the pipeline was important to create stability and trust in Europe, while the Reagan Administration wanted to strangle the Soviet Union economically and technologically. Peter Schweizer wrote in his book Victory (1994) that already from early 1981, Reagan’s CIA Director Casey and Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, wanted to stop the pipeline, while State Secretary Alexander Haig argued that the U.S. could not confront all of Europe. Schweizer describes President Reagan’s visit to Chancellor Schmidt in June 1982: “While [Reagan] was making an impassioned plea [for curtailing the pipeline], Schmidt was looking out of the window at the garden – purposely ignoring him”. Schmidt had not treated Reagan as a U.S. president. “That was a mistake”, Schweizer wrote. The UPI intelligence correspondent Richard Sale told later in an Arte interview with Dirk Pohlmann (and also in e-mails to me) that, shortly afterwards, Weinberger’s Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Perle turned to the small and divided German Free Democratic Party (FDP) and offered them financial support, if they replaced their alliance with Schmidt with an alliance with the conservative Christian Democrats and Helmut Kohl. FDP accepted the offer, and Kohl took over as a Chancellor 1 October 1982. The problem for the U.S., however, was that Kohl would not cancel the pipeline. The Pipeline created trust between the German and Soviet leadership, which became the material foundation for ending the Cold War and for a united Germany.

HINTERGRUND: To what extent did this policy reflect a specifically European—perhaps even German—approach to balancing security and economic cooperation during the Cold War? And can economic interdependence through energy infrastructure actually contribute to peace and stability?

OLA TUNANDER: For Germany, Russia will always be a close neighbor. We cannot change the geography. Russia and Belarus are located next door, only with Poland in between. A good relationship with Russia has always been German “Realpolitik”. The Russian–German pipelines created mutual dependencies during the Cold War, and it strengthened common European–Russian interests and stability on the continent. Germany, after the Second World War, has developed in close cooperation with other European countries and within the EU, but Germany has also in many respects common interests with Russia. To trade cheap Russian gas for German advanced industrial products gave both countries an advantage. In recent decades, Russia has also, like Germany, avoided military adventures. The invasion into Ukraine in 2022 was a direct response to the U.S. ambition to include Ukraine in NATO. Leading Americans, the founder of NATO’s containment policy [from 1949], George Kennan, and then Secretary of Defense Bill Perry [1994-97] were warning for the serious consequences of NATO enlargement. Even Chancellor Angela Merkel understood that Russia would interpret Ukraine’s NATO membership as “a declaration of war”. Russia wanted a “neutral Ukraine” as a buffer to deny forward deployment of U.S. weapons systems. To have a neutral Ukraine was Russia’s only real demand. “Everything else was cosmetic”, said the Ukrainian negotiator David Arakhamia, in Spring 2022. There has, up to now, not been any Russian aggressive ambitions. To keep a peaceful relationship with Russia should be a highest German priority and the pipeline was the bridge that would make us able to keep that peace.

HINTERGRUND: From a U.S. strategic perspective, why might closer energy ties between Europe and Russia have been perceived as problematic?

OLA TUNANDER: The U.S. as well as the British have always claimed that there was a “Russian threat” to Europa, and after Second World War this appeared in certain respect to be true. The Soviet Union had occupied East Germany and the Central Europe, but that was after a U.S. elite as well as the British, from Spring 1945, had planned for a massive attack on the Soviet Union (“Operation Unthinkable”). The Russians did not want to have another war on Russian territory and kept Central Europe as a buffer zone. This was not consistent with International Law, but neither did it reflect Soviet aggression. The U.S. military superiority during the Cold War and the British advantage could not have been translated into political influence if the Europeans did not believe in a direct military threat to Europe. The U.S. and the British and their people on the European continent always claimed that there was a “Soviet threat” that they had to protect us from. A top-secret NATO Military Committee document (in the 1980s) had concluded that the Soviets were not aggressive and that the Soviets would avoid a war with the West, if possible, but this document was classified as Cosmic Top-Secret. This tells us everything. After the Cold War, the overwhelming U.S. military superiority became suddenly impotent in a peaceful world. The only way to translate this overwhelming military superiority to political influence was to describe the Other, Russia, as a direct military threat. The problem was that the pipelines between Russia and Europe seemed to have made the Anglo-American threat perception irrelevant. For this U.S. elite it became necessary to “cut it off”, to quote John Bolton.

HINTERGRUND: To what extent did NATO expansion and shifting security arrangements affect trust between Russia and the West?

OLA TUNANDER: There was the same group of U.S. political leaders that wanted to expand NATO and wanted to cut the Russian–German pipelines. Secretary of Defense and later Vice President Dick Cheney wanted to enlarge NATO. He did not just want to break up the Soviet Union and let former Soviet republics be part of NATO, he wanted to break up Russia into pieces, then CIA Director, later Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, said. Cheney wanted to eliminate Russia as a major competitor, and at a meeting in the Baltic in 2006, he spoke out against the Russian gas pipelines as a warning against the new Nord Stream pipeline being prepared for at the time. His protégé and national security advisor Victoria Nuland played a major role, from 2014, in pushing Ukraine closer to NATO, and she had a major role for the elimination of the Nord Stream pipeline in 2022. Afterwards, she celebrated the destruction of the pipeline. We can now say that the plans to expand NATO up to the Russian border and to deploy U.S. weapons systems close to Moscow in Ukraine would definitely provoke a Russian war in Ukraine. It would lead to a total lack of trust between the West and Russia, which almost certainly was a precondition for the German political elite accepting the bombing of the Nord Stream pipeline and the replacement of the relatively cheap Russian gas with the much more expensive U.S. LNG. The Ukraine war was a precondition for cutting off the pipeline and for decoupling Russia from Europe. When President Biden in February 2022 said that “there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2, we will bring an end to it […] I promise you. We will be able to do it”, Chancellor Olaf Scholz was standing close to him saying that we will act together with our American friends. The German elite apparently accepted the U.S. destruction of the pipeline and the destruction of the German economy.

HINTERGRUND: How important has the control of energy routes and infrastructure been as a long-term factor in global power politics? Pipelines are often described as more than just economic projects. What makes them such powerful geopolitical instruments?

OLA TUNANDER: In my answer to your first question, I quoted the U.S. former Secretary of Energy, Bill Richardson, who said: “it’s very important that both the pipeline map and politics come out right”. The U.S. has intervened and pushed for regime change in one country after the other to make “politics come out right”, to use his words, but the U.S. also wanted to control the pipelines and nowadays even the shipping of oil, because the U.S. wants to be able to strangle competitors to force them to give in. President Trump’s idea of controlling the oil of Venezuela and Iran and to control the shipping of oil was primarily to strangle China, to force China to submit. For the U.S., to cut the Nord Stream pipeline became necessary to decouple Europe from Russia. Only by cutting off the Nord Stream was it possible to regain full U.S. control of Europe.

HINTERGRUND: In this broader historical framework, how should Nord Stream be understood: as a continuation of an earlier cooperation, or as a source of geopolitical conflict from the beginning? And why did Nord Stream become such a politically sensitive and contested project?

OLA TUNANDER: For the people around Dick Cheney and Brent Scowcroft with Victoria Nuland, Condoleezza Rice and John Bolton, the Nord Stream was unacceptable already from the very beginning. One had to cut it off to avoid Russian influence. Or rather, one had to replace Russian–German collaboration with U.S. control by tying Germany to the U.S. gas deliveries, and “it’s time to do it now”, as Condoleezza Rice’ told the Germans already in 2014. While it is very clear that the Nord Stream pipeline was to the advantage of both Germany and Russia and was a continuation of German Ostpolitik from Chancellor Willy Brandt and Helmut Schmidt, it also limited U.S. influence and control of Europe. The Nord Stream pipeline together with the Norwegian–German gas pipelines gave Europe sovereignty, while the bombing of Nord Stream in praxis made Germany into a U.S. vassal. It is remarkable that Russia didn’t retaliate. The Russians could easily have taken out the Baltic Pipe – the new pipeline from the Norwegian gas fields to Poland that largely replaced the Nord Stream and was inaugurated the day after Nord Stream was blown up. The Russians has been extremely cautious. We should rather quote U.S. former State Secretary Alexander Haig about the Russians: “I was mind-boggled with their patience”.

HINTERGRUND: When looking at the destruction of the pipelines, what key questions should be asked beyond simply “who did it”?

OLA TUNANDER: One should ask: Who benefits? And who has been pushing for taking out the Russian–German pipelines for 40 years? One should ask: Who has tried to bomb the pipeline on earlier occasions? Who was totally preoccupied by taking out the pipeline the years that preceded the bombing? And which people celebrated the bombing of the pipeline afterwards? And they are all from the same country or the same countries and from the very same power elite.

HINTERGRUND: And who did it? Who destroyed the pipeline?

OLA TUNANDER: We know that the American journalist Seymour Hersh claimed that U.S. Navy deep divers from Panama City, Florida, had planted the explosives (with timers to be triggered by a coded signal) during the BALTOPS-22 mine countermeasure exercise east of the Danish island of Bornholm 5-17 June 2022. While the exercise itself just demanded dives on the surface, we know that there were US Navy divers operating from a Norwegian ship Magnus Lagabøte, which was equipped with decompression chamber for deep water diving, witnesses speak about divers with equipment for deep diving developed at Panama City Florida, and we know that the divers were diving over the pipelines, which would imply that they went down to the pipelines. We also know that aircraft leaving the BALTOPS-22 exercise, flew not just to allies in Europe and to U.S. Naval Station Norfolk at Washington, but also to Panama City Florida. As Hersh source told, these divers would have been from Panama City Florida. According to Hersh, the timers to the explosives had been triggered by a coded signal sent from sonar buoys dropped by a P-8 Poseidon aircraft, and we also know that shortly before the explosions, an American Poseidon aircraft had been brought up from the Mediterranean to fly back and forth over Bornholm and southern Baltic Sea.

However, we know as well that a small sailing boat, Andromeda flying a Ukrainian flag and with a crew with Ukrainian divers had supposedly planted the explosives on the pipelines in September, just weeks before the explosions, but it is not clear why they choose to do it in the deep water basin of 80 meters east of Bornholm, when they didn’t have equipment for deep water diving and when the pipelines in southern Baltic Sea largely run through more shallow waters of 30-50 meters? To plant the bombs in the Bornholm deep-water basin could not have been their decision. And it is very unlikely that this was a decision made by their Ukrainian superiors. We also know that a couple of large U.S. naval ship, including the 257 meters’ “aircraft carrier” Kearsarge, with deep-water diving capability and with its AIS turned off, turned up at the place of the explosions on 20-21 September less than a week before the explosions. When the Danish rescue vessel went out to check what kind of ship it was that didn’t respond on radio, the Danes were told to keep out from the area. We know that the day after, a Russian ship SS-750 with a capability for carrying a small minisub approached the same area, but it was apparently chased away by Danish and Swedish naval vessels after they had been pre-notified by the supposed “organizer of the Ukrainian diving trip”, “the Colonel” [Roman Chervinsky], Wall Street Journal journalist Bojan Pancevski writes. This argument has been presented by the Swedish engineer Erik Andersson. Furthermore, we know that the Danish and Swedish investigations were closed down without conclusions, and they did not hand over evidence to the German investigation. Furthermore, we know that both Chervinsky, and his superior, the former Chief of Ukrainian Intelligence, “the General” [Vasyl Burba], had been working hand in glove with the American CIA and that they collaborated closely with several top leaders of the CIA (with the Directors of the CIA Mike Pompeo and Gina Haspel). That is what Pancevski writes. Burba and Chervinsky were the CIA in Ukraine. One cannot credibly argue that Burba’s and Chervinsky’s operation was not a CIA operation. A Ukrainian politician, Andrei Derkach claimed in 2024 that the Ukrainian contribution with divers on a sailing boat had actually been initiated by CIA’s top man in Kyiv, Christopher W. Smith, later Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for eastern Europe. According to Pancevski, “the General” [Burba] was his close drinking friend. Derkach argued that “the Ukrainian operation” was organized as a cover to make it possible for the Americans to blame Ukraine.

In covert operations, the U.S. Defense Department and the CIA would always prepare a cover. This cover or cover story has to be “true”. It has to be real, but it still will cover up for the real purpose of the operation, as stated by the former Chief Scientist of the U.S. Navy Special Project Office, John Pina Craven. He developed the U.S. DSRVs that were described as “Deep Submergence Rescue Vehicles”, two midget submarines that were carried on the back of their mother submarines. They would supposedly be used to rescue sailors from sunken submarines on the sea floor, and they were used for this purpose during exercises with allied navies. But the DSRVs were never used during an actual emergency. Their real purpose was intelligence. The “R” in the DSRV did not only stand for “Rescue” but also for “Recovery” and “Research” (Tripple “R”). The DSRVs deep diving capability was used for recovering Soviet missile parts on the sea floor and for tapping Soviet communication cables on the sea floor. “Research” was in this case a cover for intelligence, for espionage. The rescue function of the DSRV was a cover, and most senior allied naval officers believed that the DSRVs were nothing but rescue vehicles, they told me. The real purpose of the DSRVs was extremely secret, and the same would have been the case with the bombing of the Nord Stream pipelines. One has to have several layers covering up for the real operation to give the U.S. “plausible deniability”, as they call it. However, to use a handful Ukraine divers in a small sailing boat as a cover still means that this has to be a real operation. These divers may even have believed that they were the ones responsible for the operation, similar to how allied navies believed that the DSRVs were built for the purpose of rescuing sunken submarines.

To understand the real instigator behind the bombing of Nord Stream, we have to look at what happened in late September 2022. We know that the U.S. Navy, for the three nights before the explosions, were running a special operation (not a training mission) over Bornholm area and the southern Baltic Sea with a P-8 Poseidon aircraft that was brought up from Sigonella Sicily, where it was responsible for covering underwater activity in the Mediterranean. However, for these three days and nights, this U.S. “Mediterranean aircraft” was brought up and was based at Nordholz Naval Air Base (Cuxhaven, Hamburg), Germany, while flying back and forth over the Bornholm area. One task for the P-8 was to drop sonar buoys, and this P-8 could have been used to drop a sonar buoy to send a coded signal to trigger the timers for the explosives on the pipelines. The bombs must have been triggered in one way or another, and a coded signal was a safe way to do it. To bring up a U.S. “Mediterranean P-8” to the Baltic Sea is exceptional, but it happened also during the BALTAP-22 exercise in June the same year. In addition, the Americans were running an operation with a second P-8 Poseidon from Keflavik (Iceland). This P-8 was responsible for covering underwater activity in the North Atlantic and in the Norwegian Sea (not for the Baltic Sea), but now, on this very occasion, it was brought down to cover the area of the first explosion for five hours in the night and early morning on 26 September. The aircraft arrived east of Bornholm one hour after the explosion at 02.03 and it started its trip to the target area two hours before this explosion. It was air refueled over Poland for almost an hour by a U.S. tanker aircraft that left its U.S. Spangdahlem Air Base (Germany) close to Luxemburg at the very minute of the explosion, and the refueling was necessary for an extended patrol by the P-8 Poseidon. At 09.00, it passed over the site of the explosion at low altitude for the last time. Then immediately, it climbed to 10,000 meters and returned to Keflavik. The U.S. decision to patrol the area of the explosion for five hours had been taken long before the first explosion happened. Already from the time before the explosions, a U.S. Seahawk helicopter was hovering over the waters close to the Russian Baltic Fleet base Baltiysk to cover all Russian naval activity before and after the explosions, and a U.S. signal intelligence aircraft RC-135 was circling around the Russian naval base several times. After the explosions, U.S. ships were involved in investigating the crime scene, while the Nord Stream company was denied to even come close to its own pipeline in international waters. The bombing of the pipelines was a huge U.S. operation. The evidence show that the U.S. was not just directly involved, the U.S. would have had the overall responsibility.

Based on the 40-years’ history of U.S. attempts to disrupt the Russian-German pipelines and based on the U.S. activity days before the explosions, on the night of the first explosion, and after the explosions, the U.S. would have had the main responsibility for cutting off the Nord Stream pipelines: Or to quote now Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski on Twitter, on the day of the explosion, over a photo of the Nord Stream gas release: “Thank you, USA”. However, the British would have been aware of it as well, because of their traditional role for intelligence in the Baltic Sea area, while both the Poles and the Ukrainians would have been directly contributing to the operation. Intelligence operatives from Norway, Denmark and Sweden may also have been directly involved and perhaps even from Germany. All of them seems to have had their fingers in the pie, although they are not yet caught with their hands in the cookie jar.

The actual flight path of KAL 007 over Petropavlovsk in Kamchatka, over the Sea of Okhotsk and Sakhalin, where it was shot down, and the usual (or planned) flight path up to 500 km further east over the Pacific and Japan to Seoul in South Korea (Source: Wikipedia).

[This article is a follow-up to a conversation I had with Pascal Lottaz and Rainer Rupp on Neutrality Studies a couple of weeks ago and to one of Lottaz’ earlier interviews with Rupp.]

On 1 September 1983, Korean Air Line 007 with 269 people was shot down north of Japan by a Soviet fighter aircraft. This was one of the most disturbing events of the 1980s. It had an enormous impact on the opinion in the West. The Soviet war in Afghanistan had made people in the West turn against Moscow. Also in 1983, President Ronald Reagan spoke about the Soviet Union as the “Evil Empire”. Western media believed that Soviet submarines were penetrating Swedish naval bases, as if the Soviets were preparing for an attack against the neutral country of Sweden, while Moscow, the same year, was convinced that the NATO exercise, Able Archer, was used as a cover for a U.S. nuclear strike against the Soviets. The Soviets were even close to launch a preemptive nuclear counterattack, which was stopped by an East German spy Rainer Rupp in the NATO Headquarters. The Soviet bomber forces with their nuclear weapons were already waiting on the runway for a signal to go – with their engines running. 1983 was probably the most dangerous year in the latter part of the Cold War. Although the Afghanistan War turned out to have been initiated by the CIA half a year before the Soviet Union entered the war, and it also turned out that the submarines in Swedish waters had almost exclusively been from the West with operations decided by CIA Director Bill Casey, the Korean Air Line 007 (KAL 007) was definitely shot down by the Soviets. For the people in Europe and the United States, this incident was probably a most significant event this year. It had a major impact on the Western world. There was an outrage against the barbaric Russians, but how should we explain this event? I will go more into detail below.

One day after the attack, on 2 September, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs, Richard Burt, wrote a briefing memorandum for the State Department: “This terrible tragedy paradoxically gives us an opportunity to reinforce the President’s overall policy of strength and purpose. We should use it. — We should punish the Soviets for their barbaric action, but we should above all speak and act so as to point up how it shows the differences between our two systems. We should not act as though this incident has come as a big surprise. Instead, it only portrays what we have long known about the Soviet system.”

While leaving his helicopter, President Ronald Reagan spoke to the media the same day:

“Now, in the wake of the barbaric act committed yesterday by the Soviet regime against a commercial jetliner, the United States and many other countries of the world made clear and compelling statements that expressed not only outrage but also demanded a truthful accounting of the facts. Our first emotions are anger, disbelief and profound sadness. While events in Afghanistan and elsewhere have left few illusions about the willingness of the Soviet Union to advance its interests through violence and intimidation, all of us had hoped that certain irreducible standards of civilized behavior nonetheless obtained, but this event shocks the sensibilities of people everywhere. The tradition in the civilized world has always been to offer help to mariners and pilots, who are lost or in distress on sea or in the air. Where human life is valued, extraordinary efforts are extended to preserve and protect it, and it’s essential that as civilized societies, we ask searching questions about the nature of the regimes where such standards do not apply.” And President Reagan continued: “What could be said about Soviet credibility, when they so flagrantly lie about such a heinous act? What could be the scope of legitimate mutual discourse with a state whose values permits such atrocities? And what are we to make of a regime, which establishes one set of standards for itself and another for the rest of humankind? We have joined a call for an urgent United Nations Security Council meeting. Today, the brutality of this act should not be compounded through silence or the cynical distortion of evidence now at hand, and this night I will be meeting with my advisers to conduct a formal review of this matter, and this weekend I shall be meeting with the congressional leadership, to the families of all those on the ill-fated aircraft. We send our deepest sympathy, and I hope they know our prayers are with them all.”

Three days later, President Reagan gave a tv-broadcasted speech from the White House about the “Korean Air Line Massacre”:

“My fellow Americans I’m coming before you tonight about the Korean Air Line Massacre: the attack by the Soviet Union against 269 innocent men, women and children aboard an unarmed Korean passenger plane. This crime against humanity must never be forgotten, here or throughout the world. Our prayers tonight are with the victims and their families. […]. This is not the first time the Soviet Union shot at a civilian airliner, when it flew over its territory. In another tragic incident in 1978, the Soviets also shot down an unarmed civilian airliner after positively identified it as such. In that instance, the Soviet interceptor pilot clearly identified the civilian markings on the side of the aircraft. He repeatedly questioned the order to fire on the civilian airliner and was ordered to shoot it down anyway. The aircraft was hit with a missile and made a crash landing. Several innocent people lost their lives killed by shrapnel from the blast of the Soviet missile. […] Let me recap for a moment and present the incontrovertible evidence that we have. The Korean airliner [007], a Boeing 747 [from John F. Kennedy Airport, New York], left Anchorage, Alaska, bound for Seoul, Korea, on a course south and west, which would take it across Japan out over the Pacific in international waters. It was for a brief time in the vicinity of our reconnaissance plane, a RC-135 on a routine mission. […] The 747 was flying a course further to the west than it was supposed to fly, a course that took it into Soviet airspace. The Soviets tracked this plane for two and a half hours, while it flew a straight-line course at 30 to 35 thousand feet. Only civilian airliners fly in such a manner. At one point the Korean pilot gave Japanese air control his position as East of Hokkaido, Japan, showing that he was unaware they were off course by as much or and more than a hundred miles. The Soviets scrambled jet interceptors from a base in Sakhalin Island. Japanese ground sites recorded the interceptor planes radio transmissions – their conversations with their own ground control. […The pilot] reports he’s reducing speed to get behind the airliner. [He] gives his distance from the plane at various points in this maneuver and finally announces what can only be called: the Korean Air Line Massacre. He says he has locked on the radar, which aims his missiles, has launched those missiles, the target has been destroyed, and he is breaking off the attack. […] This attack was not just against ourselves, or the Republic of Korea. This was the Soviet Union against the world. […] It was an act of barbarism. […] The Soviets revealed that, yes, shooting down a plane, even one with hundreds of innocent men, women, children and babies is a part of their normal procedure if that plane is, in what they claim as their airspace.”

President Reagan says that the Soviet pilot could not have confused the civilian airliner with a military aircraft, although the path of KAL 007 had been crossed by a U.S. signal intelligence aircraft RC-135 that usually operated in the area and went on more or less the same altitude. CIA Director Bill Casey also said that the pilot must have been able to see that this was a Boeing 747 and not the smaller Boeing 707 (the RC-135). Richard Burt told reporters that “the Soviets knew it was a passenger plane”. However, both the CIA and the NSA (National Security Agency) had told, in their briefings, that “the Soviets might have thought that they were shooting down a U.S. spy plane”. Alvin Snyder, who had produced the U.S. video for the UN Security Council meeting on 6 September 1983, told Washington Post in 1996 that he had only had limited access to the transcripts 1983. When he got the full access to the transmissions in 1993, he realized: “The Russians believed the intruder aircraft [KAL 007] was an American RC-135 reconnaissance plane, many of which flew routine missions in the area”. The ground control had said “the target is military”. The Soviet Sukhoi-15 said that the flight “does not answer my call” and the Sukhoi-15 “had fired warning cannon shots”. He was instructed to shot “warning burst”, and he answered that he did shoot these warning bursts, but the pilot of KAL 007 did not react to the warnings. The Russian pilot said afterwards that he identified the plane as a civilian plane but thought it had been used for military purposes. He had not informed his superiors. The Soviet command believed it was a military plane.

However, there are more disturbing facts. A senior NSA officer told me that the NSA listening post in Hokkaido (Japan) had followed the Russian communication about the airplane for perhaps two hours. They knew that the Russians believed that KAL 007 was the military intelligence plane (RC-135) and they had sent three reports “with highest priority” back to the U.S., which means that these reports would have reached NSA Director Lincoln Faurer, the White House, and probably Chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff, General John Vessey and Secretary Caspar Weinberger, and perhaps CIA Director Casey and Vice President George H.W. Bush. There had been enough time to inform the Russians to prevent the shootdown. Someone must have taken the decision not to inform Moscow about the identity of the plane. However, President Reagan and his national security advisor Bill Clark were in California and did not return until a day later. Clark’s deputy Robert McFarlane was in the Middle East, and his deputy Admiral Poindexter was with Reagan and Clark in California. Immediately after the shootdown, Clark was in contact with Richard Burt in Washington, and with Casey and State Secretary George Schultz. Burt wrote a policy memo to handle the situation, but why did nobody act on the reports from the NSA in Japan? General Vessey was briefed by an Air Force general, and at 11.30 he briefed Secretary Weinberger. At 14.00, before Reagan had returned, Vice President Bush chaired a first meeting with the Special Crisis Group with Schultz and Casey, but neither Vessey nor Weinberger attended. General Vessey had a prior engagement “that could not be cancelled”, he said, according to Seymour Hersh (“The Target Is Destroyed”, 1987). Vessey argued: “If the White House was going to play hard ball with the Soviets, that was its business”. And Vessey added: “We weren’t going to go over there and bomb Moscow”. Neither Vessey nor Weinberger went to the meeting. Casey took over and argued that the Russians must have been able to identify the airplane.

But there is also another disturbing fact. In Pascal Lottaz’ interview with Rainer Rupp, Rupp said that he, in the 1980s had been chairing the Current Intelligence Group in the Situation Center of NATO, where all the intelligence was brought together. He mentioned the KAL 007 shootdown and described how he, “weeks later”, received a DIA Intelligence Memorandum (IM). It was a wording like “manna from heaven”: “We now got all the nodes, the strategic communication centers, how it all works in the air defense in the Soviet Far East”. And Rupp continued: “That is what the Americans got out of it”. KAL 007 passing over the most secret installations on Kamchatka and Sakhalin would have triggered the Soviet air defense radars and communication systems, and this was all picked up by U.S. satellites over the area. Was it a coincidence that the flight happened to pass over Petropavlovsk, one of the two Soviet bases for strategic nuclear missile submarines? Was it a coincidence that the U.S. satellites at the time were so positioned that they were able to cover the area and to pick up all necessary information for a major war?

Korean Air Line flight 902 was in April 1978 going from Paris over Anchorage to Seoul in South Korea, but somewhere north of Iceland or over north Greenland, it turned eastwards to the Kola Peninsula in the Soviet Union. The passengers were surprised that the sun first was on one side of the plane and then suddenly on the other side. The pilot ignored all the warnings from the Russian fighter jets and refused to land, but the fighter jet forced it down and it landed on a lake and survived. It was a very strange “navigation error” (Source: Wikipedia. The photo is originally from Pravda).

However, there is also a third disturbing fact. Five years earlier, in 1978, another Korean Air Line flight, KAL 902, was supposed to fly from Paris via Anchorage (Alaska) to South Korea but was responsible for an equally strange “navigation error”. It went up towards Iceland as it should, but instead of continuing its planned path over northern Greenland towards Alaska, it turned around and went eastwards, north of Norway, while it followed the usual flight path for the signal intelligence aircraft RC-135 going from the UK to the Kola Peninsula, but instead of following the coastline as RC-135 used to do, KAL 902 went over the Headquarters of the Northern Fleet, over Severomorsk (at Murmansk), the other of the two Soviet bases for the strategic missile submarines, and then over the strategic nuclear bomber base Olenegorsk (Olenya) 90 km further south. KAL 902 was followed by a Soviet fighter aircraft sending warning signals demanding it to land. Passengers saw the fighter plane close to them for 15 minutes. It was firing warning bursts. The passengers even saw the red star on the aircraft, but the pilot ignored the warning signals. CIA Director Stansfield Turner said: “When the Soviets gave the signals, the pilot didn’t obey”. Instead, he went deep inside the Kola Peninsula towards the Soviet - Finnish border. The Soviet Sukhoi-15 shot two missiles. One hit the wing of the airplane, but the pilot succeeded to land on a frozen lake. The crew and 107 passengers survived – two died. The captain shouted in the microphone: “We have survived” and the passengers burst into applause. The captain claimed that he had just followed the instruments. Everything seemed to have been fine. He believed he had passed over Greenland. The two Korean airliners had seemingly not understood that they were on a totally wrong course. They happened to pass over the Soviet Union’s two and only strategic submarine bases with a large portion of the Soviet strategic nuclear missiles and with hundred percent of its submarine-based strategic nuclear missiles.

In addition, Rainer Rupp described another important event. In 1981-83, U.S. bomber forces regularly approached the Soviet Arctic coastline, which has been described both by Peter Schweizer in his book Victory (1994) and by the later CIA Chief Historian Ben Fischer in his “The 1983 War Scare in U.S. Soviet Relations” (partly released in 2018) and his A Cold War Conundrum (from 1997), both published by the CIA. U.S. strategic bomber forces and fighter bombers were flying over the North Pole, and when they seemingly were about to penetrate Soviet airspace, in the last second, they turned around. All the Soviet air defense systems were triggered, and this was done while the satellites passed over the area to pick up all information. Sometimes, it was done several times a week. The Soviets “didn’t know what it all meant”, U.S. Under Secretary of State for Military Affairs, William Schneider said. But some time afterwards, Rainer Rupp received an IM from the DIA with all the air defense communication nodes and air defense radars. And the same kind of report, he received in autumn 1983 after the KAL 007 had passed over the Soviet Pacific. The idea was to trigger the whole system, while the satellites picked up the single communication nodes and the hierarchy of nodes.

The same was actually done on a smaller scale in Baltic Sea along the Soviet Baltic Coast around 1975 with the use of a Swedish SAAB aircraft, a J-35 Draken, that seemingly tried to penetrate the Soviet coast and trigger all Soviet defense systems, while the incident-ready Soviet air defense fighter aircraft had their yearly training in the Urals. The U.S. satellites would have picked up all necessary information, but it was not the Swedish Air Force that was running this operation, it was the Wallenberg owned company SAAB that in this way may have received some favors from the U.S. This I was told already in the 1980s by Sweden’s Deputy Chief of Defense Staff Intelligence, Björn Eklind. He also mentioned the strange event with the KAL 902 airliner.

All these operations now seem to reveal a pattern. The U.S. may have simulated attacks on the Soviet Baltic coast including its Baltic Fleet Naval Base Baltiysk around 1975, on the Kola Peninsula and on its Northern Fleet Base including its submarine base in Severomorsk at Murmansk in 1978, on the whole Soviet Arctic coastline in 1981-83, and on the Soviet Pacific coastline including and the Pacific Fleet submarine base in Petropavlovsk in 1983. The U.S. had systematically triggered the Soviet air defense systems, radars and communication nodes along the Soviet periphery, while letting the U.S. so-called ferret satellites pick up necessary information for the U.S. to be able to eliminate the Soviet air defense and communication systems in case of a war. Ben Fischer writes for the CIA in his Cold War Conundrum: “During the 1950s and 1960s, the US Strategic Air Command and the Navy had conducted similar operations--intelligence-gathering missions, including ‘ferret’ operations aimed at detecting locations of, reactions by, and gaps in Soviet radar and air defense installations--along the USSR’s Eurasian periphery in preparation for possible nuclear war.” These “ferret missions” were run on a regular bases, also over Kamchatka and Sakhalin (for example “Project Home Run”). In 1950s, the U.S. had had a superior air force that could fly deep into Soviet Union, while the Soviets couldn’t do anything. In the 1970s and 1980s, however, one had to use civilian aircraft for the same purpose, to penetrate Soviet land territory, and in the latter part of the Cold War one had apparently used both military and civilian aircraft to provoke the Soviet air defense systems, by flying over Soviet bases and coastal areas or by simulating a major bomber attack, which would make the Soviet air defense systems blinking red. One was willing to sacrifice hundreds of civilians for this military goal.

How is it possible that the Korean Air Lines could have been used for this purpose? It may surprise most of us, but in parallel to be a civilian company, Korean Air Lines seems to have been deeply involved in covert military activity including arms smuggling for the U.S. The company had been growing dramatically in the 1970s to become the second largest carrier in East Asia. Much of the financing came from U.S. Export-Import Bank under its president and chairman, later CIA Director William Casey. While Casey had initially pushed for the narrative that the Soviets must have known that it was a civilian airliner, he may have been deeply involved in the military use of the Korean Air Line aircraft, and he may have known that the navigation systems of the two airliners seemingly were manipulated. While Reagan spoke about a barbaric act and “the Korean Air Line Massacre”, Richard Burt said that the shootdown would give us an opportunity: “We should above all speak and act so as to point up how it shows the differences between our two systems. We should not act as though this incident has come as a big surprise. Instead, it only portrays what we have long known about the Soviet system.” A Soviet journalist told Alvin Snyder that his [Snyder’s] video that the the U.S. had shown at UN Security Council on 6 September 1983 was the biggest propaganda blow [the Kremlin] ever suffered during the Cold War, something from which the Soviets never fully recovered.”

However, some people in the U.S. system knew that the Korean airliners’ “navigation errors” would give the U.S. all necessary information about Soviet air defenses, while at the same time, if the plane was shot down, it would give the U.S. an enormous propaganda victory. Would this barbaric act really make everyone realize “the difference between our two systems”?

Russian hypersonic missile Oreshnik. Attack on Dnipro (Ukraine), November 2024.

[Some people have argued that the U.S. nuclear umbrella for Europe still exists, because the U.S. may still be willing to use nuclear weapons against Russia and that the doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) was the foundation of deterrence during the Cold War, and that this form of deterrence still exists. I will make a short comment on these ideas.]

The U.S. nuclear umbrella for Europe always presupposed a U.S. willingness to use nuclear force – either at the tactical level, in a European War, or-and at the strategic level between Washington and Moscow. However, a U.S. willingness to escalate to a strategic nuclear war will presuppose a U.S. relative advantage on these levels: an escalation dominance. During the Cold War, the U.S. would firstly, according to NATO plans, be able to strike Soviet conventional forces in the Warsaw Pact countries with nuclear weapons, but not Soviet Union itself, because that would make the Soviets use nuclear forces to strike the United States. Secondly, the U.S. Cold War advantage at the higher levels of the escalation ladder (as discussed in earlier article), would, at the time, probably have forced the Soviets to back down from any escalatory “adventure”. That was the argument presented by U.S. Secretary of the Navy, John Lehman in the 1980s. The U.S. “aggressive” Maritime strategy would open for a “victory”, he argued. The U.S. would not rely on the mutual suicide of MAD (Mutual Assured Destruction). In summary, the U.S. Cold War “nuclear umbrella” appeared credible, because of the U.S. ability to use its tactical nuclear capabilities and because of its relative advantage at the strategic level making a nuclear strike against the Soviets possible to imagine.

This is no longer the case. Firstly, the U.S. has no longer any Warsaw Pact countries to target, and many Europeans would be unhappy if the U.S. would use of nuclear weapons on their own territories. Secondly, the U.S. has no longer escalation dominance, because of Russian relative parity, when it comes to strategic submarines, and because the hypersonic missiles will give Russia an advantage at the higher levels of the escalation ladder.

In praxis, the Mutual Assured Destruction or MAD doctrine was never perceived as credible inside the military elite. MAD would not deter war at lower levels of escalation and was replaced by Nuclear Use Theories or NUT. We might argue, however, that an uncertainty whether nuclear weapons will be used or not is enough, but that is no longer relevant when there is a significant escalation without nuclear use. In short, nuclear weapons will not deter anyone, if one does not believe that they will be possible to use. There is no deterrence, if these weapons only task is “to deter”. Accordingly, if one claims that nuclear weapons are unlikely to be used because of the stigma against nuclear weapons, the more likely it is that they will be used. This paradox is the foundation for nuclear deterrence.

The concept of Mutual Assured Destruction was never a guiding principle for U.S. nuclear forces, because under the “umbrella” of MAD, one side could strengthen its position to a degree that the other side would be forced to retreat. That was the origin of the U.S. doctrine of Flexible Response that came to dominate in the 1970s. In the 1980s, however, CIA Director Bill Casey launched a covert operation war against the Soviet Union to attain victory under the cover of the nuclear umbrella. According to Casey, this aggressive policy would make Soviet nuclear weapons impotent, and for Secretary Lehman, the U.S. Maritime Strategy would force the Soviets to retreat, because the U.S. would be able to possibly take out the Soviet nuclear second-strike capability, its strategic submarines, by letting U.S. conventional armed submarines attack them, which would give the U.S. escalation dominance. This would happen in the first minutes of a war, and the Soviets couldn’t do much, he argued. And in the 1980s as well as today, neither Mutual Assured Destruction, nor a relative nuclear parity is enough to create stability and deter aggression, because the U.S. has been able to move its forces forward step-by-step, using a salami tactic, to minimize its cost of aggression. The Russian change of its nuclear doctrine in September 2024 was an attempt to counter this salami tactic.

That is also the background for Sergey Karaganov’s statement that Russia has to use nuclear weapons in Europe, to show to the Europeans that nuclear deterrence is still credible. One might argue that this is nothing but a Russian Flexible Response Doctrine. The problem, according to Karaganov, is that the Europeans acts as if the nuclear weapons did no longer exist. British intelligence officers and technicians have sent conventional missiles and drones from Ukraine territory deep into Russia in a manner that would have been impossible during the Cold War. Karaganov did not argue that Russia should use nuclear weapons against Ukraine, and definitely not in Eastern and Central Ukraine, but rather against U.S. military bases in certain European countries, but Russia would first use conventionally-tipped Oreshnik missiles as a warning. Western countries were supposedly directly involved in targeting the Russian strategic air force base in Olenja on the Kola Peninsula in June 2025. This would, according to Russa’s new nuclear doctrine, open for the use of nuclear weapons against these Western countries, because strategic air force bases are part of the Russian nuclear triad. President Trump’s envoy, General Keith Kellog, said that this would make “risk levels going way up”.

In Summary, U.S. does not seem to have escalation dominance today, which means one have the choice of either “outsourcing” the war to the Europeans or back down in case the war escalates. The problem with the Europeans today is their hybris. They overestimate their own capability, they believe that they can avoid a nuclear war if the war escalates, and they believe that they will be able to fool the Americans to assist the Europeans in a war with Russia – similar to Allen Dulles in 1961, who believed that he would be able to fool President John F. Kennedy to give approval for military operation against Cuba in case CIA’s Bay of Pigs operation had not been successful. But Kennedy said “No”, and the Americans are likely to do the same with the Europeans in a war against Russia.

From 1977 to 1989, Rainer Rupp was a West German civilian representative at the NATO Headquarters. As Chair of NATO Current Intelligence Group in the 1980s, he had access to Cosmic Top-Secret documents, while he was working as a spy for East German intelligence. His code name was “Topaz”. In 1993, Rupp was caught by German authorities, and he risked a lifetime sentence in prison, but in 1994 he was give 12 years in prison, because he had tried to avoid a war. He was released after six years. He was, in 1983, most likely the single most important individual making Europe able to avoid a nuclear war and World War III (Photo: the website of Rainer Rupp).

According to a popular view, states covered by the U.S. “nuclear umbrella” was protected by U.S. nuclear weapons, but against whom was the U.S. to launch these weapons? The U.S. could not launch them against the Soviet Union and later Russia without risking a Russian nuclear counterattack on the United States. During the Cold War, the U.S. “nuclear umbrella” presupposed the existence of the Warsaw Pact states that could be targeted by U.S. nuclear weapons. The “nuclear umbrella” also presupposed a general perception of a U.S. escalation dominance that would allow the United States to escalate and deter a Soviet attack, also at the higher levels of the escalation ladder. Neither of these preconditions exist today. There is, accordingly, no longer a U.S. “nuclear umbrella”. But let us start by looking at the 1980s to understand the logic of this very strange “umbrella”.

At the NATO Headquarters in the early 1980s, U.S. neoconservatives had pushed for a nuclear “decapitation strike”. They wanted to use the very precise Pershing II missiles that would reach Moscow in ten minutes to take out the whole Soviet civilian and military leadership, to make “the mighty Red Army run” around “like decapitated chickens”. The neoconservatives tried to implement these ideas as part of NATO’s plans, and the Soviets would certainly have been aware of this ambition. In November 1983, Soviet intelligence picked up the orders from the NATO command centers during a very realistic NATO nuclear exercise, Able Archer. The Pershing missiles were moved into place. The codes were changed and everything was very real, which made the Soviets believe that the NATO exercise was a cover for a real nuclear strike. The Soviets were convinced that the West prepared for “a decapitation strike” with an imminent nuclear attack. The Soviets responded by ordering their nuclear bomber forces in East Germany out on the runways. All these aircraft were just waiting for a signal to go, with their engines running. This was confirmed by a U.S. intelligence memorandum 16 December 1988. it said that overhead photography showed fully armed Soviet Flogger aircraft in East Germany, and it “stated that as of 1900 [Central European Time] on 02 November the fighter-bomber divisions of the air force of Group Soviet Forces Germany had been placed in a status of heightened alert.” There would “have been at least 108 fighter-bombers on alert”. These aircraft “were to be armed and placed at readiness 3 (30-minute alert) to ‘destroy first-line enemy targets’.” Later Director Defense Intelligence Agency Lieutenant General Leonard Perroot decided not to respond to the Soviet measures, which also might have been decisive.

A U.S. or NATO nuclear attack on the Soviet Union would imply an enormous destruction. To the Russians, it was necessary to strike first, to destroy the Pershing missiles and other U.S. or NATO nuclear forces, before these forces were able to hit the Soviet Union. The Soviets were convinced that they had to strike pre-emptively to survive. However, an East German spy at the NATO Headquarters, Rainer Rupp, reported to the East Germans and the Russians that Able Archer was just an exercise. He was able to convince them that it was not a real nuclear attack, and the Soviet nuclear “counterattack” was stopped, which we are now all very happy about. The CIA and DIA reports about Able Archer and about the Soviet war scare had supposedly shocked President Reagan to a degree that it totally changed his policy. He started his talks with the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985.

In an interview with Pascal Lottaz, Rainer Rupp said that a top-secret document, “one of the most secret documents of NATO of the Military Committee […] said quite clearly: the Soviet Union doesn’t want a war with NATO. Their strategy is, if a war breaks out, that they [will] do everything [to ensure] that the war will not be fought on socialist territory, but to carry it across into the territory of the aggressor.” The Soviets did not think in terms of an attack on the West, but they would strike back, possibly preemptively in case of a Western attack.

In another of Pascal Lottaz’ interviews with Rainer Rupp, he says: “In the [upcoming] weeks, I had to chair the Current Intelligence Group in the Situation Center of NATO, that is the innermost sanctum, where all the intelligence information from member countries come in. The CIA and the DIA send their assessments of new developments etc., and I could see the intelligence memorandum of the DIA, how they discovered communication nodes of air defence systems in the north of Russia […] and you can read it nowadays in [the later official CIA Historian] Ben Fischer’s [now declassified paper on the Able Archer nuclear exercise …]. In the course of the [biannual WINTEX] exercises, the use of these tactical nuclear weapons became bigger and bigger [and in] the last exercise, already after the meeting of Gorbachev and Reagan, we actually used, I think, 153 tactical nuclear weapons in two waves: First over a hundred on Eastern European industrial but also mainly on military targets. Then, [after three days], the rest. So, all in all, I remember 153, and that was for the first time also nuclear weapons on East Germany, because up to then the Germans had always insisted that there would not be a nuclear weapon on East Germany. But interestingly enough, there […] was on Dresden. I remember well, because of the historic parallel of the firebombing of Dresden […]. An important point [was] that the target selection during WINTEX – for the use of nuclear weapons in the East – was always done [by the Americans]. That was an American prerogative. So, the target selection never touched Russian territory. Never. Why? Implicitly, it is very clear because the Americans knew that from the moment, they hit Russian territory, it is going to come back against American territory, in the United States. And that is the old question of the reliability of the nuclear umbrella, of the U.S. nuclear umbrella for Germany. I mean, [the Americans] were quite happy to fight to the last German in a war against Russia or to even destroy most of Europe. […] I remember in that context a presentation at the Nuclear Planning meeting in Oberammergau, where I participated, and an American general presented the problem of the Fulda Gap [… where the massive Soviet forces were supposed to roll into West Germany]. In the Fulda Gap we got a real problem [, he said]: ‘the German villages were only half a kiloton away from each other’.”

The idea of a U.S. “nuclear umbrella” for Europe presupposed the existence of the Warsaw Pact states that the U.S. could target. The Germans participants did not like that the U.S. would use nuclear weapons to bomb East Germany. The Germans wanted the U.S. to use the “bombs” further east (in Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary), but not in Germany. The short-range nuclear missiles presupposed, however, that a large proportion of them would be used in East Germany and against the Soviet forces entering West Germany. A former Commander-in-Chief of BALTAP (the NATO Command Baltic Approaches in Karup for Denmark and Northen Germany) told me that Special Forces were prepared for carrying backpacks with nuclear weapons, and they would not reach very far. In a European war, much of the U.S. tactical nuclear weapons would almost certainly be used in Germany.

Norwegian Chief of Military Intelligence Alf Roar Berg (a former Chief of the Nike air defence systems) on the Oslo Fjord in June 1992 together with CIA Director Robert Gates and the U.S. Ambassador to Norway Loret Miller Ruppe (Photo: private archive).

The Norwegians were also unhappy about the fact that the nuclear weapons in the North were going to be used in Finnmark in Northern Norway, because they could not be used against the Soviet Union. Furthermore, in Norway, the Nike missile air defence systems had conventional warheads and were officially deployed to protect the capital of Oslo, but in wartime these missiles would be deployed with nuclear warheads, and these Norwegian Nike batteries had already storages prepared for their nuclear warheads, I was told by a former chief of these missile systems, the later Chief of Military Intelligence Major General Alf Roar Berg. The idea was that these nuclear surface-to-air missiles were going to be used against the swarms of Soviet nuclear bombers forces heading for the U.S. nuclear bomber forces in the UK and perhaps for the U.S., General Berg told me. The same was the case in Denmark, West Germany, the Netherlands and Belgium. The Nike batteries made up a wall of nuclear missile forces through Europe from north to south, a nuclear shield that would block the Soviet bomber forces’ access to the UK. The radioactive fallout from the many nuclear explosions would rain down over Scandinavia and Germany from inside the nuclear umbrella.

