“An Underwater U-2”: Part II

A damaged midget submarine in Sweden in 1982

The British HMS Porpoise (88 meters) rebuilt as a mother submarine (MOSUB) with cradles for two small mini-subs and with white edges on the sail to make it easier for these midgets to find her under water. All MOSUBs use to have these white markings on the sail. There are also external pipes to extra tanks that could be filled with air to compensate for the extra weight of the midgets, when the submarine enters the Baltic Sea with its low salinity. The white-painted water pipes and the high pressure air pipes are protected by steel beams, so that the midgets won't bump into the pipe. Some small Italian midgets like 3GST9 were transported on top of a regular submarine as HMS Porpoise.

5. Three scenarios

If the US Secretary of the Navy John Lehman (1981-87) was telling the truth in Part I, the damaged midget, the Underwater U-2 at Muskö Naval Base (at 14:40 on October 5) would not have come from the United States but from another NATO country. This gives us at least three possibilities. Firstly, it could have been a British vessel. In 2000, British Navy Minister Keith Speed told SVT (Swedish Television) that the Royal Navy operated Porpoise and Oberon class submarines in the Baltic Sea, also in Swedish waters. British [mini-]subs went almost into the Stockholm Harbor, “not quite but that sort of things”, Speed said. HMS Porpoise was said to have operated in the Baltic Sea, also along the coast of north Sweden, one submarine captain told me. The Porpoise was rebuilt to carry two small midget submarines (see photo) and she was adapted to carry these midgets into waters of low salinity as the Baltic Sea. Speed confirmed intrusions into Swedish waters to the Sunday Times in 2008, but he said: “Yes, but I cannot say any more as I am bound by the Official Secrets Act until the day I die.” “They were the most secret operations the UK ever carried out. Every single operation was approved by Margaret Thatcher.” Sir John Walker, former Chief of the British Defence Intelligence, told AP on 7 March 2000 that “if you were going to operate inside the Stockholm Archipelago, you wanted to make sure that the Swedes would not attack you with torpedoes”, and he said that the west was “allowed a certain number of intrusions during a given period”.

Two British submarine captains explained to me that they had operated submarines in Swedish waters. They also did it to land Special Forces, the UK Special Boat Service (SBS). One of them had briefed Prime Minister Thatcher in her office. He told me: “Margaret Thatcher signed approval for every single operation”. The other described himself as a “taxi driver” for the SBS forces also in the Baltic along the Swedish coast. At the Bodø conference on US Maritime Strategy in 2007, Admiral James Eberle indirectly confirmed that the Royal Navy had operated submarines in Swedish waters. He also said that it was he, along with former US Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral William Crowe (1985-89), who had represented the West in the nuclear weapons talks with Marshal Shaposhnikov after the “end of the Soviet Union”. British SBS forces, which were put ashore from a submarine, trained with the Swedish Stay Behinds, but according to Wolbert Smidt, former HUMINT chief of the German intelligence service BND, these submarines never appeared on the surface. These operations were decided by a secret NATO committee, the Allied Clandestine Committee (ACC) with Smidt as a West German representative, but it was not these submarines that showed up in Swedish waters. These submarines operated covertly as submarines should do, he told me at his home in Berlin and at the Institute for Defense Studies intelligence conference in in Oslo April-May in 2005.

Left: An observer’s drawing of a submarine in the Stockholm southern archipelago in February 1982. The Naval Base wrote in a formerly top-secret document: “Very similar to a West German Type 206 (see Mathias Mossberg 2016). Right: A Type 206 (48 meters) (Photo: The German Navy).

West German Type 100 (20 meters) and similar mini-submarines were sold to South Korea and Taiwan, and a couple of small West German vessels may also have operated covertly in the Baltic Sea.