Most Europeans probably believed that the U.S. nuclear umbrella was going to be used, in one way or the other, to protect the Europeans against the Soviet Union and now Russia. One believed that the umbrella was going to protect us from Soviet nuclear weapons by using a U.S. nuclear deterrent directed against the Soviet Union, and the U.S. escalation dominance (see former article on my Substack) would deter the Soviets from any “adventure”. However, if the “deterrence fail”, these U.S. weapons were going to be used in Europe. The U.S. nuclear weapons were always going rain down from inside the umbrella. During the NATO exercises, the U.S. did never target the Soviet Union or Russia.

Today, there is no Warsaw Pact. We have an extended Western Europe, and the U.S. tactical nuclear weapons would, if used, be used in Europe, not against Russia, because a U.S. nuclear strike against Russia would immediately be followed by a Russian nuclear strike on the United States. In a U.S.-Russian war, Russia might for example create a buffer zone in Norwegian Finnmark to protect the Kola bases (close to Norway), to make it possible to defend them against a Western attack. This would be a scenario when the U.S. might use nuclear weapons, but the U.S. would use these weapons against Russian forces in Norway, in Finnmark, and against Norwegian infrastructure, not against Russia. Some people argue that the U.S. strategic nuclear forces (forces that would be used against Russia in case of a final escalation) would be enough of a deterrent to make the Russians back down, but that would presuppose a U.S. escalation dominance, and this escalation dominance does no longer exist (see my former Substack article). There is no longer a U.S. “nuclear umbrella”. Many people in Europe have misunderstood what a U.S. “nuclear umbrella” would mean to Europe.

Today, one is also talking about a possible “French nuclear umbrella” as a replacement of the U.S. “nuclear umbrella”, but also France would for obvious reasons try to avoid using nuclear weapons against Russia. In case of a massive Western (including French) conventional missile attack against Russia, Russia would (according to the new nuclear doctrine from September 2024) possibly use nuclear weapons, which could provoke France to retaliate with the use of nuclear weapons, but also that would be very risky, because the destruction in France would be totally unacceptable compared to the destruction in Russia. There does not seem to be any credible option for Western powers to use nuclear weapons in a war with Russia.

Hypothetically speaking, one can imagine that president Trump would take a decision to launch a nuclear missile strike against Russia and that Russia would respond by a nuclear strike on the United States, but, as I wrote in my article on “Escalation Dominance”, the responsible people in Pentagon would then be worried that the U.S. missiles might be taken down by Russian air defence, while the U.S. would definitely not be able to intercept the new Russian hypersonic missiles. It is accordingly almost impossible to imagine that the U.S. would enter a conflict in Europe that might escalate to a strategic nuclear level. One would almost certainly back down and “delegate” the war to the Europeans. The Europeans are now on their own, but they don’t have to worry. The Russians are not interested in Europe or in conquering European territory. The Russians still don’t think in terms of an attack, on invading Europe. The Europeans can actually calm down.

Left: Defence Minister Sergei Ivanov in 2007, later First Deputy Prime Minister (for military industry) and Chief of Staff of President Vladimir Putin (Photo: Wikipedia). Right: Former U.S. Secretary of the Navy John Lehman in 2007, in Vestfjord (Norway), where his aircraft carriers should seek radar shadow (Photo: Private archive, The Maritime Strategy Conference, Norwegian Institute for Defence Studies, Bodø). 

The paper below was presented at the International Sea Power Conference “The World Ocean - a Space for Cooperation and Competition» - ‘Old Theatres – New Challenges’. In memory of Fleet Admiral S.G. Gorshkov.” It was held at The Primakov National Research Institute of World Economy and International Relations, Russian Academy of Science (IMEMO), 20-21 November 2025. My paper brings up the U.S. advantage in the 1980s in the Maritime Theatre in the North, which would have forced Russia to back down in case of a confrontation and which later forced Russia to develop its capabilities at the upper end of the escalation ladder. The technological changes and Russian strategic investments have forced the U.S. to accept a more cautious attitude. Perceptions about an escalation dominance have been turned upside-down.

The conference brought together scholars and admirals from many countries, from Russia, from Asian and African countries, and from Greece and Turkey. There were also a U.S. member of the Arctic Council and two scholars from Western Europe: Alexandre Sheldon-Duplaix and me. Sheldon-Duplaix was a researcher at the French Ministry of Defence and teacher at the Defence Staff. He has written several volumes on submarine history. I was a research professor at the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO) and have written books on geopolitics, submarine operations and deception. Both of us brought up U.S. Cold War deception with the use of Western submarines in Swedish waters. But now, I will first give a few words of background to the topic.

From late 1980s, PRIO and the Defence Research Institute in Oslo organized conferences and seminars on naval strategy and confidence-building in the high north, one with President Reagan’s Assistant Secretary of Defense, Francis ‘Bing’ West, from Naval War College, who headed “Sea Plan 2000”. This plan became the foundation for President Reagan’s and Navy Secretary John Lehman’s Maritime Strategy. We had a seminar with former President of the Naval War College and Director of the CIA, Admiral Stansfield Turner, with the Dean of Naval War College, Robert Wood, and with European and Russian contributors, which resulted in a book, Naval Arms Control (edited by Sverre Lodgaard). I wrote a chapter on “Regional restraint at sea”. My doctoral thesis about the U.S. Maritime Strategy was used as a textbook at the U.S. Naval War College. John Lehman said later some nice words about it to the British Sunday Times, to the journalist Pelle Neroth.

After my doctoral thesis and after an Oslo conference in 1989, I recruited Professor Robert Bathurst from the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School (Monterey) to PRIO. We participated in conferences with U.S. Navy and Russian Navy officers. Robert Bathurst had been heading the U.S.-Soviet hotline, been U.S. assistant attaché to Moscow and been head of Attaché Affairs Eastern Europe. He was Chief U.S. Naval Intelligence Europe and held the Admiral Layton Chair of Intelligence at the Naval War College, while Stansfield Turner was president at the college. In early 1990s, we had several conferences together with U.S., European and Russian participants. PRIO had a couple of seminars with the Russian Navy’s “Peace to the Ocean Committee”. In 1993, I headed a Norwegian “delegation” on a Russian naval ship with Bathurst, myself, and individuals from the Norwegian Navy, the Defence Ministry and Defence Research Institute. My and Bathurst’s opposite numbers were Major General Pyotr Barabolja and Admiral Nikolai Amelko. The latter gave me lecture on Soviet submarines in the Baltic. I was skeptical, but the same summer I had talks with former CIA Director James Schlesinger, who confirmed a U.S. role in Swedish waters. Admiral Amelko and Admiral Sergey Gorshkov had been the most high-ranking naval officer in the Soviet Union. In the 1980s, Amelko was the deputy to the chiefs of the General Staff, Marshal Ogarkov and Marshal Akhromeyev. Two of the new Russian frigates are now named after Admiral Gorshkov and Admiral Amelko. The former was the Soviet Chief of Navy for 30 years, from 1956 to 1986.

This frigate program was initiated in 2005 under Defence Minister Sergei Ivanov. He later became Deputy Prime Minister (responsible for military industry) and Chief of Staff to President Vladimir Putin. Ivanov put priority on the strategic submarines, the new quiet Borei class to operate in Arctic waters. But also, on the very quiet Yasen class. Sergei Ivanov said: “that about 40 percent of the military budget would be spent on the Navy in 2009, mainly on building Project 955 [the Borei class submarine]” (Andrei Frolov 2009). One had to secure the “second strike capability” and have a real capability at the upper end of the escalation ladder. The first tests of hypersonic missiles were also under Defence Minister Ivanov. These missiles would supposedly make “U.S. proposed missile-defense system useless”.

When I saw Sergei Ivanov as a minister of defense from 2001, I recognized him from the 1980s. At a conference about Arctic Security at the International Affairs Institute in Helsinki in 1987, I gave a talk about the U.S. Forward Maritime Strategy: “Four scenarios for the Norwegian Sea”. I was just moving from Sweden to my job as researcher at PRIO in Norway, and I was finishing my doctoral thesis on U.S. Maritime Strategy. Sergei Ivanov was a young Third Secretary at the Soviet Embassy in Helsinki, and he was very interested in the Maritime Strategy and the U.S. scenarios that would follow from it. He spoke fluent Swedish without an accent. He had never been to Sweden, he said. Not many universities such excellent language skills. My first reaction was that he must be from the KGB, which turned out to be correct.

His problem was that the U.S. Forward Maritime Strategy had made Admiral Gorshkov’s global presence almost irrelevant. The U.S. forward deployments had made Moscow forced to retreat and put priority on defending their noisy strategic submarines. One had to focus on a “bastion defence” in the Arctic. When the U.S. Navy stated that one would take out the Russian strategic submarines, it was impossible for Moscow to know whether any Russian ballistic missile submarines would survive a confrontation. The submarines could not contact the base, because they would then reveal their position. Moscow would have to worry about its “second-strike capability”. One would have to retreat and adapt to U.S. demands. One had to accept a limited sovereignty. When John Lehman said that the U.S. Navy could attack the Kola Peninsula, the most “valuable piece of real estate on earth” and “the Soviets couldn’t do anything”, this was the lesson the Maritime Strategy taught Moscow. The rebuilding of the Russian Navy must be understood in this perspective.

Below follows my presentation at the Primakov Institute in Moscow, on 21 November 2025. It was part of the session on “The Frigid Sea”, about the Arctic waters. I have added some lines in brackets to my presentation to make some arguments clearer.

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Strategic Naval Thinking and Capabilities in the 1980s and Today:

From U.S. Horizontal Escalation to Russian Escalation Dominance

Many thanks for your nice invitation. I am happy to be here at the Primakov Institute in this World Ocean Conference. I remember listening to a lecture of then Foreign Minister Yevgeny Primakov in Oslo 1997. He mentioned the promises Western leaders had given to President Gorbachev, which had been a precondition for the Russian withdrawal from Central Europe. But soon afterwards, the Western countries refused to recognize their own promises. I actually wrote an article about it in 1995 and now, 30 years later, a Swedish book.

I wrote my doctoral thesis about the U.S. Maritime Strategy and the geopolitics of frigid seas. After my doctoral degree in 1989, I became Senior Research Fellow at the Peace Research Institute in Oslo, Norway, and I became Research Professor and wrote books on submarines and deception. I am now retired.

To understand today’s naval development, we should go back to the 1980s: to the U.S. Forward Maritime Strategy. In a war on the Central Front, the Soviet Union was believed to have a conventional force superiority, but instead of confronting this superiority with nuclear weapons as had been the conventional wisdom in the West, the U.S. Secretary of the Navy, John Lehman, was pushing for a “horizontal” or “geographic escalation” replacing the old strategy of “vertical”, “nuclear escalation”. [One should rather hit the most valuable piece of Soviet territory]. Instead of using tactical nuclear weapons to confront the Soviet army in Germany, Lehman and President Reagan was pushing for a forward deployment of aircraft carriers in the Norwegian Sea and the Barents Sea, and, in the first five minutes of a war, use U.S. attack submarines to destroy Soviet strategic missile submarines, while they were leaving the Kola Peninsula. The idea was [to hit the Soviet Union where it was most vulnerable instead of confronting Moscow where it had its strength]. The idea was to decimate Soviet’s sea-based strategic [ballistic] missiles, the Soviet “second-strike capability”, to force Moscow to worry about the vulnerability of its nuclear triad.

[During the Cold War, tactical nuclear forces were supposed to be used on the battlefield, while the strategic nuclear forces would strike the heart of the opponent. The latter forces consisted of the nuclear-capable strategic bomber aircraft, the land-based strategic nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles and the nuclear ballistic missiles based on strategic submarines. These three elements formed the “nuclear triad”. Both sides were worried that the other side would use its nuclear ballistic missiles to eliminate one’s own air force bases and missile bases in a “first strike”. However, the strategic missile submarines would not be possible to take out in a “first strike”, one argued. They were accordingly described as a “second-strike capability” that would force the aggressive part to abstain from an attack, because the defender would be able to retaliate. One would be able to strike and destroy vital parts of the aggressor’s territory. But if the strategic missile submarines of one side turn out to be vulnerable and could be eliminated, this will make that side worry about a possible “first strike”. During the Cold War, the U.S. overwhelming advantage in sonar systems and quiet submarines became a serious problem to the Soviets].

In the early 1970s, a friend of mine, Robert Bathurst, was based in London as Chief U.S. Naval Intelligence Europe. Every morning at 7 o’clock, he briefed the Admiral – the Commander-in-Chief US Naval Forces Europe – about where all the Soviet surface ships and submarines were in the European theater. The U.S. Navy knew where the Soviet submarines were in the Atlantic, in the Norwegian Sea and in the Baltic Sea, because of the SOSUS cables and other sonar systems. They knew which individual submarines were passing out, because they had an archive of sound signatures with every single submarine. 90 % of these signatures had been tape-recorded by Norwegian military intelligence, Bathurst former subordinate, the Director of U.S. Naval Intelligence and later Deputy CIA Director, Bill Studeman, told his Norwegian counterpart.

Studeman’s predecessor as Deputy CIA and Director Naval Intelligence, Admiral Bobby Ray Inman had been Assistant Attaché to Stockholm, while his colleague Robert Bathurst was Assistant Attaché in Moscow. Inman had succeeded to conclude a deal with a couple of people in Sweden that gave the U.S. Navy right to deploy sonars/hydrophones in Swedish waters that were able to track Soviet submarines in the Baltic. At the time, this was very secret [because one could for obvious reasons not inform the Prime Minister and one could accordingly not use land cables as one did in Norway]. The hydrophones were maintained by small Western [Italian-built] mini-submarines brought into the Baltic Sea on U.S. civilian merchant ships [that let these submarines out in its area of operations through a door in the hull, delivered the cargo further north, and then, on its way back, picked the submarine up in the same area].

In the 1980s, Inman’s Director of the CIA, William Casey let these small mini-subs appear on the surface in Swedish archipelagoes and naval bases. [After a Soviet Project 613 went up on a Swedish island in 1981, all submarines the following years] were believed to be Soviet. After three years of submarine intrusions, Swedes believing in a Soviet threat increased from 25-30 % to 83 %. From 1981 to 1983, Sweden became a different country. The Europeans requested U.S. support, while the successors to Bathurst reported to the U.S. Admiral in London where all the Soviet submarines were in the Baltic Sea, and they were not in Swedish waters. [Or to be more precise, up to 1982, according to Admiral Inman, Soviet submarines did some training along the Swedish coast. “They went into Swedish territorial waters, they crossed the 12-miles’ territorial limit, but they never entered the archipelagoes”. The intrusions into Swedish inner waters from 1982 onwards were not made by Soviet submarines. These submarines were from the West. In the 1980s, Western submarines had “regularly” and “frequently” gone into Swedish waters to test Swedish readiness, the U.S. Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger told Swedish TV in year 2000. The decision had been taken by deception committee under Casey, Lehman told]. Deception was CIA strategy.

To my knowledge, the U.S. did not know where the Soviet subs were in the Arctic Ocean, because of the noise from the continuous crashing and breaking ice floes. But the U.S. Navy tried to tail the Soviet strategic submarines. The U.S. Navy probably knew where most of the Soviet strategic submarines were, and [in case of a U.S.-Soviet confrontation] the Soviets would not know if any submarines had survived creating a worry in Moscow.

In 1982, Prof. Barry Posen at Harvard University wrote an article, in the journal of International Security. The article was called “Inadvertent Nuclear War?” Posen was concerned that a U.S. horizontal escalation might trigger a Soviet nuclear response. The Soviets might feel pushed into a corner, forcing them to go nuclear. But Navy Secretary Lehman argued: “we were not concerned”. The Soviets did not have the capability, he said. Barry Posen was not aware of the U.S. overwhelming advantage in tracking Soviet subs. If the Soviets wanted to respond, they could not be fully confident in their “second-strike capability”. This uncertainty would force Moscow to back down. The U.S. would have, what we call “escalation dominance”.

This “escalation dominance” and this U.S. self-confidence made the U.S. Navy enter the Norwegian Sea and even go up to the Barents Sea with aircraft carriers seeking radar shadow in Norwegian fjords. The F-14 aircraft on the carriers would create an area of sea control with a radius of 500 km to deny any cruise missile or aircraft coming close to the carrier. The silent U.S. attack submarines would deny any Soviet submarine threat to the carrier. The forward U.S. presence would open-up for attacks on the Kola bases at Murmansk [and the Soviets would not be able to climb the “escalation ladder”]. The idea of the Reagan Administration was that the U.S. would be able to force the Soviets to retreat in Central Europe without using of nuclear weapons.

Now, the situation is very different. The modern drone technology and missile technology has turned this U.S. self-confidence upside-down. The new drones make it possible to survey large areas of the oceans. The war in Ukraine has taught us that surface ships may not survive. Relatively cheap drones and missiles can easily take out large ships. The precision strikes of the Russian hypersonic missiles would make any U.S. presence of aircraft carriers in the Northern waters impossible.

In addition, the new Russian submarines like the Borei-class, the Khabarovsk, and the Kazan that went to Cuba a year ago, are now so quiet that they may pass out undetected by U.S. sonar systems. The U.S. seems to have lost its major advantage of the 1980s: the very quiet submarines. The new unmanned submarine technology with the Poseidon will also make the U.S. calculus more difficult.

But equally important, advanced Soviet air defenses may be able to take down some U.S. missiles, while the Americans know that U.S. air defenses will not yet be able to intercept Soviet maneuverable hypersonic missiles. The U.S. worry and uncertainty, expressed in a recent Atlantic Council report, gives Moscow a similar advantage as Washington had in the 1980s. [The Report claims that the challenge from Russian hypersonic missiles “requires a fundamental rethinking of the US strategy for deterrence and defense”.] The U.S. will hesitate to climb the escalation ladder, because the U.S. is worried that Russia may have an advantage. The U.S. has no longer “escalation dominance”.

The “Annual Threat Assessment of the U.S. Intelligence Community” (March 2025), states that Russia “has seized the upper hand” in the war in Ukraine, which “perpetuates strategic risks to the United States of unintended escalation to large-scale war [and] the potential use of nuclear weapons”. This was also what President Trump told President Zelensky in the White House in February this year. “You are gambling with World War Three”, Trump said.

But the problem for the U.S. is not just the risk of a global catastrophe, which certainly is real, but also that U.S. will no longer be able to take out Russian high-value targets. One will no longer be able to eliminate the Kola bases at Murmansk with conventional weapons without Russia taking out corresponding bases like Norfolk Naval Station at Washington. In case of a U.S. attack on Russia, Moscow may retaliate by using conventionally armed Avangard missiles with enough kinetic energy to destroy U.S. bases.

Russia’s Cold War uncertainty and worry about its strategic submarines (its “second-strike capability”), is now replaced by a U.S. uncertainty and worry about Russia’s advantage in hypersonic missiles – the Avangard, Tsirkon, Kinzhal and the Oreshnik – nuclear as well as conventional. In other words, it is Russia that now appears to have “escalation dominance”.

This Russian advantage will make it possible for Moscow to offer a fair peace agreement that recognizes the security concerns of both sides. [This would help ensure European stability]. However, despite that the U.S. leaders are aware of their own vulnerability, they still prepare for war, but they try to “delegate” the war-fighting [in Ukraine] and proposals about Western “security guarantees” to the Europeans that cannot imagine that the U.S. has lost its “escalation dominance”. And the Europeans still trust NATO’s Article 5, and they still believe that they will be able to drag the U.S. into the war if the conflict escalates. [The Europeans still believe that there is an American “nuclear umbrella”. However, the United States will not be able to use nuclear weapons against Russia without Russia responding by using nuclear weapons against the United States, and after the Cold War there are no Warsaw Pact countries, which the United States would be able to attack with nuclear weapons without being attacked itself. If the United States today was to “defend”, for example, Norway with nuclear weapons, it would have to use these nuclear weapons in Norway. It would destroy what it was supposed to defend.]

The U.S., however, has strong reasons to avoid this game [One will avoid the risk of “escalation to large-scale war (and) the potential use of nuclear weapons”, as stated in the Threat Assessment], while letting the Europeans pay the price. [The Europeans claim that one cannot accept that Russia changes the European borders by force, but the Europeans seem unaware of that the U.S. already in 2014 had taken over the sovereign state of Ukraine by force, by forcing its democratically elected leader and a million of his supporters to flee the country, while other supporters established their own “state”, in legal sense, a “successor state”, in the president’s core area in the east, in Donbass. The Europeans have been deceived to believe that the coup-plotters in Ukraine in 2014 represented a popular majority, and the Europeans are now “gambling with World War Three”, to get their narrative accepted. But they will not, even less than the U.S., be able to climb the escalation ladder. They are allowing British intelligence to send drones and missiles deep into Russia for attacks against vital Russian targets such as the nuclear triad, not believing that Russia will respond. They want to provide "security guarantees" for Ukraine and they demand a Western military presence, but they do not have the capability. It will lead to a Russian-European confrontation, while the United States is unlikely to enter the conflict in support of Europe. In an unlikely U.S.-Russian war, however, Russia would take Finnmark (in northern Norway) and Finland as a buffer to protect S:t Petersburg, the Kola bases and the lines of communication in-between them. These were Moscow’s war planes of the 1980s, as described by Lieutenant General Vladimir Cheremnikh, responsible for the plans for Northern Europe, but for Sweden and the rest of Norway, Russia would just eliminate the air bases that the U.S. was prepared to use. There were no offensive Soviet ambitions to conquer Northern Europe in the 1980s, and there are no such Russian ambitions today. However, the advantage of today’s weapons technology is that Russia would not necessarily use nuclear weapons, because of the new missile technology]. A major U.S. deception has once again fooled the Europeans.

The most delicate question seems to be: why are the European leaders unable to understand their own interests? Are they too young to have a strategic awareness? Why are they cutting off the lifeline of their own economic growth? Are they just incompetent or do they have another agenda? I have no immediate answer to this, but the sooner the Europeans understand their own interests, the better.

Olof Palme’s gravestone at the Church of Adolf Fredrik close to the place of the killing (Photo: Wikipedia Public Domain).

I have done some corrections and re-writing of this article in January-February 2026 for the 40-year anniversary of the Palme murder on 28 February 2026.

Did the Western Intelligence Community remove all dissident leaders?

Prime Minister Olof Palme worked for a dialogue with the Soviets. In the 1960s and 1970s, he supported the Vietnamese fight for independence and he met with the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, with representatives for the the African National Congress (ANC) and in the 1980s with the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. Palme turned against colonialism and racism, and he wanted to have a new security architecture for Europe that he called “Common Security”. It was necessary to recognize the security concerns of the other side to have security yourself, he argued. This was presented by the Palme Commission in 1982. The Commission included European, U.S. and Soviet top advisors like the West-German Chancellor Willy Brandt’s advisor Egon Bahr, the former U.S Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, and later President Mikhail Gorbachev’s advisor Giorgi Arbatov. However, Edward Luttwak at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a former advisor to President Reagan’s CIA Director William Casey, told Swedish TV:

“Palme Commission was saying: ‘You must talk to them [the Soviets]. You must make a deal with them’. That was Palme. The Reagan Administration’s answer to Palme was: ‘We don’t have to talk to them. We just have to pull the rug from underneath, because the Soviet Union will collapse’. So we should not talk to them, because by talking to them, we enable them to continue. It was a complete head-on clash between the Palme Commission and the Reagan administration. […] Palme was an inconvenient person to have around. I don’t think that anything was done about it.”

The U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs, Richard Burt (1983-85), argued that if “Common Security had been adopted by Western European countries, I don’t think we would have a Europe whole and free today,” and he added:

“I think Sweden without Palme became a more normal country in the sense that governments after Sweden [sic] were no longer seeking fundamental changes in the world. Swedish government became, what normal governments were worrying about: issues concerning domestic problems, their own neighbourhood. After Palme, you didn’t have a Swedish global policy. […] I think Olof Palme was really kind of an irritant, someone who did not believe in the U.S. foreign policy at the time. Clearly he did not like our strategy and was a critic, and to some extent a troublemaker.”

To Richard Burt, Prime Minister Palme was impossible to have, and thanks to the elimination of Palme in 1986, one did no longer have to worry about his and other governments’ ambition to seek “fundamental changes in the world”. They would all adapt to U.S. policy. Important officers in the Swedish security and intelligence services trusted their American and UK counterparts. Sweden’s former Chief of Counterintelligence, Olof Frånstedt, described Palme as a Soviet “agent of influence”, because that is what his opposite number in the U.S., CIA’s James Jesus Angleton had told him. Olof Palme emphasised welfare for common people before rearmament against a fictive enemy. Olof Palme came from an affluent family but showed solidarity with the working people and he turned against Western colonialism and racism very similar to the Swedish UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld had done before him. They had much in common, and they were both killed. Actually, every Swede that had had a significant role on the global scene, Folke Bernadotte (the UN Envoy for the Palestine-Israel negotiations in 1947-48), UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold (1953-61) and Prime Minister Olof Palme, who some believed would become a new UN Secretary-General, were all shot.

Bernadotte was shot by the Israelis. He wanted to divide the country equally between the Israelis and the Palestinians, which was unacceptable to the Israelis. He also wanted to keep Jerusalem as UN responsibility, because of the city’s importance for the three religions, but also this was unacceptable for the Israelis. The decision was made to take him out. The man who held the machine gun killing Bernadotte and his French aide, was Yehoshua Cohen, later bodyguard of Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion. Ten years later, when Hammarskjöld was invited to Ben-Gurion, he was placed next to Cohen at the dinner table just to tell Hammarskjöld what would happen him “if he didn’t behave”. He was informed about Cohen by his Chief of Staff General Horn. Hammarskjöld said he would never go back to that country.

A couple of years later, the plane of Hammarskjöld, the four-engine Albertina, was shot down over Ndola airport in Northern Rhodesia at the border to Katanga/Congo. Witnesses in Ndola saw another airplane shooting down the four-engine airplane. It caught fire in the air. The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission spoke about British, South African and U.S. preparations for eliminating Hammarskjöld. In the archives originating from the Royal Rhodesian Air Force, a top-secret document dated 18 September 1961, the day of Hammarskjöld’s crash, draws the attention to “an unfriendly force using a four-engine transport aircraft” coming in from the north “including orders to shot down such aircraft”. This was stated by the former minister and UN representative Sydney Sekeramayi, who was responsible in the UN to go through the archives of the former British colony Rhodesia. However there might have been another plane that also was tasked to shoot it down. A British trained Belgian mercenary pilot Jan von Risseghem confirmed that he had shot it down. The U.S. National Security Agency picked up the conversation from the shooting down of the plane, and President Harry Truman said that Hammarskjöld was killed. Two CIA surveillance planes were on the Ndola airstrip that night. There were also French mercenaries from OAS (see below) present in Ndola when it happened and a South African mercenary claimed that he had killed Hammarskjöld at the crash site. There was also a photo of the body of Hammarskjöld leaning against a tree. He had a white shirt and had obviously been able to escape the burning aircraft. The first UN representative who saw the body of Hammarskjöld, the Norwegian intelligence officer, later Major General Bjørn Egge, told me that Hammarskjöld had been able to escape from the burning plane. He had grass between his fingers, and it looked like a bullet hole in his forehead, but it was whisked away from the photos afterwards. Egge claimed that the British had acted very suspicious. Hammarskjöld was certainly an inconvenient person to have around. Similar to Olof Palme, Hammarskjöld was probably shot because the British and the Americans would not accept his anti-colonial policy and a dialogue with the Soviets.

U.S. President John F. Kennedy was also killed for more or less the same reasons. He was willing to have a dialogue and to collaborate with the Soviet leader Nikita Khrusjtsjov. A 1962 BND document states that high-ranking U.S. Airforce officers had told Otto Skorzeny, CIA’s man in Madrid and Hitler’s most celebrated SS-officer, that “the election of Kennedy was a disaster”. He is “soft and does not recognise the superiority of the West over the East”. He supports “negro states”. And these high-ranking U.S. officers would not have visited Skorzeny for courtesy reasons. In 1944, Skorzeny had established Stay Behinds in Ukraine to attack the advancing Soviet army. After the war, he established an executive action capability in Madrid or what we usually would call “a death squad”. In 1963, he was recruited by Israeli Mossad and he conducted assassinations also for Israel. He had collaborated with CIA’s Allan Dulles and with James Jesus Angleton, and Angleton was Israel’s man in the CIA. Many researches now consider Angleton the key actor in the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and Angleton contributed to Israel’s development of nuclear weapons, while Kennedy tried to stop it. There is certainly a link to Israel. At the time, Angleton and his colleague Bill Harvey were primarily preoccupied by creating a pool of assassins, Peter Wright of the British MI5 wrote after visiting them in Langley in early 1960s. They wanted to know about the British capability, but Wright told that we don’t do it any longer, but talk to “the French” (Wright, Spycatcher, 1987).

A couple of other BND documents from 1961-62 stated that “Skorzeny had regular contact with the French OAS [Organisation Armée Secrete]”, whose assassins had been responsible for the attempts to kill President Charles de Gaulle. De Gaulle had pushed for a European détente policy, decolonisation and a collaboration with the Soviet Union. He concluded that Kennedy’s “story is the same as mine”, and he continued: “[The killing of Kennedy] looks like a cowboy story, but it is only an OAS story. The security forces were in cahoots with the extremists” (quoted in David Talbot, The Devil’s Chessboard, 2015). One of the OAS assassins, Jean Souetre, who was involved in the attempt on de Gaulle’s life, was also in Dalles on the day of Kennedy’s murder. According to a CIA document, Souetre was expelled from Dallas to Mexico 48 hours after the assassination, which made de Gaulle cancel his upcoming trip to Mexico (Talbot 2015). There was a Western covert action capability able to “veto” any attempt to seek détente and collaborate with Moscow. There was, what we would call a Western “dual state” to use Hans Morgenthau’s concept (1955; originally from Ernst Fraenkel 1941). There was a security state or “Deep State” “able to ‘exert an effective veto over the decisions’ of the regular state governed by the rule of law”. The “Deep State” would intervene with the use of threats, blackmail, assassinations and by discrediting an opponent.

Enrico Mattei, the director of the Italian oil company ENI, had accepted favourable agreements with the oil-rich Arab countries, and he started to collaborate with the Soviet Union from 1960, which challenged the U.S. and British oil companies. He had to go. He was killed already in 1962 (Alf R. Jacobsen 2025). All influential Western leaders that diverted from U.S.-UK policy were apparently taken out. This was very clear when it comes to a supporter of Mattei, Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro. He tried to establish an “historical compromise” between the Christian Democrats and the now “almost Social Democratic” Communist Party. He also opened for a dialogue with the Soviets, but before the “historical compromise” had been established, he was in Washington, where he was threatened to his life by senior U.S. officials. On the day of the final vote in the parliament in Rome, he was kidnapped and then killed. The U.S. Special Envoy Steve Pieczenik said: we had to sacrifice him, because he started to reveal classified information. The so-called Red Brigades that had kidnapped him, were at the time in the hands of the CIA and the Intelligence Chief of Italy, Giuseppe Santovito, Oswald LeWinter told. But the Red Brigades were also infiltrated by Israel, because Aldo Moro had close contact with Arab regimes and let Palestinians operate in Italy. According to Italian journalist Eric Salerno, Mossad was almost certainly central for the killing. The operation was a U.S.-Israeli enterprise.

All these political leaders seem to have been killed by the same forces. These forces killed or tried to kill many leaders in the third world, leaders that did not follow the instructions from the West, but this “veto force” also killed or seriously discredited every political leader in the West that worked for a dialogue with “the other”, with the Soviets or the Russians. They discredited leaders like Willy Brandt with his Ost-Politik (Eastern Policy), British Prime Minister Harold Wilson and the Belgium Minister and Secretary general of NATO, Willy Claes, as mentioned in Part I. The Chairman of the Deutsche Bank, Alfred Herrhausen had been working with the Soviets to finance the German-Soviet pipelines, similar to what the Italian ENI Director Enrico Mattei had tried to do 20 years earlier. Herrhausen developed Willy Brandt’s Ost-Politik in praxis with close ties to President Gorbachev, and he opened up for a European-Soviet collaboration. But he was killed in November 1989 before he was able to realize the real close cooperation with Gorbachev.

The father of the Ost-Politik, the West German Chancellor Willy Brandt was discredited. He had had a former East German assistant Günter Guillaume working for him, but Guillaume was soon suspected to be working for Stasi. However, Günther Nollau, a former Nazi party member and in 1972-75 Director of Verfassungsschutz (German domestic intelligence), let Guillaume continue to work for Brandt for another year so they would have “enough information on him”, but this made it also impossible for Brandt to continue as chancellor. Brandt had been something of a mentor to Olof Palme, and now, in 1974, he was taken out and replaced by the less controversial Helmut Schmidt. Willy Brandt was also criticized for having been struggling with alcohol. But Winston Churchill’s drinking habit was not a reason for removing him from office. The important point with Guillaume as an agent was not primarily that he had had access to cosmic top-secret NATO documents, but that he could be used to discredit and to remove a dissident political leader.

On 11 September 2003, Swedish Foreign Minister Anna Lindh, was stabbed to death in central Stockholm. She had had Olof Palme as a mentor and similar to Palme she had been a supporter of the Palestinians, the ANC in South Africa, and the socialists in Nicaragua. She was the likely successor to Prime Minister Göran Persson. She would become Sweden’s first woman as prime minister, but similar to Palme she was assassinated in central Stockholm. After she had experienced threatening behavior from people at public meetings and threats sent to her, the Foreign Ministry had several times asked the Security Service (SÄK) for protection, but SÄK denied that there was any threat to her. Before Anna Lindh’s five public appearances in August-September 2003, SÄK took the decision, in each case, not to give her bodyguards (“Personskyddet för utrikesminister Anna Lindh”, SOU 2004:108). “Domestic threat levels were low”. “She was not controversial”, SÄK wrote. Sweden is perhaps the only country in the world where the Security Service could deny its Prime Minister and Foreign Minister security. The impression is that all political leaders that opened up for a détente policy and a dialogue with Russia, have all been taken out, or one has let it happen; one after the other. In all these cases, the Anglo-American intelligence community as well as the Israelis has played a significant role.

The ACC/SOPS documents presented in Part I of this article and referred to in the first three parts seem to indicate that the assassination of Prime Minister Olof Palme was largely run by and perhaps delegated to the Swedish secret state or “Deep State” that used its Stay Behinds or rather parallel Stay Behinds to execute the killing, but the Swedish actors are unlikely to have acted with such self-confidence without the backing of the Western intelligence community and not least of the Americans and the British. The fact that we are not able to declassify important documents and that also the Inquiry to the Palme murder was not given access to the very sensitive documents indicates that these documents involved a foreign state, which made it impossible to release them.

However, the key question is the following: to what extent was this operation initiated by Western intelligence and by a NATO committee as expressed in the ACC/SOPS document? And to what extent was this a U.S. and British operation using NATO committees in order to create an overwhelming legitimacy inside the Western intelligence community?

If we accept the January 1986 document from the Allied Clandestine Committee / Special Operation Planning Staff (ACC/SOPS) as a genuine document, because of what senior chiefs of intelligence have said afterwards and because the claims in the documents are confirmed by many other documents and statements, one could interpret this to mean that the assassination of Prime Minister Olof Palme was a “NATO operation”. NATO’s ACC/SOPS that coordinates operations with local Stay Behinds would have initiated the use of Swedish Stay Behinds or “parallel Stay Behinds” to eliminate PM Olof Palme. However, this is to jump to conclusion. It was almost certainly not an attack run by NATO as a formal organization, and I will try to explain why.

Firstly, there were a number of warnings about the upcoming assassination implicating state agencies such as the CIA, the British MI6 and the South African services. These warnings did not imply any NATO committee. Secondly, these very sensitive operations were usually not a matter for NATO, they were kept as state-to-state operations. The most sensitive operations were not run within the framework of NATO. Thirdly, the major actors, the U.S. and the UK, treated NATO in general as a “front” through which they pushed for their own agenda. This supports the argument that state actors “above NATO” used NATO committees to influence allies to establish legitimacy.

Olof Palme in a 1968 demonstration against the war in Vietnam together with North Vietnam's Moscow Ambassador Nguyen Tho Chan (Source: Wikipedia). 

Warnings weeks before the killing

There were as mentioned in Part III a few warnings to the Prime Minister’s Office and to other Swedish authorities, weeks before the killing, and some of these warnings seemingly imply a direct link to the CIA, not to a NATO committee. In December 1985 and then in January 1986, a Swedish-Yugoslav former mercenary, Ivan von Birchan, was approached by a U.S. “businessman” from ITT, “Charles Morgan”, who he knew from the civil war in Rhodesia in the 1970s and who he knew as “CIA” (Part III). Von Birchan was offered two million dollars for shooting Olof Palme, because, according to Morgan, the Americans were afraid that “Palme might be appointed UN Secretary General”. Von Birchan informed both Alf Karlsson at SÄK and then Stockholm City Police authorities, weeks before the killing. The Social Democratic politician Hans Hagnell said also weeks before the killing that “Palme’s days are counted”. In addition, we also know that the first suspect, who was arrested, was a religious right-winger, Victor Gunnarsson, who a week before the murder had said that “Sweden will soon change”. Days before the killing, he had said that Palme will be shot before Saturday with ammunition that will penetrate bulletproof vests, which later turned out to be correct. Shortly before the murder, he shaved his mustache. In his home, the police later found a note about “Charles ITT”, Ivan von Birchan and about Åke Ek (see below).

Before the killing, extreme rightwing police and military officers in Stockholm had held meetings in the Old Town, where they discussed the killing of Olof Palme. They claimed that Palme was a traitor, who was selling out Sweden to Moscow. The most senior police officer in the group had said about ten days before the killing that Palme will be shot. Several people actually said that Palme will be shot before Saturday with ammunition that will penetrate bulletproof vests. On 16 January 1986, there was a meeting with police officers and a former military intelligence officer, in the city of Norrköping 150 km south-west of Stockholm. They had discussed Prime Minister Palme’s upcoming trip to Moscow and and they described Palme as a “traitor”. “Something was going to be done about it”. He should be removed from power. There would be some kind of coup d’état. They discussed how to defend the city of Norrköping. Later Minister of Education Carl Tham wrote in Dagens Nyheter on 8 February, three weeks before the killing, about the extreme worry among Swedish nationalists about Olof Palme’s upcoming trip to Moscow. They seemingly believed that he was going to negotiate about war and peace or selling out Sweden to the Soviets.

A couple of the officers at the Norrköping meeting had background from IB (see Part II), and one of them Jörgen B. became very suspicious. He contacted a local leader for the Social Democrats, Henry Eriksson, who then called a contact, Leif Gustafson, at the Prime Minister’s Office. Gustafson informed the Party Secretary Bo Toresson. The report about this event supposedly went to the Deputy and Chief of Operations at the Swedish Security Service P-G. Näss. A year later, Jörgen B. also gave the local Security Service representative, Kenneth Nykvist, a report that he sent to Stockholm, but nothing happened after that. The case was apparently removed from the Inquiry. The Inquiry did not have access to this material. Lars Borgnäs made a TV documentary about these events. His source, Jörgen B., said that he believed that there had been similar meetings also in other cities. In Mariestad 150 km west of Norrköping, the County Governor Karl Frithiofson, a former state secretary for defence and politically was close to Olof Palme, told that someone in the night had raised the Nazi-flag at his Residence. This would have happened before people in general knew about the killing. The culprits were police officers. The footprints in the snow revealed prints from boots used by the police, his son Ola Frithiofson said.

Olof Palme seems to have been aware of the threat to his life that existed at the time. On his last day, he was interviewed by a journalist and the photographer wanted to take a picture of him in front of the window, but Palme didn’t want to do it: “You do not know what there is out there?”, he said, as if he was worried. A former central figure in the World Anti-Communist Leage (WACL) in Sweden, Anders Larsson, had handed in a warning to Prime Minister Palme and to the Foreign Ministry on 20 February, a week before the killing (see Part III). Larson had been told that “they are going to shot Olof Palme in connection with the trip to Moscow or before the trip to Moscow”. He later claimed that he had received this information from a friend Bo Ståhl, who had had a bookstore frequented by police officers with Nazi sympathies. Larsson claimed in a document that his colleague in WACL, Åke Ek, a Nazi and volunteer in Sveaborg (see Part II) in the Finnish-German War with the Soviet Union, had spread false leads about the killing of Olof Palme. Ek had founded the Swedish-South Africa Society and was the main teacher of psychology at the Swedish Police College. Similar to the earlier mentioned South African agent Bertil Wedin, he was a member of WACL and he had planted false leads.

WACL had organized South American death squad leaders and fascists and Nazi collaborators from Ukraine. In the 1980s, WACL was led by General John Singlaub, a former U.S. Special Force general and CIA officer, who had been working closely with Oliver North in the Iran-Contras operation. However, according to Larsson, it was not WACL as such that had been responsible for the killing of Palme. It was the CIA “Covert Action Department” that had used WACL as a front and relied on its network of police officers. Palme had been on CIA’s kill list already since 1983, he said. Larsson was also convinced that people in the Swedish Security Service (SÄK or SÄPO) were involved in preparing for the killing. In an interview with Lars Borgnäs for the Swedish Radio in early 1990s, Larsson confirmed that he had handed in the letters as a warning. At the time, Ståhl had already died at the age of 43. Shortly after the interview, two very senior Swedish Nazi collaborators called Borgnäs and tried to discredit Larsson. Larsson also said that after the election in 1985, some Swedish Social Democrats linked to wartime preparations had a slogan: “The Bolsjevik has to go”, which supposedly referred to Olof Palme. Larsson had referred to former Chief of Defence, General Stig Synnergren and Synnergren was close to Sven Andersson (see Part III). Larsson died shortly afterwards 52 years old.

In Part I, I also mentioned the comment from MI6 agent Howard Brooks who referred to his MI6 handler in Stockholm. He had told him two nights before the killing of Olof Palme: “Something is going to happen very soon, and it is going to change this country forever”. The MI6 handler had been deeply involved with South African agents in Stockholm, and it was clearly a “big operation”. Some people on the Swedish side were also involved, and many people seem to have known in beforehand that it would happen.

In autumn 1985, Mac Falkirk of British MI6 allegedly obtained Olof Palme’s secret agenda for the upcoming Moscow meeting with the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in early April (as stated in Part I). This agenda had supposedly been used by the CIA to convince Swedish senior officers that Palme was selling out Sweden to the Soviets. These officers could have acted within the framework of ACC and by using Swedish Stay Behinds, but also through a direct preparation for a military coup, as stated by the Palme critic Alf Enerström (see Part II). Enerström said that he had been approached by senior officers who wanted him in their upcoming government and the last time they contacted him was in late 1985. They told him that they had 500 men that were prepared to carry out a coup d’état. It was impossible to change Sweden by the use of democratic means, they said.

However, there are indications that not only South African assassination teams were in Stockholm at the time of the murder but perhaps also an American-Chilean professional killer Michael Townley. Palme had been a major critic of the Pinochet regime in Chile and Michael Townley, an agent for the CIA and DINA (Chile’s intelligence service), had been involved in attempts on Palme’s life in 1976, according to the FBI. He had been responsible for the killing Salvador Allende’s Minister of Defense, Orlando Letelier, and in 1974 in Rome for the attempt on the life of Bernardo Leighton, a former Minister of Interior and critique of Augusto Pinochet. Townley had shot Leighton and his wife with a too small calibre and they had survived. According to LeWinter, Townley had been in Stockholm the week before the killing, and witness who was on the same cinema as Olof and Lisbeth Palme but at a different movie with less people saw a man very similar to Townley, Kajsa Ekis Ekman wrote. He had a beige coat and sat down close to them, but he was 5-10 minutes late and left suddenly almost an hour before the film ended, which coincided with the end of the shorter “Palme film”. Several other witnesses have experienced something similar at a restaurant and at another movie. One could hear a signal and then the person left the place, which coincided with the end of the Palme film. There is no proof that the man who left the first film was Michael Townley, but he definitely seems to have been involved in the operation against Palme.

The same night, I was on my way to an editorial committee meeting for the cultural and literary magazine Ord & Bild. I took the bus down to the Prime Minister’s Office and crossed Drottninggatan at the bridge from the Parliament, Riksbron, which Olof and Lisbeth Palme would have crossed, if they had walked to the cinema. I passed a man who was standing close to the bridge, and when I passed him with a meter he jumped over the fence to the street and opened the trunk of his car as if he had done it on a signal. He moved very fast. My reaction was that this was obviously some kind of criminal activity. I stopped for a couple of seconds. I wanted to check the car number, but at that very moment the church bell struck 19.00. I was late to the meeting and went away. On the streets close to where the Palmes were walking, there are quite a few witnesses reporting about people with walkie-talkies (there were about 80 reports in 1986), and most reports about men with walkie-talkies are from after 23.00 in the area of Sveavägen close to the cinema. The film that Olof and Lisbeth Palme had seen ended at 23.07. One witness at Tunnelgatan on the other side of Sveavägen at 23.23 claimed that at a man with walkie-talkie spoke German or rather Dutch (or perhaps South African “Dutch”: Afrikaans). Quite a few people seem to have been involved. The organization appears to have been complex.

The impression is that the CIA and MI6 acted by using professional killers, by relying on the WACL and its network of Swedish police officers and Stay Behinds, by influencing senior Swedish military officers and by involving states like South Africa, which certainly wanted to have Olof Palme killed. The CIA and MI6 may also have acted through various other intelligence services and through the above-mentioned NATO committees dealing with clandestine operations. My hypothesis is that these organizations and committees have rather functioned as “fronts” through which the U.S. and British pushed for their agenda and was able to control allied states by a sophisticated network of individuals in vital positions. These individuals were “plugged” into the U.S. and UK services. Let us return to the document from ACC/SOPS discussed above.

Secretary of the Navy John Lehman (1981-87) and the author drinking Nordland Bier at the Institute for Defense Studies and Parallel History Conference in Bodø, 2007. Behind them, Vestfjord, where Lehman’s aircraft carriers were to seek radar shadow in wartime (Photo: private archive).

Too secret to be run by NATO and the role of oral agreements

The two NATO committees mentioned in the earlier parts of this article, the Allied Clandestine Committee (ACC) with SOPS and the Clandestine Planning Committee (CPC) were highly secret during the Cold War. They coordinated Stay Behinds and clandestine operations inside the NATO area, but the Stay Behinds were largely directed by the Americans and the British. The British were running much of the training. The United States and Britain were each responsible for operations in their respective areas of Europe. CPC was chaired by a U.S. general, more precisely SACEUR (Supreme Allied Commander Europe) himself, while “ACC had a rotating chairmanship”, to quote Wolbert Smidt, the German representative in both committees and former director of operative intelligence in the BND.

You will not find anything about these committees in any public document before the end of the Cold War. Most generals in NATO would not have heard of them. In 1998, I spoke with General Herman Fredrik Zeiner-Gundersen, Norway’s Chief of Defense (1972-77) and Chairman of NATO Military Committee (1977-80). He told me that he had never heard about these committees: ACC and CPC. He might have lied to me, but that is what he said. I also had conversations with General Vigleik Eide, Chief of Defense of Norway (1987-89) and Chairman of NATO Military Committee (1989-93). Eide said that he did not receive sensitive information as a NATO top-general but rather as Chief of Defense of Norway. He also received sensitive information as a close colleague to Norway’s Chief of Intelligence Alf Roar Berg, who had close ties to Director of Central Intelligence Robert Gates and to the later acting Director, Admiral Bill Studeman. As Chairman of NATO’s Military Committee and the principal advisor to the Secretary General of NATO, Eide did not receive such delicate information. We spoke about Western submarines operating secretly in Swedish waters in the 1980s. These submarines were under U.S. and British command. They were not under NATO command. These very sensitive operations were too secret to be run within the framework of NATO, he said.

In March 2000, the former UK Defence Minister and now Secretary General of NATO, George Robertson, was in Stockholm. He also said that these covert submarine operations were not NATO operations but state-to-state operations. They are “not a matter for NATO. [They are a matter] between Sweden and individual countries”, he said. Also in March 2000, the U.S. Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger said in a long interview on Swedish TV (SVT) that they had operated submarines “regularly” and “frequently” in Swedish waters to test Sweden’s coastal defense forces and their readiness “after consultations with the Swedes”. In the same program, SVT also interviewed Sweden’s Chief of Defense General Bengt Gustafsson (1986-94), who said: “Not with me, at least”, and if someone in the Swedish Navy had done that, he could be charged with treason. After these interviews, I was sitting in the TV News studio together with former Prime Minister Ingvar Carlsson. I told them that Weinberger, in the full interview, had said that these operations had been conducted after “Navy-to-Navy” consultations – “the U.S. Navy to the Swedish Navy” and “the Swedish Navy is part of the Swedish Government”, Weinberger said. These were state-to-state operations, not NATO operations.

The following day, I visited General Gustafsson in his home at Strandvägen in Stockholm. His Chief of Navy Bengt Schuback (1984-90) had just called. He wanted to talk. While I was visiting Gustafsson, Bengt Schuback called again and asked if he also could bring his predecessor Admiral Per Rudberg (1978-84) with him. They certainly had something to explain. Gustafsson did at the time not trust his Navy commanders.

In 2007, I had conversations with Weinberger’s Secretary of the Navy, John Lehman. He said that the decision about the operations Weinberger had spoken about on Swedish television, had been taken by an “inter-agency committee”, the “Deception Operation Committee”, chaired by CIA Director Bill Casey and including the national security advisor and the undersecretaries of Defense and State. In other words, these were U.S. operations, not NATO operations, and they were primarily not about testing coastal defenses but about deception. The ambition was apparently to fool the Swedes and the Europeans in general. When I asked who on the Swedish side that had been involved, Lehman replied: “If I would tell that, I would have to kill you afterwards”.

The West German intelligence officer and representative in ACC and CPC, Wolbert Smidt, said that submarine operations coordinated by these two NATO committees, had nothing to do with the small submarines that turned up on the surface in Swedish naval bases and archipelagoes. NATO or ACC operations with British and perhaps German submarines landed Special Forces while training with Swedish Stay Behinds, but these submarines never appeared on the surface, he said. Submarines coordinated by ACC/SOPS had nothing to do with the submarines pretending to be Russians in Swedish coastal waters. When Weinberger had spoken about “NATO” and that they were testing Swedish coastal defenses, he actually meant submarines from various NATO countries, General Eide said. These submarine operations were, as already stated by Eide, too sensitive to be conducted within the framework of NATO.

The British Navy Minister Keith Speed told SVT in April 2000 and Pelle Neroth from Sunday Times in 2007 more or less the same: The U.K. operated Royal Navy submarines in Swedish waters to test the readiness of Swedish coastal defenses. It was the British “Chief of Defense Staff or Flag Officer Submarines [the British top-submarine commander], who told his Swedish counterpart”. These very sensitive operations were run as state-to-state operations, not as NATO operations. Of course, Western submarines operating in the eastern Atlantic, including the Baltic Sea, were coordinated by a NATO command, by the British COMSUBEASTLANT (Commander Submarines Eastern Atlantic) in Northwood outside London and by his U.S. Deputy. However, this British NATO commander was the same officer, the same individual, as the Flag Officer Submarines. He also had a Royal Navy “hat”. He and his U.S. Deputy would have known about this activity to be able to coordinate the movements of all submarines in the European theater, but this information did not reach the NATO committees. When I spoke with the former NATO Commander-in-Chief Eastern Atlantic, Admiral James Eberle, he clearly also knew about these operations, but rather because of his Royal Navy “hat”: Commander-in-Chief Fleet.

At a conference in Bodø (Norway) in 2007, I had a conversation with General Eide and Admiral Eberle, and we spoke about British submarines going submerged through the Danish Straits. However, I also mentioned the UK use of Oberon-class submarines to land British Special Forces along the Swedish coast. This was apparently something very sensitive, and Admiral Eberle told a very unpleasant story about his use of MI6, and he threatened to kill me. General Eide came up to me afterwards and said that Admiral Eberle had done the same to him once. There is no doubt that Admiral Eberle considered NATO and the Chairman of the NATO Military Committee as subordinate to the British. Eberle also told that at the end of the Cold War, when the West was negotiating with Russia and Marshal Shaposnikov about the Soviet nuclear weapons, it was not the General Secretary of NATO or the Chairman of NATO Military Committee that represented the Western World. It was the U.S. former Chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral William Crowe and Admiral Eberle himself. When it comes to the real sensitive and most important issues, it was “not a matter for NATO”.

At the same Bodø conference, the same night, while Secretary Lehman had a conversation with Admiral Bengt Schuback, I once again approached Lehman about which people on the Swedish side that were involved in these U.S.-Swedish Navy-to-Navy consultations. He gave the same answer as he had done the night before: “If I would tell you that, I would have to kill you afterwards”. Bengt Schuback immediately responded: “Many people in Sweden would be happy about that”.

In the conference buss up to the Norwegian military headquarters at Reitan the next morning, I happened to sit close Bengt Schuback. He was sitting preparing his speech. I saw that it was very much about the foreign submarine intrusions into Swedish waters, but in the afternoon, when he actually presented his speech, he announced that he shortened it considerably. It turned out that he had cut out everything about the submarines. John Lehman had obviously told him that I knew that the submarines were from the West, and to speak about “Soviet submarines” could have been embarrassing to him. I could possibly refer to what John Lehman had said two days ago. 20 years earlier, Schuback had contacted me after I had published an article on Maritime Strategy in Dagens Nyheter. In 1987, he pushed for publishing my draft doctoral thesis about the U.S. Maritime Strategy as a report by the Swedish Defence Research Establishment, and my volume became one of two major textbooks at the Swedish Military College that year. However, he had apparently not appreciated my writings about Western submarines from year 2000. This had revealed a treason among some Swedish admirals. They had not informed their Government about the Western origin of the submarines, and of course John Lehman could not mention them by name. The role of the few Swedish admirals that were “plugged” into the U.S.-British system was something extremely sensitive.

A couple of weeks after the SVT interview with Caspar Weinberger in March 2000, my friend Robert Bathurst, a former Chief U.S. Naval Intelligence Europe and the major U.S. Navy author about the Soviet Navy, brought my transcript of the whole interview to his former colleagues at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School in Monterrey. He spoke with his Navy Intelligence successor for Europe, Norman Channell, and with Professor Wayne Hughes, who had been a military adviser to the Deputy Secretary of the Navy, the later CIA Director James Woolsey. Robert asked them who had organized these operations in Swedish waters that Weinberger had spoken about. They spoke with Weinberger’s Military Assistant, Vice Admiral Donald Jones, a former deputy for Naval Intelligence and an “Inman protégé”, as Casey had called him. Robert’s colleagues came back to him and said: “Don’t touch it. It’s physically dangerous”. In May, after returning from the U.S., Robert told me about it. He had an e-mail contact with a retired U.S. Navy Intelligence officer and with an officer from the U.S. Navy SEALs. Robert wrote: “I am trying to help a colleague, a Swedish Researcher […] If it is too sensitive, I drop it”. A couple of weeks later, in June, he died. He did not wake up in the morning when his wife was going to serve him tea. It seems to have been a system to take out people revealing highly classified matters, as the Norwegian intelligence chief had told me (see Part I).

Defense Secretary Weinberger said that it might have been a formal agreement between U.S. and Sweden “before I took office in 1981”, but “in my years”, he said, there were “consultations, which led to an understanding” with the relevant Swedes. There was nothing on paper. At a conference lunch on the Oslo Fjord in 1989, I had some conversations with Weinberger’s Chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff General John Vessey (1981-85). He said: “When it comes to Sweden, there was only one rule: Nothing on paper”. I called him eight years later. He confirmed this statement. Several other high-ranking officers said the same, including U.S. former Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Elmo Zumwalt. The Swedish military liaison to the Americans in early 1960s, Major General Åke Mangård told the Swedish Neutrality Policy Commission in early 1990s that every briefing he gave to the Defence Staff was made “orally”. And if you didn’t understand that you had to do that you wouldn’t get very far. The above Chairman of NATO Military Committee, General Zeiner-Gundersen, told me that this is a general rule: “What was most secret was decided orally and guaranteed by trust between individuals” (Tunander 1999). The “real secrets” exist only as oral information. This means that a breach of discipline cannot be punished according to the rule of law. There is no law to regulate this activity. It has to be conducted as extra-legal activity, as something “mafia-like”, as a “deep state” activity that is located above the law. Assassinations and physical threats become the rule. Anything that is above the formal hierarchy of secrecy is also above the law. While I was civilian expert the Swedish Submarine Inquiry in 2000-2001, the Chief of the Inquiry Ambassador Rolf Ekéus and I learned that it was a separate archive with top-secret documents with a green label at the Defence Ministry. These documents were so secret that they formally speaking did not exist. They did not have a legal existence and were rather understood as oral information. The breach of trust could accordingly not be pursued legally. People that do not adhere to secret oral agreements have to be punished through extra-legal use of force: they may be assassinated or just threatened.

Senior Swedish officers consulted by the Americans and the British developed oral agreements, and such agreements were kept by making its participants enforcing discipline by the use of extra-legal violence or threats executed by a power entity we call the “Deep State” (see my Substack article “The Concept of the Deep State”). It seems to me that these Swedish echelons of power developed private ties to their Western counterparts. Norwegian Chief of Defense Zeiner-Gundersen said that he went skiing in the mountains with his Swedish counterpart General Stig Synnergren (1970-78), because what was most important was to keep personal ties. U.S. Defense Secretary Weinberger had chosen the Swedish Chief of Navy, Vice Admiral Per Rudberg, as his escort officer during his five-days visit to Sweden in October 1981, because Rudberg was trusted by the Americans. Rudberg and family went on holiday with the then Deputy Director of the CIA Admiral Bobby Ray Inman, former Deputy Chief of Defense Staff Intelligence, Björn Eklind told me. Both Inman and Rudberg trusted Swedish Defense Minister Sven Andersson, who would have known about this very sensitive information, but he did not tell his Prime Minister Olof Palme. He didn’t tell him about the Western submarines. When Palme in 1983-84 became aware that the submarines were from the West, he asked journalist Olle Alsén: “Did Sven fool me [or deceive me], did Sven fool me?” [in Swedish: “Lurade Sven mig? Lurade Sven mig?”] These U.S. British deception operations were largely directed against Olof Palme to fool him and the Swedish public to turn against the Soviets. When Olof Palme became aware of the fact that the submarines were from the West, there was an obvious U.S. and UK worry that he may reveal this highly classified information to the Soviets. Palme had to be taken out. He would be the “important carrier of information [that had to be eliminated] so the occupying power [the Soviet Union] won’t be able to get its hands on [him]”, to refer to the Palme Inquiry document in Part II. Palme would accordingly be taken out by extra-legal use of force. He would be assassinated.

Norway’s Chief of Intelligence Major General Alf Roar Berg (1988-93) with his counterpart, the Director of the CIA and later Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, on the Oslofjord in June 1992 (Photo: private archive).

NATO as a U.S. and British “front”

We now know that NATO commanders in peace-time were coordinating very secret operations, but they were not running them. The ACC/SOPS document presents a conversation, and it concludes with letting the Swedes take care of SPM (Swedish Prime Minister). The document states that one “consider SPM internal Swedish problem to be handled by Swedish interests” as “long as the threat to the Northern Flank is dealt with successfully”. But should this be interpreted primarily as a consensus decision by ACC/SOPS on this matter and then delegated to the Swedes? Or does it rather imply that certain states or agencies have been able to influence allied representatives making them believe that the Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme was a “threat to the Northern Flank”, which had to be “dealt with successfully”?

I will bring up another example that will make the role of the U.S. and British very clear. Shortly before the end of the Cold War, in the autumn of 1988, the Soviet Union was discussed at NATO’s Intelligence Steering Committee meeting, which brings together the chiefs of intelligence in the NATO area. The Norwegian Chief of Intelligence Alf Roar Berg explained to me that the U.S. and British chiefs of military intelligence [in other words Lieutenant General Leonard Perroots and Lieutenant General Derek Boorman] claimed that a Soviet military attack on the West was “imminent”. Initially, all NATO representatives, except Norway, came to accept the view of Washington and London, because most representatives trusted U.S. and British “intelligence”, but Norwegian Military Intelligence knew that Russian readiness in the whole northwestern Soviet Union was low and that all claims about “imminence of war” were false. These claims had obviously been made for political reasons. General Berg stood up to the British and the Americans. One member after another switched to the Norwegian side. The U.S. and the British had to back down.

My wording about this event was confirmed by General Berg before my Swedish book, Det Svenska ubåtskriget (“The Swedish Submarine War”) went to print in 2019 (I brought up this event on page 93). However, why did the U.S. and the British push for obviously false claims? It appears as if the U.S. and British wanted to deceive NATO and its intelligence committee in order to support a policy of confrontation with the Soviets. The U.S. and the British defense intelligence had used NATO as a “front”. According to a National Security Decision Directive from 1984, signed by President Reagan, the use of PSYOPs (and accordingly deception operation like the U.S. operations in Swedish waters) presupposed “imminence of war” and “interagency coordination”. But equally important, they apparently wanted to have NATO “onboard” to sabotage the top-level negotiations between President Ronald Reagan and President Mikhail Gorbachev. If the U.S. DIA had presented false information to the President, this could have been disconfirmed, but if there was a NATO committee statement, this would have been more difficult.

The member states have their representatives in the various NATO committees, and all states are in that sense “equal”, but some states “are more equal than others”. If you do not have the intelligence, you have nothing to say, and that gives the U.S. and the UK and often Israel an upper hand over NATO decisions as could be seen in the alleged document from ACC/SOPS, which brought up Israeli claims about the alleged transfer of Swedish nuclear material. As mentioned above, U.S. and British submarine deception operations in Swedish but also in Norwegian waters were not brought up at the NATO Military Committee meetings. Vigleik Eide said that these operations were too sensitive to be run within the framework of NATO. Most NATO representatives would accordingly consider them to be Soviet operations. But certain NATO commanders knew. Sensitive operations like the Swedish ones were in this case coordinated by a national commander, who also had a NATO “hat”, while the operations were run by state agencies, by the British and the Americans using small Western submarines.

The U.S. and British use of deception psychological operations against allies and friends has always been an extremely sensitive matter, and in the U.S. such operations were and are classified as NOFORN (No Foreign Nationals). A more recent but similar example is the top-secret CIA document code named “Vault 7”, which was leaked by WikiLeaks in 2017. One special resource, “Marble Framework”, made it possible for the CIA to hack into allied states’ computer systems and to leave traces from Chinese characters, Russian Cyrillic texts or Farsi, to make friends or allies believe that these attacks on their computers were run by “hostile nations”, not by the CIA, similar to how Western submarines had shown small vessels, periscopes, or divers in Swedish archipelagoes, while the local naval bases believed them to originate from “hostile” Soviet forces. Similar to the operations with submarines in Swedish waters, these CIA hacking operations would be used firstly, to test allied readiness (to test the ability of the U.S. allies to detect foreign electronic intrusions to make them increase their readiness); secondly, and most important, these operations would deceive the general public as well as the political leadership in these countries to make them believe in Russia, China and Iran as an “imminent threat”. These operations were, similar to the submarine operations, typical PSYOPs. All these CIA documents were classified as “TOP SECRET, NOFORN”, because they were directed against the U.S. allies or friends. “NOFORN” could apparently also be translated as “NOT FOR NATO”, because these activities were primarily directed against the U.S. allies. The idea was to fool these allies into believing that the Russians and the Chinese are an immediate threat to them, which would force them to turn to the British and the U.S. for intelligence support. In 2017, CIA Director Mike Pompeo thought that the leak was so serious that he considered to have the WikiLeak founder Julian Assange assassinated.

In all these cases, the Americans and the British took the initiative and were able to get a wider support by pushing for their agenda inside NATO. NATO allies were fooled to believe in the U.S. and British position, but not at the Intelligence Steering Committee meeting in autumn 1988, when Norwegian Intelligence was able to disconfirm the U.S. and British arguments. However, very often allies were deceived to accept the U.S. and British agenda, which means that the latter had used NATO as a “front”. NATO is not “the board of directors of the West” or “a Central Committee of the West” but rather a “front” that Anglo-American agencies are using to push for their agenda to receive a wider legitimacy, and this is likely to have been the case also when it comes to ACC/SOPS document’s discussion about the assassination of PM Olof Palme. Instead of putting the blame on state agencies, like the CIA or MI6, one wants to put the blame on a NATO committee that formerly speaking have taken a consensus decision, but this committee would primarily have been deceived in believing that PM Olof Palme was a “threat to the Northern Flank”. This is at least my preliminary impression. These NATO committees may be extremely secret and they make Cosmic Top-Secret decisions, but they are still largely run by primarily U.S. and British state agencies or perhaps more correct, by certain networks inside these very agencies.

Reconstruction of the killing of Prime Minister Olof Palme at the Dekorima shop at the corner of Sveavägen-Tunnelgatan (Hötorget Subway Station marked by a "T") in the very center of Stockholm at 23:21, 28 February 1986. The killer is taller than Olof Palme and behind them, one can see the witness Anders Björkman (Photo Public Domain: “Assassination of Olof Palme”, Wikipedia).

I have done some corrections and re-writing of this article in January-February 2026 for the 40-year anniversary of the Palme murder on 28 February 2026.

The police documents and Gunnar Wall

It is not yet confirmed who shot Olof Palme. On a Friday night, 28 February 1986, Palme went to a movie with his wife in central Stockholm. He was shot at subway station at the street corner of Sveavägen-Tunnelgatan at about 23:21. It was a busy night. There were several witnesses at the scene. Statements from each witness are now to be found on the internet. You can find early statements from some of the police interrogations. Less than a handful of witnesses saw the shooting (Anders Björkman, Anders Delsborn and Inge Morelius) and about ten witnesses saw the killer run away and disappear. The witnesses describe the killer in some detail: a couple of witnesses said that he had a dark knitted cap, and a dark or black knee length coat that flew as he was running. After the two shots, he took a couple of steps and began jogging into the dark narrow street of Tunnelgatan among some barracks. Some people believe that he disappeared into the Skandia building (historically the office for Swedish Stay Behinds). But one witness said that he ran up the stairs to the street of David Bagares gata, where he supposedly disappeared.

The autopsy found that Olof Palme had been shot in the back (through the spinal cord, the trachea and the aorta) at a distance of 20 cm. He was hit at “exactly the right place”. He was shot with metal-piercing ammunition designed to penetrate bullet proof vests or at least these were the bullets that were presented officially. Witnesses describe the killer as calm. One witness said that the revolver had a relatively long barrel. It might have had a silencer. Olof Palme’s wife, Lisbeth, had walked close to Olof. When he was shot, she was walking in front of him and she thought the sound came from Easter crackers. She did not connect the sound with her husband falling on the street. She didn’t understand what had happened. She was screaming: “What are you doing?”, one witness said. She went down on her knees and then looked around for help. She saw a man standing some 5-10 meters behind her. She said, when interviewed by the police, that he was staring at her. He had a blue down jacket. He was just standing there. Afterwards, we know that this man was a witness, who had been walking some meters behind Olof and Lisbeth Palme and was now hiding in a doorway shocked by the shooting. His name is Anders Björkman. He had been at a bar with some friends and saw the shooting and, similar to a few others, he saw the killer run away. He told the police that the woman (Lisbeth Palme) had been staring at him. Lisbeth Palme believed that this man (Björkman), with his blue down jacket, was the killer (she described the killer as having a blue down jacket standing at this very place), but other witnesses say that the killer had a dark coat and disappeared immediately.

After Olof Palme’s body and Lisbeth had arrived at the hospital, Lisbeth told Chief Inspector Åke Rimborn that she had seen two men at the crime scene. One had supposedly a beige coat or something similar, and he had avoided her, when she looked for help. A witness in a car, Leif Ljungkvist, who had stopped for red light seems to have seen the same person moving fast from the crime scene but southwards on Sveavägen. In a professional operation, it would very likely have been two people on the crime scene: one is shooting, while the other will intervene if something would go wrong, a Swedish intelligence officer told Sydsvenska Dagbladet days after the killing (Kari Poutiainen 2025). At the hospital, Lisbeth Palme told a nurse that it was Olof that wanted to go to Dekorima (the shop in the corner Sveavägen-Tunnelgatan). Several people believe that Olof was supposed to meet someone. Gunnar Wall and Lars Borgnäs point to the fact that a couple of witnesses Anders Björkman and Anders Delsborn claim that the killer and the Palme couple appeared to be “a group of three”. A third witness in another car, Anna Hage, said the same. Palme and the killar may have been talking to each other. Lisbeth and then Olof left the man (or at least she walked in front of Olof). The man then put his right hand on Olof’s shoulder and shot him in the back, Björkman said. The man shot twice. Olof Palme would have died immediately from the shot that hit him. One shot hit Lisbeth Palme’s coat. The killer must have used his left hand for shooting him, Borgnäs writes. This either indicate a left-handed man or a professional that is comfortable using both hands.

Although we don’t know who the killer was, we now know quite a lot about what happened and which people might have been involved. A number of books bring up declassified documents from the police inquiries that tell us about these events. See Kari and Pertti Poutiainen, Inuti labyrinten (Stockholm: Grimur, 1995; pp. 887); Gunnar Wall, Mörkläggning: Statsmakten och Palmemordet (Göteborg: Kärret 1996; pp. 980); Thage G. Peterson, Olof Palme: som jag minns honom (Stockholm: Albert Bonniers förlag, 2002; pp. 439) Lars Borgnäs, En iskall vind drog genom Sverige (Stockholm Norstedts, 2006; pp. 512); Gunnar Wall, Mordgåtan Olof Palme (Stockholm: Semic, 2010; pp. 528); Lars Borgnäs, Nationens Intresse: Har svenska folket vilseletts om ubåtarna, Estonia och mordet på Olof Palme (Stockholm: Norstedts 2011; pp. 348), Gunnar Wall, Konspiration Olof Palme: Mordet, politikern och hans tysta fiender (Stockholm: Semic, 2015; pp. 398); Lars Borgnäs, Olof Palmes sista steg: i sällskap med en mördare (Semic, 2020); Kari Poutiainen, Den hemliga alliansen: Palmemordet och Stay Behind (Stockholm: Karneval, 2025; pp. 808).

Left: The protocol from the introduction to the police interrogation with the police driver for the two police officers, C-G Östling and Stellan Åkerbring, for their trip to the U.S. Embassy in early autumn 1986 (see Part II). They had told the driver that they knew “who the killer of Palme was, and they said that the killer will never be revealed”. Right: C-G Östling.

Some suspects, the Larsson document and Alsén, Hasselbohm and Poutiainen

The first main suspect was a 33-years-old religious right-winger, Victor Gunnarsson. He later moved to the U.S., and in 1994, he was found shot with two bullets in his head. He was naked, wearing only a gold watch and a gold ring. At his home, he had the address to Ivan von Birchan and a note, “Charles ITT”, which would be the same “Charles Morgan” ITT, who in November 1985 had offered the Swedish-Yugoslav mercenary Ivan von Birchan two million dollars to shoot Olof Palme. Von Birchan was approached twice by “Morgan” (November 1985 and January 1986). He reported this to the Stockholm City authorities, to K-G Ohlsson at the Stockholm Police and to the responsible Security Service police, Alf Karlsson, more than a month before the killing. Von Birchan knew “Morgan” as a CIA operative from his time in Southern Africa (from the civil war in Rhodesia). He had been Special Force officer in Vietnam and von Birchan claimed that “Morgan” was involved with the Contras in Honduras (with Oliver North, Richard Secord, and John Singlaub). Some people linked to Singlaub’s organization, World Anti-Communist League (WACL), were of interest to the Inquiry. In addition to the warning from von Birchan, there were several warnings presented to Olof Palme or to the Social Democratic Party weeks before the killing (see Part IV).

One week before Olof Palme was killed, Anders Larsson, a former Swedish WACL representative, handed in a warning of a pending threat to Palme´s life to the office of Prime Minister Olof Palme and to the Foreign Ministry. Shortly before he died, Larsson wrote that “CIA Covert Action Department” was involved in the killing (see Part IV, the book volumes above and Larsson’s report from September 1990). Already in August 1985, Alf Karlsson from the Security Service said that Kurdish people were a threat to Olof Palme although this did not appear to be very credible. Olof Palme had let Kurdish leftwing organization PKK stay in Sweden despite their guerilla attacks on the Turkish state and violent attacks on their own traitors. A Swedish South African agent and a former WACL representative Bertil Wedin had planted a “Kurdish lead” in a Turkish newspaper, while the South African death squad leader Eugen de Kock told the South African Supreme Court in 1996 that Wedin’s chief, a South African secret police agent Craig Williamson, had organized the killing of Olof Palme. De Kock’s predecessor, Dirk Coetzee, said the same. This was reported in a series of articles by the Swedish journalist Anders Hasselbohm. In an interview, Craig Williamson said that he had done operations for the Americans and the British as if they preferred to use the South Africans for “plausible deniability”. South African security forces were certainly interested in having Olof Palme eliminated. Sweden was the Western country that was the strongest supporter of the ANC in South Africa. Swedish Chief Prosecutor Jan Danielsson confirmed that Williamson was in Stockholm at the time of the killing. It later turned out that shortly after the killing, the former Chief of the Swedish Security Service Per-Gunnar Vinge had sent an exclusive piece of art, a glass sculpture of a blacksmith with a hammer, to South Africa. According to the South Africans, the code name of the operation was “Hammer” (Google has recently removed the original article with reference to the laws of the European Union).

The first head of the Palme Inquiry, the Stockholm County Chief of Police and the former Chief of the Security Service, Hans Holmér, argued that it was all a “Kurdish conspiracy”. The police started to tap the phones of Kurdish PKK members in Sweden, but they found nothing. Holmér had to leave after a year following the conflict with the chief prosecutors. In 1988, the Palme Inquiry supposedly had a few suspects: a Croatian rightwing radical, a member of Ustasha and WACL, Miro Barešić; a Swedish-Finnish Nazi and former weapons instructor for the Stockholm police, Carl-Gustav Östling; and a violent alcoholic and drug addict, Christer Pettersson. The police arrested the 41-year-old Pettersson in December 1988, which made the police now try to find evidence against him. In practice, they dropped all the other leads. Pettersson had been in the area the same night. He had been violent and had killed a man, but he never had used a gun.

In July 1989, he was found guilty of killing Prime Minister Palme after Lisbeth Palme had “identified” him as the man standing behind her. She had confused the killer with the witness Anders Björkman with his blue down jacket standing exactly where Lisbeth Palme said that the killer had been standing. The Chief Prosecutor K.G. Svensson said later that it was clear that Lisbeth Palme had confused the killer with Björkman. However, it turned out that one prosecutor had told her that the suspect was an alcoholic, and when the police let Lisbeth Palme “identify” Pettersson among some anonymous police officers, she had said: “one can easily see who of them is an alcoholic”. But in November 1989, a higher court found Pettersson not guilty.

What is remarkable with Lisbeth Palme’s “identification” of Pettersson is not whether he was the killer or not (which he obviously wasn’t), but why the police accepted Lisbeth Palme’s claim that the man in the blue down jacket (apparently Björkman), standing 5-10 meters behind her, was the killer, when the autopsy had found that Olof Palme was shot at a distance of 20 cm and when other witnesses said that the killer had had a dark coat, that he shot Olof Palme at close range and that he had disappeared immediately. Lisbeth Palme may not have seen the killer, but some evidence indicates the opposite. As stated above, three witnesses claim that the killer seemingly had been talking to Olof Palme. They appeared to be a group of three before Lisbeth and then Olof took a couple of steps towards the subway entrance. Then, the killer put his hand on Olof’s shoulder and shot him. He died while falling.

Some witnesses turned up from two cars and a taxi, that had stopped for red light. The taxi driver, Anders Delsborn, called the switchboard at Järfälla Taxi immediately, and they tried to call the Police Operation Center. A young nurse student Anna Hage in another car saw the man (Olof Palme) falling, the woman (Lisbeth) went down on her knees. Another man was running away. She did not hear any shots. She thought it might have been a heart attack. She left the taxi and began to make heart compression, but it was blood all over. She was interviewed as a witness. The police wanted to know exactly what she saw. The Security Service also approached her, but it was unclear what they wanted. Cars were often waiting outside her house with the lights turned off. She called the police, but then the cars disappeared. In August 1988 she was contacted by a man in military uniform. He chose a caffe that she used to visit. She was afraid. He said she was under surveillance. She could talk to family and friends but not to the wrong people, and certain things should not be disclosed. “We have to keep the country calm”, he said.

Left: The street Tunnelgatan today, where the killer disappeared after having shot Olof Palme. In the background, one can see the stairs up to David Bagares gata. The middle photo: the view of the same area in the night. Right: the view from the crime the following morning showing the blood and some flowers on the street and the barracks in the middle of Tunnelgatan that made it difficult to see where the killer disappeared. (Photo: Wikipedia, Tage Olsin and Gunnar Wall).

More precisely, the killing may have taken place about 23.21.30. Anders Delsborn would have called Järfälla Taxi seconds later. The woman at the Taxi switchboard tried to contact the Police Operation Center but she had to wait. The Police received her call about “a man that had been shot at the corner Sveavägen-Tunnelgatan” at 23.23, or at least the responsible officer, Ulf Helin, who usually did not work at the Operation Center, registered the call at 23.23. He asked for confirmation and sent his own police car no. 1230, but the police documents show that he, at 23.24, sent this very police car, not to the shooting at Sveavägen-Tunnelgatan but to a quarrel between drunken men at the Central Railway Station. The police car sent to the crime scene at Sveavägen was accordingly several minutes late, which made it easier for the killer to disappear. However, a police car with Chief Inspector Gösta Söderström happened to pass the area and arrived minutes after the killing, at 23.25 (Poutiainen) or shortly afterwards (Söderström), and he arrived before the car sent by the Operation Center. A witness from another private car, Leif Ljungqvist, called the Alarm Center at 23.22, and telephone calls from the Alarm Center were supposed to have priority at the Police Operation Center, but this mechanism was turned off this very night. When the Alarm Center reaches the Police Operation Center close to 23.25 (and you can hear the exact time on the tape in the background), the police Janne Hedlund answers. He says that we have not been informed about any shooting (Poutiainen 1995; 2025). Helin had seemingly not informed others at the Operation Center about it. Not until now, at 23.25, did the Police Operation Center go out with a local alarm for the police cars in the vicinity.

Kari Poutiainen also found that the Police Operation Center had received another call about the shooting (Sveavägen-Tunnelgatan) already before 23.23, but from a police radio 3625. Birgitta Brolund at the Operation Center said that this call was received before the call from [Järfälla] taxi. Police radio 3625 belonged to a reconnaissance car that supposedly wasn’t on duty that night. A person with access to this police radio must have been close to the place of the killing, informing the Police Operation Center and then left. Why did this police officer not turn up on the crime scene? A witness saw a man running on David Bagares gata, the continuation of Tunnelgatan from the crime scene (as if he had been running up the stairs from Tunnelgatan), while trying to put down something in a hand bag. It was first believed that this was the killer putting down his revolver, but the killer had put down his revolver immediately. Perhaps was the man on David Bagares gata putting down his walkie-talkie or communication radio after having left the top of the stairs from where he had reported about the killing at Tunnelgatan-Sveavägen. He might have been one of the perhaps ten people with walkie-talkies that seemingly followed the every movement of the Prime Minister Palme that night.

Another remarkable incident minutes after the killing was reported by a Dagens Nyheter photographer Åke Malmström, who arrived to his car at Dalagatan not far from Sveavägen. He turned on the police radio, as he used to do, and heard the following: First voice: “Hello up there. How’s it going?” Another voice responded: “Fine, but bloody cold”. The first voice: “The Prime Minister has been shot”. Then it was silent. This is not a typical police communication, and it took place when very few people in addition Lisbeth Palme knew that the man, who had been shot, was Prime Minister Olof Palme. The first minutes after the killing, none of the other witnesses understood that it was Prime Minister Palme that had been shot. The communication in the police radio appears to have been part of an exercise or an operation, where the prime minister should be taken out. When Malmström informed the police a couple of days later, they were not interested in his testimony, and they were not even interested in looking at his police radio in the car.

Many witnesses had seen people with walkie-talkies in the Old Town close to Palme’s apartment, at the subway station and around Sveavägen north and south of the cinema. This was unusual at the time (there were no small mobile phones in 1986) and there were several tens of observations. Most of these men with walkie-talkies spoke Swedish, but at least one spoke German/Dutch (or perhaps South African Afrikaans). A man from the Parliament used to pass the house for the Palme family on his way to his job, and the week before the murder, there used to be two to three men standing there, and they spoke something that sounded like German. The editorial writer at Dagens Nyheter Olle Alsén interviewed a Finnish woman, who told that she and her friend had been walking on Sveavägen this very evening. She claimed that they had passed the place of the killing shortly before it happened. They saw a man standing there. One woman recognized him as a Finnish-speaking man she had seen earlier. She asked him in Finnish what time it was. He then spoke in Finnish into a walkie-talkie, saying: “I am recognized. What should I do?” (To use another language is logical in a covert operation and the U.S. had used American Indians in the World War II instead of coded communication). The answer in Finnish was: “Well. Do what you should do. They are coming now”. One of the women argued that the man had had a gun in the other hand. They had heard gunshots minutes afterwards. Frightened, they decided not to tell anyone, but one woman did.

A copy of a Swedish Radio interview with this woman was later found in the possession of a South African military intelligence agent, “Nigel Barnett” in Mozambique. In 1997, he was arrested in Maputo on charges of espionage. He had several passports and aliases like “Nicho Esslin” and “Henry William Otto”, but his real name was Henry B. He was a trained killer with experience from the civil war in Rhodesia in the 1970s. He spoke fluent Swedish, because of his adoptive mother. A Swedish police officer in South Africa, Jan Åke Kjellberg, followed the court case and he was able to question Henry B., who had been to Stockholm several times in the 1980s. He did not pass the polygraph test (“lie detector”) specifically “whether he participated in the killing of Olof Palme or whether he suspected someone specifically for the murder”, but he also said that “he knew for sure that it was a South African operation”. However, despite the espionage charges, he was suddenly released from the arrest, which only could be explained by a high-level intervention or rather by an intervention from a foreign state. His ashes were officially buried in Stockholm in his family grave in 2017, but whether it was really his ashes is uncertain, Kjellberg told Hasselbohm. Henry B. had supposedly been healthy before he died. A senior official in the British deep state once told me that when you bury an agent, you may not know this person’s real name or identity.

As analysed by Poutiainen (1995), the Palme case would have been easier to solve if the Police Operation Center in Stockholm had sent a car immediately to the place of the shooting. As stated above, they sent a police car to deal with a quarrel at the railway station. Only a couple of minutes later did they send a car to the place of the killing, which gave the killer time to disappear. For this very night and only for this night, Ulf Helin was taking over as one of the responsible officers at the Operation Center. He was a close colleague of one of the main suspects, the Finnish-Swedish Carl-Gustav Östling. Helin had sent a police car with their mutual colleague Claes Djurfeldt, who ran up the stairs to David Bagares gata “to follow the killer”, and the last person seeing a man running at David Bagares gata told that he disappeared behind a car, which turned out to be Djurfeldt’s own private car meters from the small office of Östling and his colleague, a retired officer, Major G., formerly a liaison to the U.S. at FFV (Swedish Ordnance). Five weeks before the killing (on 20 January), Major G. had been given a position at Televerket Radio, which demanded high security clearance. This supposedly enabled him to follow all radio traffic and walkie-talkie traffic in the Stockholm area. He left his position a week after the killing (on 9 March) and started a weapons company, Strateg Protector, together with Östling. They also started a couple of other weapons companies. They both had close South African police ties, and they provided Hans Holmér and the Palme Inquiry with all its weapons. Holmér’s “bodyguards” came from the same group of police officers.

Some police officers were surprised to find that Holmér’s “bodyguards” were not regular bodyguards but political right-wingers or rather extreme right-wingers and that they were sitting with Holmér inside the “Palme room” (the Headquarters of the Inquiry) and not outside. This was the same group of police officers that Palme’s State Secretary Ulf Larsson had said that they had made “Hitler salute” at meetings in the Old Town in 1985 and that had “discussed the removal of Prime Minister Palme”, according to Commodore Cay Holmberg (see this article, Part II). According to Anders Larsson (mentioned above), Holmér had not chosen his “bodyguards” himself. They were appointed to control the Palme Inquiry. A week before the murder, Östling had cut out his appendix, but after lunch on 28 February he left the hospital against his doctor’s advice. However, he received an alibi for the early evening from his friend Per Arvidsson at FMV, but it turned out that he had no alibi for the late evening. According to a taxi driver, five minutes after the killing, he had picked up two men on Malmskillnadsgatan a couple of hundred meters from the crime scene. The stairs from Tunnelgatan leads up to Malmskillnadsgatan (in parallel to Sveavägen). After having seen a photo of Östling, the taxi driver claimed that he was one of the two men he drove to Söder (or South Stockholm, where Östling was living). Östling could have been the man speaking Finnish in the walkie-talkie with the man at the corner Sveavägen-Tunnelgatan that the two Finnish women had spoken with. Östling, Djurfeldt, Helin and Major G, and two officers analyzing the bullets, Sonny Björk and Per Arvidsson, all belonged to the Stockholm Combat Shooting Club (Stockholms försvarsskytteförening) with 18 people (see above), a society for combat shooting and training military combat in the city, which might have been a cover for a group within the Stockholm Stay Behinds or rather “parallel Stay Behinds” (see above).

What happened is still not clear. In the Palme Inquiry, these police officers have been described as a group of right-wing police officers, but they rather seem to have had a role linked to the Stay Behinds using their positions as police officers on this very occasion. I have not published anything serious about the killing of Olof Palme for 30 years, so there may be some mistakes in this text, but I have tried to verify all of it. Much of the above network was revealed in a 1995 book by Kari and Pertti Poutiainen, Inuti labyrinten (Stockholm: Grimur, 1995). The book was recommended in a review on the leader page in Dagens Nyheter by former Minister of Finance and Deputy Prime Minister Kjell-Olof Feldt (Kjell-Olof Feldt, “Vem lita på om inte sina egna” [Who to trust if not your own people], Dagens Nyheter, 17 August 1995). Dagens Nyheter was the most influential Swedish newspaper. The day after, 90 % of Swedish local newspapers wrote about Feldt’s comment on Poutiainen’s book. In the following night, there were two men on the roof of Prime Minister Carlsson’s residence – they were both caught by the police but then released. This might have been a “security test” at the Prime Minister’s residence, similar to the test at the defence staff (see above), but it was definitely also something else. The next day, Carlsson suddenly announced his resignation as prime minister. Media became immediately occupied by Carlsson’s resignation. Nothing more was then written about the book of Poutiainen. It was certainly not the Government but other forces that were responsible for this operation.

All this information has appeared in a number of Swedish books, but there are not much translated into English. We still do not know exactly what happened, but it seems pretty clear what kind of networks that were involved in the killing, and we know quite a lot about the ties between these networks and foreign agencies. The killing was certainly not the responsibility of a single individual seeking revanche or acting against the Prime Minister because of private hatred.

Already from the night of the murder, both Feldt and Carlsson had been wondering what the Stockholm police was doing. Vice Prime Minister Ingvar Carlsson had received a phone call from Olof Palme’s State Secretary Ulf Dahlsten saying that Olof had been shot, and the Cabinet would have to meet immediately at the Prime Minister’s Office. Ingvar Carlsson was living in Tyresö outside the central Stockholm. He took a taxi. He thought it might have been a coup or something, and he hide in the back of the car, but when he arrived at the Prime Minister’s Office at 00.45, there was no police presence, no protection, nothing (Carlsson, 1999). Feldt was also informed by Ulf Dahlsten (about the killing of Palme and about the meeting), and around midnight, 40 minutes after the killing, he called the local police in southwest Stockholm and asked them to drive him to the Prime Minister’s Office, but they had no information about the Prime Minister being shot. There had been no police alarm for the Stockholm area, only for some police cars in central Stockholm. A nation-wide alarm about the killing of Prime Minister Palme went out at 02.05 (two hours and 40 minutes after the murder), and the Swedish Defence Staff was, at least officially, not informed until 01.15, when they received “a call from Sweden’s Defence Attaché to Washington [Jan-Henrik Torselius]”, who told that Palme had been killed, and it had been on American TV 15 minutes earlier.

The day after the killing, the new prime minister Ingvar Carlsson spoke with the leader of the Opposition, the Conservative Party Leader Ulf Adelsohn. Adelsohn wrote about Carlsson as saying: “Now, when this has happened, it would have been better if there was a lone gunman, but the killing seems to have been planned for quite some time in advance. There are signs that there is a group that is willing to damage the Swedish society. In that case, it is very serious.”

Protocol from the early police interrogation with Carl-Gustav Östling about the murder of Prime Minister Olof Palme, 19 August 1986.

The strange connections

At the time of the murder Carl-Gustav Östling and his colleague Major G started a company Strateg Protector providing weapons, including machine guns mounted into briefcases, to Hans Holmér and the Palme Inquiry, which was their only customer. Holmér’s “bodyguards” came from the same group of right-wing police officers. When Swedish Customs authorities entered the apartment of Strateg Protector, they found a large amount of ammunition, guns, revolvers and a couple of anti-tank rifles. They found a postcard linked to the journal Contra, 13 photos of Östling and his colleague making Hitler salute (also on Jewish graves), a file for South African contacts, and exactly the same metal piercing ammunition as the one that had been used for the killing of Prime Minister Olof Palme. In 1988, Östling purchased bugging equipment that one of Holmer’s “bodyguards”, P.O. Karlsson, tried to smuggle through the Swedish Customs to Holmér’s close associate Ebbe Carlsson. Holmér, the first chief of the Police Inquiry, and Ebbe Carlsson had had close contacts since 1970s. The formal receiver of the bugging equipment, however, turned out to be the South African Legation in Stockholm. Before the killing, Östling’s colleague as well as several other police officers made trips to South Africa in close contact to the South African police.

Ebbe Carlsson was a journalist and a publisher, who had been press secretary for the Social Democratic Minister of Justice Lennart Geijer (1974-76), and he had been close to Hans Holmér already at the time when Holmér had been Chief of the Security Service (SÄK) 1970-76. The most delicate question, however, is: why did Hans Holmér and Ebbe Carlsson, who both were described as “Social Democrats”, collaborate with people who were working for the South African apartheid regime and with people who were active Nazis making Hitler salute and discussing the killing of Olof Palme? Why did Holmér and Ebbe Carlsson recruit these people and use them as bodyguards? Several extreme right-wingers seemed to have known about the killing in-beforehand. From 1984, Holmér was the Police Director for Stockholm’s Län (County), and he had appointed himself to investigate the murder. Soon afterwards, together with Ebbe Carlsson, he gave the first briefing for the new Prime Minister Ingvar Carlsson. Ingvar Carlsson said later: why was Ebbe Carlsson there together with Holmér? Ebbe Carlsson was just a private individual. “Why was he briefing me, the Prime Minister?” Ingvar Carlsson asked on Swedish TV.

In recent interviews with Michael MacLaine Ångman, it turned out that Hans Holmér had never been a Social Democrat. He had visited the family since the time of Michael’s childhood. Holmér was supposedly best friend of Michael´s father, Gösta Ångman, a director of a management company and a former director at the Wallenberg company Electrolux. In the early 1980s, they regularly had had “anti-Palme dinners”: “he should be shot in the back of his head”, someone said. At these dinners at Ångman’s home in Näsbypark (north of Stockholm), there were naval officers, businessmen and lawyers. The home was close to Näsby Castle and the Royal Naval War College, where later Admiral Bror Stefenson and Bofors’ Claes-Ulrik Winberg studied in the same class together with my stepfather and Admiral Carl-Fredrik Algernon. The latter lived almost next door to Ångmans. The owner of Ångman’s company told the son Michael: “Your father is saving this country”.

The son said that the father had a large mobile phone in the car already in the early 1970s, which private individuals did not have at the time. He was well-trained as a military officer. He was shooting with his left hand as well as with his right hand. He might have had a secret position in the Swedish Stay Behinds, the son said. After the killing of Olof Palme, there were no more dinners. There was nothing. Someone sabotaged the brakes of Ångman’s car. All brake hoses had been cut. After a second event, a naval officer told the father that “they are serious”. Take your son and leave, he said. The Ångmans “escaped” to Spain and went into hiding. The son became almost hostage of his father. When the son demanded to go back to Sweden, the father gave him a naval officer to keep an eye on him, as a “bodyguard” (see several interviews with T. Gjutarenäfve 2022).

In MacLaine Ångman’s account, Holmér appears clearly as a right-winger linked to naval officers and to his father, who hated the Social Democrats and particularly Olof Palme. Holmér’s recruitment of Nazis and other right-wingers as “bodyguards” and weapons providers is suddenly much easier to understand. Holmér’s driver claimed that he had driven Holmér on the evening of the murder in Stockholm, also to the place of the murder, while Holmér himself claimed that he was far north of Stockholm intending to participate in a skiing competition, “Vasaloppet”, but the support for that is very weak. The son describes his father as having been a very social figure until all this ended, after the night of the killing. He then went into isolation worrying about every car behind him. The son believes that the father might have been the man who shot Olof Palme or just been involved in one way or the other. Both Gösta Ångman and Hans Holmér died 72 years old.

Together with Ebbe Carlsson, Hans Holmér had claimed that the Kurdish group PKK (the Kurdistan Workers’ Party) had been responsible for the killing of Prime Minister Palme. The same had been claimed by the Swedish-South African agent Bertil Wedin (who worked for Williamson, who was accused in the South African Supreme Court for having organised the killing of Palme) and by Alf Karlsson, who had been the officer responsible for Olof Palme’s security, and he had refrained from acting on specific plans to kill Prime Minister Palme. Alf Karlsson went from Security Service (SÄK) to P.G. Vinge’s private security company. Vinge had been forced out as chief of SÄK by Olof Palme, and he had been one of four senior officers who, according to the IB Document, had taken the decision to take him out (see Part II). After Holmér had been forced to leave as the Chief of the Palme Commission in 1987, Ebbe Carlsson tried to continue to push for a Kurdish suspect, and he had received support from Walter Kegö and Jan-Henrik Barrling from SÄK. This was a hidden investigation linked to SÄK.

In recent years, however, it has turned out that the Kurdish lead, according to Barrling and others, was a cover for the Soviet KGB. PKK was believed to have acted as a proxy for the Soviets, and a KGB officer in Stockholm responsible for their agents without diplomatic cover, was believed to have been deeply involved in this operation. The weeks prior to the killing, there had been a radical increase in Soviet short wave-transmissions, SÄK had claimed. This KGB officer, Vladimir Nezjinskiy, was a Soviet diplomat and was under surveillance. He had supposedly arranged an apartment for the Kurdish suspect. In October 1985, the British MI6 had unlawfully installed listening devices in Nezjinskiy’s his private apartment in Stockholm, and this was made at the time when MI6 had been able to make a copy of Olof Palme’s handwritten agenda for the meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev. The British had, according to the ACC/SOPS documents above, demanded that the “threat to the Northern Flank” should be eliminated. Olof Palme had to go, but in collaboration with SÄK, MI6 listened to all Nezjinsky’s conversations. And in the early night after the killing of Olof Palme, Nezjinsky had supposedly said: “Now, it has happened”, which not only SÄK and MI6 but also officers in the Swedish military intelligence service had interpreted as “foreknowledge”. The Soviets would have been directly involved, they argued, and this information would also have been forwarded to Hans Holmér as the leader of the Palme Commission and to Prime Minister Ingvar Carlsson.

Exactly as the Warren Commission during the investigation into the killing of President John F. Kennedy, the Swedish Government and the Palme Commission would have been faced with the choice of either investigate the Soviets and “their attack on the country” or point to a single assassin, and the former alternative would have made the investigation into the Palme murder much more difficult. However, the last state to be interested in killing Kennedy as well as Palme was the Soviet Union. Recent research makes a convincing case claiming that the CIA Chief of Counter-Intelligence James Jesus Angleton had planted these alternatives for the Warren Commission, and Angleton seems himself to have been deeply involved in the planning of the killing of John F. Kennedy. In the Palme case, the MI6 may on purpose have installed the equipment in Nezjinsky’s home before the Palme murder to pick up something of Nezjinsky’s conversation that could possibly be used to put the blame on the Russians. Both Barrling and Kegö from the Security Service and the officers from Swedish Military Intelligence seem actually have believed that the Soviets could have been involved. All their energy were used to surveil the Soviets, and they could hardly imagine any other suspect. It seems that the MI6 had used the same trick as Angleton had done more than 20 years earlier. Up to now, this information has been classified, and originally, it seems to have been the Government or rather Prime Minister Ingvar Carlsson, who wanted to keep this information as top-secret. He had experience from the submarine incidents and people from SÄK and Swedish Naval Intelligence always pointed to the Soviets, while having no real evidence. Prime Minister Ingvar Carlsson would definitely not have trusted them. The KGB reaction to the killing, “Now, it has happened”, was no evidence of “foreknowledge”. It was rather what many people were thinking and what I actually was saying day after, because of the massive campaign against Prime Minister Olof Palme.

Ebbe Carlsson had ties to intelligence, but also to both extreme right-wingers and to leading Social Democrats. At the first glance, this appears to be very confusing. We may therefore have to look at who these Social Democrats were and particularly we have to look at Sven Andersson.

Left: Defence Minister Sven Andersson 1966 (Photo: Digitalt Museum). He was defence minister 1957-73 and cabinet minister 1948-76. Right: Prime Minister Olof Palme 1985 (Photo: (Photo: Source: Ministry of the Presidency. Government of Spain, Public Domain). He was prime minister 1969-76 and 1982-86 and cabinet minister for 17 years.

The Palme-Andersson split and the role of the Deep State

Unlike his contemporary ministers, like his predecessor, Defense and Foreign Minister Torsten Nilsson and Prime Minister Tage Erlander, Andersson did not write about his time as a cabinet minister in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. The other two wrote several volumes about their years as cabinet ministers, and Erlander’s minister of finance Gunnar Sträng, who also had been minister for 25 years, let a researcher, my colleague Anders Johansson, write his memoirs. Sven Andersson, however, wrote (together with Ebbe Carlsson) about his experience during World War II and his Swedish military trip to Berlin in late 1940, where he received “terrific” information about the upcoming German attack on the Soviet Union half a year later. But he did not write about the years after 1948. Perhaps Andersson had reasons not to write about his own 28 years as a Swedish minister (minister without portfolio responsible for defense issues, minister of communication, his 16 years as minister of defense and then minister of foreign affairs). According to the only declassified CIA document on Sweden from 1976 that I found, Swedish Foreign Minister Sven Andersson was, from 1972, married to Ulla Brambeck, the Social Secretary of the British Ambassador. It is remarkable that the Swedish Foreign Minister is married to a secretary of the British Ambassador. This was the only information in this document. Andersson moved into Brambeck’s apartment in the Palace of von Rosen at Strandvägen in the most exclusive part of Stockholm. Ola Frithiofson, the son of Karl Frithiofson (Andersson’s state secretary for defense for ten years) had a conversation with former Deputy CIA Director Bobby Ray Inman. Inman said that Defense Minister Sven Andersson was “a very fine man”, and that he (Inman) had, as U.S. Assistant Naval Attaché to Stockholm in mid-1960s, used Wallenberg’s senior intelligence officer, Karl Arvid Norlin as his “go-between” to Andersson. Norlin was deeply involved with the Wallenberg-produced Swedish Air Force and with the weapons deals with the Americans. Andersson seems to have been equally preoccupied by these affairs. Inman had had an apartment in Baroness von Platen’s Palace practically next door to the Andersson-Brambeck´s later apartment. Inman apparently trusted Andersson and he had close private ties to Bengt Schuback’s predecessor as Sweden’s Chief of Navy, Vice Admiral Per Rudberg (1978-84). Like Inman, Rudberg also really trusted Sven Andersson, he told me. Inman told Bob Woodward (1987) that he, in Stockholm, had had a “terrific source who provided significant military information on other countries”. If that was Sven Andersson, Per Rudberg or someone else, I don’t know.

Hans von Hofsten, who initiated the Naval officer´s revolt against Olof Palme, visited Sven Andersson shortly before the killing. And Ola’s father Karl, did not only have professional ties with him. The Frithiofson family had also private ties to Anderssons, because the two families had summer houses close to each other on the island of Orust/Rossö. Ola’s parents said that Sven lost his foundation in the Social Democratic Party, when his wife Rosa died in 1967. Sven did not always take the decisions by the Social Democratic Party Congress “very serious”, the father said. Sven collaborated closely with others, and it was certainly not with the Soviets. There are strong indications that he was as close to the Americans as to the British. Ola’s mother’s characterization of Ulla Brambeck was not very favorable, and when Sven died in 1987, he was buried together with his former wife Rosa.

Sven Hirdman, State Secretary for Defense in the late 1970s and early 1980s, said that Sven Andersson was still responsible for “the most sensitive issues” (in other words the Stay Behinds) many years after he left as Minister of Defence (see Ola Frithiofson, 2021). Later defense ministers had not been that senior and could obviously not be entrusted the most secret information. Hirdman had actually been “acting” Defence Minister at the time, according to Chief of Defence General Ljung, but the real secrets were still kept by Sven Andersson despite the fact that Andersson formally had left the Ministry many years earlier. Sven Andersson may have kept his secret position in the Deep State also in the mid-1980s.

Hirdman was a senior ambassador. He had replaced Algernon as responsible for export of war material in 1987, he had been ambassador to Israel and had been ambassador to Moscow for ten years. A confident of Andersson, Tage Tuvheden, said: after Olof Palme had criticized the Americans, Sven Andersson had to turn to Washington to calm them down. Nothing had changed, Andersson told them. Tuvheden had been offered to become neighbour to Sven Andersson at his summer house on Rossö, because of his important role for the Swedish Air Force (interview with T. Gjutarenäfve 2023). Another confident of Andersson, Tore Rainer, had been working for the Swedish signal intelligence agency (FRA or the Defence Radio Agency). He belonged to the crew of the DC-3 that conducted Swedish reconnaissance flights along the Soviet Baltic coast after the War, and the signal intelligence was conveyed directly to the Americans. When the airplane was shot down by the Soviets in June 1952, he was not onboard, but he continued to work for FRA and had a central role in the agency. In his home, he had a lot of radio equipment. When someone was going to visit him, he or she had to give a coded signal before entering. He would, as stated by Donald Forsberg above (see this article Part II), in case of an occupied Sweden have a role for the communication network of the Swedish Stay Behinds. He married a Finnish woman. His stepson, Carl-Gustav Östling, seems to have become a central figure in the U.S.-linked “parallel Stay Behinds” in Stockholm (see above). He may have been introduced to this world by his stepfather. It seems likely to assume that Andersson was aware of this. He was as deeply involved with the Americans as he was with the British.

A real conflict between Prime Minister Palme and Defence and Foreign Minister Andersson seems to boil down to when to receive the bomber and attack aircraft of the U.S. Air Force, if a war starts. Andersson’s close assistant Ingemar Engman (see Part I) argued that in the 1960s, Sweden’s prime minister, foreign minister and defence minister had accepted the U.S. use of Swedish airbases from Day One in a war, already before Sweden had been attacked (Tunander 1999; 2003). In the 1960s, Prime Minister Tage Erlander (1946-69), his assistant and later Prime Minister Olof Palme (1969-76), Defence and Foreign Minister Torsten Nilsson (1951-57; 1962-71) and Defence and Foreign Minister Sven Andersson (1957-73; 1973-76) supposedly believed that the U.S. would have a significant air force available to deploy in Sweden only in the very early phase of a war. Some Swedish air bases were prepared to receive U.S. aircraft “on their way eastwards”, Engman stated (Arte documentary “Täushung: Die Methode Reagan”, 2015). However, in the 1970s, there are clearly indications that at least Olof Palme and his close colleagues rejected this idea, because U.S. use of Swedish airbases would make Sweden a target of Soviet nuclear missile strikes. The Soviet war planning for 1970s and 1980s did not include an occupation of Sweden, but the elimination of Swedish airbases used by the Americans, we were told by the Lieutenant General Vladimir Cheremnikh, who had been Deputy Chief of Staff for Leningrad Military District up to 1986 and responsible for the war planning for the Nordic Region. In a war with United States, the forces of the Leningrad Military District would occupy Finland and Finnmark (in northern Norway) as a buffer zone. They would not take Sweden and the rest of Norway, but they would eliminate the airbases used by the Americans. Olof Palme would have been aware of these Soviet plans. And the secret Swedish policy of the 1960s, as described by Engman as Andersson’s assistant, was not handed over to the new Prime Minister Thorbjörn Fälldin in 1976 (Holmström 2015). Sweden would, according to Palme’s policy only receive U.S. aircraft after a possible Soviet attack.

Lieutenant General Vladimir Cheremnikh paying tribute to Olof Palme at his grave in Stockholm in connection with a conversation on SVT in 1995. General Cheremnikh had two wishes when he arrived in Sweden: to see the place where Olof Palme was shot and to visit his grave (Photo: Private Archive).

If the Soviets had tried to take out the Swedish airbases with conventional bomber aircraft, they would have to continuously bomb these airbases. They would lose too many aircraft. The Soviet Union would almost certainly use nuclear weapons. This is the only logical conclusion. Olof Palme was preoccupied with the risk of a nuclear war, and to let U.S. aircraft operate from Swedish airbases would be nothing but an invitation to Soviet nuclear strikes on Sweden. In a war, the Soviets would be short of forces on the Central Front (MccQwire, 1987), and one would very much prefer a neutral Sweden. Sweden could accordingly stay out of a war, perhaps until the very end of the war. But this became a major U.S.-British problem, because they wanted to use Sweden as an unsinkable aircraft carrier in the very early phase of a war to firstly, establish air cover over the Central Front; secondly, to attack Soviet reinforcements through Poland and along the Baltic Sea coast and thirdly, to take out the Soviet air defence systems in the Soviet Baltic Republics in order to open up for U.S. bomber aircraft to facilitate their attacks on Leningrad and Moscow. On this very issue, Olof Palme knew that Sweden had common interest with the Soviets. For the Americans and the British, however, a Swedish neutrality was unacceptable (“Russian Military Thinking”, Tunander 2024).

In other words, with Olof Palme as prime minister, there wouldn’t be any Soviet attack on Sweden that would justify U.S. and British use of Swedish airbases. And if the Russians didn’t want to attack Sweden, the U.S. and the British had to do it themselves. They had to instigate a false “Soviet attack” by using British and small Western submarines under U.S. command to land Special Forces that would kill Swedish political and military leaders to create an impression of a Soviet attack (see Part II and Part IV). Top-leaders like Olof Palme that would prefer to keep a neutral Sweden would have to be taken out. They would be described as “important carriers of information” and they would be taken out so the Soviets “won’t be able to get their hand on them” (see this article Part II). Many Swedes would believe that such a fake “Soviet attack”was real, and to them it would justify U.S. and British use of Swedish territory. The major problem for the U.S. and the British would be Prime Minister Palme, who, from 1983-84, had understood that these intruding submarines actually were Western submarines. Olof Palme and some other responsible ministers in the Cabinet like Foreign Minister Sten Andersson and later Defence Minister Thage G. Peterson would have to be taken out by the use of Swedish assassination teams (or Stay Behinds) or by British Special Forces. The latter would be put ashore from British Oberon- or Porpoise-class submarines and coordinate with Swedish Stay Behinds, and this British attack would appear as an attack made by the Soviets. Sweden would largely turn against the Soviets and enough many Swedish military officers “were plugged into” the U.S.-UK system to administrate the landing of U.S. and British air forces in Sweden. The Swedish Deep State would act, and leaders like Sven Andersson were trusted by the Americans and the British and by the U.S.- Swedish liaisons, by Admiral Bobby Ray Inman and by Admiral Rudberg, and the latter would be responsible for the Swedish Stay Behinds.

The question seems to be: not if but when Prime Minister Palme was going to be killed. Was he going to be taken out when the war started? Or already in peacetime? It may be of some significance when Sven and Sven O Andersson told MI6 and Mac Falkirk shortly after the murder: “if the Swedes will get to know the truth about the murder of Palme, Sweden will not be the same in hundred years”. Hans Holmér said something similar in an interview with Dagens Nyheter. The Swedish Parliamentary Committee on the Constitution was questioning Holmér on 7 March 1989 about this statement. A female Committee representative asked Holmér: You said: “When the truth about this [the murder of Olof Palme] will be revealed, the Swedish society will change in its foundation”. And she continued: “What did you mean by that?”. Holmér first said that this would take too long to explain and the issue was not within the competence of this Committee, he said. When the Committee representative did not accept his answers, he just refrained from answering.

The procession with the coffin of Olof Palme through Stockholm before the funeral.

I have done some corrections and re-writing of this article in January-February 2026 for the 40-year anniversary of the Palme murder on 28 February 2026.

The IB/Lingärde document and the ACC/SOPS document

Ulf Lingärde kept contact with Birger Elmér, a close associate of Olof Palme and a former chief of the Swedish secret intelligence service (“Informationsbyrån” or IB). The Social Democratic Government had used IB in an attempt to guarantee Swedish sovereignty and to control the regular Swedish intelligence service and its officers, so they won’t be an easy prey to the Americans. Former Deputy Chief of Defense Staff Intelligence, Björn Eklind, told me that in the 1970s and 1980s, when he as a Swedish intelligence officer met foreign intelligence officers, the meetings were arranged by IB, and he was usually not even allowed to get the names of his counterparts. The revelation of the existence of IB in 1973 had made the military leadership demand that Elmér be replaced by a military officer to be in control of the secret intelligence service. With the new Center-Right Government in 1976, Elmér was forced out. However, he was still influential and in November 1988, Elmér let his Chief of Operations, Bo Anstrin, give Lingärde a day’s briefing about what they knew.

Ulf Lingärde claimed in a March 1993 document (here called the “IB document”) that Olof Palme had offered what was left over from the Swedish nuclear weapons program to India including 650 kilo weapons grade uranium stored at Forsmark nuclear power station to finalize the artillery deal with India. Palme’s only demand was some extra money to finance the legal support activity for the ANC in South Africa. This seemed to confirm the statement in ACC/SOPS documents from December 1985 and January 1986. According to the journalist Olle Alsén, a senior official at the Swedish Defense Ministry was overheard saying more or less the same in conversation with a representative of Sweden’s civilian nuclear energy program, which all seems to confirm the statements in these documents.

The IB/Lingärde document is relatively detailed about the early planning of the assassination on the Swedish side. It claimed that in late 1970s, a few senior officers started a build-up of a military network at the military districts with local units to be activated “in case of a socialist seizure of power”. These networks “Aktionsgruppen Arla Gryning” (in English “Action Team Early Dawn”) were developed in parallel to the regular Stay Behinds and beyond the control of Birger Elmér. They were run by a staff of trusted military security and intelligence officers. A group of people at the Swedish Defence Research Institute and in Swedish Psychological Defence presented the claim that “Olof Palme was a Soviet spy”. Several senior officers considered Prime Minister Palme a “socialist”, and in the 1980s one had started to prepare this “parallel Stay Behind network” in the “Northern Military District – South” (“Militärområde Nedre Norrland”) to be used in an operation against Olof Palme. This network would have been initiated by the District Commander in late 1970s, later Chief of Navy, Vice Admiral Per Rudberg.

Rudberg was a Swedish liaison to the U.S., and in 1978 when he left as a District Commander to become Chief of Navy, he was received in the U.S. by 15 admirals. At the dinner in the honor of Rudberg there were seven U.S. admirals (Holmström 2015). This reception was exceptional. “Not even the most important NATO countries had got a corresponding reception”. The upcoming U.S. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral William Crowe met Rudberg three times. As Chief of Navy, Per Rudberg was also, in case of a war, designated to become Swedish Commander-in-Chief in Exile and commander of the Swedish Stay Behinds. During U.S. Defence Secretary Caspar Weinberger’s five-days-visit to Sweden in October 1981, Admiral Rudberg was Weinberger’s choice as escort officer, Rudberg told me. The staff for these “parallel Stay Behinds” was first supposed to be located at the Naval Staff and the decision had been taken by the then Chief of Defence Staff, later Chief of Navy Vice Admiral Bengt Schuback. One started to have a relevant organization, but “one lacked one thing – a shooter. Nobody one could trust, wanted to be a shooter”, Lingärde wrote.

The IB/Lingärde document also claimed that the decision to eliminate the Prime Minister had been taken by four senior officers: the former chief of the Security Service, SÄK or SÄPO, Per-Gunnar Vinge (who had been forced out of his position by Prime Minister Palme), the former chief of the Military Intelligence Service, Major General Bengt Wallroth, by Wallroth’s predecessor as Director General of FRA (the Swedish signal intelligence service) Lars Ljunggren, and by Rudberg’s successor as Chief of Navy, Vice Admiral Bengt Schuback (a former Chief of Defence Staff and former Chief of the Southern Military District, where he succeeded Lieutenant General Sven-Olov Olson). These four senior officers represented different aspects of the Swedish security state: the civilian security service, the military intelligence service, the signal intelligence and the regular military forces (including the Stay Behinds), and they would have had regular contacts with their opposite numbers in the Western services. To me, it seems unlikely that they would have acted with such a self-confidence if they hadn’t had the backing from the Americans and the British. The version presented by IB/Lingärde would rather support the credibility of the ACC/SOPS documents. These senior officers would have known that they had the full backing of the Western intelligence community and its covert state networks.

When Italian generals and right-wingers organized coups or coup-attempts in the 1960s and 1970s, they always turned to the Americans, and the Americans gave them green light for the operation. The “De Lorenzo Coup” in 1964, the “Borghese Coup” in 1970, and the “Sogno Coup” in 1974 were all able to transform Italian politics (Bale 1994; Ganser 2004; Tunander 2008). In each case, the coups were preceded by bomb explosions that were used to create chaos and demands for “emergency measures”: a military intervention. Explosives had been planted either by regular Stay Behinds or by parallel Stay Behinds with direct links to the CIA in order to force the people “to trade democratic freedoms for security”, to block a socialist majority or a broader coalition between the Christian Democratic Party and the Socialists. The December 1969 bomb killing people at Piazza Fontana in Milan was first believed to have been planted by leftwing anarchists, but it turned out that it was planted by the fascist group Ordine Nuovo to create demands for emergency measures to prepare for the Borghese coup in 1970. Ordine Nuovo operated under cover of the regular Stay Behinds as parallel Stay Behinds with a direct link to the CIA. The Italian Chief of Counter-Intelligence General Gianadelio Maletti confirmed in court that U.S. intelligence had provided Ordine Nuovo with the explosives from a storage in West Germany. The Italian Chief of Stay Behinds 1971-74, General Gerardo Serravalle, said that the CIA Station Chief had forced him to put priority on these “internal measures”. The bombings were a precondition for continued financial support. A bomb attack in 1972, similar to other bomb attacks, fooled people to believe that it was carried out by left-wingers, the Red Brigades, but the culprit, Vincenzo Vinciguerra, was also from Ordine Nuovo, and he explained in court how the Italian Stay Behinds were organised, despite that nobody in the organisation was supposed to know about it. General Serravalle concluded that there must be a parallel network directly linked to the Americans that he was not informed about. All the bombings and all the coup attempts had had explicit backing by the CIA and other U.S. agencies. The killing of Prime Minister Aldo Moro in 1978 was also firstly blamed on the Red Brigades, but it turned out that the U.S. and other agencies had been directly responsible (see Part IV).

However, the Scandinavian countries were also very much a British responsibility. It seems implausible that the killing of Palme was a strict Swedish initiative decided without the backing by U.S. and British agencies. Also, officers involved at lower levels would presuppose high level backing. For example, information from Swedish signal intelligence went directly to the Americans and the British and the Americans had financed Swedish equipment. In NATO, Swedish signal intelligence was responsible for the Soviet Baltic Republics, while Danish signal intelligence was responsible for Poland (because of the Island of Bornholm) and West German signal intelligence was responsible for East Germany. The Swedish actors considered themselves to be part of the Western intelligence community, and the Swedish Prime Minister became “impossible to have”, when the Americans and the British had lost trust in him.

Alsén spoke with a former Swedish Defence Minister, a Social Democrat, who said that he didn’t believe Wallroth would have done it. Wallroth had not pointed to Soviet submarines and to me he even indicated that one might have used small Italian vessels. The former minister trusted Wallroth or had at least trusted him, but he was not surprised about the other names. They could very well have taken such a decision, he said (according to Alsén). Either Wallroth was involved in foul play or IB/Lingärde was not correct. However, when the journalist Anders Hasselbohm had written a Swedish book Ubåtshotet [The Submarine Threat 1984] pointing to Western intrusions into Swedish waters, he was contacted by former Chief of Army, Lieutenant General Nils Sköld, who at the time worked for the Defence Ministry. Sköld claimed in a conversation with Hasselbohm that it most likely had been Western submarines in Swedish waters in October 1982 (He also claimed the same in public in 1987). The Diary of the Chief of Defence Lennart Ljung stated shortly after the publication of Hasselbohm’s book that this “Sköld’s adventure” was reported to him by the Swedish “Chief of Defence Staff and by his deputy”, in other words by Vice Admiral Bror Stefenson and Major General Bengt Wallroth, possibly implying a “double-cross” and deception on behalf of the latter.

Lingärde also claimed that the senior SÄK director Alf Karlsson had had an important role for the Palme operation. He had been responsible for Olof Palme’s bodyguards at the time, and he had been a participant at the Palme Inquiry meetings the first months. In 1988, he left SÄK and joined Per-Gunnar Vinge’s private company VIP (Vinge Integrated Protection) with the words: “The private business takes care of its own people”. Lingärde also states that thanks to Peter Wallenberg, some “responsible Swedes” got in contact with the South Africans that had their own interest in eliminating Olof Palme, because of Olof Palme’s massive support for the ANC. These “responsible Swedes” also used some police officers in Stockholm that collaborated with the South Africans and were linked to the “parallel Stay Behinds” (see below). After Lingärde’s information was made public, he received threats and threats to his children. Anonymous people called him and said they would kill him. They called the children when they were alone at home and threatened to kill them. When Ulf Lingärde and his wife came home, the children were hiding in the basement. After that they got police protection. Ulf Lingärde died in 2001 at the age of 57 in a heart attack. It is very difficult to know if the two ACC/SOPS documents, the document on Mac Falkirk, the CIA document and the IB document truly reflect the real events, but they all seemingly confirm each other. I will argue that we should not brush them aside. We cannot exclude that they are authentic documents.

From left: Admiral Noel Gayler (U.S. former Director of the NSA), and members of the Palme Commission: Egon Bahr (a close advisor to the German Chancellor Willy Brandt), Olof Palme and Georgy Arbatov (a close advisor to Soviet leaders from Brezhnev to Gorbachev) in Amsterdam 18 June 1983 (Photo: Public Domain).

The Covert USA: the Taylor Report and the North Diary.

In 1982, William Taylor, a Director of Military-Political Studies at CSIS (Center for Strategic and International Studies) in Washington, edited a book, The Future of Conflict in the 1980s with a contribution by James Schlesinger, a former Director of the CIA, Secretary of Defense and Secretary of Energy. Taylor was married into a family of the Swedish Navy. He was worried about “the Swedish neutralism of Olof Palme” and about the Swedish influence in both Europe and the Third World.

The 1982 Palme Commission pushed for a dialogue between the Western countries and the Soviets. Palme wanted to continue the work of former German Chancellor Willy Brandt, and Brandt’s close advisor Egon Bahr drafted the Palme Report. Taylor was worried that a “Swedenization” of Europe, particularly of Germany adopting a kind of Swedish neutrality, could “make further inroads in Africa, Southwest Asia, the Caribbean Basin and the Pacific Basin”. Taylor said in 1982 that U.S. PSYOPs should target friends that “take public stands in opposition to U.S. national interests” (like Sweden). The target area had to be studied in detail. In 1985, he edited a book about the Nordic region and contributed a chapter on the change of public opinion in Sweden, where his “target area” was studied. Sweden had changed because of the violations of its territorial waters, he wrote.

In 1982, he argued that threats of force in Europe would be at the lower end of the conflict spectrum “in the realm of PSYOPs”. PSYOPs would be particularly useful in Europe. Overt use of force was not possible in Europe, because of the risk of nuclear escalation. This made the U.S. turn to PSYOPs and other forms of Low-Intensity Conflicts or what we today would call “Hybrid Warfare” to discipline the European governments. A “credible threat may be to assassinate a key leader in a democratic country”, he wrote and continued: “It is credible because it would be relatively easy to accomplish. Freedom of movement is extensive in Western Europe; crossing national boundaries is simple. In addition, people in Western Europe place a great deal of value on their democratically elected leaders”. He proposed the use of PSYOPs “to undercut support for an undesirable government”. This reflects the kind of U.S. thinking prevalent at the time.

At a nuclear weapons conference in Norway in 1993, I had a lunch conversation with James Schlesinger. We spoke about Scandinavia, and I asked him about his view of Sweden from his time in the Administration. He responded by asking me: “Which Sweden? The ‘Political Sweden’ or the ‘Military Sweden’? ‘The Military’ was planning for us to come as soon as possible [he actually said: ‘wanted to come …’, but when I called him five years later, he changed this wording to ‘was planning for us to come as soon as possible’].” “The Military Sweden [or rather some military leaders]” wanted to receive U.S. attack- and fighter aircraft already before Sweden had been attacked. From Schlesinger’s point of view, there was definitely “two Sweden”: a “Political Sweden” with the Prime Minister and Foreign Minister defending Swedish neutrality and “The Military Sweden” or more precisely some very senior military officers on the Swedish side that “were plugged” into the US-UK system.

In collaboration with the Americans and the British, senior Swedish naval officers had been running PSYOPs in Sweden using Western submarines, acting as “Soviet submarines”, in Swedish coastal waters. U.S. Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger said on Swedish TV in March 2000 that the US had been running these submarine operations in Swedish waters to “test Swedish readiness”. It was always done after U.S.-Swedish “Navy-to-Navy” consultations, he said. His Secretary of Navy John Lehman told me that the decision had been taken by the “Deception Operation Committee” (he also used the term “Deception Committee”) chaired by CIA Director William Casey. According to Lehman, the operations Weinberger were talking about had been decided by Casey’s committee. They had used small Italian vessels for “plausible deniability”. Lehman’s protégé Admiral James “Ace” Lyons, a former Deputy Chief Naval Operations, told the German TV Channel Arte and journalist Dirk Pohlmann that he had been responsible for planning these deception operations. Casey had called him directly, Lyons told.

A most senior CIA-official Fritz Ermarth, who was the U.S. National Intelligence Officer for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe 1983-86 and Special Assistant to President Ronald Reagan and Senior Director of Soviet and European Affairs at the National Security Council 1986-88, said that Admiral Lyons had been responsible for some very secret naval operations in Northern Europe, which made Pohlmann go to the U.S. to interview Lyons, and Lyons told that it was he and his staff that was responsible for these operations.

A former Director of U.S. Naval Intelligence, Admiral Bobby Ray Inman, Casey’s Deputy Director for Central Intelligence, told me that there had been no Soviet intrusions deep into Swedish waters, neither into the archipelagoes nor into the Naval Bases. He told the same to a colleague of mine, Ola Frithiofson. We can conclude that these intrusions penetrating deep into Swedish coastal waters were from the West and Admiral Lyons seems to have been largely responsible. However, he told Pohlmann that this was something he couldn’t speak about.

The Soviet leader Yuri Andropov and his ambassador to Sweden, later Foreign Minister Boris Pankin said that the Swedish Navy should sink all these submarines in Swedish waters so the Swedes could see for themselves who is responsible. It is not our submarines, the Soviets said. In 1988s, Soviet Prime Minister Nikolai Ryzhkov arrived in Sweden. He said the same to Swedish Prime Minister Ingvar Carlsson: “Destroy the submarines, if you want. It has nothing to do with us.” But almost all Swedes, and almost all naval officers, believed that these submarines were from the Soviet Union. Swedish naval officers believed that Olof Palme had given the ceasefire orders that let the submarines out. Naval officers below the rank of vice admiral and rear admiral largely believed that the submarines were Russian, and many believed that Olof Palme had collaborated with the enemy to let them out. However, naval documents now show that decisions about ceasefires had been taken by a few Swedish admirals “plugged” into the U.S. and the British system (see below).

Oliver North Diary 11 March 1986 (see exact wording below).

However, there were also other Swedish-U.S. relations that were of importance. In November 1985, in an effort to release U.S. hostages kept by Iran, Oliver North (working for National Security Council and Vice President George H.W. Bush) had tried to deliver 80 Hawk missiles (missile parts) to Iran using Shimon Peres’ man Amiram Nir in Israel and the weapons dealer Manucher Ghorbanifar in Iran, but the U.S. needed “credible end-user certificate” and for obvious reasons the transport had to go through third country. The Report of “the Congressional Committees Investigating the Iran/Contra Affair” argues that Oliver North had concluded that the “Country 15” could accept the transfer via this country to Iran, but on 18 November 1985, it turned out that “the government of ‘Country 15’ was unwilling to grant the special clearances”. Major General Richard Secord was sent by North to “Country 15” to “straighten out the mess”, the Committee writes. Secord (close to Oliver North in the Vice President Bush’s Operation Sub-Group, OSG) allegedly claimed in an early Iran-Contras hearing that “Country 15” actually was Portugal (Walter Pincus, “Some ‘Secrets’ in North Case already Disclosed”, The Washington Post, December 12, 1988). But it is difficult to know whether this was a false lead and Portugal would not have been the only country approached.

Another OSG officer close to North, Gene Tatum (who allegedly replaced Secord as head of OSG-3), argued that North and Donald Gregg (a former CIA officer and National Security Advisor to Vice President Bush) had presented the case for Olof Palme to use Sweden as “a third country”. Palme had not been willing to grant end-user certificates, “special clearances”, which had been fatal to Palme, Tatum said. Tatum’s version is not confirmed, but the role of the weapons business for the killing is consistent with Lars Borgnäs SVT interview with Mikhail Gorbatsjov. Gorbatsjov said that Palme had been “annoying powerful interests […] that capitalized from the tension and rearmament and made huge profits from it”.

Swedish Bofors Company had already a channel open to Iran. Some of these Swedish transfers had supposedly been cleared by Carl-Fredrik Algernon (as stated above, he got into trouble and “fell” in front of a subway train at the Stockholm Central Station a year later, in early 1987). According to a representative of the Palme Inquiry, Palme had blocked one or two of these transfers in autumn 1985. Lee Hamilton’s report to Congress states that the prime minister of the third country had “refused to grant necessary clearances”. I later read North’s diary at the National Security Archive (Washington). Most of the diary was still blacked out (classified), but parts of it had been declassified. The entries for January-February 1986 are almost entirely about missiles or missile parts to Iran. Statements about Palme having possibly blocked “items”, the missile part transfer, are supported by the notes in North’s Diary on 11 March, days after the killing:

“11 March 09.00. Call from [Amiram] Nir. G[h]orba[nifar] wants Nir to bring items with him (G) to Sweden port. Most important thing is to go and have two. As far as Goode [Oliver North] is concerned [unreadable] cannot work unless they perform. After February, all things are possible” (see image above).

“Goode” stands for Oliver North. He usually used “William P. Goode” as his alias. Immediately after the killing of Palme, transit through Sweden seems to have been possible. I have recently learned that some people argue that North does not write “to Sweden port” but “to Sweeten pot”. I don’t think this is consistent with his handwriting (and why use a capital “S” for “sweeten”), but I cannot prove it. On 18 April, a “private U.S. aircraft will pick up the Hawk missile parts”. North goes to Teheran. The missiles arrive. On 30 April, Oliver North diary states (but it is difficult to read) that his National Security Council colleague, Captain (soon Rear Admiral) James (or “Jim”) Stark, will go to Stockholm 6-7 May to meet Palme’s assistant, Sweden’s later foreign minister Jan Eliasson: “Going to Sweden next week 6-7 May. Jan Eliasson (for [unreadable]) Palme in Teheran”.

This means that just after the London meeting on 6 May with Amiram Nir and Ghorbanifar, when North received the promise that all hostages should be released (Hamilton and Inouye, 1987, pp. 229-231), North’s covert action staffer Jim Stark would go to Stockholm to meet Jan Eliasson, Palme’s assistant for the Iran-Iraq talks. Eliasson had not been Palme’s first choice. He was linked to the Americans and had been appointed on the recommendation of the Center-Right Government’s State Secretary for Foreign Affairs Leif Leifland, because Palme’s preferred choice, Ambassador Rolf Ekéus had “not been available” (he had just been given an international position), according to Leifland, quoted from a source close to Ekéus. Eliasson had worked for Leifland at the Swedish Embassy in Washington. He was close to Leifland, and considered to be an “American”, but Palme might have preferred “to have the Americans onboard” in the Iran-Iraq negotiations instead of having them attack him from outside, the source said.

In October 1983, CIA Director William Casey arrived in Stockholm in his own airplane (according to Peter Schweizer’s book Victory). He met an official from the Ministry of Defense, had lunch with some military officers, and met someone from the Prime Minister’s Office, who also arranged a short telephone conversation with Prime Minister Olof Palme. I spoke with Ulf Larsson, Palme’s State Secretary, and asked him who, at the Prime Minister’s Office, could have had contact with CIA Director Casey. Larsson said immediately: “Eliasson [and then after a second]. He was the only one who had these kinds of contacts”. When Ola Frithofson asked Eliasson in an e-mail about his October 1983-meeting with Casey, Eliasson wrote that he could not remember it, but he is likely to have remembered such a meeting, unless he met with Casey on a regular basis. North’s diary and Schweizer’s book are perhaps relevant for the discussion about the killing of Olof Palme. However, the Americans would always demand “plausible deniability”. They would prefer someone else to conduct such an operation. They would try to use people of other nationalities. They would prefer to let some Swedes do it or to use the South Africans, who had a definite interest in killing him (see above). The South African agent Craig Williamson, who several people have pointed to as responsible for the operation against Olof Palme, said that he also had done jobs for the Americans and the British.

From the radical rightwing journal Contra. Left: Palme-forbidden territory. Right: Olof Palme closing his eyes for “the Soviet submarines” in the Swedish archipelago (The journal Contra, January 1985).

The Borgnäs Documentaries

Commander Hans von Hofsten told Swedish TV in 1985 that in early 1980s, there were Soviet submarine intrusions almost every day. He believed in an upcoming Soviet attack against Sweden. He initiated the so-called “Naval officers’ revolt”. These officers believed that Olof Palme was selling out Sweden to the Soviets. Hans von Hofsten wrote two articles in January 1986: “Do the Swedes know this?” and “The Soviet Republic of Sweden” in Dagens Nyheter. Von Hofsten wrote that Chief of Navy Bengt Schuback had reviewed his articles before they went to print, and General Sven-Olov Olson was enthusiastic when he met von Hofsten afterwards (von Hofsten 1993). Hans von Hofsten confirmed his talks with rightwing police officers at a restaurant in the Old Town. They had discussed the removal of Prime Minister Palme. But they “had not brought up any specific methods for killing” him, his superior, Commodore Cay Holmberg, said on Swedish TV in one of Lars Borgnäs documentaries. Palme’s State Secretary Ulf Larsson told Borgnäs that he and Olof Palme had been briefed about these meetings in the Old Town in 1985: “There were about 25 people present. I noted that they had made Hitler salute,” Larsson said. The group was led by police inspector Stellan Åkerbring. One of them, Carl-Gustav Östling, had been a suspect of the Palme Inquiry, but he was removed from the Inquiry by the Swedish Security Service Deputy P-G. Näss, first time already in 1986.

After a British military historian, Professor John Erickson, had falsely claimed on Swedish TV (12 January 1986) that Palme had released a Soviet submarine after talks with Moscow, Östling became furious. Palme was “selling out Sweden to the Soviets”, he said (Borgnäs, 2011). Palme is a “traitor”, he argued. However, the released submarines were not Soviet submarines. It was not Palme but Chief of Defence Staff Vice Admiral Bror Stefenson who had given several orders for releasing them. According to British Navy Minister Keith Speed, it was the British Chief of Defence Staff or the Flag Officer Submarines that had spoken with his opposite number in Sweden – in other words with Sweden’s former Commander Submarines, now Chief of Defense Staff Admiral Stefenson. Stefenson was the Swedish liaison to the British. He was the officer that was briefed on the upcoming British submarine intrusions in Swedish waters. And in the mid-1990s, when he was Chief of Staff to the King, I spoke with him about the military ties to the U.S. He then underlined that the Navy ties to the British were equally important. During the October 1982 events, at least one submarine passing out during Stefenson’s ceasefires was almost certainly a British submarine, and Olof Palme knew nothing about it. But this is something that also Östling was unaware of.

Carl-Gustav Östling’s “Försvarsskytteförening” or “Stockholm Combat Shooting Club”, had been used to test security at the Defense Staff similar to the operations conducted by U.S. Special Forces from 1985. They attacked U.S. naval bases worldwide to test their security (see the “Red Cell” initiated by Admiral “Ace” Lyons after a telephone conversation with CIA Director Bill Casey). Östling’s military colleagues, a Special Force officer Lieutenant X and his friend, dressed up in police uniforms, and penetrated the security all the way up to the office of the Swedish Chief of Defense, as a test of Defense Staff security, while Östling and his police colleague P.O. Karlsson waited outside. Members of the club acted as a “B-force” or “enemy force” targeting your own people to give the Swedes “more realistic training”. And this was definitely not a “private initiative” and probably not a regular Swedish initiative. It was almost certainly a U.S. or British initiative. This was the same type of force that the U.S. had used all over the globe to “test the security” on their own bases, and CIA-linked “parallel Stay Behinds” had acted in a similar way in Italy, according to documents from an Italian court case (Salvini 2001). The combat shooting club of police and military officers was very likely a cover for a Swedish “parallel Stay Behind network” linked to the U.S.

Preparations for a Stay-Behind network started in the UK already during the war, and the wartime resistance leader in Norway and post-war Defence Minister Jens Christian Hauge, started the buildup of Stay Behinds in Norway from 1946 by recruiting from his wartime resistance network with exile headquarter in London. From early 1950s, they buildup separate networks for 1) exfiltration of key personnel, for 2) sabotage, for 3) espionage and for 4) communication. They were trained by the British and later also by the Americans. In Sweden, Prime Minister Tage Erlander’s Chief of Intelligence Thede Palm was approached by an American contact in 1946, who proposed the establishment of a Stay Behind network in Sweden. Palm was in contact with the Chief of Defence Staff Carl August Ehrensvärd, who appointed Anders Grafström to establish the network. He was a former Sveaborg commander for the Swedish volunteers on the Finnish-German front against the Soviet Union after 1941. While the Norwegian Stay Behinds started recruiting people from the anti-fascist resistance movement against the Nazi occupation, the Swedish Stay Behinds started by recruiting from the only networks with wartime experience, the volunteers from Finnish/German front, from Nazi-connected Sveaborg and German Waffen SS.

In addition, the leader of Sveaborg, “the old Nazi [Otto] Hallberg”, to quote Erlander, had initiated his own “parallel Stay Behind” by recruiting volunteers from the Sturmabteilung Sveaborg and Waffen-SS, which led to his arrest. But also Grafström recruited from the same group of volunteers, and he contacted Hallberg’s collaborator and Director of ASEA, Ragnar Liljeblad, who kept contacts with the U.S. Embassy from 1948-49. While the Swedish Security Service arrested Hallberg, Sweden’s Chief of Defence Staff Lieutenant General Richard Åkerman (1951-57), gave Hallberg his support and said: “It is good there are people that thinks in this way, so just continue” (Mats Deland, 2007). Erlander recruited the Director of the Thule insurance company, later Skandia, to become the chief of Stay Behinds above Grafström and Thede Palm. Prime Minister Erlander’s idea was to have a network with a popular base, and they started to recruit people from the trade unions and also from the industry. At the time, later CIA Director William Colby (1973-76 succeeding Schlesinger) was CIA’s Chief of Station in Stockholm or rather Scandinavia Chief of Office of Policy Coordination (OPC) 1951-53. He wrote in his Honorable Men (1978) that he had, when necessary, created a parallel network of resistance fighters in the Nordic countries. And he actually used exactly the same words ten years later when I visited him in his home in Georgetown in Washington in early November 1989.

In Honorable Men, Colby writes that “the situation in each Scandinavian country was different […] in one set of countries, the governments themselves would built their own stay-behind nets, counting on activating them from exile to carry out the struggle. These nets had to be coordinated with NATO’s plans. […] But in both cases, whether the CIA worked with or without local cooperation, we would have to operate with the utmost secrecy.” Colby writes that some work was done “without the knowledge of the governments”. This involved building “stay-behinds networks in those countries in which the local government would not, or felt it could not, collaborate even secretly with the American CIA. And some of it involved the building of independent ‘assets’ within those countries in which the governments build the nets jointly with us, as back-up capabilities in case the original operations were exposed and eliminated just when they were needed, or the governments in power at the time of the invasion decided that collaboration was the better part of valor, accepted the occupation, and betrayed the net.” Accordingly, Colby built parallel networks that the governments were unaware of and he developed specific ties to single individuals like the then Swedish Social Democratic Party Secretary Sven Aspling, he writes.

In the 1970s and 1980s, there had been such a parallel network under U.S. command in Norway, I was told by a couple of retired intelligence officers. One of them had been run by such a U.S. net, and he told that this very secret network was a backup, because the Stay Behind network under the Norwegian Intelligence Service might very well be exposed. There was definitely such a parallel network in Norway, and there were almost certainly such networks at the time also in Sweden. The regular Stay Behinds in Norway and apparently also in Sweden were later coordinated by the British (see above). In late 1970s, the British had received sensitive information including the codes to activate the Norwegian networks, which had created a controversy in Norway. Several section leaders had opposed this decision (Høiland & Bjaaland, 2024). Were the Stay Behinds under national control or under British control? they asked. The Scandinavian Peninsula was largely British responsibility. Europe was divided between U.S. and British responsibility. That was what LeWinter had said in a BBC interview in 1992, but it was also what former Deputy Director of the CIA Bobby Inman had told me about the Baltic Sea in my talk with him in 2021. The Baltic Sea was primarily British responsibility, and British Special Forces training with local Scandinavian Stay Behinds were either dropped from small aircraft or landed along the Norwegian and Swedish coasts from British Porpoise and Oberon class submarines.

However, the parallel Stay Behinds mentioned by Colby were run by the Americans and the above mentioned networks with Östling et.al. were apparently also run by the Americans. Six months after the Palme-murder, Åkerbring and Östling, as central figures in this network of police and military officers or “parallel Stay Behinds”, had been brought by a police car by a third police officer, to the U.S. Embassy. The latter officer told the Palme Prosecutor that the two others had been speaking about the killing of Olof Palme in an arrogant way. They said that “they knew who had killed Palme and that the killer will never be revealed” (according to a now, declassified police document). The source was worried that the two others would “take him out”. The political views in the group were “brown to dark blue” and Östling was the worst of them all, he said.

Defense Minister Thage G. Peterson and Foreign Minister Sten Andersson, who both were close to Palme, told Borgnäs on Swedish TV that people inside the military and inside the Security Service (SÄK) had targeted Prime Minister Palme. The former Deputy Director of SÄK and Chief of Counterintelligence Olof Frånstedt said in a video interview with the author Anders Jallai that SÄK considered Prime Minister Palme to be a possible traitor, a Soviet “agent of influence”. This is what his opposite number in the CIA, James Jesus Angleton, and his opposite number in MI6 Peter McKay had told him in the early 1970s. Angleton had been close to CIA Director Allan Dulles and had carried his urn at Dulles’ funeral. And Angleton had recruited fascists in Italy like the fascist naval Special Force Commander Junio Valerio Borghese, who was the commander for the Italian coup attempt in 1970. Angleton was an extreme right-winger, and he was very paranoid. In 1974, Colby had, as the Director of the CIA, fired Angleton as his Chief of Counterintelligence.

Frånstedt’s Director of SÄK, P. G. Vinge, had been forced to leave his position, because he had said that he did not trust Prime Minister Palme, because he might reveal things to the Soviets. Frånstedt said that he couldn’t write down anything in the Palme files, because we had “a serious traitor” at SÄK. “It was Melker Berntler. He went up to Palme”. He was leaking secret information to the Prime Minister. In early 1970s, when the military junta ruled Greece, Olof Palme’s Government supported their Social Democratic colleagues in Greek resistance, while SÄK bugged these resistance activists in Sweden and copied their phone lists for the Greek Junta or rather they were sent to Greece via Germany, Berntler told me. The same was the case with refugees from the apartheid regime in South Africa and from coup regimes in Chile and Argentina. SÄK reported to the CIA on these political refugees in Sweden, and the CIA forwarded all this information to these regimes in Latin-America and South Africa that could arrest or execute their contacts. There was certainly “two Sweden”, as James Schlesinger had said (Tunander 1999).

Frånstedt argued, however, that the many observations of men with walkie-talkies at Sveavägen and around Palme on the night of the killing would very likely have been from an armed anti-socialist group in Stockholm that he called the “Barbro Group”. This group was supposed to act in case of a socialist takeover, and it belonged to a communication network inside the larger Stay Behind network. The group operated regularly with walkie-talkies to surveil political radicals and drug traffickers, but this was also done as a form of training and the latter seems to primarily have been a cover for its real purpose: to act as Stay Behinds in case of an occupation. Frånstedt, as Swedish Chief of Counterespionage, was asked to make a security check of members of this group. The Swedish Chief of the Stay Behinds Alvar Lindencrona had earlier asked Frånstedt to do such security checks, and the Barbro Group apparently belonged to the regular Swedish Stay Behinds under Lindencrona. Barbro Sagnell, the leader of the group, was supposedly “suspicious against everything that smells Social Democracy, Socialism or Communism”. She told Frånstedt that some people that the Security Service had tried to monitor may have belonged to her group. She had been working for Swedish signal intelligence agency FRA, and for the voluntary radio organisation FRO (Frivilliga Radio Organisationen). Her group was specialized in using communication equipment to surveil targets, and they were illegally tapping telephones. According to Frånstedt, it is very likely that the Stay Behind operation center was located in a cavern at the end of Tunnelgatan, meters from where Olof Palme was shot. This was also where the South African intelligence asset had his computer firm, which the MI6 agent Howard Brooks had spoken about (see Part I). And Barbro Sagnell had also been a director for the same company. South African agents working with MI6 may have been working directly with the Swedish Stay Behinds or with MI6 as their lianson.

In conversations with a Danish general and a Norwegian admiral in the 1990s, they told me that they had been shocked by what they had learned from their Swedish counterparts in the 1980s. These two senior officers said that they could easily imagine that Swedish officers had been behind the killing of Prime Minister Palme. The language used by Swedish admirals against the Prime Minister would have been impossible in Norway. You had to respect your political leaders, the Norwegian admiral said. Compared to Norway, Sweden is more class divided with an aristocracy that includes parts off the officers corps. But the Swedish society was not just divided, as Schlesinger had said, a coup d’état was also part of Swedish military tradition. During the World War II, Chief of Defence Staff General Axel Rappe tried to recruit officers for a military coup, later Chief of Navy Admiral Stig H:son Ericson wrote in his memoars (Knopar på logglinan, 1966). Rappe wanted the Swedish Army to fight the Soviet Union on the Finnish-German Front and senior Swedish officers wanted to collaborate with the Nazis against the Soviet Union. Rappe even imagined that the Swedish Army would be able to conquer an important piece of Soviet territory.

In 1980s, as described above, Alf Enerström and Gio Petré had orchestrated a media campaign with regular advertisements against Prime Minister Palme in major newspapers on behalf of Swedish industrialists and bankers (Wallenberg and Thunholm; see the Review Commission on the Police investigation on the murder of Olof Palme, 1999). Enerström told Borgnäs and Swedish TV that he, as a most public critic of Olof Palme, received senior military officers preparing for a coup d’état. They wanted to have Enerström as a minister in the upcoming coup government. According to Enerström, they said: “We have 500 men. 250 will take over the Prime Minister’s Office and 250 will take the Radio and TV.” Enerström was sceptical to the credibility of the plan, but these senior officers had said that “not a single officer or a single police will support Palme”. And this was despite that the leftwing government just had received a majority in the parliamentary election in September 1985. Prime Minister Palme and the Social Democrats had received 45 % of the votes backed by the Leftwing Party with 5 %, while the Conservatives received 21 %, the Liberals 14 %, and the Center Party 12 %.

Enerström wrote for the journal Contra (running the “black propaganda”). It was edited by C.G. Holm, who later came to work for Per-Gunnar Vinge. Contra distributed a picture of Olof Palme’s face inside circles to be used for target practice. However, Enerström did not believe in a military coup d’état. He wanted to neutralise and remove Palme by the use of “a tax fraud case” linked to a lecture that Olof Palme had given at Harvard University, something Palme hadn’t notified the tax authorities about. However, five hours before the killing of Olof Palme in the evening on 28 February 1986, his appeal to higher court in this legal case had been illegally erased from the computers. This must have been done by someone with physical access to the computers. The Palme case is very complex. Already five hours before the killing, Enerström’s option for taking out Olof Palme as a prime minister seemed to have been cancelled. Palme would accordingly be shot.

Document of the police interrogation with Chief Superintendent Jan Värnhall about the Palme Murder 7 January 1991 and about Värnhall's own "anti-coup plan" that he destroyed immediate after the killing.

The Lindquist Document and Lieutenant X

Linquist’s 92-page document about what had happened in the night of the killing explains the role of a coup exercise, a military exercise, involving quite a few people in Central Stockholm at the very night of the killing. The Palme Inquiry was interested in Lieutenant X and his colleagues. He was a Special Force officer from Karlsborg. He belonged to a group that was supposed to be running assassinations in connection with a coup d’etat or a military occupation and he was training others in covert assassinations. This force was used to target your own people as the “B-force” described above, and it was X and his fellow military officer using the police uniforms of their colleagues, Östling and Karlsson, who had penetrated the Defence Staff up to the office of the Chief of Defence (see above). Some officers in this team had been trained by the British, and they had established “SAS-groups” (Special Anti-Sabotage groups) that also could be used to target your own people during exercises or to target your own forces or military bases as the U.S. Navy Red Cell had done in the 1980s. What was of interest to the latest Palme Inquiry was Lieutenant X and his Special Force colleagues from Karlsborg had been flying in from an exercise on the island of Gotland to Stockholm at noon on 28 February 1986. But already the day before, there seams to have been a meeting preparing an operation the coming day. And according to his early list of travel expenses, he went by car from Stockholm to Karlsborg, where he arrived late at night. The testimonies from the individuals in the group after arriving at the Stockholm airport were contradictory.

The interest of the Palme Inquiry was how this Special Force group that included trained assassins would link up to the Stay Behinds in Stockholm that would be responsible for reconnaissance and for surveilling the “target” before he was taken out. A document written by the Swedish Security Service (SÄK) Special Analysis Group concluded already in April 1986 that there had been surveillance of Prime Minister Palme, and there had been at least four people, and witnesses seeing people with walking-talkies indicate that it actually was a larger group. The Palme Inquiry is also interested in a Special Force officer that supposedly had left an exercise in North Sweden at the time of the murder. The hypothesis of the Inquiry was that these Special Force officers would have linked up to Stay Behinds in Stockholm similar to how British Special Force officers on Porpoise and Oberon class submarines landed on the Swedish coast for having exercises with local Swedish Stay Behinds. The trained Swedish assassins would turn up for an exercise in Stockholm linking up to the local Swedish Stay Behinds presupposing a scenario with a Soviet occupation of Stockholm. The Palme Inquiry had from 2016 access to a prosecutor document and a tape recording with one participant speaking about a Special Forces group from Karlsborg coming in for an exercise in Stockholm and the document continues:

“[According to] the scenario, Stockholm and [its surroundings] Mälardalen have been occupied by a foreign power [read the Soviets], and the resistance forces are acting from outside [Stockholm]. The task of one group is to go to Stockholm, set up a base and then localize and eliminate [assassinate] individuals who are important carriers of information, so the occupying power won’t be able to get its hands on them. [Still classified name] argues that these groups functions as a kind of military Stay Behind groups.”

Special force groups had been flying in from Gotland and Norrland (North Sweden) for the anti-coup exercise in Stockholm on 28 February 1986, and for the Palme Inquiry this was of significance, because the important carrier of information might have been Prime Minister Olof Palme himself. One witness said that X had had the same kind of ammunition that had been used against Olof Palme. The Stay Behinds were so secret that only a couple of people at the Defence Ministry knew about them, I was told by an assistant to the defence minister, and the group that acted inside the Stay Behinds to actually carry out the killing would have been much smaller.

The Police Superintendent Jan Värnhall had been responsible for the security at the Prime Minister’s Office. He had drafted an anti-coup plan that included a scenario presupposing the killing of the Prime Minister. However, immediately after the killing of Prime Minister Palme, Jan Värnhall destroyed his own plan, he said. He was interrogated, because the Palme Inquiry had been tipped off about his role. Most of the interrogation with Värnhall is still classified. The case was removed from the investigation by Security Service Deputy and Chief of Operations P-G Näss. It seems that some people had used a Swedish anti-coup exercises or anti-coup plan to carry out a real coup. This is actually the way the “De Lorenzo coup” was carried out in Italy in 1964 and the Greek military coup was carried out in 1967. One used the anti-coup plans of “Piano Solo” and the “Prometheus Plan” respectively (Ferraresi 1996). The Italian plan had supposedly been initiated at the order of the then CIA Station Chief in Italy (the former Station Chief in Sweden), and later Director of the CIA, Bill Colby.

A Swedish former intelligence and Stay Behind operative Donald Forsberg explained in 2015 why there were so many observations of people with walkie-talkies in this very area [at Sveavägen and the surrounding streets both north and south of the cinema, also where Olof Palme was shot] that night. He said that this is something that very few people know:

“Here I know something that very few people know about. There was a group in this country that was tasked with conducting sabotage against the foreign power entering the country and the city. This group trained in peacetime in the city to carry out its tasks. Either they trained against fictional objects, or they trained against identifiable objects.”

This group had also been surveilling drug traffic in Stockholm, and it was the same “Barbro Group” that was mentioned by Frånstedt above. According to Forsberg, who himself had been working with the Stay Behinds, the FRO together with the FRA (the signal intelligence agency) “would in case of a war or if Sweden had been occupied by a foreign power be included in, what was called, the Stay Behinds and they would be a form of resistance movement”. According to Forsberg, they had exercises in central Stockholm using walkie-talkies. Forsberg told the Palme Inquiry that he had seen two of these people at around 18.00 on the night when Olof Palme was shot. They did not know each other privately and they had clearly participated in an exercise. Like the Chief of Counterespionage, Olof Frånstedt, Forsberg said that they had used the underground cavern or tunnel system in Stockholm. Also Olof Palme’s State Secretary Ulf Dahlsten said that he had been informed about a group of 6-10 people using walkie-talkies around Sveavägen-Tunnelgatan that supposedly was surveilling drug traffickers, which we now know had been the cover activity for these Stay Behinds.

In other words, this is all about a Stay Behind exercise, and most of the participants in the exercise would have believed that this was nothing but regular training. Olof Palme may also have believed that he was part of an exercise training for an emergency situation. However, there are some questions we have to answer. Why didn’t Olof and Lisbeth Palme walk towards the nearby subway station on Sveavägen north of the cinema? Why didn’t Olof Palme have bodyguards this very night? Why did the shooter apparently wait for Olof Palme at the subway station south of the cinema? Why did a couple of witnesses believe that Olof Palme was talking with the third person, just before this person shot him? Was Palme supposed to meet someone at this very place? Was this part of an exercise that kept Palme under surveillance? Was the exercise the reason for not giving Palme bodyguards that night? Who did he talk with just before this event?

The Social Democrat that had been the liaison to the CIA’s Chief of Station William Colby during the Swedish buildup of the Stay Behinds in the early 1950s, was the then Party Secretary Sven Aspling. Aspling was a friend to the Palme family, and he was, according to Aspling, the last person to speak with Olof Palme on telephone just before Olof and Lisbeth went to the cinema at 20.35, and shortly after Olof had had a telephone call around 20.00 with the then Party Secretary Bo Toresson. But after Olof Palme was shot, nothing of this was possible to speak about.

On Klarabergsgatan (crossing Sveavägen and parallel to Tunnelgatan), a couple of minutes after the killing, a group of three men were running towards a parked sports car. They were passing two witnesses at a distance of 1.5 meters, while one of the three men shouted in Swedish: “He shouldn’t have shot him. He shouldn’t have shot him”. This man obviously believed that something went seriously wrong and that it rather should have been a simulated killing, but it seems more likely that a group or individuals inside the exercise or attached to the exercise was tasked to carry out the real killing – similar to what happened in London in 2005, when the security forces held an anti-terrorist exercise at three subway stations, and suddenly Peter Power, who was responsible for the exercise, realised that the simulated attacks had become real; real bombs went off simultaneously at exactly these three subway stations, where the exercise was supposed to take place. There was a live attack with many people killed hidden inside the exercise.

It seems very likely that the killing of Olof Palme used a similar concept and perhaps the “parallel Stay Behinds” were infiltrated into the regular ones, or perhaps they had used a Swedish Special Force assassin linked up to the regular Stay Behinds or they had used a South African assassin that was tapped into the Swedish Stay Behinds, while letting him disappear into the Stay Behind safe house, the computer firm of the South African intelligence asset. While the secrecy surrounding the Stay Behinds made it impossible to even speak about it.

The latest Palme Inquiry tried to analyse this event, but the members of the Inquiry were not able to prove their case. They did not get access to many secret documents. The Palme Inquiry had been told that the Swedish Security Service (SÄK) had large files on Prime Minister Palme in their archive, but when they visited SÄK in 2019 and asked for “their Palme files”, SÄK told that they had “disappeared”. That they might “have been burnt”, they told. Jonas Englund from the Palme Inquiry wrote a now partly declassified document telling that the Inquiry did not get access to or were not able to declassify documents from SÄK, and the Military Intelligence Service had not been willing to release documents. One has to ask oneself: what right does these services have to deny the Government Inquiry the access to secret information about the murder of the Prime Minister. They apparently did not consider Olof Palme their prime minister, but perhaps more important: one cannot declassify documents that involves a “friendly foreign power”. The fact that the Government investigation into the killing of the Prime Minister did not get access to secret information about this killing imply an involvement of the Americans and the British, and the guardians of this secrecy were the part of the Swedish state that was “plugged into” the Anglo-American system. This secret world was run by what we usually would call the “Deep State”. It also turned out that the Palme Inquiry document written by Jonas Englund had largely used my material about a U.S. divide between the “Political and the Military Sweden”, the U.S. worry about a “Swedenization” of Europe and about a nuclear weapons-free zone, about use of submarines for psychological operations, and the fact that the Palme Government would deny the U.S. Air Force the use of Swedish airbases in an early phase of a war. Much of the investigation of the Palme Inquiry before it was closed down in 2020 was dealing with the fact that a small assassination team may have used a Stay Behind as a cover for the killing. This is the conclusion of the Lindqvist document (https://www.jblindqvist.se/palmemordet-ovningsscenariot/) and this seems all be consistent with what is stated in the ACC/SOPS documentents and other documents discussed above.

Prime Minister Olof Palme 28 September 1984 (Photo: Source: Ministry of the Presidency. Government of Spain).

I have done some corrections and re-writing of this article in January-February 2026 for the 40-year anniversary of the Palme murder on 28 February 2026.

Background

On 28 February 1986 at 23:21, Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme was shot dead in central Stockholm after having been to the cinema with his wife. He was shot at a distance of 20 cm through the trachea, the aorta, and the spinal cord, and the ammunition used was capable of penetrating bulletproof vests. This looks like a professional operation. Several witnesses saw the killer, but he disappeared immediately and was never found. The police investigation began to follow a Kurdish lead that led nowhere. The police then suspected a man who was violent alcoholic. The Review Commission of the Olof Palme Inquiry in the 1990s found that the police investigation from the beginning had been “unprofessional”. Subsequent inquiries did not lead anywhere, despite many detailed claims in the media about the suspects and their agencies. The Palme Inquiry was closed down in 2020 after the prosecutor had pointed to a deceased man, a bureaucrat and designer, who supposedly happened to leave his job at Skandia insurance company in this very minute late at night with a gun in his hand, with bullets able to penetrate bulletproof vests, and he happened to meet the Prime Minister and his wife at this very place. Not many people believed this claim, not even the investigators themselves, who had actually been looking deeply into the involvement of Swedish Stay Behind networks, South African security agents and Western intelligence services. The problem has not been a lack of information but rather the huge amount of largely credible evidence pointing in different directions. This would also indicate a professional operation.

In September 1985, the Swedish Social Democrats with their leader Olof Palme won the elections despite an enormous media campaign against him. Some media had accused him of being mentally ill as well as pro-Russian. His “Common Security” project had brought together leading figures from Western countries, the Soviet Union, and the Third World. His proposal for a nuclear weapons free zone made the Americans and the British furious. His dialogue with the Soviets led the U.S. and the British services to accuse him of being “a Soviet agent of influence”. He had supported Vietnam’s fight for independence in 1960s and 1970s, the ANC’s struggle for freedom in South Africa and he had supported the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, while the U.S. was mining their harbors. Swedish right-wingers described Palme as a traitor, and they argued that his welfare state was too expensive. Money should instead go to the defense of Sweden against a Soviet aggression, they said.

From early 1980s, Sweden experienced intrusions on an almost “daily basis” of what was believed to be “Soviet submarines” deep into Swedish archipelagoes and naval bases. The Swedish Navy used depth charges and mines against the submarines. In three years, the number of Swedes considering the Soviet Union as unfriendly, or a direct threat increased from 25-30 % to 83 %. Sweden became a different country.

Still, Olof Palme received almost 50 percent of the votes in the general elections in autumn 1985. Mass media described his peace initiatives as “appeasement policy” with dangerous consequences. When he was shot in February 1986, my first reaction was: “They finally did it”. It was certainly no surprise. He had been prime minister for more than 11 years (1969-76 and 1982-86). The political climate was tense – he was unacceptable to both the Americans and the British. When a friend of mine, Ola Frithiofson, went with Olof Palme to Heathrow (London) in 1981, airport security stopped Olof Palme, the only passenger to be stopped, opened his luggage and put up all his private belongings on the table for everyone to see. It was obviously done to bully him.

This article is not an investigation into the murder case, but rather an attempt to look into a couple of documents that might be of use to understand the killing of Prime Minister Palme. There are now declassified documents from the Police Inquiry, partly declassified U.S. and UK documents, there are private documents and leaked documents linked to people from the intelligence services. I will start by looking at the ACC/SOPS document presented by a former CIA officer for Editorial writer Olle Alsén at Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter in the early 1990s. The Allied Clandestine Committee (ACC) dealt with the Stay Behinds that were initiated in all West-European countries after World War II as armed resistance groups to be activated in case of a Soviet occupation. From the 1960s, some Stay Behinds were also used in the domestic struggle against the Socialists or Communists. Special Operation Forces were training with the Stay Behinds and were coordinated by the Special Operations Planning Staff (SOPS). At the ACC/SOPS meetings, there was also a NATO ITAC (Intelligence Tactical Assessment Center) representative from the CIA, who is said to have leaked this document. Some people have dismissed it without a deeper analysis. I am not able to verify it, but my intention here is to try to have a serious look at it rather than brushing it aside or dismissing it.

The ACC/SOPS document

I do not know if the attached ACC/SOPS document is authentic or not. But it is at least possible to have a sincere discussion of it. It is classified as “Cosmic Top Secret”, which is a NATO top secret classification. It originates from ITAC office NATO. It is supposedly from 7 January 1986. It starts with a few concluding points about Norway from the previous page. The documents states:

“N-13. Ingebri[g]tsen to publish series in Aftenposten stressing necessity of naval build-up in Norwegian Sea between Lofoten and Jan Mayen to intersect access of Sov. Northen Fleet, i.e. Typhons based on Kola into Atlantic.

N-14. Willoch will use Ingebri[gtsens] script to compromise Norse Social Dem[ocrats]. All delegates felt it imperative they be denied power since Brun[d]tland party against Lehman plan and likely pro-Sov[iet].

N-15. Norse contact with Hofsten and his group has been established by Bull-Hansen staff to warm campaign for Sweden to join NATO and destab[ilizing] Swedish polit[ical] scene. Funds from Pargesa AS needed (re: Thunholm).

Sweden

Invited participants: [senior Swedish intelligence officer] Adm[ira]l C Algernon on behalf of [Commander-in-Chief] Gen[eral Lennart] Ljung. Discussion centered on condition resulting from further demilit[arization] of Finnmark, which makes northern Sweden crucial for tracking traffic of Kola stationed SSBNs. Monitoring Gremikha activity given top priority. FRG delegate feels that entire Northen Flank in danger due to SPMs [Swedish Prime Minister’s] intent to seek NFZ [Nuclear Free Zone] in Scandinavia. UK delegate sees SPM trip to Moscow SP-86 [Spring 1986 or actually early April 1986] as posing greatest danger to NATO CTMT [Containment] policy if as reported by INTELCENT [Intelligence Centre.] SPM to discuss NATO exit of Norway and Denmark. Belg. (Chair) proposes increased intelligence activity re: SPM staff to ascertain reliability of INTELCEN[T] report. Danish rep. confirms increased activity in SD [Social Democratic] party vs. NATO. Norse rep. intends to supply SOPS names of leading Oslo anti-NATO activists. Chair reiterated seriousness of item under discussion. All reps [representatives] agree. Swedish rep[resentative] stated position of Ljung and key Stockholm friends that SOPS consider SPM internal Swedish problem to be handled by Swedish interests. SOPS agrees so long as threat to Northern Flank is dealt with successfully. Stockholm rep[resentative] to keep SOPS current via Oslo. ITAC introduced report from Tel Aviv re SPM activity in India for Bofors, which was confirmed by Paris. Deal offered India by Bofors reported to include Lg Quan [Large Quantities] WG 235 [Weapons-Grade Uranium 235]. ITAC requested by Chair to obtain confirmation. Näss [Swedish Security Service deputy and liaison to Western security services P-G Näss] to attend next session to report re [Swedish naval bases of] Muskö and Karlskrona incl. renewed effort by SPM to deny NATO sub-fleet access to both by 1986.

Summary and conclusions

S-01: CN [Commander North?] to present SOPS with feasibility study latest 4/86 re elsurv [el-int surveyance] station to monitor Gremikha from Kebnekajse area.

S-02: SOPS to coordinate threat reduction plan re SPM Moscow trip.

S-03: NATO exit plans in Norway and Denmark must be foiled BAMN [by all means necessary].

S-04 Poss[ible] SHPMT [shipment] of WG 235 must be interdicted or contaminated.”

See original below:

This document was originally sent to journalist Olle Alsén by fax. The receiver was his colleague Göran Beckérus, also at Dagens Nyheter. His name can be seen at the top of the page. Another version of the document has a handwritten text stating in Swedish: 
“Tillhör Olle A”, which means “Belongs to [journalist] Olle A[lsén]”.

Originally, many people said that this document could not be authentic, because one could not imagine that Sweden had a representative in a NATO committee (ACC). However, Wolbert Smidt (former director of operative intelligence in the BND) had participated as a German representative in both the ACC (Allied Clandestine Committee) and the CPC (Clandestine Planning Committee). Both committees dealt with Stay Behinds and clandestine operations. The major difference between these committees was that the “neutrals” participated in the ACC, not in CPC, he said in a panel at an intelligence conference in Oslo, 28 April – 1 May 2005. Of course, there were other differences, but the fact that the “neutrals” (incl. Sweden) participated in the ACC meetings was most significant.

ACC would deal with Stay Behinds and training for the Stay Behinds, also in Sweden with infiltration and exfiltration of Special Forces from submarine or from small airplane (such airplanes were in mid-1970s mistaken for being used in drug smuggling and the responsible British staffs may, because of that, have put more emphasis in using submarines for landing Special Forces). The Stay Behinds in Scandinavia (Sweden, Norway and probably Denmark) was British responsibility using Royal Navy Porpoise and Oberon class submarines (see below). One captain of an Oberon class submarine told me that he was just a “taxi driver” for the Special Forces (SBS or Special Boat Service) both along the Norwegian coast and in the Baltic along the Swedish coast. In private talks with Smidt at the conference in Oslo and later at his home in Berlin, he told me that the CPC was “more interesting” to him, because SACEUR (Supreme Allied Commander Europe) himself was chairing the meetings, while the ACC had a rotating chairmanship. Smidt also said that the submarines used for infiltration & exfiltration of Special Forces into Sweden and Norway, were not the same submarines that had shown periscopes or even sails in Swedish archipelagoes and naval bases. The submarines operating for the ACC/SOPS (with Special Forces training with the Stay Behinds) never appeared on the surface, he said. That was at least his understanding The submarines that revealed themselves were other submarines (see below). In addition, Ingemar Engman, close assistant to Swedish Defence Minister Sven Andersson (1957-73) and later Assistant Secretary of Defense for Defense Material and responsible for classified accounts at the Swedish Defence Ministry (incl. accounts for Stay Behinds), also pointed to Swedish participation in such a NATO committee. He brought it up with Ambassador Rolf Ekéus, for his official Swedish Submarine Inquiry in 2001 and his Cold War Inquiry 2002-03, but Ekéus had then no other source confirming this claim, and he never brought it up in the reports (I was civilian expert to the Submarine Inquiry for half a year 2000-01).

Not many people knew about SOPS (NATO Special Operations Planning Staff). It was certainly involved in these operations because Special Operations Forces were used in contacting and training with local Stay Behinds. That Western submarine operations in Swedish waters – at the naval bases of Muskö and Karlskrona – were discussed in an ACC/SOPS document is logical. Swedish participation in this committee, in ACC is a fact and ACC had to coordinate with SOPS (as ACC/SOPS), but this was very sensitive. The committee was obviously worried about Palme bringing up the use of Western submarines in Swedish waters in the upcoming meeting in April with Gorbachev in Moscow.

Oswald LeWinter (who forwarded the document to Dagens Nyheter journalist Olle Alsén in Sweden) was certainly from the CIA. Alsén had received the contact through the BBC journalist Allan Francovich, who had interviewed LeWinter for his 1992 BBC documentary on the European Stay Behinds. The film was called “Operation Gladio” after the Italian Stay Behinds. They had been used in domestic killings in the 1960s and 1970s to create chaos to justify emergency measures and fascist coup attempts. LeWinter had also discussed the British and U.S. division of labor with the former having primary responsibility for Stay Behinds in Scandinavia and the Low countries, while the latter being largely responsible for Germany and Southern Europe like Italy. After the war, the Stay Behinds in Germany and Italy had organised the remaining Nazi and Fascist forces in these countries, and they had been directly involved in terrorist actions by planting bombs in public places. However, we now know that LeWinter did not bring the involvement of Israeli agents in these terrorist attacks. We know that in the 1970s, there were several Israeli agents that contributed to the terrorist bombings in Italy (see Part IV). We also know that Oswald LeWinter claimed to have had close ties to CIA’s Chief of Counter-Intelligence James Jesus Angleton, who had been working intimately with Israeli intelligence and who had been given a memorial stone in Jerusalem (see Part IV). We can imagine that LeWinter had covered-up a possible Israeli involvement in the killing of Olof Palme as he had done in the 1992 BBC documentary. He could also had covered-up the direct role of the CIA and the MI6. However, it is clear that several things in the ACC/SOPS document would not have been possible to obtain without special access. LeWinter claims that ITAC was linked to ACC, and that ITAC had a CIA representative at the meetings including LeWinter himself in late 1970s to early 1980s. He had participated in the ACC/SOPS meetings, but he had left this position in early 1980s. He might have received the document from one of his successors.

Alsén presented LeWinter to Ingemar Engman. He was “genuine”, Engman told. LeWinter’s description of the Swedish participants, their behavior, was correct. His description of Lieutenant General Sven-Olof Olson (former Commander Southern Military District and later Chief of Air Force) was to the point. LeWinter had clearly experienced meetings with him and others. LeWinter was not a “fake”, although he might have left out the Israeli angel, and some of his information might have been false leads. For example, he might have been forced to present false information to discredit his earlier statements. LeWinter has been described as “an agent of disinformation”, but this is also a usual way to discredit a source. In addition, others have received the same document from other sources. Daniele Ganser and Mats Deland argued in Journal for Intelligence, Propaganda and Security Studies (2010) that there were two other sources to this document: “both with secret services background”. We cannot exclude that this ACC/SOPS document is authentic. One has to analyze each statement or each particular document to find out what might be true or not.

I spoke with former Chief of the Norwegian Military Intelligence Service, Rear Admiral Jan Ingebrigtsen (1979-85), who was mentioned in this document. I used to see him at conferences and seminars, and I visited him in his home in Oslo where I showed him the document. His reaction to it was: “It should not come into the hands of a journalist”. He thought that the document was authentic. He had written these articles mentioned in the document, he knew Algernon from such meetings, and several other things were apparently correct. In 1986, Jan Ingebrigtsen had recently left the Norwegian Intelligence Service (NIS) and the claim in the document that Prime Minister Kåre Willoch was willing to use “Ingebrigtsen script”, his articles in Aftenposten, appeared credible to him. Kåre Willoch did not trust the Labor Party, when it came to a nuclear weapons-free zone and when it came to the U.S. maritime strategy, and Kåre Willoch would have used texts by Ingebrigtsen as background information for the Norwegian debate. I used to meet Kåre Willoch regularly, but he argued that when it came to sensitive matters, he usually did not want to know about it.

I also spoke with a friend of mine and successor of Ingebrigtsen, the Chief of Norwegian Military Intelligence Major General Alf Roar Berg (1988-93). He said that he didn’t know whether the document was authentic or not. He did not exclude that this ACC/SOPS document was a genuine document. Nothing in the style of the document had surprised him. He was called around 01.00 AM in the night about the murder of Olof Palme. He was at the time heading the Analysis Section of the Intelligence Service (1986-88 and before that he had had the relevant position in the Defence Ministry, 1984-85). On a later occasion, he also mentioned that there was a system for taking out people, people who did not follow the rules, for example, if they were speaking out about classified matters. One example from a third source seemed to indicate that one might have used assassins from other countries to carry out these kinds of tasks, because in general it is more difficult to carry out such operations against one’s own people. Ingebrigtsen said he usually did not participate in these ACC meetings himself. He sent his subordinate, his director for this section (the head of the Stay Behinds) to these meetings.

I had some talks with a couple of former chiefs of Stay Behinds but not about Olof Palme. I met one of these officers, Roar Haugen, at conferences, receptions and dinners, and I actually had a lunch with him when I intended to show him the above ACC/SOPS document, but he did not tell the truth about the use of British Oberon class submarines to land Special Forces in Norway, and there was no point to bring up this document with him. Afterwards, I thought it might have been a mistake., because he would have been the Norwegian representative at the meeting. The other chief of Stay Behinds Finn Horvei had kept close ties to the British. He knew about their use of Oberon class submarines along the Norwegian coast. He had had close ties with John Venning, the MI6 Chief of Station in Oslo. MI6 had convinced him to use a criminal to make a break-in into Norwegian military weapons storages to steal weapons for the Irish IRA, perhaps to be able to track the route for the transfer of weapons to the IRA and/or to be able to discredit the IRA for stealing Norwegian weapons. Horvei’s chief, the director of NIS, Alf Roar Berg told me that he had heard rumors about the use of the criminal Espen Lie to steal Norwegian weapons, but Horvei had then denied everything. When it was revealed in the media in 1991, Berg had to replace him (he became a teacher at the Defence College). This was already published in Norwegian newspapers at the time.

I met Venning’s successor at cafés and parties, and I had him for dinner at home once, after the Belgium former Socialist Party Foreign Minister Willy Claes had been appointed NATO Secretary General. Claes had been President for the European Socialists; he refused to participate in the 1991 Gulf War; and he sought a diplomatic solution to the Bosnia War. My MI6 friend told me that Claes was unacceptable from a British point of view, but the British couldn´t veto him. They had already “used up their veto”, he said. Some weeks later, the “Augusta Affair” blew up in the face of Willy Claes. As a Belgium minister, he had been involved in buying Augusta helicopters from Italy, which had included some bribes, which forced Claes to leave his position as NATO Secretary General. The leak about the bribes would most likely have been planted by the British. The problem with Olof Palme seems to have been that he wasn’t corrupt enough. In this case, in the case of Willy Claes, corruption appears as a “life insurance”, and the bribes to Claes may have saved his life.

I also spoke with General Fredrik Bull-Hansen, who had been predecessor to Ingebrigtsen as Chief of Norwegian Intelligence Service (1977-79). In 1986, he was Norway´s Chief of Defence (the top general in 1984-87), and he is mentioned in the ACC/SOPS document in connection with Hans von Hofsten, who was a harsh critic of Olof Palme and who had organized the Swedish “Naval officers’ revolt” against Olof Palme in collaboration with the Swedish journalist and later Press Secretary to Prime Minister Carl Bildt, Lars Christiansson. It is not far-fetched that von Hofsten had tried to get some contacts in Norway at the Defence Staff. Bull-Hansen’s first reaction was that the document was not authentic. The document, however, does not state that von Hofsten had been in contact with Bull-Hansen himself, but rather with someone in the Defence Staff, and Bull-Hansen admitted that his subordinates not always had told him the truth. He brought up one example:

In 1978, when he was chief of the Norwegian Intelligence Service, the Oslo Police had entered a villa of the owner of a shipping company, Hans Otto Meyer, in Skøyen, Oslo (almost next door to where I live). In the basement behind an armoured door, there was a large weapons storage, and the spectacular news was brought up in the media. The Chief of Intelligence, Fredrik Bull-Hansen turned to his Chief of Stay Behinds Sven Ollestad, who denied that Meyer was working for him, and the Defence Minister Rolf Hansen immediately informed the Parliament that the weapons storage had nothing to do with the Norwegian Defence Forces (Høiland & Bjaaland, Volume II, 2025). But a day or two later, Bull-Hansen’s Chief of HUMINT (espionage), Trond Johansen, approached Bull-Hansen and showed a photo of Sven Ollestad and Hans Otto Meyer, Bull-Hansen told me. Meyer had certainly been working for the Stay Behinds and Ollestad had to admit that he had provided him false information.

Bull-Hansen was most likely sincere in his comment, and he was probably not aware of von Hofsten’s activities. He told me at a reception that after the Cold War, one had to start from scratch and to be more open about what had happened these years. Someone else, who participated in our conversation, became worried and tipped off another intelligence officer about what Bull-Hansen had said. I don’t think that Bull-Hansen was trying to hide the information about von Hofsten. Bull-Hansen also told me about a secret MI6 office at the NATO Northern Command in Oslo at Kolsås (inside the mountain of Kolsås). He said that this office had been running irregular activities. In 1986, he had turned to the British Commander-in-Chief (General Geoffrey Howlett) at Kolsås and demanded that he stopped this irregular MI6 activity. According to Bull-Hansen, this MI6 office was then closed down.

This is interesting. A MI6 agent in Stockholm, Mac Falkirk, claimed that MI6 had been running him from MI6’s office, the “Office of Policy Studies” at Kolsås (not from the MI6-office in Stockholm). At first, I was skeptical about the existence of this office. I had never heard about it, and I thought this was a weak point in his story, but Bull-Hansen confirmed its existence and that they were running irregular operations. Falkirk had first told the Dagens Nyheter journalist Cecilia Steen-Johnsson, whom he had known for perhaps 20 years, and she put him in contact with Olle Alsén (according to Alsén’s documents and the Review Commission of the Palme Inquiry). Christer Larsson at Swedish Radio researched the case in cooperation with Alsén and Göran Beckérus at Dagens Nyheter. Larsson wrote a relatively detailed report on their research in 1992. Falkirk’s female source at the Prime Minister’s Office had in October 1985 succeeded in bringing him the secret agenda for Olof Palme’s upcoming Moscow meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev in early April 1986. Falkirk had copied the agenda in “their shop” at Drottninggatan (close to the Prime Minister’s Office). The agenda had several points, but one point supposedly stated that they were going to discuss the security of the Nordic region and if possibly Norway and Denmark could leave NATO, according to Steen-Johnsson. Larsson also writes about another MI6 agent who seemingly confirms the shop at Drottninggatan and that they had copied the agenda.

Furthermore, Alsén received a top secret document from October 1985 that LeWinter had handed over to him. It was sent from the U.S. Embassy in Stockholm to U.S. Secretary of State, Director of Central Intelligence and Director of NSA. It states: “SUBJ[ECT] NATO NORTHERN FLANK - SWEDISH PM [Prime Minister] AGENDA”. It states that “CONTACT IN PMS OFFICE HAS PROVIDED THIS [CIA] STA[TION] WITH FACS[IMILE] OF PROPOSED AGENDA FOR PMS MOSCOW TRIP FIRST QUARTER 86. NORWAY AND DENMARK SEEKING SOV[VIET] REACT[ION] TO POSSIBLE WITHDRAWAL FROM NATO.”

To many scholars at the time, this statement about Norway and Denmark possibly leaving NATO seemed less credible, but the British were actually alarmed and several British documents from Foreign Office and from Defence from late 1970s and early 1980s (see below) expressed an extreme worry about the Scandinavian development and the information in this October 1985 document is identical to the information given by Falkirk, and it also corresponds to what is stated by the ACC/SOPS document above and by the document below.

Shortly afterwards, Falkirk was informed that the document had been used by the CIA Station Chief in Stockholm to discredit Palme before senior Swedish naval officers at a U.S. Embassy reception (the naval officers might have been then Chief of Navy Vice Admiral Bengt Schuback and his predecessor Vice Admiral Per Rudberg). Steen-Johnsson knew people who had been informed about it at the Swedish Navy’s Lucia festivities on 13 December. Rumors had spread to the Naval Officers’ Club in Stockholm. One had considered Palme a traitor. “He should be shot”, some people said. Falkirk had gotten bad feelings about the whole thing. He believed that he in some way had been used in the attempt to target Palme. A week after the murder, Falkirk had had a lunch with Sven O. Andersson (Sweden’s Chief of Psychological Defence) and with former Defence Minister and Foreign Minister Sven Andersson at a China restaurant at Odengatan (at Odenplan; see Olle Alsén’s notes “The Falkirk document”). Sven O. Andersson supposedly had said: “if the Swedish people will get to know the truth about the murder of Olof Palme, Sweden will not be the same in hundred years”. Sven Andersson died the following year, and Sven O Andersson died the year after (When writing this, I am sitting in the apartment below Sven O Andersson’s apartment that he had before he died). Later, Falkirk told the Swedish Review Commission that he just made up the story, but that would have been an agent’s obvious response to any official commission and the existence of the secret MI6 office at Kolsås was not something he made up, and the Stockholm MI6 office as well as the document from the CIA Station in Stockholm seems to have confirmed the statement from Falkirk. Palme’s agenda for the Moscow meeting, which would bring up Norway and Denmark in NATO coincides with one of the most important points in the ACC/SOPS document above and it is explicit in another ACC/SOPS document below. Falkirk seemingly confirms these documents.

Rear Admiral Carl-Fredrik Algernon is mentioned in the January ACC/SOPS document as the Swedish representative to the meeting. Admiral Ingebrigtsen knew Algernon. He had met him as a most senior intelligence officer several times, and he told me a story when they met at the Kastrup airport in Copenhagen. Algernon was at the time heading the National Swedish War Materials Inspectorate (1981-87) dealing with clearances for Swedish export of defense material. As a former senior intelligence officer, he could easily have been the Swedish representative at ACC meetings. This seems credible, and it was obviously credible to Ingebrigtsen. Algernon, however, fell in front of a subway train a year later in January 1987 and died. He had been planning his holiday that would take place shortly afterwards. Algernon’s man, former Deputy Chief of Defence Staff Intelligence, Björn Eklind, said: if he had wanted to commit suicide, he would have used his service weapon and definitely not throw himself in front of a train. He considered the official claim of a suicide as nonsense.

Norwegian Finnmark at the border to the Soviet Union, was not “demilitarized”, as stated in the ACC/SOPS document, but Norway had not deployed a strong military force in this county. The real Norwegian defense line was further west, because of topography. The Americans and the British would definitely speak about Finnmark as “demilitarized”. In a speech at a Harvard-U.S. Navy Conference on Iceland in 1987, Jacob Børresen, Military Assistant to Norway’s Defense Minister Johan Jørgen Holst, mentioned Norway’s policy for Finnmark. U.S. Navy Admiral Paul Butcher leaned over to the Dean of Naval War College Robert Wood: “Did you hear what he said”, Butcher whispered to Wood (Robert Wood told me in 1989). They went to a hotel room with Sweden’s later Prime Minister Carl Bildt and drafted a U.S. note of protest against Norway, which confirms that they were unhappy about what the ACC/SOPS document called a “demilitarized Finnmark” (What Carl Bildt did in this hotel room as “a U.S. representative” is not clear to me). In addition, the Americans would most likely want to have a Swedish backup for Norway’s signal intelligence base at Vadsø in Finnmark to “monitor Gremikha activity” (the new naval base on Kola Peninsula east of Murmansk) and other activities. This is very likely, but I don’t know the details. However, I was told in late 1980s by Algernon’s man, Björn Eklind, that the Swedes did follow Soviet activities on Kola from somewhere in the north of Sweden.

Many explicit claims in this ACC/SOPS-document are credible and possible to verify, and it is a fact that the Swedish banker Lars-Erik Thunholm, who is mentioned in the document, participated in a campaign against Prime Minister Palme to “destabilize Swedish political scene”. Thunholm was the Chairman of the Board of the Wallenberg bank Skandinaviska Enskilda Banken (SEB) 1976-84, which show the significant role of leading Swedish industrialists. An earlier document from the ACC/SOPS meeting 15 December speaks about the role of Swedish industrialists. LeWinter’s reading from this document was tape-recorded by Olle Alsén.

ACC/SOPS document (page 2 of 9) obtained by Patrik Baab for his and Harkavy’s book Im Spinnennetz der Geheimdienste: Warum wurden Olof Palme, Uwe Barschel und William Colby ermordert? (Frankfurt: Westend, 2017), p. 368.

The German journalist Patrik Baab was able to get hold of a copy of this document for his book on the killing of Olof Palme, et.al. Baab’s source was not LeWinter or anyone connected to him. His document was from a very different source, but it is the same document, the same wording. Olle Alsén’s transcript has a few language mistakes (incl. the name of “Kashoggi”), and it includes additional half a page that brings up SPM’s (Olof Palme’s) financial support for the Mandela group in South Africa and for pro-Moscow elements in Angola and Namibia as well as commercial activities indicating transfer of weapons-grade uranium to India and weapons to Iran. The document states that SOPS will send two people, including the ITAC representative, to the Yggdrasil meeting to be held in Wiltshire west of London, in the first quarter of 1986. The attendees are Swedish bankers and industrialists. “Host P [Erik Penser, Bofors], P.G. [Pehr G. Gyllenhammar, Volvo], C.N. [Curt Nicolin, ASEA later ABB], Göran E. [Göran Ennerfelt for Antonia Ax:son Johnsson (shipping)], Mats L [Mats Lundberg] for C.U.V. [Claes-Ulrik Winberg, Bofors], P.W. [Peter Wallenberg (SAAB and Enskilda Banken)], P.S. [?] and the general. Top item on the agenda will be rept. [report] on Näss [Swedish Security Service deputy and liaison to Western security services P-G. Näss] Beirut activity w. [with] respect to SPM [Olof Palme]” (Yggdrasil AB was a Penser company in control of Bofors arms manufacturer).

The ACC/SOPS document from December 1985 states: “Chair is reminded by US rep that joint US-UK effort has resulted in obtaining copy of secret SPM [Swedish Prime Minister] agenda for Moscow mtg [meeting] in spring 86 [1986] from contact on staff SPM. Agenda confirms presumptions made earlier this year (ref: MS/7851Ø) by UK rep Re: Threat to NATO Northern Flank. Current status of above makes it imperative that ‘Operation Tree [Palm Tree]’ be carried out successfully. SOPS has been assured that arm’s length will be maintained to insure deniability. Project management is local [organized in Sweden], technicians [assassins or executors] imported. SOPS requires details to be kept fully compartmented on need to know basis. Dutch [representative, ACC/SOPS] feels it necessary to reiterate that the connection between SOPS and Yggdrasil group is completely informal and not officially acknowledged or sanctioned by member governments.” The document speaks about the role of Swedish industrialists incl. Wallenberg, the role of P-G Näss, the UK and U.S. obtaining a copy of the SPM agenda for the Moscow meeting with Gorbachev, the “threat to the Northern Flank”, the uranium to India and that the Swedish Palm “Tree” has to fall. Everything is in line with the January 1986 document but also with the claims about the secret agenda made by Mac Falkirk of MI6 and by the CIA Station document.

Another former MI6 agent, Howard Brooks, was interviewed by journalist Pelle Neroth. Brooks said that his English guy, his MI6 handler in Stockholm, had told him two nights before the killing of Olof Palme: “Something is going to happen very soon, and it is going to change this country forever”. After the killing, he did not want to speak about it. But he told Brooks that the CIA Chief of Station in Stockholm had called him in the night, hours after the killing and exclaimed: “For God’s sake. It wasn’t us. It wasn’t us”, which he thought was “highly amusing”. What Brooks also wondered about was that his MI6 handler, weeks before the murder, had told him that he knew a South African [intelligence guy], who had a computer firm at very end of Tunnelgatan (at the stairs up to David Bagares gate), where Brooks could exhibit his paintings. He did not accept his handler’s proposal. But afterwards he realized that this was where the killer might have disappeared, and this was an obvious safe house, which would have been connected to a larger cavern inside the mountain with the command centre for the Stay Behinds (see below). This was not more than a hundred meters from the place of the killing. His MI6 handler had a network of South Africans in Stockholm, and this was the reason for why Brooks thought that the South Africans were involved. His MI6 guy had also had frequent contact with a Swedish criminal called “Bombmannen”, Lars Tingström, who hated Olof Palme and who had become famous for bombings in Stockholm in early 1980s. But Brooks did not believe in a direct British role. The impression you get, however, is that some people in MI6 were very much onboard. Afterwards, Brooks informed the Swedish Security Service, but they didn’t act on his information.

The Swedish Secretary General for Civil Defence Karl-Gunnar Bäck was a couple of days after the murder informed by a third British MI6 agent, who claimed to have specific knowledge about the people that were organising the killing og Olof Palme. He spoke about a group of Swedish businessmen that were in contact with the South African Security Service and some individual Swedish police officers with links to the Swedish Security Service. This information apparently confirms information from the ACC/SOPS documents and the claims of Brooks above. Bäck tape-records his information and handed it in to the Security Service, where everything disappeared.

According to Olle Alsén and Dagens Nyheter, Lars-Erik Thunholm and the Wallenbergs largely financed Alf Enerström’s and Gio Petré’s media campaign with regular advertisements in major newspapers against Prime Minister Palme (see below). Petré had been living with Enerström for 27 years before she married Thunholm. The fact that Wallenberg group financed this campaign was also confirmed by the Review Commission on the murder of Olof Palme. The involvement of Swedish industrialists and finance is also supported by a statement by Olof Palme’s Minister of Industry and former State Secretary Thage G. Peterson. He wrote about his conversation with a Chief Executive Officer and former Chairman of the Swedish Industrialist Society, Nils Landqvist. He said that among his colleagues, there had been rumours that Olof Palme was “going to be shot”, and the day after he was shot, this kind of people were drinking champaign at the famous restaurant Operakällaren in central Stockholm. The industrialist Hans Werthén told Thage G. Peterson that it was a campaign against Olof Palme. Another claim about the involvement of London-based Swedish industrialists came from a daughter in law to the famous Swedish industrialist and billionaire Hans Rausing. She wrote to the journalist Gunnar Wall that she knew the person who was involved in the killing of Olof Palme and she wrote the name, but she died shortly afterwards, and her family has denied the journalist to reveal the information in the mail and they will apparently sue him if he does.

The January ACC/SOPS document about the Norwegian scene states in N-14: “Willoch will use Ingebri[gtsens] script to compromise Norse Social Dem[ocrat]s. All delegates felt it imperative they be denied power since Brun[d]tland party against Lehman plan and likely pro-Sov[iet].”

This must be read in context. The “Lehman plan” or the U.S. Maritime Strategy would escalate any US-Soviet conflict on the Central Front or in the Middle East to Northern Norway. Instead of a nuclear “vertical escalation” on, for example, the Central Front, U.S. Secretary of the Navy John Lehman, had succeeded to change U.S. strategy to pursue “horizontal escalation”, to move the U.S.-Soviet conflict to the area where the Soviet Union was most vulnerable, to the Kola Peninsula, including attacking the strategic submarines (the SSBNs) based at Murmansk and Gremikha. This would immediately move the conflict to the Northern Norway, which would not be in Norway’s interest. The Social Democrats with the head of the Parliamentary Foreign Affairs Committee and later Foreign Minister Knud Frydenlund was critical to the “Lehman plan”, and he sent his close advisor Sverre Jervell to Harvard to find out what the U.S. Navy and the CIA were up to, because he did not trust what the Americans told Norwegian military officers. The Norwegian Social Democrats did not want to provoke the Soviets; they wanted to have a dialogue with them, but they were not “pro-Soviet”, as stated in the ACC/SOPS document. However, the more rightwing circles in the U.S. and the UK would definitely consider this approach “pro-Soviet” in line with the statement: “Either you are with us, or against us”. In other words, this claim in the document is quite plausible.

I always thought that the least credible claim in the January 1986 document was its worry about a Nordic Nuclear-Weapons-Free Zone (NFZ). Such a “peace policy” would never have been accepted by the Nordic NATO elites. The whole thing was exaggerated, and the exit of Norway and Denmark from NATO would not happen. Claims that “the entire Northern Flank [was] in danger due to SPMs [Swedish Prime Minister’s] intend to seek NWZ [Nuclear-Weapons-Free Zone] in Scandinavia” were not serious. A discussion about a Nuclear-Weapons-Free Zone had supposedly been mentioned in Olof Palme’s secret agenda for the meeting with Gorbachev in April and this had infuriated Swedish naval representatives. The ACC/SOPS document’s statement, “NATO exit plan in Norway and Denmark must be foiled BAMN [By All Means Necessary]”, seemed pretty far-fetched to me in the 1990s. Mac Falkirk claimed that Social Democrats close to the Danish leftwing Minister of Social Affairs, Ritt Bjerregaard and close to Norway’s Labor Party Leader Reiulf Steen wanted a nuclear weapons free zone, but the security elite in these countries would never accept such a proposal. At the time, I thought that this was the weakest point of the document. It made it less credible. I told that to the Dagens Nyheter journalists Olle Alsén and Göran Beckérus in the 1990s.

However, after reading a number of documents from the British Foreign Office from late 1970s and early 1980s that journalist Pelle Neroth found at the British National Archives, I had to change my mind. The British worry about a Nordic Zone was real. To state that Olof Palme’s trip to Moscow would pose a great danger to NATO’s Northern Flank appears stupid to put it mildly, but the British and U.S. side believed in the necessity of confrontation. They were genuinely worried about the anti-nuclear campaign in Norway, Denmark, and Sweden, which was clearly expressed in the British documents. The British wanted the campaign to be foiled “by all means necessary”. In his 1981 New Years speech, Norway’s Prime Minister, Odvar Nordli, spoke about a Nuclear-Weapons-Free Zone. The US Secretary of State Alexander Haig “hit the roof”, Bernt Bull, Assistant to Foreign Minister Frydenlund told me. The Norwegians were on a “slippery slope”, one British Foreign Office document claimed. One had to speak harshly with the Norwegians, and the Swedes were even worse. Nordli left office a month later. While the Labor Party Chairman, Reiulf Steen, also spoke about a Nuclear-Weapons-Free Zone, the British supported Vice Chairman Gro Harlem Brundtland, who was married to International Affairs scholar Arne Olav Brundtland, was considered more pragmatic. I knew Arne Olav well. He was in favor of a détente policy, but he certainly favored a strong NATO. Nordli and Steen had to leave months later and were replaced by Gro Harlem Brundtland.

The January ACC/SOPS document concludes that some “responsible Swedish officers” will take care of SPM (Olof Palme), to handle the “threat to the Northern Flank”. This is logical, and the alternative would be to let foreign forces take care of “SPM”, which would have constituted a foreign attack on the State of Sweden. It is obvious that the Swedish military representative preferred to handle “SPM” as “an internal Swedish problem”, as stated in the document, and the ACC/SOPS-meeting apparently supported this as “long as the threat to the Northern Flank is dealt with successfully”. The main responsibility for the operation against “SPM” was delegated to Sweden although one may have planned to use a foreign assassin.

The claim that Olof Palme had tried to stop Western subs “access to” Swedish naval bases is also almost certainly true, and it is very likely that he would discuss this issue in Moscow. At the time, he had been briefed by several individuals telling him that the intruding subs were not Soviet vessels as his former defense and foreign minister Sven Andersson had told him. They were from the West. From Autumn 1983, he received credible information stating that the submarines were from the West. They had been used by the U.S. and the UK to make the Swedes believe in an imminent Soviet threat in order to “disarm” the anti-nuclear weapons campaign and to disrupt Prime Minister Olof Palme’s dialogue with the Soviet Union. Sven Andersson’s deputy, his State Secretary for Defense, Karl Frithiofson, had a meeting with Olof Palme 2 December 1983 after having been informed about the Western submarines the day before at a meeting with Sweden’s top military commanders. These Western submarines acting as Soviet subs were at least partly directed against Prime Minister Palme himself. His intention to bring it up with Gorbachev in early April 1986 would have been enough of a reason to eliminate him.

The January ACC/SOPS document states: “Näss to attend next session”. Per-Göran or P-G. Näss was the Deputy and Chief of Operations for the Swedish Security Service (SÄK or SÄPO), and Swedish liaison to the Western services. Together with another senior security service representative, Christer Ekberg, he had been to Beirut in an attempt to “recruit a suitable assassin”, Alsén writes. The upcoming report from Näss was also brought up in the ACC/SOPS document from December 1985. This report was supposed to be a major issue in the upcoming Yggdrasil meeting outside London.

Alsén and two other Swedish journalists (Göran Beckérus and Christer Larsson) tried to test LeWinter’s credibility by asking him to come up with information on two Swedish generals (former Chief of Intelligence Major General Bengt Wallroth and Major General Ragnar Persson), which he did, and he presented some details of their carriers although Wallroth’s “CV” contained more information. But another Swedish journalist claimed that LeWinter had spoken with him and asked about the two generals, which made the others suspicious. However, the claim from the latter journalist did not make sense, because he had no special access, and the documents presented by LeWinter gave some details of the careers of the two Swedish generals. This information seems to have been genuine, but the three journalists (or at least Beckérus and Larsson) were still worried, because they could not confirm this information. Some people tried to disconfirm the document by claiming that one of the generals, Ragnar Persson, had not been a Swedish general at all, but that was not true. He was, and we also have to think about the hidden agenda among the people who tried to discredit such information.

Finally, the January ACC/SOPS document’s statement of Olof Palme’s offer about “Lg Quan WG 235” (Large Quantities of Weapons Grade Uranium 235) to India to finalize the Bofors artillery deal in 1985-86 is also controversial. The documents states: “ITAC introduced report from Tel-Aviv re SPM [Olof Palme’s] activity in India for Bofors which was confirmed by Paris. Deal offered India by Bofors reported to include Lg Quan WG 235 [Large quantities of weapon-grade uranium 235].” Paris would know something about it, because the French company that tried to sell its artillery, had already concluded a deal with India, they believed, and they had offered huge bribes. They understood that something was seriously wrong with the Swedish offer, and the Israelis may possibly have known because of a leak in Sweden. The December 1985 document also states that “UK rep offered confirmation of Swedish shipment of WG 235 to New Delhi. SIS [MI6] rept. states shipment made via FRG (Kiel).”

Several people have rejected the claim that Sweden had offered “Weapons Grade Uranium” as totally implausible. However, a very competent person at the Defence Ministry in Stockholm told me that Olof Palme had demanded, and succeeded, in reducing the bribes for the Indian purchase of the Bofors artillery, lowering them from 17 % to 7 %. The Swedish–Indian several billion-dollar contract was important. It was a huge sum at the time, and some people supposedly lost a large amount of money (some British players were supposedly left out), because of Olof Palme’s intervention. The French had offered enormous amounts of bribes. The question we have to ask us is the following: what did the Swedes or rather Olof Palme offer instead? Palme had been directly involved in the Swedish nuclear weapons program in the 1950-60s. The program had been closed down or rather “put on ice” in mid-1960s, and of course one can imagine that he, in the mid-1980s wanted to get rid of it. This would have been an offer Rajiv Gandhi could not resist. I asked responsible people on the Indian side. At a dinner I also asked the “father” of the Indian nuclear weapons program. He said that this, if true, would have been something between Olof Palme and Rajiv Gandhi. He had not purchased the nuclear material, he said. He did not know about its origin, but the timing fits with Indian nuclear program, which really started in late 1980s (After the first test in 1974, it was not until late 1980s that the real production started). If it is true that Palme offered what was left over of the Swedish nuclear weapons program, this would explain several things. A friend of mine, Einar Ansteensen (head of Political Section and the Planning Section in the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs for 15 years) was also a friend of Olof Palme. According to Ansteensen, Palme had told him that he felt a bit schizophrenic, because he was “walking in peace demonstrations during the day while selling weapons at night”. Ansteensen had been the mentor of the Norwegian foreign ministers Knud Frydenlund and Thorvald Stoltenberg. He was stationed in Stockholm in the early 1980s, and I had a lot of talks with him at seminars and at the home of a common friend. It is obvious that Olof Palme thought it was necessary to support Bofors, and that this was part of a Swedish “Realpolitik” that he couldn’t escape.

I do not have any other definite evidence confirming these claims that “Large quantities of weapon-grade uranium” had been part of Olof Palme’s deal with Rajiv Gandhi. But I have the document in the following part of this article, and there are several statements from senior sources that supports this claim. I do not have any clear evidence confirming the statement in the December 1985 document that most senior Swedish industrialists and bankers had been involved in preparing for the killing of Prime Minister Palme, but there are a lot of support in books by leading social democrats pointing to senior bankers and industrialist running a campaign against Olof Palme. Everything else in the documents seems possible to confirm. The fact that Sweden participated in this ACC/SOPS committee is now clear and that Admiral Algernon would have been a Swedish representative in the committee is very likely after the comments made by Admiral Ingebrigtsen. Almost everything in the documents is possible to confirm.

However, one can also imagine that the content of the documents is authentic, while they are still fake. For example, the so-called Killian documents claiming that later President George W. Bush had been able to receive preferential treatment for his military service was presented by CBS 60 minutes in in September 2004 by Dan Rather and his investigating team. The documents confirmed much of what the team already knew, and the documents appeared to be credible, but they turned out to be false. Much of the information in the document confirmed what their sources had told them, but the documents turned out to have been printed with a font that did not exist in the early 1970s, when the young George W Bush was supposed to do his military service. The documentary became a scandal. The investigating team was fired. Dan Rather, the most celebrated journalist in the U.S., had to leave his position shortly afterwards. “The Killian documents” were seemingly a sophisticated instrument to kill a story that most likely was true. Of course, one can imagine that the content and the wording of the 1985-86 ACC/SOPS documents were true, but that they still were manipulated and accordingly false. Although a couple of former chiefs of Western intelligence services did not react to the typography and the style of the documents and not even to the content, there could still be something in the documents that could be proven false. However, it is also very possible that they are real and authentic.

One can see CIA Director Bill Colby (left) arguing in favor of continuing the war in Vietnam at the crucial meeting on 28 April 1975. On President Gerald Ford’s left-hand side is Defense Secretary James Schlesinger and on his right-hand side is State Secretary Henry Kissinger (photo: Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library).

Yesterday, a president was publicly disgraced and thrown out of the White House, because he didn’t understand that “No security guarantees” means “No security guarantees” and he didn’t understand that he is losing on the battlefield. This reminds me of a similar event during the Vietnam War. The CIA was unable to understand that the U.S. was losing on the battlefield. In April 1975, at a White House meeting, President Gerald Ford, State Secretary Henry Kissinger, Defense Secretary James Schlesinger and Director of Central Intelligence Bill Colby discussed the fact that the Vietnamese troops were taking more and more territory. CIA Director Bill Colby was arguing for regrouping the forces, so that the U.S., or the South Vietnamese, would then be able to force the North Vietnamese (as they called them) to retreat. However, Colby was confronted at the meeting by Defense Secretary James Schlesinger, who said: “It’s over Mr. President. It’s over.”

Bill Colby was unhappy with Jim Schlesinger’s conclusion, and wrote a book, Lost Victory: A Firsthand Account of America's Sixteen-Year Involvement in Vietnam, which was finalized in autumn 1989. He argued that victory had been possible. I visited Bill Colby at his home in Georgetown in early November 1989 to discuss Swedish-CIA relations. I showed my new book on US Maritime Strategy, while Bill Colby pushed for his new book: Lost Victory. He left me alone in his living room library and went out to the pharmacy. When he got back, we discussed primarily the current situation in Europe, not Vietnam.

Almost four years later, the Peace Research Institute in Oslo had invited relevant people, including Jim Schlesinger, to a nuclear-weapons conference. In the bar the first night, Jim Schlesinger explained what had happened at that crucial meeting in the White House. Colby had argued in favor of regrouping the forces, but there were actually no high-quality forces left to regroup, Jim Schlesinger said. “We had lost on the battlefield”, and at this April meeting, he confronted Bill Colby and made the important statement: “It’s over Mr. President. It’s over.” Henry Kissinger did not say anything, but after the meeting he went up to Jim Schlesinger, put his arm over his shoulders, and told him about his view. In the bar in Rjukan outside Oslo, Schlesinger continued, while acting as Henry Kissinger, he put his arm over my shoulders, and said: “I totally agree with you, but I don’t think you should have told the President”.

According to Henry Kissinger, to tell the President at this stage would make it too difficult for him to digest the defeat. You had to be more cautious, and this custom of protecting a president or a prime minister from the truth, will easily make him or her live in “bubble”. The president will not be able to understand when the war is over, because you cannot tell him the bad news. He will live in his own “bubble”, as the Europeans and the Ukrainian President do today. They try to get the U.S. onboard to offer “security guarantees” with some U.S. forces in Ukraine, but this will almost by necessity lead to a US-Russian “shooting war”. It will be a “gambling with World War III”, as the U.S. President said yesterday, and that is why the Ukrainian President was thrown out of the White House. He and the Europeans are living in a “bubble”. It is tragic to see what now happens. It will end very badly. “It’s over Mr. President. It’s over”.

Oreshnik missile warheads hitting a Dnipro defence industry plant in Ukraine on 21 November 2024. This missile was not armed with explosives. It hit the target at a speed of 3 km per second (at a temperature of 4000 degrees Celsius). It is a kinetic energy weapon (KEW) possibly comparable to a very small nuclear bomb. It is a precision guided missile that can take out any target in Europe. It will have a significance for Russia to avoid escalation to a nuclear war. 

Western countries argue that Russia attacked Ukraine in an attempt to conquer the country, and “if Putin wins in Ukraine, there is real risk that his aggression will not end there”. He may attack “other countries after Ukraine”, Jens Stoltenberg says. But the leadership in Moscow says that Russia will not be able to defend itself if US forces can operate from Ukrainian territory only 500 km from Moscow. This has nothing to do with Vladimir Putin. Everyone in Moscow, the entire Russian leadership will claim the same thing. They all wanted a neutral Ukraine. That was their only real demand, said Ukraine's chief negotiator David Arakhamia after the Ukraine-Russia talks in March-April 2022. “Everything else was cosmetic”, he said. But when the West did not accept a neutral Ukraine, Moscow demanded a Ukrainian buffer zone under Russian control. However, Russia is unlikely to occupy areas that do not have a Russian or Russian-speaking majority.

Now, both Russia and the Western countries describe “the other side” as an existential threat. Both sides will then sacrifice everything to survive. This means that they must be able to imagine a possible extension of the war to Western Europe. Ultimately, we must expect a possible nuclear war, and Western authorities must explain how they envisage being able to avoid such an escalation and such an expansion of the conflict in the coming years.

There is a lot we do not know, but we can say the following with certainty:

1. In a conventional war of attrition such as the one we are experiencing in Ukraine today; Russia will necessarily prevail because Russia has a many times larger population. At the same time, Ukraine seems to lose more than five soldiers for every lost Russian soldier. The exchange of dead bodies between Ukraine and Russia indicate much larger losses on the Ukraine side. In the recent months, there seems to have been ten Ukrainian dead bodies exchanged for every Russian, and this is also supported by a statement by General Syrsky. “If it continues like this, we will lose the war”, said Ukraine's former Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba in November 2024. Eventually, there will simply be no Ukrainian men left. On the Russian side, it is about the survival of the state. And it does not matter how much weapons the Western countries contribute, because Russia produces more weapons than the Western countries combined. And if the West deploys more advanced weapons, Russia will do the same. The war will end when Ukraine runs out of men

2. If large Western forces do not enter the war, Russia will take more and more territory. Ukraine must then accept the Russian demand for a neutral “residual Ukraine” in order to end the war. The 2015 Minsk Agreement and the Istanbul Agreement of April 2022 had given Ukraine neutrality and territorial integrity, but the US and the UK did not accept these agreements. The fact that the Minsk Agreement had been signed at the UN Security Council, also by the United States and the United Kingdom, was completely ignored. It was an internationally valid agreement. Now, it turns out that Ukraine will never again be able to get such a favorable agreement. Moscow will not trust the words of the West, and in a future negotiation, Russia will never exchange the Russian-controlled four eastern counties for something else, because those who still live there, who have collaborated with the Russians, will almost certainly be liquidated if these counties will be returned to Ukraine, as the collaborators were after the Russian forces left the Kyiv area and Kharkov in 2022.

3. British analysts claim that the only option to turn the war around is to deploy Western ground forces or to launch hundreds of long-range Western missiles (Storm Shadow, ATACMS or SCALP) against bases far into Russia, but these missiles are guided by the Americans and British. According to Russia, it is not Ukraine, but the United States and Great Britain that are attacking Russia. Other countries arming Ukraine will also be responsible for these actions, Putin said. Moscow will then respond to such attacks, not by entering Western countries with ground forces, but by using missiles to take out, for example, British or American bases in Russia’s vicinity (Rygge and Evenes in Norway or bases in Poland, Sweden and Finland). The British attempt to turn the war around will by necessity extend the war to Europe and have direct consequences for countries like Norway.

4. Informally, Russia has said that it will respond by launching inter-continental Avangard missiles, which move at a speed of 6-9 km per second and hit the target at 3 km per second. In Europe, Russia will presumably respond by launching the new intermediate-range ballistic missile, the Oreshnik, which was launched in November against a military industry in the city of Dnipro in Ukraine. Western air defenses have supposedly no ability to take out these missiles, and the kinetic energy released when hitting the target at a speed of 3 km per second is said to be equivalent to a small atomic bomb, but with no radioactivity. In response to Western launch of missiles against Russian bases, Moscow will launch above missiles to knock out US bases in, say, Poland or Norway. Western countries do not yet have this capability, unless they escalate to nuclear war.

5. It is, accordingly, more likely that the Western countries, not Russia, will escalate to a nuclear war. However, if Britain would respond to a Russian Oreshnik attack with use of nuclear weapons, Russia would also go nuclear, and Britain is a small country, and the destruction would be horrible. The United States, on the other hand, cannot do much, because Russia will not go into Europe with ground forces. And if the US were to attack, for example, the Kola bases, Russia would knock out the Norfolk Naval Station outside Washington. The United States will most likely try to avoid such terrible destruction. According to US intelligence, any war game with these assumptions will lead to a general nuclear war. Europe will find that the US nuclear umbrella no longer exists. This will be a crisis for NATO. An escalation to a nuclear war is unlikely to be an advantage for Europe.

6. If Western countries continue to claim that a Russian victory in Ukraine is an existential threat to the West, while Russia says that a Western presence in Ukraine is an existential threat, we will necessarily move towards a nuclear war. Military targets in Europe will be destroyed and American bases in Norway will be knocked out. The Russian perception has been the same since the 1990s. It was clearly expressed by Putin several times from 2008 and has been accepted by the realist school in the West with Henry Kissinger. To avoid a nuclear war, the Western countries must change their attitude and their perception. They must understand that Russia also has security interests and that the only chance for us to survive in the next few years will be to recognize a “common security”, which takes the interests of both sides seriously.

We can think of four scenarios, four possible ends to the war.

A) That the war will end fairly quickly, perhaps after the U.S. and the UK have started firing missiles into Russia and Moscow has started taking out U.S. and British bases in Europe. In such a case, Crimea and the four counties in the southeast (Donetsk, Lugansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia) will become part of Russia, while the “residual Ukraine” will have to accept neutrality and some form of demilitarization (some form of “Finnish solution”). The area around Lviv may be given a special status. This would be the absolute best scenario for Ukraine. Russia will not accept a “Korean solution”: a division between a Western “NATO-Ukraine” and an Eastern “Russian Ukraine”. In this first scenario, a neutral “residual Ukraine” will be able to keep most of its territory, have continued access to the Black Sea, and be given a clear non-Russian-speaking majority.

B) That the war continues as a conventional war. Ukraine will have increasing problems mobilizing ground forces, while the European countries are unlikely to go in with a hundred thousand men, and Europe is unlikely to continue the war when some Russian missiles destroy not only US bases in Europe, but also infrastructure. Russia will take more and more territory and will eventually take the Russian-speaking counties such as Mykolaiv, Odessa, Kharkov and perhaps Dnipro in addition to the counties already taken. But Russia will still demand a neutral “residual Ukraine”. Ukraine will lose its access to the sea and much of its industry and fertile soil. This option almost presupposes a Ukrainian and European capitulation.

C) That the war continues with missile strikes that trigger an attack with nuclear weapons. The Russian conventionally armed Avangard and Oreshnik missiles will perhaps destroy European military bases and partly civilian infrastructure. The British and French may feel compelled to respond with the use of nuclear weapons. Russia will then also respond with nuclear weapons. British and American military structure in Europe will largely be destroyed. Hundreds of thousands of people will be dying. The Russian losses will also be large, while the U.S., like China, will seek to avoid entering the war. There will be a U.S.-European split and NATO may collapse. Military targets and infrastructure, not least in the UK, will be destroyed. Norway will be better off, but it depends on where the wind is coming from.

D) Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has said that the U.S. should not presuppose that it can avoid a war, while Europe is being destroyed. “For Americans, any talk about the Third World War comes down to something that would affect Europe alone, [… but] we have our own doctrine, including the one governing the use of nuclear weapons”, Lavrov said. Russia is unlikely to trust that the U.S. will refrain from attacking Russia. We may have a global nuclear war with terrible destruction. Those who are worried about global warming will immediately experience “a nuclear winter”. It will be the most drastic climate measure ever. No one can say when we will pass the threshold of disaster. To even consider such a nuclear war is an expression of hubris.

We now have a generation of politicians and journalists who only have professional experience from the post-Cold War era. They have experienced the wars in the Balkans, in Afghanistan, in Iraq and in Libya, all of which have led to chaos and destruction. But the Western states still succeeded in defeating the other party: forcing it to adapt. We now have a generation of politicians and journalists who believe that you can force an opponent to accept a Western view and that you can force Russia, a nuclear power, to adapt by using force. This is a generation that suffers from hubris, while at the same time lacking empathy and a sense of realpolitik.

One has to treat Russia and Russian leaders with respect, and this has nothing to do with one’s opinion about Russia, whether one believes that Russia is autocratic or democratic or whether President Vladimir Putin is the single dominating actor or not. What really matters is the Cold War notion that one “must turn away from shooting wars” between the major nuclear powers, to quote President Reagan’s Under Secretary of Defense Fred Iklé. Even the most hawkish members of the Reagan administration understood that such a war might escalate into a nuclear war.

It is incomprehensible that the Western authorities continue the war as they are now doing, and the longer they continue, the more territory Ukraine will lose. According to President Zelensky's former military adviser, Oleksiy Arestovych, 4.5 million Ukrainian men have not registered. They stay in hiding. They do not want to participate in the war. Many are trying to flee. Financial Times writes that 50-70% of the new recruits are lost after a few days at the front. The Economist said in November 2024 that there have been Ukrainian losses of close to 500,000 soldiers, but this is probably a low estimate. Tass argues that the Ukraine losses were 118,500 in 2022, 405,400 in 2023 and 593,410 in 2024, or altogether 1.1 million. The New York Times revealed in 2023 a secret Pentagon document claiming that Ukraine lost close to five men for every Russian, while in November and December 2024 Ukraine lost close to ten men for every Russian (if one looks at the body exchange between the two countries). Associated Press (AP) quotes a Ukrainian soldier in November saying that for every shell Ukraine fires, the Russians fire 50, and much of the killings are because of artillery fire. AP also says that about 100,000-200,000 Ukrainian soldiers have deserted to Russia. According to Newsweek, 1,700 men of 5,800 men in the Ukrainian 155th Mechanized Brigade had fled, many during its training in France in 2024. Eventually, Ukraine will soon have lost more than a million men. Despite this, the West continues the war.

Continuing the war like this cannot possibly be in Ukraine's interest. It would have been better for Ukraine if Norway and other Western countries had thrown all these tens of billions into the sea. Although the elite that now rules Ukraine is dependent on Western support, it is hardly in Ukraine's interest that the country is destroyed, loses territory and allows all the men to be killed. Both Ukraine’s and Russia’s leadership claimed in 2022 that Russia wanted a “neutral Ukraine”, not to conquer the country. Those who said that Russia wanted to conquer Ukraine were an American-British political and media elite. It was the same neoconservative individuals – for example, the Kagan family with Kimberly Kagan and Frederick Kagan at the Institute for the Study of War, the father Donald Kagan and first son Robert Kagan and his wife, the US most central player in Ukraine, Victoria Nuland, and her former boss, Vice President Dick Cheney – who already from 1991 wanted to dissolve the Russian state and who, from the end of the 1990s, pushed for a war in Iraq. But at that time, Norwegians were better at exposing all the lies.

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice announces the nomination of John Bolton as U.S. Ambassador to the UN (Photo State Department, 7 March 2005). Rice was U.S. National Security Advisor 2001-2005 and U.S. Secretary of State 2005-2009. John Bolton was Under Secretary of State 2001-2005, U.S. Ambassador to the UN 2005-2006 and U.S. National Security Advisor 2018-2019.

The pipeline company Nord Stream AG (51 % owned Gazprom, Russia, and 49 % by German and other European energy companies) has brought a €400 million lawsuit against Lloyd’s Insurance Company and Arch Insurance in the High Court of Justice. In the upcoming court case with start in November, the insurance companies seem to claim that the attack on Nord Stream was an act of war, a military attack, carried out by Ukraine in a Russian-Ukraine war. Nord Stream AG, however, argues that the attack was a terrorist attack, which would be covered by the insurance, while an act of war wouldn’t. Both the U.S. and Britain claim that they were not and are not part of any war with Russia. Accordingly, a U.S. or British attack should be considered an act of state terrorism, while a Ukrainian attack could possibly be presented as an act of war launched by Ukraine in the Russia-Ukrainian war. It is possible to have a serious discussion about the credibility of each claim. Let’s bring up a few arguments:

1.      From 1981, President Reagan with Defense Secretary Weinberger, CIA Director Casey and National Security Advisor Dick Allen tried to stop the proposed Soviet-German pipeline. Peter Schweizer writes about the clash between President Reagan and German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt in summer 1982. Schmidt was replaced by Helmut Kohl in October 1982, but Kohl did not stop the pipeline. Allen and the Deputy Advisor Tom Reed said that the CIA actually succeeded to bomb it in 1982, but the Russians and the Germans continued to build it, which created mutual trust between former enemies. The pipeline became the material foundation for a new “European Peace”, the ending the Cold War, similar to how the Coal and Steel Community had created mutual trust between former enemies after World War II. President Gorbachev spoke now about a Common European Home. But this “European Peace” reduced U.S. influence in Europe. Significant U.S. elites with National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft and Defense Secretary Richard Cheney wanted, already around 1990, to stop the European-Russian collaboration. In 2006 in Vilnius, then Vice President Cheney was warning Russia about new pipeline project. Nord Stream was apparently unacceptable. Scowcroft’s protege, former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, told the German TV in 2014 that the Germans had to replace their dependency on Russian gas with U.S. gas. “It is time to do that”, she said. You have to act, and “act as quickly as possible”. From that moment, it was clear that the U.S. was going to cut off the Nord Stream pipeline. They wanted to cut off Russia from Europe. There was no other way to do it. From 2016, the U.S. started to increase LNG production (liquefied natural gas), which could possible replace the Russian gas, and from 2017, German actors started to plan for a LNG terminal in Wilhelmshaven. Rice UN Ambassador and former National Security Advisor John Bolton told Sky News that the demand for cutting off the Nord Stream pipeline was brought up to Trump Administration in 2018 or 2019, and Bolton accused Trump of being unwilling to do it. He said (in early 2022): “We should have cut it off in the Trump Administration [2018-19]. Trump talked about it, but he never actually wanted to do anything about it. That is not untypical unfortunately”. In 2020, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo promised to increase the LNG production and do everything to stop the pipeline. In 2021, U.S. Senator Ron Johnson and the Foreign Relations Committee wanted the U.S. to take “action that will prevent [the pipeline] from ever being operational”. In early 2022, Cheney’s protege and U.S. Under Secretary of State Victoria Nuland as well as President Biden himself promised to eliminate the pipeline and immediately after the attack a few months later, Nuland and Secretary of State Blinken celebrated the successful operation. “It is a tremendous opportunity”, Blinken said. We are “very gratified” to know that Nord Stream 2 is now a “hunk of metal at the bottom of the sea”, to quote Nuland. To cut off Russia from Europe has been a long-term U.S. policy.

2.      Seymour Hersh wrote in February 2023: President Biden himself had taken the decision to destroy the pipelines. Hersh’s sources [supposedly from the CIA] argued that they had recruited a team of U.S. Navy deep-sea divers from Panama City Florida, and that they were going to use the June 2022 BALTOPS exercise at Bornholm as a cover. The divers planted the bombs on the pipelines at the end of the exercise, he argued. The U.S. would then, in September, have used a Poseidon aircraft to drop a sonar buoy sending a coded signal that would trigger timers for the bombs, Hersh said. And true, the U.S. Navy deep-sea divers were based at the U.S. diving center Panama City Florida. One source, a coordinator for the divers at the BALTOPS exercise claimed already a week after the explosions that U.S. Navy deep-sea divers arrived at the end of this exercise and were under water for a long time. There was no need for such divers in a mine clearing exercise like the BALTOPS that only included dives just below the surface. These deep-sea divers were also received by the U.S. admiral. They were not treated as regular divers. The coordinator believed that they had used the advanced MK29 rebreather system from Panama City Florida. Immediately after the exercise, some U.S. Navy aircraft left Ronneby BALTOPS airbase (Sweden) for U.S. Naval Air Station Sigonella (Italy), while others left for U.S. Naval Station Rota (Spain) and went further to U.S. Naval Station Norfolk (outside Washington), while two aircraft left for Panama City Florida. There are clear indications supporting the argument that U.S. Navy deep-sea divers from U.S Navy diving center Panama City participated in the BALTOPS-22 exercise and the only reason for using these deep-sea divers would be to go down to the sea-floor, to the pipelines and possibly to plant bombs on the pipelines.

3.      Several major U.S. Navy ships, among them USS Kearsarge (257 meters), USS Gunstone Hall (190 meters) and the Flagship and Command ship of the 6^th Fleet, USS Mount Whitney (189 meters), participated in the BALTOPS exercise in June 2022 east of Bornholm in the area of the pipelines and the upcoming explosions. U.S. Navy divers could easily have used a midget submarine from the former ships to go down to the pipelines. U.S. Navy divers also used the Norwegian ship KNM Magnus Lagabøte carrying a decompression chamber only necessary for deep-sea diving. There were plenty of opportunities to support these dives. Kearsarge, Gunstone Hall and USS Arlington (208 meters), all with capabilities to bring a midget submarine with divers down to the pipelines, also appeared in the area of the pipelines east of Bornholm around 20-21 September days before the explosions and with their AIS turned off. On 21 September, a Danish rescue vessel went out from Christiansø northeast of Bornholm to check out a couple of ships that did not respond on radio and had their AIS turned off (close to the area of the upcoming explosions). These were Kearsarge, Arlington and Gunstone Hall. Kearsarge left the Baltic Sea on the 22 September, four days before the explosions. There seems to have been a significant U.S. Navy presence with capabilities for deep sea divers over the area of the upcoming explosions both during the BALTOPS exercise and during the very days preceding the explosions. On the day of the explosions, while using AIS signals to masquerade as a Greek container ship, U.S. Navy destroyer USS Paul Ignatius (160 meters) left Gdynia (Poland) to “guard the crime scene” for three weeks until 18 October. In November, a chartered large Norwegian offshore ship Northern Frontier (with a huge crane and a UUV Hugin) appeared at the crime scene, both at the northern and the southern sites of the explosions, while guarded by the American USCGS Hamilton. This seems definitely to have been a U.S. operation.

4.      During the BALTOPS-22 exercise, a U.S. Navy Poseidon maritime patrol aircraft went up from U.S. Naval Air Station Sigonella Italy to the German Naval Air Base Nordholz (Cuxhaven) from where it operated over the Baltic Sea east of Bornholm. During the BALTOPS exercise, also another U.S. Navy Poseidon went on daily basis from Keflavik Iceland to the Baltic Sea east of Bornholm, where it covered the area close to the upcoming explosions. Usually, it was refueled at Ronneby airbase in southern Sweden before returning back to Keflavik over Sweden and Norway. The two Poseidon seem to have operated in tandem. Days before the explosions, a U.S. Poseidon from Sigonella went once again up to Nordholz (Germany). For three nights 22-25 September, it passed back and forth over Bornholm. It would have had plenty of occasions to drop a sonar buoy that would trigger the timers for the bombs. Military aircraft are usually not in the air during the night, and during these nights there were no other aircraft except for a U.S. Navy Seahawk helicopter that patrolled the area outside the Russian naval base of Baltiysk apparently following Russian naval activity. Each night, this Poseidon also patrolled the area between Gotland and Latvia and each time for a couple of hours, which appear to have been a cover operation. If the timers of the bombs had been triggered by sonar buoy shortly before the explosions on 26 September, as Seymour Hersh had said, these buoys would have been dropped by a U.S. Navy Poseidon from Sigonella (Italy), not from a Norwegian Poseidon, as his sources originally had told. But in operations like this, the U.S. always prepares a cover. One tries to involve someone, like Norway, that for example would have (economic) interest in destroying the pipeline and accordingly could be presented as “the usual suspect”, but the training program for new Norwegian Poseidon aircraft had been delayed. They were not yet fully operational. Norway seems to have backed out some weeks or months before the attack was carried out.

5.      On 26 September, at midnight, Central European Summer Time (CEST), a U.S. Navy Poseidon aircraft left Keflavik Iceland for the area of Bornholm. At 02.03 CEST, at the time of the first explosion at Bornholm, this Poseidon passed southwest of Norway. One hour later, at 03.00 CEST, the aircraft reached the position of the explosion. It then went in over Poland, where it was air refueled by a U.S. tanker aircraft, which had left the U.S. Spangdahlem Air Base at the very minute of the explosion. After an hour of refueling, the U.S. Poseidon went in over the southern Baltic Sea again and towards the site of the explosion and at lower altitude. It then turned off its transponder at 05.10 CEST and turned it on again three hours later. It then passed over the site of the explosion at rather low altitude at 09.00 CEST. Minutes afterwards, it climbed to 10,000 meters and returned to Keflavik. No other military aircraft were in the area except for the U.S. Seahawk that patrolled the waters off the Russian naval base of Baltiysk. The U.S. Poseidon covered the area east of Bornholm for hours after the explosion. This operation was planned and prepared for before the first explosion took place, also the refueling for the extended patrol over the area of the explosion was planned beforehand. Different from the pattern during the BALTOPS exercise, this Poseidon avoided Norwegian and Swedish territory. It was refueled not at Ronneby airbase (Sweden) as during the BALTOPS exercise, but over Poland. The Americans were definitely aware of the upcoming explosion and the exact time of the explosions and the possible sensitivity among the Norwegians and the Swedes. The Americans definitely knew, and they did neither inform the Nord Stream company nor the Russians or the Germans. They were, accordingly, involved in the operation. This seems to be definite evidence.

6.      On 6-7 September, three weeks before the explosions, five Ukrainian men and one woman (including three divers) went on a 15 meters’ sailing boat from Rostock Germany, visiting harbors on Rügen (Germany) and Bornholm (Denmark), Christiansø at Bornholm 11-12 September, the Swedish port of Sandhamn on 13-14 September, according to some sources Christiansø once again on 16-18 September and then the city of Kołobrzeg in eastern Poland on 19-20 September, before returning to Rügen on 22 September and to Rostock three days before the explosions. They flew a Ukrainian flag, and the charter fee had been paid by a small Ukrainian company with address in Warsaw Poland. Media claimed that the operation had been ordered by Ukraine Chief of Defence General Valery Zaluzhny. President Zelensky had “initially approved the plan”, The Wall Street Journal writes, but the CIA had asked him “to pull the plug”. Colonel Roman Chervinsky was said to have been responsible for the logistics. A Ukrainian politician Andrei Derkach claimed on Belarus TV that that this “Ukrainian contribution” had actually been initiated by CIA’s top man in Kyiv, Christopher W. Smith, now U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Eastern Europe. The very competent divers had been trained on the South Stream pipeline from the Mangalia Naval Base in Romania. The “Ukrainian operation” was organized as a cover to make it possible for the Americans to blame Ukraine, Derkach said. The CIA would always prepare a cover, and why would a couple of divers in a small sailing boat lacking specialized equipment plant the explosives at the depth of 75-80 meters, when the depth along the pipeline in southern Baltic Sea is mostly 30-60 meters? The pipelines would be much more easily accessible in these areas. In addition, the crew did not try to hide their presence. They seem to have been occupied by visiting various ports. They may have had a role in the operation, but perhaps rather as a cover.

7.      On 27 September, the day after the explosions, the Norwegian-Danish-Polish pipeline, the Baltic Pipe, was inaugurated. The Baltic Pipe came to replace the Nord Stream as the main pipeline for delivering gas to Central Europe. The leaders of Norway, Denmark and Poland had pre-notified their presence at the upcoming inauguration in the Polish city of Szczecin. This was supposed to be a major event. However, five days before this event, Norway’s Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre cancelled his trip to Poland after having been to Washington and having had a one-day guided tour by U.S. Secretary of the Navy Carlos Del Toro at the U.S. Naval Station Norfolk outside Washington. Del Toro must have told him about the upcoming attack on Nord Stream. Obviously, it became impossible for Prime Minister Støre to celebrate the new Baltic Pipe, because in that case, he would also have celebrated the physical destruction of the Nord Stream pipeline, Norway’s main competitor. Perhaps the date, the day before the inauguration of the Baltic Pipe, had been chosen to punish of Norway for backing out from the deal of triggering the explosives. Instead of going to the most important Norwegian inauguration for years, Prime Minister Støre stayed in Oslo looking at some figures for the yearly budget. It is very difficult to explain this if he wasn’t pre-notified about the upcoming explosions. The Polish leadership, however, seems to have been happy letting its pipeline replace the Nord Stream pipeline. On the day of the explosion, the present Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski wrote on his Twitter account over a photo of the massive gas release from the pipeline: “Thank you, USA”. When the German authorities wanted to question a Ukrainian “suspect” in Poland, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said that the initiators of Nord Stream [the Germans] should “apologize and keep quiet”. The air refueling over Poland would also have included Polish pre-knowledge.

Concluding remarks: An important U.S. elite has for years prepared for cutting the Nord Stream pipelines in order to cut off Russia from Europe, which would increase U.S. influence in Europe and make Europe turn to the U.S. for protection. The above Poseidon flights over the area of the explosions on 23-26 September and particularly on 26 September, do not just show that the Americans were aware of the upcoming explosion and of the exact time of the explosion, the U.S. would also have been directly responsible for targeting the Nord Stream, because one did neither notify the owners of Nord Stream, nor the states dependent on it. The massive U.S. naval and air presence in the area during the BALTOPS exercise and during the days preceding the explosions indicate a huge U.S. operation. There are enough evidence supporting Seymour Hersh’s claim that the U.S. had used deep-sea divers from Panama City Florida at the end of the exercise. These divers cannot be explained by any task linked to the BALTOPS exercise itself, because the exercise only conducted dives close to the surface. The deep-sea divers almost certainly went down to the pipelines, and they would then have planted or prepared for the bombs that would have been triggered by a coded signal from a sonar buoy dropped by a Poseidon aircraft, as stated by Seymour Hersh. But this Poseidon would have been a U.S. Poseidon from Sigonella (Italy), which was the only military aircraft operating in the area the nights before the explosions. However, the U.S. always wants to have “plausible deniability”. They want to involve other states to be able to blame these states afterwards, in case something goes wrong. One will choose states with direct interest in blowing up the pipeline, like Norway that would radically increase its profits after the elimination of its major competitor, or Poland and Ukraine that always protested against these pipelines that circumvented Polish and Ukraine control. But such a cover has to be true. It has in certain respect to be real. The state covering up for the U.S. has to be involved in the operation in one way or another. One could possibly even imagine that the Ukraine diving team would have been able to plant a bomb at, for example, the southern site or contribute with something else. To use Ukraine as a cover would also make it possible for Western countries to claim that a Russian pipeline was a legitimate military target for Ukraine. The attack would no longer be a considered a terrorist or state terrorist attack. To use a Ukraine cover could make it possible to present the attack a legitimate act of war.

Some Polish people were almost certainly involved, some Ukrainians would have been involved, at least in a cover operation, some Norwegian Navy and Intelligence people were most likely involved and also some Swedes, Danes and probably Germans and almost certainly some British people, because Britain has, according to the historical U.S.-British division of labor for intelligence operations, largely been responsible for the Baltic Sea area. However, the U.S. would, in this case, have had a dominating role and the overall responsibility. On 26 September, the U.S. Poseidon aircraft seems to purposely have avoided Swedish and Norwegian territory. The U.S. Navy had apparently decided not to embarrass Sweden and Norway. The attack on the Nord Stream pipeline would primarily have been a U.S. state terrorist operation.

U.S. state terrorism is not something you would read about in the newspapers, and for that reason, it might be interesting to listen to Lieutenant General William Odom, who was the military assistant to the U.S. national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski under President Carter 1977-81, Chief Army Intelligence 1981-85 and President Reagen’s Director National Security Agency 1985-88 (heading U.S. signal intelligence). In 1987, he was a candidate to replace Robert Gates as Deputy CIA. Odom stated several times that “terrorism is a tactic and not an enemy”, and “the United States itself has a long record of supporting terrorists and using terrorist tactics.” In 2004, he wrote: “That is why efforts to draft a law against international terrorism in the U.S. Senate in 1979 were eventually dropped: no variant could be devised that the United States had not violated.” Two years later, he wrote: “By any measure the US has long used terrorism. In ‘78-79 the Senate was trying to pass a law against international terrorism – in every version they produced, the lawyers said the US would be in violation” U.S. covert operations or “state terrorism” has had a major role in U.S. policy.

The evidence supporting a U.S. act of state terrorism is overwhelming, while several countries are likely to have been involved in the Nord Stream attack, including Ukraine. But that does not make the attack an act of war, a legitimate military operation, and the attack on Nord Stream was not just an attack on Russia but also an attack on Germany, which would raise the issue of NATO’s article 5. To claim that the attack on Nord Stream was an act of war in a Ukraine-Russian war is not credible. It does not fit with the actual evidence.

Left: A U.S. P-8 Poseidon (N/A) returns to Keflavik on 7 June after having patrolled the Baltic Sea and been refueled at Ronneby (similar to what it did the whole week). One can also see a Poseidon (N/A also in red) from Sigonella coming up to Nordholz Naval Air Base in northern Germany. Right: 15 minutes later, one can see how the Poseidon from Sigonella is landing at Nordholz, while a German P-3 Orion, also based at Nordholz, is flying close to Ronneby.

In 2022, U.S. Naval Air Station Sigonella brought up a P-8 Poseidon to the Baltic Sea on two occasions: during the BALTOPS exercise in June 2022 and just before the explosions in late September 2022. In both cases, this Poseidon operated from the Nordholz Naval Air Base in Germany. For BALTOPS-22, the airplane left Sigonella for Nordholz on 7 June. It returned on 17 June at the end of the exercise. This Poseidon operated over the Baltic Sea, east of Bornholm, between 8-15 June (On 8 June, it just went to Ronneby and back). In September, a U.S. Poseidon from Sigonella patrolled the Baltic Sea back and forth over Bornholm Island for three nights, 22-25 September, until the very night of the explosion on 26 September. The U.S. could easily have dropped a sonar buoy from the Poseidon to send a coded signal to the timers of the explosives. They would then have used a Poseidon to trigger the explosions, as Hersh claimed.

During the BALTOPS-22, this Poseidon aircraft from Sigonella operated over the Baltic Sea in tandem with a Poseidon aircraft from Keflavik, which went down to the Baltic Sea, east of Bornholm, almost every day 7-16 June, on a few occasions in July and August and on the very night of the explosions on 26 September. During BALTOPS-22, it usually went straight from Keflavik to Bornholm over southern Norway and Sweden. It was regularly refueled at the Swedish airbase Ronneby, which made the Poseidon able to stay in the area for a longer period of time. On almost every day, it patrolled the area of the Nord Stream pipelines, particularly the areas of the upcoming explosions. However, when it came closer to these areas, it usually turned off its transponder.

The Poseidon from Sigonella leaves Nordholz (close to Cuxhaven northern Germany) on 10 June and arrives at a position northeast of Bornholm at 11.50, while the Poseidon from Keflavik can be seen further towards northeast after just having past over southern Norway and Sweden.

When a Poseidon left Keflavik for Bornholm shortly before the explosion on 26 September, it passed south of Norway and south of Sweden, and it was refueled by a U.S. tanker aircraft over Poland, not at Ronneby. The U.S. had then clearly decided not to involve Norway and Sweden, and no Norwegian Poseidon was used, as was the original plan, according to Seymour Hersh. The U.S. Poseidon on 26 September avoided Norwegian and Swedish territory. It went south of these countries. The Poseidon, instead of being refueled at Ronneby, it was refueled over Poland, and this U.S. decision was taken already before the first explosion of the Nord Stream pipeline (see separate articles “The U.S. Poseidon attack on Nord Stream”, 9 September 2023). To use a Norwegian Poseidon had supposedly been the plan from the beginning, but something happened. Two new Norwegian Poseidon did not make their first training tour until June. They made some trips in July, August and September mostly around their airbase Evenes, and they made a couple of trips to mid- and south Norway. According to Norwegian authorities, they had some technical problems. Norway seems to have backed out from triggering the explosives sometime during the summer (see separate Poseidon article).

Two Norwegian Poseidon aircraft on training tours in July 2022 leaving from and returning to the Norwegian Poseidon base at Evenes (EVE) close to Harstad. At the time, the Norwegian Poseidon aircraft just went on short trips. The first training trips were made in June.

But let us look at the Poseidon aircraft coming in from Keflavik every day (except for 13 June) during the BALTOPS exercise. It passed the Faroe Islands and the Shetland Islands and went down over southern Norway and Sweden to the southern Baltic Sea, to the waters south of Ronneby and the Swedish naval base Karlskrona and northeast of the Danish Island of Bornholm. It was circling over the area of the Nord Stream pipelines for several hours. For perhaps 50 % of the time, its transponder was turned off and it was flying at low altitude. On 13 June, when the Poseidon from Keflavik did not enter the Baltic, the Poseidon from Nordholz replaced it, and circled in a similar way northeast of Bornholm as the other Poseidon had done most of the week. After patrolling the area east of Bornholm, the Poseidon from Keflavik landed at Ronneby to be refueled and perhaps to brief the U.S. staff. After that, it returned to Keflavik.

The U.S. Poseidon going down to the Baltic Sea from Keflavik (Iceland) over southern Norway and Sweden to the area northeast of Bornholm on 12 June. The aircraft is circling northeast of Bornholm for more than four hours. When approaching the area of the upcoming explosions, it turns off its transponder. After that, it is refueled at Ronneby before it returns to Keflavik.

The same aircraft five hours later, while it returns from Ronneby to Keflavik over southern Sweden and Norway. During the BALTOPS exercise, the Poseidon from Keflavik regularly went over the southern tip of Norway and Sweden different from what it did on the later occasion.

The Poseidon aircraft is coming in from Keflavik to the Baltic Sea on 8, 9, 12 and 14 June. It is going down circling over the area of the pipelines east and northeast of Bornholm each time for around four hours, but it is visible less than half the time, because the transponder is turned off when the aircraft gets closer to the area of the upcoming explosions. After that, the aircraft will land at Ronneby to be refueled before returning to Keflavik. Also, on 10 June and 16 June, it did almost the same, and on 13 June, the other Poseidon replaced it and operated in a similar way northeast of Bornholm.

At this moment, we can only speculate what the above Poseidon was doing northeast of Bornholm for several hours each day for a week. In general, we may argue that it is about intelligence. For example, it would have used its sonar buoys to pick up sounds to pinpoint the position of the Russian Kilo class submarine Dmitrov (Project 877), which is now the only Russian sub in the Baltic Sea. But in that case, it doesn’t make sense to just circle around in a small area. One should cover larger territories, similar to what this Poseidon did on 11 and 15 June (see below). One can also imagine the Poseidon followed the activity of all Russian surface vessels, but the flight pattern – circling around in a small area – rather indicates a search operation. However, to cover the same area for a week point to something stationary like the pipelines. A special version of the Poseidon, P-8I, has a Magnetic Anomaly Detector (MAD) to detect steel-hulled submarines down to a depth of a hundred meters or more, but also pipelines. This would presuppose that the aircraft operated at low altitude, which it did when it turned off its transponder in the area of the upcoming explosions between the visible flight pattern and the Bornholm Island. The Americans, of course, had the drawings and the maps of the exact position of the Nord Stream pipelines, but the U.S. usually wants to have such information confirmed with their own means. We do not have any explanation yet. The U.S. could possibly also have used the P-8 Poseidon to be in contact with divers underwater, but this does not explain why it operated like this for a week. There must have been a specific explanation for this flight pattern of the Poseidon going down from Iceland to the Baltic Sea every day.

Poseidon from Keflavik is returning after a tour over the Baltic Sea on 11 June. Different from the other days, it was refueled over the North Sea and went south of Norway and Sweden. It made a short tour in over Poland exactly as it did when it was refueled over Poland on 26 September, and it also went up along the coast Lithuania and Latvia but primarily outside Russian main naval base of Baltiysk before returning to Keflavik. This flight pattern appears as 
preparation for the tour on 26 September.

What we know is that the Poseidon went down to the Baltic Sea to cover certain sea areas east and northeast of Bornholm each day, and when it approached the areas of the upcoming explosions, it usually turned off its transponder. We can only see it for a very short time when it operates a low altitude close to these positions, but it at least causes suspicion. In general, it seems very likely that the operations of the two Poseidon aircraft during the BALTOPS-22 exercise had something to do with the upcoming explosions of the Nord Stream pipelines. The activity appears, both for the Poseidon from Keflavik and for the one from Sigonella as preparations for the operation in September that would change not just European energy dependency but also global geopolitics for many years. This was a major operation that the U.S. had prepared for at least since 2014 (see main article 21 March 2023) and during the BALTOPS exercise the preparations were seemingly intensive.

The Poseidon from Sigonella is leaving Nordholz on 17 June and arrives in Sigonella at 14.30.

After the flights from the BALTOPS airbase Ronneby to U.S. Naval Station Rota and from Ronneby to Sigonella and further to Rota on 16-19 June, there are two U.S. military flights from Rota to Panama City Florida: one direct flight from Rota to Panama City-Tallahassee (Florida), and one via Norfolk to Panama City, which both supports the claim from Seymour Hersh and from the BALTOPS “diving coordinator” about deep divers from Panama City or divers using equipment from Panama City at the BALTOPS-22 exercise (Source: Flightradar24).

[After some research on the air activity during the BALTOPS-22 exercise, I have added some material to section 3 of my Substack article from 21 March 2023 (“After Seymour Hersh’s article”). Hersh argues (8 February 2023) that during this exercise, the U.S. had used special deep-sea divers from Panama City Florida to prepare for the destruction of the Nord Stream pipeline. In Part I, I brought up the letter of the “coordinator for the divers”, who confirmed this. Below, in Part II, I will present additional support for Hersh’s story using “Flightradar24”. Journalists who argue that his claims are just fiction have to explain why two U.S. military flights that left the BALTOPS airbase Ronneby (Sweden) at the end of the exercise continued via U.S. Naval Base Rota (Spain) to Panama City Florida. One flight was a direct flight, the other went via Norfolk (Washington).]

Left: A U.S. Hercules going up from Sigonella to Ronneby on 3 June. Right: A U.S. C-40 Clipper arriving in Ronneby from Sigonella the following day, on 4 June.

Let us first look at the timeline. We will look at Flightradar24 that gives us information about flights coming in for the BALTOPS exercise. We know that days before BALTOPS-22, several U.S. military aircraft arrived at Ronneby (Kallinge) at Sweden’s Naval Base South in Karlskrona close to the Danish Island of Bornholm. These U.S. aircrafts arrived from U.S. Naval Air Station Sigonella (Sicily, Italy) and from U.S. Naval Station Rota (at Cadiz in southern Spain) that had received U.S. aircraft coming in from Washington and from the major U.S. Naval Station Norfolk at Washington (U.S. Second Fleet Command or Atlantic Command and NATO Joint Forces Command). On 1 June, a U.S. Super Hercules C-130J went from Sigonella to Ronneby and then back to Sigonella (via Ramstein). On 3 June a U.S. C-130 Hercules arrived at Ronneby and then back to Sigonella (via Ramstein). On 4 June a U.S. C-40 Clipper left Sigonella and arrived at Ronneby. It then returned to Sigonella, and on 6 June the same C-40 Clipper left Sigonella in the morning, went to Rota to pick up people coming in from the U.S. and then, it once again went up to Ronneby.

Left: A Boeing C-40 Clipper going from Norfolk Naval Station (U.S. Fleet Command) outside Washington and is arriving to U.S. Naval Station Rota (Spain) on 4 June. Right: A U.S. C-40 Clipper going from Rota to Ronneby (Sweden) on 6 June. Several aircraft followed the same route.

n 3 June a U.S. C-40 Clipper had left Norfolk outside Washington, and the C40 arrived at Rota at mid-night, and the days before that a U.S. C-5M Super Galaxy and a U.S. C-17A Globemaster had arrived at Rota (the latter went further to Sigonella) both came from U.S. Naval Station Norfolk. There was also a Super Galaxy from Washington to Ramstein and a Hercules flight from Ramstein to Ronneby. On 29 May, two C-40 Clipper went back and forth from Florida to Norfolk. In a combined cargo-passenger mode, the C-40 is capable of carrying up to 70 passengers. The U.S Super Galaxy and the Globemaster have even larger capacity. There was a major influx of U.S. Navy personnel first to Rota and Sigonella and then further to Ronneby, which would have included coordinating officers for the BALTOPS exercise, public relations officers, technicians, and service and intelligence personnel.

Left: A C-40 Clipper (CNV6617) going from Ronneby on 17 June to Sigonella with a very short stop in Marseille. In parallel to the C-40, there is a C-130T Hercules (CNV6516) going from Ronneby direct to Rota. Right: Two hours later, the same Hercules arrives in Rota, while the C40 arrives in Sigonella at the same time. Another Hercules left Ronneby for Sigonella two days later. On 18-19 June, a U.S Globemaster, a Hercules and a C-40 left Sigonella for Rota.

U.S Naval Air Station Sigonella and Rota seem to have had a major role in the BALTOPS-22 events. A U.S. P-8 Poseidon aircraft from Sigonella was brought up to Nordholz Naval Airbase in northern Germany on 7 June, and it returned to Sigonella on 17 June. It patrolled the area east of Bornholm for a week in concert with another U.S. Poseidon coming in from Keflavik (Iceland) almost every day during the same period (a German Orion patrolled the Baltic Sea from Nordholz on a regular basis). The formal ending of the exercise took place in Kiel, Germany on 17 June with Chief Naval Operations Admiral Mike Gilday.

After the BALTOPS exercise, the American ships and aircraft left the Baltic. Already on 16 June, some people were brought on a U.S. C-130 Hercules from Ronneby to Rota, and the following day, a more comfortable C-40 Clipper brought Navy personnel from Ronneby to Sigonella, while another Hercules brought even more people from Ronneby to Rota. On 18 June, a Hercules and a Globemaster brought people from Sigonella to Rota and the above Clipper brought more people from Sigonella to Rota the following day. A Super Galaxy arrived in Rota from Norfolk on 19 June. On 20 June, a U.S. Globemaster left Rota for Washington and another Globemaster left Rota later the same day to arrive in Norfolk the following morning, and shortly afterwards it continued to Panama City. It then went back to Washington (via Charleston). This flight was apparently returning U.S. Navy personnel from the BALTOPS exercise not only to Norfolk but also to Panama City.

Left: A C-40 Clipper leaves Sigonella early in the morning for Rota on 19 June. A Hercules had left Sigonella for Rota the day before. Right: A C-17A Globemaster left Rota for Washington next day, while another U.S. Globemaster left Rota for Norfolk a few hours later. 

Left: On 20 June, a U.S. Globemaster left Rota (see above) and it arrived in Washington seven hours later. Right: Another Globemaster left Rota a few hours after the former plane and arrived in Norfolk early in the morning the following day. This plane continued to Panama City, Florida.

Left: The Globemaster in the former image left Rota on 20 June 21.45. Right: The same aircraft arrives in Panama City Florida (via Norfolk) 15 hours later. It had a four-hours stop in Norfolk.

On 20 June, the above Super Galaxy from the U.S. Naval Station Norfolk left Rota and landed late at night at Panama City-Tallahassee (Florida). Next day, it went back to Washington. These two planes clearly were flying in U.S. Navy personnel to Panama City, and Panama City is the primary U.S. Navy center for deep-sea diving. We have reasons to believe that the special deep-sea divers from Panama City or/and with gear from Panama City that Seymour Hersh and the BALTOPS “diving coordinator” spoke about were brought back from Ronneby to Panama City either on the direct flight with the Super Galaxy from Rota to Panama City or on the flight with the Globemaster to Panama City via Norfolk.

Left: On 20 June, after the flights from Ronneby to Rota on 16-19 June, there is one direct flight with a Super Galaxy from Rota to Panama City-Tallahassee (Florida). Right: This image shows the details of the same flight. It clearly supports the claim of Seymour Hersh and the BALTOPS “diving coordinator” about the U.S. Navy use of divers and equipment from Panama City.

It is striking that you had two flights that immediately after the BALTOPS exercise went from Ronneby to Panama City via Rota (and one also via Norfolk), and both these flights left U.S. Naval Station Rota for Panama City on the same day. This clearly supports Seymour Hersh’s claim that U.S. authorities had used divers from the Navy’s Diving and Salvage Center in Panama City for an operation against the Nord Stream pipelines during the BALTOPS exercise. The intelligence officers that the “Coordinator” and Thomas Röper spoke about would have come from Norfolk and Washington, while the deep-sea divers would have come from Panama City, Florida. It is also difficult to explain why you would have deep-sea divers at the BALTOPS exercise, when divers in this exercise only were training to locate simulated mines just below the surface. The deep divers from Panama City had nothing to do with the exercise. They were planting timers and explosives or navigation equipment to the Nord Stream pipelines.

USS Kearsarge (LHD-3) was the largest vessel during the BALTOPS exercise (5-17 June 2022). It is able to carry some six attack or fighter aircraft and some 20-25 helicopters. Kearsarge returned to the Baltic Sea on 2 August and left 22 September after having passed over the northern site for the upcoming explosions the day before.

[After some research on the air activity during the BALTOPS-22 exercise, I have added some material to section 3 of my Substack article from 21 March 2023 (“After Seymour Hersh’s article”). Hersh argues (8 February 2023) that during this exercise, the U.S. had used special deep-sea divers from Panama City Florida to prepare for the destruction of the Nord Stream pipeline. I said in my original article that a “coordinator for the divers” had confirmed Hersh’s claims. This is brought up in Part I of this article below. In Part II and Part III, I will present additional support for Hersh’s story. Journalists who argue that his claims are just fiction have to explain why two U.S. military flights that left the BALTOPS airbase Ronneby (Sweden) at the end of the exercise continued via U.S. Naval Base Rota (Spain) to Panama City Florida, which is the center for the U.S. Navy deep-sea divers.]

On 8 February 2023, after months investigation, Seymour Hersh published a detailed article on the planning of the attack as well as about its execution. He wrote that President Biden, in December 2021 – months before the Russian invasion – had appointed National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan to chair an interagency group with participants “from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the CIA, and the State and Treasury Departments” to solve the problem with the pipelines. They had a series of meetings on the “top floor of the Old Executive Office Building” at the White House. In early 2022, the CIA came up with a credible plan “to blow up the pipelines” with the use of special Navy deep-sea divers from the diving center in Panama City Florida, which “just happens to be the location of the CIA Maritime branch in the Directorate of Operations”, to quote former CIA officer Larry Johnson. Everyone understood that it was serious. If it is traceable to the US, “it’s an act of war,” one of Hersh’s sources said. In order to handle local problems in Europe, the group had turned to Norway, he said.

They had selected eight divers from the Navy’s Diving and Salvage Training Center, Panama City, Florida, to plant C-4 explosives on the pipeline, but it was also important to have local Scandinavian support. According to Sy Hersh, a “very competent American team went to Norway”, “sometime in March” 2022, “to meet with Norwegian Secret Service and Navy” to prepare for the destruction of the Nord Stream pipeline. The team approached the Norwegians, who were “quick to find the right spot, in the shallow waters of the Baltic Sea a few miles off Denmark’s Bornholm Island”. The Norwegians were also supposed to support the operation with a ship and with a Poseidon aircraft, Hersh argued. He actually once said that he had gathered information from the U.S. team that went to Norway (he clearly also had other sources). We know that the divers planted the bombs in the relatively deep waters of the Bornholm Basin (80 meters; see main article 21 March 2023). As a cover they prepared to use the NATO BALTOPS-22 exercise (5-17 June 2022), which was scheduled to take place just east of Bornholm. The exercise was to be held in exactly the right area, but it was not supposed to engage in deep-sea diving. It was supposed to train NATO forces in “mine-warfare”, where divers would locate simulated mines just below the surface. Only deep-sea divers would be able to plant the explosives on the Nord Stream pipelines.

However, BALTOPS-22 was ideal as a cover to justify any diving operation. If you use a single boat above the pipeline, you will become a suspect. You have to have a cover. I wrote two articles already in late 2022 in the Norwegian magazine Ny Tid saying that one most likely had used BALTOPS as a cover. It was, however, too obvious that the explosives could have been planted during the exercise, and one had to have a mechanism to delay the explosions for a couple of weeks or rather months. One had to separate the deployment from the triggering of the explosives. Seymour Hersh says that one solved this problem by preparing the use of a Poseidon aircraft that would drop a sonar buoy sending a coded signal to a receiver that triggered the timers and later the bombs.

BALTOPS-22 was supposed to train mine warfare with divers and with the use of a UUV (Unmanned Underwater Vehicles) carried by US ships like USS Kearsarge (257 meters), which was also capable of carrying small midget submarines that could have been used by the divers. There is a photo from the exercise showing the Norwegian mine hunter KNM Hinnøy (55 meters) carrying a UUV (Hugin). Hinnøy is almost identical to the Alta class Hersh was briefed about, but Hinnøy, different from the Alta class, carries a decompression chamber, which would be used in any professional operation to facilitate deepsea diving. Hinnøy also carries two rigid inflatable rubber boats to be used by the divers. Another Norwegian alternative is the logistic vessel KNM Magnus Lagabøte, which functioned as a platform for the Mine Diver Command. U.S. Navy writes that divers assigned to Explosive Ordinance Disposal Mobile Unit (EODMU) 8 located at U.S. Navy Base Rota (Spain) operated with Magnus Lagabøte during the BALTOPS exercise. She had a decompression chamber, because divers conducted decompression drills onboard Magnus Lagabøte.

Baltic Sea (June 8, 2022) U.S. Navy service members assigned to Explosive Ordinance Disposal Mobile Unit (EODMU) 8 approach the Norwegian Reine-Class patrol vessel Magnus Lagabøte (A 537) (Photo: U.S. Navy). The container onboard is possibly a mobile decompression chamber to facilitate deep-sea diving.

By the end of the exercise, the U.S. special Navy divers planted the explosives, Hersh writes. They had used very special equipment for deep-sea diving with a mixture of helium in the tanks. These divers had nothing to do with the exercise itself. The very presence of such divers was confirmed by a BALTOPS “diver coordinator”, German journalist Thomas Röper writes. The coordinator had “a leading administration role during” the exercise, and Röper quotes his letter:

“A U.S. military helicopter arrived carrying a group of men who were supposed to be U.S. Navy anti-mine personnel. […] I found it rather strange that they were from the US Navy. My first thought was that they looked like a group of terrorists, not anyone from the US Navy. The other groups we had from many of the military branches had some sort of standards, haircuts, for example. [… and none of them] wore identification tags around their neck. The other thing I found odd was that they claimed to be there to search for underwater mines. However, they lacked the equipment for such exercises. Their equipment consisted of the latest Navy issue deep-diving underwater rebreathers and some small hard case boxes; we call them pelicans. Their job was to take a rubber boat to a pre-determined location, search for anti-ship mines and return with their findings. Usually in such an endeavor, they have long metal detection equipment, but that was absent from their collection of gear. A detail I found to be very strange here was that while the other minesweeping teams wore traditional SCUBA gear with tanks and such, this group was wearing state-of-the-art helium rebreather helmets and dive suits.”

MK29 Mixed Gas Rebreather System, Panama City Florida (Photo: US Navy Research)

They brought deep-sea diving equipment with them, which the coordinator believed to be MK29 system, a rebreather system with a mixture of helium (that Hersh mentioned). It had been developed at the Naval Surface Warfare Center, Naval Support Activity Panama City, Florida (where the Navy divers, Hersh spoke about, had come from). Such equipment was neither necessary nor useful for divers in a mine warfare exercise like the BALTOPS-22, and their use of such equipment had surprised the coordinator. My country would not be able afford this system, he said. When the divers arrived, they also met with the US Admiral and “a group of American men in plain clothes that had arrived a few hours earlier. We all suspected them to be some sort of intelligence officers,” and the coordinator continues:

“[The divers went out in their rubber boat]. Not to the area where the simulated mines were placed, but to an entirely different location [… and] they exited their boat wearing their rebreathers and they disappeared under the water for over six hours. There is no self-contained underwater gear that I know of that could keep a diver under for six hours. With the newest military systems, three or four max is possible if the diver isn’t exerting himself. After a few hours, we began to get concerned and we contacted the coordinator for the US 6th Fleet, which assured us that everything was fine, they were in contact and [we should ignore it] and not to make any report about it. After the exercise was over and they returned, almost all of their pelicans were missing. They did not stay for any pleasantry. They had short conversations with the civilian people from the U.S., got on a waiting helicopter, and left. The civilians they were talking to also left, but in a different helicopter. Their mission was later marked as ‘completed successfully’, even though they were never near their intended target location. In retrospect, [this creates] suspicion. The divers met with a small, waiting submersible that showed them to the area of the pipeline. […]”

Let say that the “coordinator’s” story is correct, then the divers must have participated in a very significant covert operation, because otherwise there would have been no reason for them to meet the Admiral, nor to meet the “men in plain clothes”. This was not an ordinary training mission. The coordinator did for obvious reasons not tell which ship the divers had operated from, but one can easily get the impression that he speaks about a larger ship like the USS Kearsarge or USS Gunstone Hall (190 meters) or perhaps the U.S. Sixth Fleet flagship USS Mount Whitney (189 meters) with Commander Sixth Fleet Vice Admiral Gene Black. The fact that Chief Naval Operations Admiral Mike Gilday was on Mount Whitney at the end of the exercise 15-18 June indicate the significance of the event.

On the other hand, the divers wouldn’t necessarily have met the Admiral on the same ship as they were diving from, and Hinnøy and Magnus Lagabøte could definitely receive divers and others from a helicopter. On the other hand, how the planning of the operation was carried out in real life may have changed after Seymour Hersh’s sources were directly involved in the preparations; for example, which ship they used may also have changed. Norwegian journalist Alf R. Jacobsen said that an Alta class vessel KNM Otra (that Hersh spoke about) actually had run some training in the area of a major Norwegian pipeline at Mongstad close to Bergen on 31 May to 3 June, in the days preceding the BALTOPS exercise and this also fits with U.S. Falcon and Hercules flights from Bergen to Ronneby (over Ramstein; see Flightradar24). The US Navy divers could possibly have been training in Scandinavian waters to prepare for the upcoming operation in the Baltic Sea. Planning for such additional training may have been done at a later stage. Hersh sources may not have been informed about it.

There are too many things that fit with Sy Hersh story. It is almost impossible to believe that all this would be a coincidence: U.S. Navy divers using state-of-the-art deep sea diving equipment from Panama City Florida during the BALTOPS exercise would support Hersh’s claim that these very divers were coming from the Navy’s Diving and Salvage Center in Panama City, Florida. They turned up at the end of the exercise and they clearly did deep sea dives that had nothing to do with the exercise. The “diving coordinator” became very suspicious. His letter appears as a confirmation of several essential points in Hersh’s article. Röper wrote about it immediately after Sy Hersh’s article. Some people may have been hesitant to believe in it, since Röper presented the letter of the “diving coordinator” after Hersh’s article had been published. However, the “coordinator’s” letter was actually brought up in a video already in October 2022 by Röper’s colleague John Mark Dougan without many people knowing about it. Dougan was reading from the letter he received the same day, 4 October 2022, only ten days after the destruction of the pipeline.

Soviet Lieutenant General Vladimir Cheremnikh responsible for military planning for Northern Europe and the U.S. Navy Intelligence Chief for Europe Robert Bathurst in Stockholm, summer 1995 before the recording of the Swedish tv-program (Photo: Private archive).

[A shorter version of this article was published in the Swedish internet magazine Parabol on 1 June 2024. An early article bringing up similar issues was published on 4 March 2024 in the Norwegian magazine Nordnorsk debatt (belonging to the newspaper Nordlys). In the Nordic countries, the understanding of the Russian military thinking is of special significance because of the new DCA agreement, which gives the United States a significant presence on military bases in the Nordic countries.]

For Russia, the invasion of Ukraine was not about conquering land or subjugating a people, not about re-establishing the Soviet Union or the Russian Empire, but about establishing “a neutral buffer zone” to guarantee Russia’s existence as a state. For Russia, it is vital to have a buffer zone to guarantee its survival. The same problem applies to Northern Europe. During the Cold War, the Nordic countries served as a zone of détente, as a buffer zone, because Sweden and Finland were more or less neutral, while Norway as a member of NATO did not allow for U.S. bases on its territory. With NATO membership and the new Defense Cooperation Agreements (DCA) between the United States and the Nordic countries, we are now risking a military confrontation.

The United States has traditionally been thinking in terms of “containment”, to “contain” the Soviet Union and later Russia from any form of expansion. The U.S. moved forces close to the enemy’s border as a tripwire to trigger the mobilization of a larger military force when attacked, but as shown in the RAND report on Norway, “Enhancing Deterrence and Defense on NATO’s Northern Flank” (2020), the United States wanted to deploy missiles and aircraft fairly close to Russia to be able to attack vital facilities deep inside Russian territory to give Norway and NATO a “credible deterrent”. This would make them able “deter” Russia from attacking Norway, RAND argues. But this argument pre-supposes that Russia wants to expand its territory.

This allegedly defensive “containment” argument has, however, always been supplemented by a U.S. “roll-back” strategy, which sought to push the Soviets or Russia back step by step. This was CIA Director Allan Dulles’ policy in the 1950s. But the same offensive “roll-back thinking” was favored in the 1980s by the U.S. “Victory School”, by Dulles’ OSS colleague, then CIA Director William Casey, and in the 1990s by the neoconservative United States with Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, but also by President George H.W. Bush’s national security adviser Brent Scowcroft. They wanted to place the United States “between Germany and Russia in Central Europe” and even go into the Soviet Union itself. Cheney wanted, to quote CIA Director and later Defense Secretary Robert Gates, “to see the dismantlement not only the Soviet Union and the Russian Empire but of Russia itself”. Cheney wanted to push Russia back to Moscow.

While American security analysts thinks in terms of “deterrence”, “containment” and “roll-back”, Russian analysts thinks in terms of “buffer zones” and to strike hard, if necessary. One thinks in terms of having a necessary defensive depth to protect Russia’s vital interests. This Russian thinking has been formed by centuries of Western attacks on Russia from Charles XII in the 18^th century and Napoleon in the 19^th century to Nazi Germany in the 20^th century, all of which went deep into Russia. All these attacks were defeated, but more than 25 million Russians died in World War II. Cold War Central Europe with Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary was not part of an empire in our sense. Rather, they should be understood as a controlled buffer zone to prevent the war from being fought once again on Russian soil with losses of tens of millions of Russian lives. This was certainly not the choice of the Poles, the Czechs and the Hungarians, and from late 1988, President Mikhail Gorbachev sought to replace the Warsaw Pact states with a neutral buffer zone of independent states, something that all Western leaders had agreed to in 1990-91. If Moscow withdrew its 350,000 men from East Germany, there would be no expansion of NATO into Central Europe and not even to East Germany, they all promised.

In the summer of 1992, my colleague Robert Bathurst and I, together with American military historians, traveled to Russia. Almost all of the participants were from U.S. intelligence agencies. Robert had been an interpreter between President Eisenhower and Khrushchev, in charge of the Washington-Moscow hotline, a U.S. Deputy Attaché in Moscow, and head of U.S. Naval Intelligence Europe. In Leningrad/St. Petersburg (the city was just about to change its name), we spoke with Vladimir Cheremnikh, who in the late 1970s and 1980s was the First Deputy Chief of Staff of the Leningrad Military District and responsible for planning the military attack on Northern Europe that would have been launched in the event of a major US-Soviet war.

We invited him to Oslo to present his experience as the Soviet Commander-in-Chief in Afghanistan for a year (1981-82) and his experience as chief of the military planning for Northern Europe in late 1970s and in early and mid-1980s. Former Norwegian Chief of Defense, General Fredrik Bull-Hansen, and his Chief of Intelligence, Jan Ingebrigtsen also participated at the seminars. Lieutenant General Cheremnikh said that in the event of a Western attack on the Soviet Union, the Soviet forces in Leningrad, Petrozavodsk and Kandalaksha would occupy Finland and possibly also the northernmost tip of Sweden, while the forces in Murmansk would take the county of Finnmark in northeastern Norway. Bodø and other air bases in northern Norway were to be knocked out.

When I asked Cheremnikh what would have happened if the United States had used Swedish air bases, he replied that they in that case would also have been destroyed, but the Russians were not going to occupy Sweden. “Taking Sweden was not necessary”, he said. But we know that the Soviets at that time would not be able to knock out these air bases with conventional aerial bombing. Such attacks would have required continuous bombing, and the Russian losses of aircraft would in that case have been unacceptable. They would rather and most likely have used nuclear weapons. (In 2008, former Swedish Supreme Commander, General Bengt Gustafsson, published a document from the Swedish intelligence service MUST on the Soviet plans for an attack on Northern Europe on the website of the Washington-Zurich based “Parallel History Project on NATO and the Warsaw Pact”. The document presented a conversation with General Cheremnikh, but it turned out that I was the one who had written the document. I had given it to the Swedish defence attaché in Oslo, and it had then been presented as a MUST document. I had already published the information from this document in a book from 1995.

Sweden's Defense Minister Sven Andersson (1957-73) had a secret agreement with the United States to receive American aircraft at Swedish air bases from the very first day of the war before Sweden had been attacked by the Soviets. In case of a war on the Central Front, the U.S. aircraft in West Germany would have to have somewhere to go and Sweden was the best option for the U.S. Air Force. Swedish airbases would have received the U.S. aircraft already before a possible Soviet attack on Sweden. This I was told by Andersson’s close advisor Ingemar Engman and this understanding was also confirmed by former U.S. Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger at a conference in 1993. After my question about his understanding of Sweden, he spoke about “Two Sweden”, Sweden as a Dual State, where “the Military Sweden was planning for us to come as soon as possible”, in other words before a Soviet attack on Sweden. The “Political Sweden” with Prime Minister Olof Palme (1969–76; 1982–86) did not accept this policy. He did not hand over this Swedish agreement of receiving U.S. aircraft from “day one” to the new Prime Minister, Thorbjorn Fälldin, in 1976. Palme must have understood that the U.S. use of Swedish air bases in an early phase of a war would make Sweden a target for Soviet missiles with nuclear weapons.

Russian thinking was based on two types of buffer zones, an “inner zone” of control and an “outer zone” of denial, where the Russians would deny U.S. or Western forces. (Cf. the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 when the U.S.-Russian relations were turned around. The U.S. denied the Soviets the right to have missiles in Cuba). This is in fact a parallel to the U.S. thinking about how to operate U.S. aircraft carriers. The carriers always had to establish an inner zone of “Sea Control” with their own air defense systems, where the U.S. Navy could operate its own surface vessels: for example, two cruisers, two destroyers and a frigate. Outside this zone, one would establish a zone of “Sea Denial”, where the submarines of the Carrier Battle Group and the carrier-based aircraft will deny the other party the right and ability to operate. I wrote my doctoral dissertation on the U.S. thinking about the Maritime Strategy in the 1980s including the use of Carrier Battle Groups in Northern Waters.

Russian military thinking is based on the same idea: an “inner zone of control” and an “outer zone of denial”. According to the Finnish-Soviet “Agreement of Friendship, Cooperation, and Mutual Assistance of 1948”, Finland would not allow forces from the United States and other Western countries to use Finnish territory or airspace, as this would threaten the Soviet Union. Cheremnikh said: “We had an agreement with the Finns, but we didn’t trust them”. Finland and Finnmark belonged to the “inner zone” that the Russians would have to control to survive, while they would deny the Americans the ability to operate from the “outer zone” (Sweden and Norway in general). They would knock out U.S. bases. There is reason to assume that Russian planning is the same today. The geography has not changed.

The Russian elite is not interested in conquering foreign territory or to rule over other peoples. The experience of Poland and Afghanistan in the 1980s or earlier in Czechoslovakia says it all. Today’s generation of political leaders in Moscow is well aware that to control the territory of others in peacetime is not possible without unacceptable costs. There are, of course, Russian officers who may dream of a Greater Russia, just like some Swedish officers who may dream about the greatness of the 17^th century Sweden. But that has nothing to do with practical politics. For Russia, the invasion of Ukraine is not about conquering a country or subjugating another people, but about having a buffer zone when the existence of the Russian state is threatened.

But what about the Russian minorities of the post-Soviet states? Together with Russia, they have come to be known as the “Russian World” or “Russkiy Mir”. Does Russia not feel a special responsibility for these Russian-speaking areas outside Russia? Yes, in a sense, but despite Kyiv's shelling of the Russian-speaking Donetsk and Lugansk in eastern Ukraine from 2014 with thousands of dead civilians and despite the fact that the “new republics”, Donetsk and Lugansk, begged for recognition as part of Russia, Vladimir Putin denied them this. For Putin, the idea of the “Russian world” was subordinated to the UN Charter’s claim about the sovereignty of states. Perhaps Putin also wanted to make sure that the Russian speakers in Eastern Ukraine would not be reduced to a minority that would be dominated by the radical nationalists in Western Ukraine. In the case of Crimea, the situation is different. Already in 1991 before the dissolution of the Soviet Union, 93% of the population of Crimea voted in favor of belonging to Russia, not to Ukraine, and Russia would never cede the Sevastopol Naval Base to the United States. The problem for Crimea was that in 1991 Boris Yeltsin was more concerned with seizing power in Moscow and outmaneuvering Mikhail Gorbachev than with limiting the risks of a future war.

A further piece of evidence for Vladimir Putin’s acceptance of the existing post-Soviet Russia, is the fact that he was happy with the Minsk agreements of 2015. It provided a guarantee of a “neutral Ukraine” and a guarantee that the Russian-speaking population of the East would be allowed to speak Russian. However, when the Ukraine Parliament from 2019 declared that it would join NATO (in conflict with the Minsk agreement) and at the same time began a buildup of forces along the border to Donetsk and Lugansk, and after that from mid-February 2022 started to shell the cities of Donetsk and Lugansk massively in preparation for an offensive, Moscow saw this as a declaration of war. During the negotiations in Istanbul in March 2022, Russia demanded, a “neutral Ukraine”, the head of the Ukrainian delegation, David Arakhamia, said, and he continued: “In fact, this was the key point [for the Russians]. Everything else [was] cosmetic”. The negotiations were a “success”, said President Zelenskyy's military adviser in the delegation, Oleksiy Arestovych. “We opened the champagne bottle. It was completely successful negotiations”, he said. However, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson went to Kyiv, and said, to quote Arakhamia: “We should not sign anything with them at all, and let's just fight”. Johnson told Kyiv not to agree to anything from Russia. If the British had not intervened, we could have had a neutral Ukraine today and avoided the continuation of the war with half a million dead Ukrainians.

From the first day of the invasion, the mass media assumed that Russia wanted to conquer Ukraine, but then failed. According to a Western rule of thumb, however, an occupation would have required at least a five times as large force: it would require one soldier for every 40-50 inhabitants, and if you look at Russian experience, you can almost certainly say that they would have used a force 10 times as large (cf. Czechoslovakia 1968). In short, by using a relatively small force in February 2022, Russia signaled to the West that it had no intention of occupying Ukraine. This was also clear from what Arakhamia and Arestovych had said above about the negotiations in March-April 2022. Russia wanted “a neutral Ukraine”. One had no intention of conquering the country, but one would by all means deny Western military presence in Ukraine. The Russian military intervention was not about conquering territory, but about preventing Ukraine from turning into a U.S. bastion 500 km from Moscow. Russia wanted a neutral zone, a buffer zone, which would reduce the risk of a Western surprise attack, because such an attack would have been impossible for Russia to defend against.

“Whoever does not miss the Soviet Union has no heart. Whoever wants it back has no brain”, Vladimir Putin said in 2000. On the day of the invasion on 24 February 2022 he said: “We have been treating all new post-Soviet states with respect […]. Russia respects the sovereignty of all post-Soviet states, and we respect and will respect their sovereignty. […] It is not our plan to occupy the Ukrainian territory”. But Russia cannot accept a “[Western] threat from the territory of today’s Ukraine”. Large parts of Ukraine will, in a major war, fall within an “inner zone of control”, while the rest will fall within the “outer zone of denial”, where the adversary is to be denied the buildup of its forces. For Russia, it is not about restoring the Russian Empire or the Soviet Union, but about guaranteeing a buffer zone to deny the United States a military presence. And if this cannot be achieved through negotiations, then Russia is willing to guarantee such a buffer zone by the use of military force.

In a major European war, the problem for the Russian neighbours is whether they will end up in the “inner zone of control” or the “outer zone of denial”? The former are in danger of being occupied, while the latter are in danger of having their air bases knocked out by missiles if they have received U.S. or British air forces. The Russian side will, as far as possible, use conventional weapons, but if a war already has passed the nuclear threshold, nuclear weapons will probably be used.

According to Russian plans for a major war, Russia will not use of ground forces to enter Sweden or Norway west of Finnmark, but U.S. air bases and other significant U.S. installations will be knocked out by Russian hypersonic missiles. Russian missile technology has developed rapidly in recent years. Today, our air defense system cannot take out many of these missiles. While the U.S. thinks in terms of basing aircraft and missiles near Russian territory to “deter” the Russians from “adventures”, the Russians think in terms of U.S. planning for an attack on Russia and of the necessity of pre-empting such an attack by striking first. Any forward deployment of U.S. aircraft or missiles is accordingly extremely destabilizing.

For the countries in the “inner zone”, it is most important to ensure détente in order to prevent a war. After Finland became a member of NATO in April 2023, Russia said it will “have consequences” for Finland. Half a year later, in December 2023, Vladimir Putin said that Russia will re-establish the “Leningrad Military District”. This military district that had been tasked with taking control of Finland, was abolished after the Cold War, but now, because of Finland’s NATO membership, it will be re-established to organize an attack on Finland in the event of a major war. Russia wants to knock out the U.S. military infrastructure and occupy Finland and Finnmark, and it calls this new military district “Leningrad Military District” to make the Finns understand what it is all about.

For the countries located in the “outer zone”, it is also important for their own security to ensure détente and to prevent the United States from establishing bases for missiles and aircraft that could be used against Russia. This means that the DCA agreement with American bases by necessity opens up for Russian pre-emptive strikes. When all NATO countries had given the green light for Swedish NATO membership, Russia stated that this would have consequences for Sweden. Most likely, Russia will now target at least the five air bases that the United States has gained access to in Sweden. Sweden that formerly was outside the perimeter of a Russian attack in a major war, has now chosen to invite the United States to its military bases, which definitely will guarantee a Russian attack on Sweden in an early phase of a war. Russia has no interest in Swedish territory except for the U.S. military bases. The ignorance of the Government has exceeded my imagination.

Already in the 1940s, the risk that Moscow, in a crisis situation, would find it necessary to pre-empt the United States from attacking Russia by using bases in Norway was the reason for the Norwegian Cold War base policy from 1949, which denied the United States and other allies the right to have bases in Norway. Oslo wanted to avoid Russian worries and accordingly make Russia less inclined to attack Norwegian territory at an early stage of a conflict. We have reason to learn from this history and try to understand what is central to Russian military thinking. Nordic policy during the Cold War sought to transform the Nordic countries into region of a low-tension. It benefited us then, and it would benefit us today. I find it impossible to understand why the Governments in Northern Europe have chosen the opposite policy in recent years.

President Volodymyr Zelensky said in December 2023 that his military commanders wanted to mobilize up to 500,000 new soldiers. CNN wrote in February 2024: “As Russia makes gains, Ukraine needs more soldiers”. They have started to draft young men. The new Military Memorial Cemetery outside Kyiv will have the capacity for 150,000 burials, but most people are buried in the east on endless fields with Ukraine flags like in Kharkiv. Already in November 2022, EU’s Ursula van der Leyen spoke about a loss of “100,000 Ukrainian soldiers”. Ukraine may now have lost several hundred thousand soldiers. Russian figures point today to 500,000. A Polish general gave even higher figures. A 2023 leak from Pentagon to The New York Times estimated the Ukraine death toll to be almost five times higher than the Russian. The photo is from President Zelensky’s visit to the Lychakiv Military Cemetery in Lviv in Western Ukraine close to Poland, December 2023 (Photo: Public Domain). The dead soldiers are honored with blue & yellow Ukraine flags and with the read & black flags of the World War II Ukraine Insurgent Army (UPA) run by nationalists Stepan Bandera and Roman Shukhevych. The latter was Commander and Deputy of the Nachtigal Battalion and Schutzmannschaft Battalion 201 under the German Abwehr general command, and he was Commander of UPA, while responsible for the massacres of about a hundred thousand Poles, Russians, and Jews. Today, in Western Ukraine, the Soviet era statues have been replaced by statues of Bandera and Shukhevych.

[A Norwegian version of this article was published in the Norwegian newspaper Dagsavisen, a paper that has been close to the Norwegian Labor Party].

Why does the war in Ukraine continue? How will the war be stopped? To understand this, we must look to how political leaders think in Kyiv, Moscow, Washington and London. We need to understand the significance of the Ukraine War for these leaders. We have to start with the obvious, what everyone should know: The ABC of the Ukraine War.

A)     From day one, Vladimir Putin said: Russia had been faced with a threat “to the very existence of the state”. He saw the war as “existential”. And Putin’s perception is no different from others in the Russian elite, then-US Ambassador to Moscow, William Burns, wrote to his secretary of state Condoleezza Rice back in 2008. Ukraine is only 500 km from Moscow. Western forces entering Ukraine would make any defense of Russia impossible. And U.S. leaders like former Secretary of Defense and Vice President Richard Cheney have said that they wanted to break Russia into pieces. To Moscow, it became necessary to deny the West military access to Ukraine in order to survive. If the U.S. would enter Ukraine, the West would pass the “brightest of all red lines”, to quote Ambassador Burns, current CIA Director William Burns from 2008. This would be “a declaration of war”, the German Chancellor Angela Merkel said. The most obvious provocation ever. Despite this, the U.S. continued its military buildup in Ukraine. The U.S. actually wanted to provoke a war with Russia in Ukraine – a war that Ukraine would never be able to win. Russia has a much larger industrial base than Ukraine. It produces several times more artillery shells than the Western countries combined, which is crucial in a protracted war. Russia has more than 140 million inhabitants, while Ukraine had only 40 and many of them have fled the country. Men from eastern Ukraine, in particular, are in hiding (4.5 million) and do not want to be part of the war (see Arestovich below). Ukraine will soon have a lack of troops. Rajmund Andrzejczak, former chief of the Polish General Staff, said “Ukraine is losing this war”. It was actually clear from the first day of the war. A country like Ukraine cannot win over the much larger Russia if Russia perceives the war to be “existential”. For those who knew anything about Russian military thinking, it was clear from day one: Ukraine would lose this war, and the more weapons the West gives Ukraine, the more soldiers will die. The question is just how many hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers will be killed before one is willing to enter peace negotiations.

B)     From the 90s, Russia had one key demand: “a neutral Ukraine”. Since 2008, Russia has said that Ukrainian NATO membership would lead to war, but the United States with the support from the nationalist elite in western Ukraine still pushed for Ukrainian NATO membership. The 2014-15 Minsk Agreement gave Russia a “guarantee of a neutral Ukraine” and Russia was satisfied with that, but from 2019 Ukraine included its ambition to join NATO in the constitution in direct conflict with the Minsk Agreement, while Americans and Britons had been building up militarily in Ukraine. According to Russia, this was a violation of several agreements. Russia entered with a military force on 24 February 2022. At this very moment, President Putin said: “We have been treating all new post-Soviet states with respect […]. Russia respects the sovereignty of all post-Soviet states, and we respect and will respect their sovereignty. […] It is not our plan to occupy the Ukrainian territory”, he said. But Russia cannot accept a “[Western] threat from the territory of today’s Ukraine”. Russia demanded a neutral Ukraine. Ukraine’s chief negotiator from the talks with Russia in March-April 2022, David Arakhamia, said: Russia wanted a neutral Ukraine. “In fact, this was the key point. Everything else [was] cosmetic”, he said. President Zelensky's military adviser, Oleksiy Arestovych, who also attended Istanbul, said the negotiations were “successful. We opened the champagne bottle. It was completely successful negotiations”. Russia had no territorial claims, but British Prime Minister Boris Johnson travelled to Kyiv and said, according to Arakhamia, “We should not sign anything with them at all, and let's just fight”. After this, Russia lost all trust in a negotiated solution. When the West did not accept a neutral Ukraine as a buffer against Western military forces, Russia had only one option: to include the Russian-speaking Eastern Ukraine in Russia to secure such a buffer. However, Russia still demands a neutral “rest-Ukraine” and the longer the war continues, the more territory Russia will take.

C)     In the U.S. leadership everyone knew that Ukraine would never be able to win the war and would never be able to retake lost land. For the United States, the war is not primarily about Ukraine. U.S. policy is to “fight to the last Ukrainian”, said President Bill Clinton’s Assistant Secretary of Defense, Ambassador Chas Freeman. Most important for the United States is to “weaken Russia”, President Biden’s Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said. General Harald Kujat, former German Chief of Defense and Chairman of NATO Military Committee (2002-05) said that the U.S. is using the war in Ukraine to “weaken Russia” before the U.S. begins its war against China. For the United States, the war today is not about Ukraine, but Russia. One wants Russia to crumble. But how would the U.S. get the Ukrainian leadership accept a destructive war on its soil? To understand this, we must listen to Oleksiy Arestovych. He said back in 2019 that the best thing for Ukraine is “of course a major war with Russia and NATO membership as a result of a victory over Russia”. And he continued: “With a probability of 99.9 percent our price for joining NATO is a full-scale war with Russia”. The Americans and British had apparently told Kyiv to step up its war against the Russian-speaking Eastern Ukraine to trigger a major war with Russia in order to make NATO defeat Russia to open up for Ukraine to join NATO. It was all about provoking Russia into a war, but from the first day of the war, Western media claimed that “Putin wanted to conquer Ukraine”. Despite entering Ukraine with far too small a military force to occupy the country and despite that those Ukrainian leaders said that Putin wanted “neutrality”, not to conquer Ukraine, all Western media spoke about a “full-scale invasion”, “an unprovoked attack” and that Putin wanted to conquer Ukraine. The problem is that the longer the war lasts, the more territory Russia will take and the more Ukrainian soldiers will be killed. Ukraine could have had a neutral sovereign state if one had accepted the 2015 Minsk Agreement or if one had accepted its negotiated agreement with Russia from March-April 2022. But instead, they followed British advice not to negotiate with Putin, “the crocodile”, to quote Johnson. This is tragic.

When Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg argues that one should support the Ukrainians with more advanced weapons systems to make their hand stronger “at the negotiating table”, he hasn’t understood that Russia is not the United States. The U.S. can back out and walk away from a war when it becomes too costly. The U.S. walked away from the wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq, when the costs of these wars overwhelmed any prospect of success. But Russia would not enter such “a war of choice”. To Russia, the Ukraine War is considered to be “existential”. One will use every means necessary to win the war. Ukraine and not even the European states can win a war over a major nuclear power like Russia, and the U.S. is unlikely to attack Russia, for example attack the Russian Naval Base at Murmansk, because in that case Russia will attack the U.S. Naval Base at Norfolk (Washington), and with the present Russian development of hypersonic missiles, Russia is in no way weaker than the United States in this respect. On the other hand, Russia is not interested in conquering others. One just wanted a neutral Ukraine and to abolish threatening weapons systems at its borders in accordance with the UN Charter (Art. 2:4).

Ukraine’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Dmytro Kuleba in conversation with U.S. President Joe Biden in the White House on 22 February 2022 (Wikipedia) – two days (or rather one day and a half) before Russia entered Ukraine in the early morning hours of 24 February. Kuleba now told the world: “Putin has just launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine”. After that, every media outlet would have to use these words, “the full-scale invasion of Ukraine” every time the war was mentioned. The journalists adapted to a hegemonic discourse or were catapulted out into silence. The language used originated from Washington and London.

[This article was originally written for the Norwegian quarterly Ny Tid (New Times), March 2024 and for a seminar “Media in the shadow of war” at the House of Literature in Oslo 24 February 2024]

The hubris of Western media

What an analyst can say on TV or in the newspapers is very limited, especially when it comes to the war in Ukraine. Intellectuals I know have cancelled their newspaper subscriptions. Others want to keep a newspaper for breakfast regardless of the content because they always have. But they are also frightened by the incompetence of politicians and journalists who seem to live in a parallel universe. Those who have studied Cold War security policy for decades remain silent. Those who could have warned us have given up. During the Cold War, at least within the labor movement, the other bloc’s need for security was taken seriously. And now, everything is forgotten. But today’s arrogance and hubris among journalists, politicians, and officers will backfire. We can only wait for our hubris to be replaced by nemesis.

Since 2022, virtually every media commentator has claimed that Russia entered Ukraine to conquer land to restore the Russian Empire or the Soviet Bloc. Media believed in a Western victory: a liberation of Ukraine from the Russians as the Vietnamese liberated themselves from the United States or as Norway had succeeded in being liberated from the German occupation. And the more modern weapons that the West would give Ukraine, the greater the opportunity of Ukraine to retake lost land. So it was said.

But those familiar with US-Russian security policy know that this has little to do with reality. Nevertheless, it has been the only accepted narrative within the Norwegian media world. Whoever disagrees has been thrown into the periphery. The media system has become a totalitarian machine, a centrifuge, and whoever has brought up the obvious has been catapulted into silence. There has only been one opinion. We have to go back to Pravda during the Soviet period to find something similar.

But now something has happened. In recent weeks, many analysts have realized that a Ukrainian victory will never happen. The massive Ukrainian spring offensive first turned into a summer offensive and then continued as an autumn offensive. But Ukraine never succeeded in recapturing lost territory. On January 20, U.S. national security advisor Jake Sullivan and National Intelligence Director Avril Haines told top leaders in the Congress in “a private meeting” at the White House that Ukraine will run out of air defense and artillery. “Russia could win the war in a matter of weeks or months”. U.S. correspondents started losing hope. Some started to realize that Russia has a larger industrial base and much larger population, which in the final analysis will be decisive.

However, for almost two years, the media hope of a victory was presented as a real possibility, which had prompted the Norwegian government to give tens of billions to Ukraine in weapons support. But the more weapons we have given, the more soldiers have been killed without anything having changed on the battlefield. Today we know that Ukraine has lost hundreds of thousands of men, while the frontline is the same as a year ago. Everything the media told us turned out to be false. What is important to the U.S. was never a Ukrainian victory, but to “weaken Russia”, to quote U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, even at the cost of hundreds of thousands of dead Ukrainians. Already in March 2022, former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Defense Chas Freeman said: “We [the United States] will fight to the last Ukrainian.”

A “full-scale invasion” and a “unprovoked war”

Today, we face a cruel reality for which journalists, commentators and politicians must take responsibility. Since February 24, 2022, virtually every politician and journalist in the West talking about the war, begins by talking about the “full-scale invasion”, the “unprovoked Russian attack” to “conquer Ukraine”. The term “full-scale invasion” has been used before, but since February 2022, this term has probably been used more often each month than it has been used the past 50 years. It was Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba who spoke early in the morning of 24 February 2022 about Putin’s “full-scale invasion of Ukraine”, and virtually every newspaper and TV-channel came to use Kuleba’s words the same day. Since then, almost every time the war is mentioned, one would start by speaking about “Putin’s full-scale invasion” to “conquer Ukraine”. The Guardian reported as early as February 2, 2022, that Washington and London predicted a possible “full-scale invasion” of Ukraine. In the early morning hours of February 24, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson condemned Putin's “unprovoked attack” and President Joe Biden spoke later the same day of “Russia’s unprovoked attack”. All journalists used the same expression.

The latter term (“unprovoked attack” Ukraine) yielded more than half a million hits on Google, while the previous term (“full-scale invasion” Ukraine) yielded close to two million hits. These concepts have set the limits of the media narrative and accordingly the limits of the public discourse. Any deviation from this narrative will be washed away “like water off a duck’s back”. The media machine will centrifuge the experienced military historian and geopolitical scholar into the periphery and force him or her into silence. From day one, from the first hours of the war, so-called “truths” were established setting the limits for the public discourse. These “truths” were apparently put out in Washington and London. A few hours before the attack, Kuleba was in Washington meeting president Biden and Defense Secretary Austin. The trick seems to be to establish “a truth”, a hegemonic discourse, from the very first hours of the war and then make this discourse watertight against any criticism.

Provoking a war

The term “unprovoked Russian attack” is nothing but propaganda. As early as 2008, anyone who knew something about foreign policy, knew that an attempt to enlarge NATO to Ukraine would lead to a war. In Russia, it was seen as an unprecedented provocation. But Russia did not launch an attack in 2014, despite Ukraine’s importance to Russian security and despite U.S. direct involvement in the 2014 coup d’état against the democratically elected president. I was surprised about the Russian restraint. Intelligence analyst George Friedman described the 2014 coup as “the most blatant coup d'état in human history”. U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland gave clear instructions about who should be the new prime minister and who he should collaborate with. Despite this, Moscow was content to accept Crimea’s decision to join Russia, accept a limited support for the Russian-speakers in Donbass (but not their plea to join Russia) and last: one accepted the Minsk Agreement with Ukraine (after German-French mediation) to ensure Ukraine’s neutrality and territorial integrity and to ensure the East Ukraine’s right to practice their native Russian language.

The Minsk Agreement was even signed by all the members of the UN Security Council, but it turned out that the United States and Ukraine never intended to adhere to their signed agreement. Ukraine continued its war against the Russian-speakers in the East, despite its promise not to do it. In 2019 Ukraine added its intention to join NATO to the Ukraine Constitution, also in breach with the Minsk Agreement. Oleksy Danilov, Secretary of Ukraine’s National Security Council, said that the Minsk Agreement with a relative autonomy for the Eastern Ukraine would lead to “the country’s destruction”, while the U.S. finalized its eight-years built-up of Ukraine’s military strength. It goes without saying that Russia saw this as a threat to its existence. The country was faced with one provocation after another. Kyiv and Washington would not even comply with a written agreement signed by themselves and by the UN Security Council.

After this, Moscow lost all faith in the West. And it's hardly surprising that the Russians wouldn't give up their sovereignty, which would in practice be the consequence of allowing the U.S. to increase its military presence in Ukraine. What instead amazes me is rather that Russia did not attack earlier to respond to all these provocations. In other words, the narrative that Washington and London established on 24 February 2022 about an “unprovoked attack” was built on a pure lie.

But it has not been possible to talk about this in the major newspapers or on TV in Norway or the West in general. The Russian invasion was presented as if Vladimir Putin was longing for territory and for a greater Russia. Therefore, journalists and commentators have not understood why Russia continues the war despite huge losses. One does not understand why Russia never will accept a retreat.

When the war in Vietnam had cost the United States too much, the Americans left the country. And when the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan cost the United States too much, these countries were abandoned as well. Many in Norway have believed that Russia would do the same in Ukraine because it was believed that the war was something Russia itself had “chosen”, to quote U.S. Chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley. But for Russia, the war was not about conquering land, installing a Quisling regime or punishing an adversary. For Russia, the war was about denying the U.S. a military presence in Ukraine that would have turned Ukraine into a U.S. bastion close to Moscow, so close that Russia would not have the ability to defend itself. The Russians declared such a presence a threat to its existence. In other words, the country had “no choice”. So as the U.S. moved weapons systems ever closer to Russia, Moscow put its foot down. That meant that on the one hand, Russia would sacrifice everything to secure a neutral Ukraine, while on the other, the United States could leave Ukraine if the war would cost them too much.

Russia’s demand for a neutral Ukraine

Russia was satisfied with the negotiated Minsk Agreement. It was a guarantee of a neutral Ukraine and a guarantee of eastern Ukraine’s security and right to speak Russian. The fact that Russia accepted the Minsk agreement clearly shows that Russia had no interest in conquering Ukraine. It was Ukraine and the West that left the agreement, not Russia. If Russia had wanted to conquer Ukraine, it could have done so in 2014 after the Western-backed coup d’état. Back then, Ukraine did not have an army that could rival the Russian one. The Russians could have restored the old Soviet Union if they had wanted to. But they didn't. U.S. General Joseph Hilbert referred to his Ukraine counterpart saying: “The biggest mistake that the Russians made was giving us eight years to prepare for this [war]”.

Speaking at the invasion February 24, 2022, Vladimir Putin said, “I have already said that Russia accepted the new geopolitical reality after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. We have been treating all new post-Soviet states with respect and we will continue to act this way. We respect and we will respect their sovereignty. [...] However, Russia cannot feel safe, develop, and exist while facing a permanent threat directed at us from Ukrainian territory.” And Putin added: “It is not our plan to occupy the Ukrainian territory.”

Some people argue that Putin is lying and that he really wants to conquer Ukraine and recreate the Soviet Union. But one cannot deny that he defends the sovereignty of the post-Soviet states in his speech.

But let’s disregard Putin’s speech and his full support for “a neutral Ukraine” and instead look at the purely objective criteria: The invasion force of 170,000-180,000 men (according to General Milley) was not even one-fifth of the force needed to occupy Ukraine according to a Western rule of thumb: one soldier per 40-50 inhabitants. Yes, not even a tenth if we look at Russian practice (cf. Czechoslovakia 1968). Nor did the Russians begin the attack by air-bombing Ukrainian cities the way the United States used to begin its wars. Russia entered with a very limited force and almost without deploying its air force or navy. This was not a “full-scale invasion” of Ukraine. It was a clear signal to the West that Russia had no intention of conquering Ukraine. The term “full-scale invasion” is nothing but propaganda.

Despite what Putin said and despite what he did unequivocally pointed to the fact that he had a limited objective and no intention of occupying Ukraine, all journalists, commentators, and politicians in the West claimed that this is what he wanted to do (here we can add that a Quisling regime would also have presupposed an occupation, which Norwegians know very well). 

The March 2022 negotiations in Istanbul “were successful”. “We opened the bottle of champagne”, said President Zelensky’s military adviser Oleksiy Arestovych. Russia’s key demand was “a neutral Ukraine”, which Zelensky had accepted. “Everything else was cosmetic”, said Zelensky's chief negotiator David Arakhamia. But after that, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson travelled to Kyiv and told Zelensky that talks with “Putin the crocodile” were pointless and that the West would give Ukraine all the support in the war. According to Arakhamia, Boris Johnson said: “We were not going to sign anything”. We were going to “fight”. “Let's just fight”, he said. After this, Russia gave up its hope of achieving a Ukrainian neutrality through negotiations.

Following Ukraine’s refusal to negotiate, Moscow held a referendum in the predominately Russian speaking oblasts of Donetsk and Lugansk and in the now occupied Kherson and Zaporizhia that linked the previous oblasts with Crimea. Their inhabitants did, for obvious reasons, support Russia (most people supportive of Kyiv would already have left). After that the parliament in Moscow decided to include the four oblasts as a part of Russia.

However, NATO membership for the Kyiv-controlled “rest-Ukraine” will never be accepted in Moscow, and as long as this rest-Ukraine won’t accept neutrality, Russia will keep the war going. And the longer the fighting continues, the more territory Russia will take, and the more Ukrainians will die. Ukraine’s losses on the battlefield are enormous. And the hundreds of thousands of soldiers killed must be replaced. In December, Zelensky said that the military leadership now wants to mobilize up to 500,000 new troops. But the parliament is against it. According to Arestovych, 4.5 million men have refused to even register. People from eastern Ukraine try to avoid being recruited to the war, and the newly recruited soldiers will not be well-trained young men. They will eventually be killed, while Ukraine loses even more land. It is, as Chas Freeman explained about the U.S. Administration in the introductory section: “We will fight to the last Ukrainian.”

The media centrifuge

In sum, we can say that TV channels and newspapers in the west speak of an “unprovoked Russian attack” and of a “full-scale invasion” despite the fact that this has nothing to do with reality. This was a narrative that was established in Washington and London in the early hours of the war and repeated by the entire media world. We must ask ourselves: how is it possible that the entire Norwegian, and most of the Anglo-American media world, could be bewitched by such propaganda?

We also need to ask: how could Western media just swallow the claims from the neoconservative propaganda institutes, like the Institute for the Study of War under President Kimberly Kagan and with her husband Frederick Kagan? We all know the Kagan family from two-three decades ago with Frederick, his father Donald Kagan and brother Robert Kagan and with his wife Victoria Nuland, who all pushed for the “Project for the New American Century” and for a war in Iraq and then, if possible, to continue that war. Why are the same people (Victoria Nuland, the very close advisor to Vice President Richard Cheney and wife of Robert Kagan), that pushed for the U.S.’ war in Iraq now waging Ukraine’s war against Russia? And how could the media disregard all the expertise available in the field? How could they trust obviously erroneous claims that have cost us Norwegians many billions of dollars and which have cost the Ukrainian people hundreds of thousands of lives? Those who bear responsibility for this and who have been instrumental in this campaign must at least consider what they are guilty of.

In the very few cases where a media commentator has touched upon the background of the conflict or has mentioned what Western politics would lead to, his or her words have been filtered away and the media centrifuge has thrown the critic out of the public eye. And the more significant those critics have been – prominent ministers or famous professors – the faster the centrifuge has rotated and the more brutally have critics been trodden down. No journalist would dare to interview such critics for several years. All critics know about these limits. In other words, we have got a perfect totalitarian system, the media has become a steam roller that flattens everything in its path. It is only when the disaster lies just ahead of us that we will raise the question of whether it was wise what we did.

From 1955, the special interagency committee, "The Special Group" was headed by CIA Director Allan Dulles. In the 1970s, a similar committee, “The 40 Committee”, was headed by the national security advisor Henry Kissinger. In the 1980s, such a committee, “The Deception Committee”, was headed by CIA Director William Casey.

The origin of the Deception Committee

As mentioned in Part I, it was William Casey’s “Deception Committee” that had decided about the operations in Swedish waters. John Lehman said explicitly that this was the Committee that had decided about the Swedish operations. It was headed by DCI Casey and included the national security advisor Richard Allen and from 1982 his successor William Clark as well as representatives from State and Defense, the deputy secretaries, which would have been William Clark and Frank Carlucci respectively. It might, as earlier, have included the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (and perhaps the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Fred Iklé, who was overseeing Psychological Operations, and sometimes an assistant secretary responsible for the area), but this was not referred to by Lehman. The Casey Committee decided about most secret covert operation to provide the President and the Secretaries of State and Defense with “plausible deniability”. They should be able to speak with their opposite numbers in other countries without knowing about or at least without having taken any formal decision about these very sensitive operations.

This Deception Committee was more or less the same interagency committee that from 1955 onwards had been called “Special Group” or the “5412 Committee” (after the National Security Council Directive 5412 from December 1954) headed by the DCI Allan Dulles and with above-mentioned representatives. In 1964-69 the corresponding committee was called the “303 Committee” (after the National Security Action Memorandum 303). It was headed by national security advisor McGeorge Bundy and from 1966 by Walt Rostow, and it included the above-mentioned representatives. In 1970-76 the same type of committee had been called the “40 Committee” (after the National Security Decision Memorandum 40). It was headed by national security advisor Henry Kissinger, who kept this position when becoming Secretary of State. In 1976, the 40 Committee was replaced by the Operations Advisory Group, which included both the Secretary of State and Defense, and accordingly was unable to give them the necessary “plausible deniability”. From 1977, during President Jimmy Carter, the group was renamed the “NSC Special Coordination Committee” and was chaired by national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski and this committee still included the Secretaries of State and Defense. This was reversed by DCI William Casey, who became chairman of the new committee in 1981 and as an old OSS colleague of Allan Dulles he returned more or less to the original structure of the Special Group. He was running these operations from his office in the White House (the Old Executive Office Building) similar to what the national security advisors had done before him, and to Casey, “deception” was the key to running the political scene. This he had learned while heading European espionage for the OSS during World War II, from planning the Normandy invasion, Lehman said. Common to these committees, however, is the fact that they all authorized and decided about covert action including toppling of foreign governments, but they bore an imprint of their chairmen, and Casey was extremely secretive and understood the necessity of “plausible deniability”.

John Lehman said that the Strategic Defense Initiative, aka the “Star Wars” program was originally a product of the Deception Committee. We made the Soviets believe that you are “20 feet tall”. Casey’s idea was to deceive them into believing that the U.S. actually was able to develop a Strategic Defense Initiative that could take out incoming Soviet missiles and accordingly create an existential threat to the Soviets that would force them to hasten their high-tech military buildup to an extent that it would break their economy. This technological deception was combined with the largest CIA operation ever in support of the Muslim Mujahideen and the Pakistani ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence) in Afghanistan. It was a major U.S. and Saudi operation “sucking the Soviets” to intervene on behalf of the Afghan Government in a war they could not win. The idea was to lay a trap for Moscow to give the Soviets its own “Vietnam”, to quote Brzezinski. The US-Saudi initiative radically increased the Soviet expenses. At the same time, Casey convinced the Saudis to increase the oil production to drive down the price on crude oil. Oil was the major source of income for the Soviet Union, so Casey urged the West Europeans to stop buying Soviet gas and oil. Casey wanted to squeeze the Soviet economy by increasing the costs while radically decrease the income, which he believed would hasten the Soviet economic collapse. This is precisely how his special assistant Herb Meyer and how Thomas Reed (assistant to the President and to national security advisor William Clark) describe his strategy. Meyer says:

“We pushed them economically. Once we had the intelligence that the Soviet economy was more fragile than anybody thought it was […] we began to push the economy, e.g. by forcing a cut back of Soviet energy exports – oil and gas – into Western Europe. That was their primary source of hard currency. We pushed that down. We also worked with the Saudis to lower the price of oil, what helped our economy but hurt theirs, because lower oil prices were good for us and bad for them. That was Bill Casey by the way, who was involved in that. We worked with our European allies to reduce […] the volume of the pipelines that were being built, the gas pipeline to carry gas from the Soviet Union into Western Europe. They had to hold down their revenues. So, we pushed them economically. We pushed them militarily. We launched the biggest arms build-up in American history. [John Lehman’s] 600-ship Navy for example. We also did something which hadn’t been done before, we launched anti-communist insurgencies [in Afghanistan, Nicaragua, and Mozambique…]. It would break them. Not that they didn’t have the technical skill. […] They didn’t have the money. That’s why this was so brilliant. I keep telling people, the best way to think of President Reagan and Gorbachev is that Gorbachev was like a patient in a hospital bed with tubes and all kinds of things and Reagan was the doctor leaning over him, telling him everything is ‘gonna’ be just fine, while he very carefully stepped on his oxygen tube and killed him. That was Reagan and Gorbachev.”

Special Assistant to the Director of the CIA Herb Meyer (from the Arte interview), his chief, CIA Director Bill Casey (official photo), and President Reagan’s deputy national security advisor Tom Reed (from the Arte interview in 2014).

One might argue that the Reagan policy strengthened the Soviet hardliner, postponed the Gorbachevian reforms and prolonged the Cold War. The success of the Casey strategy is controversial, but I am not talking about its success. I am talking about the perceptions: Casey’s ideas, his great game. Already in July 1981, after he had received French intelligence on a Soviet network smuggling high technology to the Soviet Union, he had, to quote Thomas Reed, “the sense enough to not just say: ‘let’s go out and arrest all these people’”. Instead, Casey flooded the Soviet system with manipulated computer chips that, to quote Reed, “will work fine for a couple of million cycles and then they will go berserk. The software will work fine for a while, but then it will have a Trojan horse. […] That was really brilliant.” Casey’s idea was that sooner or later they will know that their system is flooded with manipulated computer chips, but they won’t know where. The computers will go berserk, fighter aircraft will fall from the sky and nuclear power plants and gas pipelines will explode, and at least the last thing happened. Gus Weiss at the CIA was deeply involved in this. He informed Reed, former Secretary of Air Force and Director of the National Reconnaissance Office and now a Special Assistant to President Reagan and Bill Clark’s deputy at the National Security Council (NSC). Reed told Arte:

“The Soviets wanted to build this pipeline. We did not want them to build [it]. We could understand it would earn hard currency and it would get the Western Europeans hooked on gas. [… We ‘helped them’ with] the software that run the pumps just fine for a couple of months, but it had a Trojan horse that said after x period of time [...] we are going to run all the pumps at twice the pressure for the pipeline. […] Sure enough, in summer 1982 the pipeline came apart. [...] I was told by Dr Weiss that it resulted in the explosion. […] You know, I was in the NSC [… We] heard about this explosion and Gus Weiss worked for the NSC. He came down the hall to talk to me and [national security advisor] Bill Clark, and he said: ‘don’t worry […] that’s a CIA job, don’t worry about it’. Ok we’ve got other things to do. […] The intelligence people thought it was a nuclear event, but there [were] no nuclear tests and no nuclear signals. […] The head of Defense Intelligence, basically, as I recall, said this is about a 3-kiloton burst. […] Yes, the CIA is in the deception business, that’s what they do. So, yes there was a [Deception] Committee.”

Thomas Reed and Gus Weiss, who also served on the National Security Council staff, revealed how they blow up the gas pipeline in Siberia in 1982, the largest non-nuclear explosion ever, one fifth of a Hiroshima bomb, a covert action that still remains classified. The operation was also confirmed by former national security advisor Richard Allen, who just had left his position. John Lehman talked above about an equally spectacular operation directed by Casey’s Deception Committee, but it is still classified, he said. They had deployed small submersibles in waters “close to the Soviet Union”, and the Swedish operations are the only ones that fit with this description. Furthermore, in private conversations, he told me that the U.S. operations with Western submarines in Swedish waters had been decided by Casey’s Deception Committee, but it was clear that this was still very secret.

Exactly one year after the 1982 October events Casey turned up with his own aircraft on a secret visit to Stockholm to meet military officers and one civil servant from the Prime Minister’s Office and one from the Defense Ministry. I asked Olof Palme’s State Secretary Ulf Larsson, whom at the Prime Minister’s Office could have met with Casey. Larsson said that it was only one person who had these kinds of contacts, later Foreign Minister Jan Eliasson, but Eliasson wrote to my colleague Ola Frithiofson that he could not remember having met Casey in 1983. Peter Schweizer describes how Casey left Rome for a “bone-chilling cold” Stockholm. He expected “his welcome from the Swedes to be about as pleasant. […] The Defense Ministry was concerned about repeated intrusions of Soviet submarines into Swedish waters, which were now occurring almost daily. The Swedish navy was having trouble tracking the subs and was interested in any intelligence the Americans would be able to provide”, Schweizer wrote, but he didn’t mention Casey’s Swedish operations. The Swedes were totally fooled, and the operations made the Soviets “feel vulnerable”, to quote John Lehman. The Deception Committee was able to change European politics from one year to the other. It was probably more influential than “The 40 Committee” ever had been. Casey “loved putting things together and making them happen in the field”, to quote a longtime confidant of Reagan, Glenn Campbell. Casey’s successor as DCI, Robert Gates, wrote in 1997 that Casey was as “risk-taking” as in the OSS believing he was running wartime operations against the Soviet Union.

It has been argued that such a committee for the 1980s was the National Security Planning Group (NSPG), headed by the President Ronald Reagan or by Vice-President George H.W. Bush (with national security advisor Allen, Director of Central Intelligence Casey, the Secretaries of State and Defense, the President’s Chief of Staff, his Deputy and the Counselor to the President and sometimes the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff). But this group did not provide the President or the Secretaries of State and Defense with “plausible deniability”, which would have been necessary for this kind of very sensitive operations. Peter Schweizer writes that already from February 1981 it was NSPG alone that reviewed the covert operations, but he clearly has confused two different entities. He says that covert operations were decided “by the NSPG alone, but he also says that they were decided by Casey in a small tight group. “It was an extraordinary arrangement for Casey” and “a reflection of the trust Reagan placed in him”. The latter group, however, could not have been the NSPG, where Casey had a subordinate role. “Casey was running his operations; there was very little policy discussions. They didn’t want any leaks”.  The Casey group, as described by Schweizer, would have been the “Deception Committee”. He discusses some now declassified operations of this Committee, but he does not bring up the Committee itself.

The US intelligence historian Jeffrey Richelson brings instead up the “Senior Interagency Group – Intelligence” (SIG-I), with more or less the same individuals as the “Deception Committee”. It was headed by DCI William Casey and with the national security advisor Bill Clark (replacing Dick Allen), the deputies of State and Defense, and with the Chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff, General John Vessey (later Admiral William Crowe). However, this group was responsible for all intelligence but covert action. It was created formally in 1982, while the “Deception Committee” was, according to Lehman, created already before Reagan’s inauguration. The SIG-I possibly became a formal cover for the “Deception Committee”. Former CIA Chief Historian Ben Fischer has argued that this Casey Committee may not have had a formal name. That was also what Lehman alluded to. The Committee was very secret and Casey “intended to run covert operations that were truly covert”, to quote Schweizer.

Left: General Richard Stilwell (photo: in public domain). Right: DCI Casey’s schedule for 8 April 1981 meeting General Stilwell from 10:40 to 11:45 “DoD brief on US strategic deception program” (National Security Archive ).

U.S. use of deception to fool its European allies

Jeffrey Richelson refers to Casey’s colleague from the Normandy deception, Fred Iklé’s Deputy Undersecretary for Defense for Policy General Richard Stilwell (1981-85), who had served in the CIA and as Chief of Staff to General Westmoreland in Vietnam. On 8 April 1981, he and Director of Defense Intelligence General Eugene Tighe were briefing William Casey on the “US strategic deception program”. DCI Casey offered them full support. Stilwell “dealt with highly sensitive matters” as “special plans”. Richelson writes:

“[The special plans”] referred to “perception management”, which has two key components. One is deception – inducing an adversary to believe something that is not true. […] The other is “truth projection” – insuring that the adversary believes certain true statements, including those threatening military action in response to some provocations. [… ‘A] series of larger, mutually supportive actions and communications could be initiated’. Those actions would be intended to raise the perception of Soviet activity in the region and trigger some response.”

Richelson asks: “whose perceptions are being targeted”? He doesn’t speculate, but we now know what General Stilwell possibly referred to. The extreme sensitivity of the case indicate the U.S. had not just targeted Iran as Richelson writes but also allies or friends. U.S. deception and actions in the region were “intended to raise the perception of Soviet activity” and to “trigger some response” (which would here be a European response). Those U.S. actions were, in this case, not directed primarily against the Soviet Union and its allies. The implication is that the U.S. should target U.S. friends (or allies) like Sweden so that they would become aware of “the real Soviet threat” (“truth projection”), for example, by regularly simulating bomber attacks against the Soviet homeland that would provoke a “threatening military action” by the Soviets, or as in this case by initiating covert underwater provocations believed to be Soviet military action (“deception”) to trigger a Swedish or Western response. The targets, in this case, would apparently be some West European states that didn’t adhere to the US discourse and didn’t take the Soviet threat serious enough. Stilwell recommended use of provocations raising “the perception of Soviet activity” to “trigger some response”. But, to target friends was extremely sensitive. Richelson writes: a cancellation notice for some very sensitive documents was sent out at the request of Stilwell on 4 February 1983. “The memo asked recipients to ‘remove and destroy immediately’ any copies of two Defense Department directives in their possession” titled “The Defense Special Plans Office”. This would indicate extremely sensitive documents related to “perception management” and “deception”, activities that “was not authorized by Congress”, to quote Stilwell. These activities would perhaps have taken place in 1981-82 or perhaps rather in autumn 1982.

Left: The author and Robert Bathurst in Sponvika southern Norway at the border to Sweden in 1996 (photo: private archive). Right: U.S. Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger awarding Admiral Bobby Ray Inman with the Distinguished Service Medal, Washington 1981 (photo: public domain).

The general concepts presented by Stilwell above had to be transformed into action by the use of certain covert instruments appropriate to the task, and in the Swedish case the Swedish Navy had been paranoid about foreign submarine intrusions. The use of submarines and submersibles was an ideal instrument to raise Swedish “awareness of the Soviet threat”. This would force the Swedes to increase their military buildup and to turn to U.S. intelligence as they did in the mid-1960 when a deal was made between the Swedish Chief of Intelligence Major General Bo Westin and the U.S. Director of Naval Intelligence Vice Admiral Rufus Taylor. A young U.S. Navy officer Bobby Ray Inman was given the position as Assistant Naval Attaché to Sweden, but his major task was to study Soviet submarine activity along the Swedish coast. Three days a week, he did that in his office at the Ministry of Defense in Stockholm. His colleague, the then U.S. Assistant Attaché to Moscow, Robert Bathurst, used to visit Inman in Stockholm to “breath some Western air”, as Robert used to say. He told me that Bobby Inman had been able to strike a deal with someone in Sweden to deploy hydrophones along the Swedish coast, which Inman also told Ola Frithiofson about. These hydrophones were extremely sensitive and could accordingly not have a land-connection. They were maintained by the use of small submarines, Robert said, and while Robert was stationed in London heading U.S. Naval intelligence Europe (1969-72), this system was up running. Admiral Inman told me in a conversation I had with him in 2021 that he didn’t “understand the comment” of Bob [Bathurst], but a third U.S. Naval Intelligence officer told me that these “small special purpose submarines” were built in Italy. They were Italian and they were brought into the Baltic Sea on rebuilt civilian merchant ships. These ships could go to let say Helsinki to deliver oil or other products but let the sub out on the way at, for example, the Stockholm archipelago, while then picking it on its way back. A former chief of the Norwegian Intelligence Service, Rear Admiral Jan Ingebrigtsen (1979-85) told me that these merchant ships had a “door” in the bottom to let the small submarine out without anyone knowing about it.

Bobby Inman avoided this discussion. What he was willing to say, however, was that they [thanks to the U.S. hydrophones] were able to identify the single Soviet submarines operating along the Swedish coast. He found out that the specific Soviet submarine captains patrolling the Swedish coast, were the same captains that later operated with nuclear submarines along the U.S. east coast. The Soviet intrusions into Swedish waters had been training missions for these captains, but the Soviets never entered Swedish archipelagoes or internal Swedish waters, Inman said. Most Swedish naval officers, however, believed that the small submarines and midgets that frequently had turned up in Swedish internal waters were from the Soviet Union and that the Soviets were preparing an attack on Sweden. When the DCI William Casey was unhappy with the Swedish politics from 1981 onwards and not least with Prime Minister Olof Palme from 1982, Casey just let these small submarines show their periscopes and sails in Swedish naval bases and archipelagoes, and the Swedes became hysteric and turned to the U.S. for support against “the Soviet intrusions”.

Left: US Navy’s X-1 (15 meters) was used to test US base and harbor security in the 1950s and 1960s (photo: public domain). Right: From 1970, the Italian COSMOS SX-506 (23 meters) was used to test harbor security and for landing Special Forces. All evidence points to the fact that from 1970 these Italian “small special purpose submarines” were used for maintaining the U.S. hydrophones along the Swedish coast and from 1980 to test naval base and harbor security (photo from early 1970s).

A senior White House official told me that these U.S. operations in Swedish waters that Caspar Weinberger had talked about was “the most secret thing we had”, and he said they were run by a CIA-DIA liaison office, which would indicate the National Underwater Reconnaissance Office (NURO), a cousin of the CIA-Air Force the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) responsible for the satellites. NURO had a CIA and Navy Intelligence Staff, and its very existence was still secret after 2000. It was using submarines equipped with DSRVs (see above) for extremely secret operations in primarily Soviet home waters. A former CIA Deputy Director for Intelligence (DDI) Douglas MacEachin told me that the operations in Soviet waters were only part of NURO’s activity. NURO had also operated submarines in Scandinavian waters, he said. In the 1970s, NURO reported directly to the 40 Committee, to Henry Kissinger. In the 1980s, NURO would have reported to the Casey’s Deception Committee. As Secretary of the Navy, John Lehman had oversight over NURO activities. Lehman was also close to Richard Allen and had been recruited by Allen to the Reagan team already before Reagan’s inauguration. Lehman would have known about the Deception Committee also through Allen. However, Bobby Inman told me that the operations in the Baltic Sea were not run by NURO. Admiral Inman had been Director Naval Intelligence (DNI) 1974-76, and as DNI he was also heading NURO. The Director of Naval Intelligence was always Director of NURO, he said. As Deputy Director of the DIA (1976-77), Director of the NSA (1977-81), and Deputy CIA up to July 1982, he was still well-informed about U.S. Navy’s and the CIA’s activities in Sweden. He was a close friend of the Swedish Chief of Navy Vice Admiral Per Rudberg, and they went on holiday together, I was told by a Björn Eklind, Sweden’s former Deputy Chief of Swedish Defense Staff Intelligence. Bobby Inman would have known about the operations in Swedish waters, and he left the CIA in July 1982 in conflict with DCI William Casey. The distance “between them on covert action” had been growing , Casey’s successor Robert Gates wrote.

In 2000, Robert Bathurst contacted his successor as head of Naval Intelligence Europe until the fall 1981, Norman Channell. “Would we ever get Bobby Inman to talk?” Robert asked. Channell wrote some nice words about my analysis, but he also said that he would “probably not have been informed anyway”. Despite being chief Naval Intelligence Europe, he was not made aware of “the games of the Agency crowd [the CIA] and the SOF people [the Navy SEALs]” in his own area of responsibility. He was “still upset” about it. He also wrote: “I really enjoyed working with BRI [Bobby Ray Inman] during the latter part of my career, but he is the original Sphinx”. What the “Sphinx” tell us may not always be trustworthy. He may have reason to hide sensitive information, but if we in this case should trust Channell and Admiral Inman, we should rather look for a parallel hierarchy that was able to bypass Naval Intelligence.

According to CIA’s National Intelligence Officer for the Soviet Union, Fritz Ermarth, Secretary Lehman’s close ally, Admiral James “Ace” Lyons, had been responsible for some “very secret operations in northern Europe”. Lyons had been Commander Second Fleet (North Atlantic including European waters) 1981-83 and Deputy Chief of Naval Operations (1983-85). “Ace” Lyons and his staff would have deployed decoys, small “special purpose submarines”, to appear on the surface; The US had tested its own harbor security with the use of small submarines or submersibles since the 1950s (see photo of X-1 and COSMOS SX-506 above). On a wider scale from the 1980s, they would have used the same system for the purpose of “deception” to make the Swedes aware of the “truth”, “the Soviet threat”, in order to “trigger some response”. The U.S. would try to trigger a buildup of military forces and to make Sweden turn to the U.S. for support. In the Arte interview, Lehman also spoke about “allegations” that submarines from other NATO countries on “numerous occasions [...] entered harbors, naval harbors [also in Sweden]”.

After the bombing of the US Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983 (killing 241 US Marines), Casey called Lyons directly and asked him to come up with something to increase the security of US bases worldwide – to prepare them for the terrorist threat. Lyons said that Casey “knew what I had done in the North Atlantic and so I said ‘of course! No question’”. Lyons initiated the Red Cell (formally: “The Naval Security Coordination Team OP-06D”) in 1984 under former SEAL Team 6 Commander Richard Marcinko to test naval bases for terrorist attacks worldwide (in the 1970s, Marcinko had been Commander SEAL Team 2 responsible for Northern Europe). The Red Cell acted as “real terrorists” similar to how they earlier had played “Soviet” intruders to test you against Soviet attacks, Marcinko said. Admiral Lyons idea was simple: in order to increase security and readiness, instructions are not enough. You couldn’t just give orders about increased readiness. You had to be “physical”, he said. You had to act as “real terrorists” or “real Soviets”. The Red Cell infiltrated US naval bases all over the world. They detonated bombs at the base, kidnapped US admirals and tortured naval personnel, they captured nuclear weapons and a nuclear submarine, and when the naval base security officer claimed that their security had not been compromised, “we said: run the tape!” The Red Cell had tape-recorded the whole event and the base commander had to admit that they didn’t have security.

After Ermarth’s comments about Admiral Lyons very secret operations in Northern Europe, I told Dirk Pohlmann, who was making a documentary for Arte about the U.S. deception operations. Pohlmann then went to the U.S. to interview Admiral Lyons and asked him about the Red Cell. Lyons said that Casey had called him in October 1983 (actually after Casey was back from Stockholm and after having learnt about the successful operations in Sweden). Lyons was asked to come up with something similar with “physical operations” against US Naval bases worldwide to increase their security, their readiness and awareness (The Red Cell), as he had done in Northern Europe. The only North-European waters where there had been such operations these years, were in Sweden. Casey told Lyons that he could not tell the Joint Chiefs, because he did not want to read about it in the Washington Post the next day. Casey, Lehman, and Lyons ran “covert operations that were truly covert”. The operations decided by Casey’s “Deception Committee” was run, not by the President and his immediate Cabinet but by a layer below, as a Close-to-Cabinet (C2C) policy.

From left: Official photo of Admiral “Ace” Lyons as Commander Pacific Fleet (1985-87); then Lyons in 2011 together with his strong supporter, the former Secretary of the Navy John Lehman, who is receiving a Freedom Flame Award; and right: “Ace” Lyons interviewed by Arte and Dirk Pohlmann in 2014.

Admiral Lyons had worked with John Lehman when developing Sea Plan 2000 in the late 1970s. He was now, in the early 1980s, running Lehman’s most delicate operations. The TV channel Arte with Dirk Pohlmann asked Admiral Lyons in 2014 about a parallel between the Red Cell and the operations in Sweden. Was it a similar idea behind these operations?

Arte: The submarine operations in Sweden, was there a similar idea [as the Red Cell] to raise the attention of the Swedes?

Lyons: Yeah, yeah, right, right.

Arte: Can you explain that?

Lyons: Well, not really [Big laugh …].

Arte: Lehman mentioned to me […] there had been a Deception Operation Committee planning these things. Who was that?

Lyons: It was my staff – me! Right here! I’m the one that put that together: the deception formations, all the decoys, and all that. It was me and my staff that did that. […]

Arte: Was the stranding of the submarine in Sweden [the Whiskey on the Rocks in 1981], was that also a deception operation?

Lyons: Yeah, could have been. (Big laugh). Yeah, yeah.

Arte: When I look at these things, there is a signature. I can see a similarity.

Lyons: Yeah, could be.

Arte: But you are not allowed to talk about it?

Lyons: Some things you still keep to yourself. […]

Arte: Were the submarine incursions in Sweden made to make the Swedish military understand that we can do this and go ahead with us?

Lyons: Well, I’m sure they recognized what we were doing […]. They were kind of standing on the side-line, holding your coat. So, yeah.

Lyons clearly misunderstood the question about the Deception Committee, but he confirmed that it was he and his staff that put together the “deception formations”. He wanted to make the Swedes aware of the enemy. When a top-CIA officer says that Lyons was running the very secret “North-European ops”, and when Lyons speaks of himself as responsible for such deception operations and specifically “in Sweden” and says that Swedish Naval leadership was “standing on the side-line holding your coat”, one has to take it seriously. The American-led forces were “playing” with the Swedes and the Swedes or rather a couple of Swedish admirals were “standing on the side-line” to intervene if necessary – for example by limiting the use of force, while the British Royal Navy may primarily have contributed with a MOSUB with a couple of submersibles and Special Forces. The U.S. would have kept an overall responsibility, while using some small Italian special purpose submarines brought to Swedish waters to maintain the hydrophones. The U.S. always preferred to use others’ vessels for these extremely sensitive operations, so that nothing physically could be traced back to the U.S., and the most obvious alternative was, in addition to a British MOSUB and couple of midgets, to use some small Italian “special purpose submarines”. Italy was the only state that had a significant production of these small vessels.

Statements by Secretary Weinberger, Secretary Lehman and Admiral Lyons are pretty blunt. US-Swedish Navy-to-Navy consultations about operations in Swedish waters and decisions taken at the very top by Casey’s Deception Committee were consistent with Lehman’s and Lyons’ understanding of how to increase the awareness and readiness of local military forces. A senior CIA official said that Admiral Lyons had been running these very secret operations in Northern Europe, and Lyons clearly confirmed his role in these operations. These operations would rather refer to above-mentioned “perception management operations” with some Western subs masquerading as Soviet submarines in Swedish waters, to make the Swedes aware of “the Soviet threat”.