Secondly, this Underwater U-2 on 5 October 1982 could have been a West German vessel. West Germany had several small submarines. Swedish Naval base archives show that the Swedish military had recorded what was thought to be West German submarines deep into Swedish waters, but it is difficult to believe that West Germans would act so provocatively without coordinating this with the Americans. The US Navy SEALs began a cooperative program with the West German Kampfschwimmers in 1972.  They operated from the West German submarine base Eckernförde. A lieutenant from the US Navy SEAL Team 2, Joseph Maguire, said they had practiced covert intrusion into the Baltic Sea harbors. He told of an intrusion along the German Baltic coast for a book on US Navy SEALs (Kelly, 1992), but this exercise is “probably the only one we can tell you about”, he said. All these intrusions were very, very secret. Maguire later became vice admiral and Chief U.S. Naval Special Warfare Command, and under President Donald Trump Deputy Director National Intelligence (2019-2020), the second highest position in the U.S. intelligence community. The US Navy SEALs operated together with the West Germans. John Lehman said that West German submarines played an important role in the Baltic Sea.

Guinio Santi Engineering (GSE or formerly Maritalia) showed this small submarine from an exhibition 1980 and a white 3GST9 (10 meters) being prepared for a trial, probably in early 1980s. I have not seen any more photos of the first vessel

Thirdly, this Underwater U-2 could have been an Italian or an Italian-built vessel. John Lehman confirmed that the US Navy was using small Italian submarines. Italy built many 10-meter and 20-25-meter mini-subs that were ideal for such activity deep into archipelagos and into foreign naval bases. In the 1980s, the Italian company Maritalia had probably the most capable small midget submarines in the world. H.I. Sutton describes how the US Navy used small Italian underwater vehicles as early as the 1960s. These vessels were developed by various manufacturers such as COSMOS, Maritalia/GSE, DRASS, Galeazzi, and Fincantieri. When the French-German TV channels ARTE/ZDF in 2015 did its documentary on the 1980s and the submarine intrusions into Swedish waters, they called the CEO of GSE (formerly Maritalia) Giunio Santi and asked about high-resolution photos of his submarines. Santi replied that they didn’t have any photos. When ARTE/ZDF insisted, and said they already had something. Santi replied: “Ask Ola Tunander. He has the photos”. An intelligence service must have briefed him. Photos that I had found on the internet were removed shortly afterwards and did never appear again. When a western admiral, who also knew Admiral Crowe and Cap Weinberger, visited the barracks of the Italian Special Forces COMSUBIN in Varignano (La Spezia), he saw a small vessel, which he thought might be the one the Swedes had hunted. He was curious, because it fitted with the Swedish description, but the Italian hosts tried to prevent him from going closer. The midget had a tarp over it. An officer in Varignano told me that these very secret vessels were kept hidden in the barracks, and the US Navy SEALs had full access, while many in COMSUBIN did not. It may have been one such midget that was Bill Casey's and John Lehman's "Underwater U-2".

Former US Captain Robert Bathurst, with whom I worked for nearly a decade, told me as early as 1991 that, while serving as US Assistant Attaché in Moscow from 1964-67, he sometimes traveled to Stockholm to “breathe some Western air” and to visit his four-year-younger attaché college, Bobby Inman. Inman later said that his position as attaché actually was a “cover”. Swedish Chief of Intelligence Major General Bo Westin had reached an agreement with US Chief Naval Intelligence Rear Admiral Rufus Taylor: The young Inman was asked to find out why Soviet submarines were operated near the border of Swedish territorial waters. “Two days a week, I’d put on civilian clothes and my Swedish Ministry of Defense badge and go play analyst”, he said  What we found out was that young Soviet submarine captains were training with diesel-electric submarines along the Swedish coast to be able to operate nuclear submarines “off the U.S. East Coast” at a later stage, Inman said. But this pre-supposed that the US Navy had deployed hydrophones along the Swedish coast in order to follow the movements of the single Soviet submarines. According to Robert Bathurst, Inman was able to make a “deal with the Swedes” about deploying very secret hydrophones run by the Americans, and this had certainly facilitated his career, Bathurst said. Inman's “deal” was most likely with Defense Minister Sven Andersson (1957-73), who was a very independent defense minister and who had withheld information from his prime ministers (Tage Erlander and later Olof Palme). Inman worked two days a week for Andersson, and he emphasized for my colleague Ola Frithiofson that Sven Andersson “was a fine man”. Inman also said that he had used the banker Karl-Arvid Norlin (Wallenberg's chief of intelligence) “as a go-between to Andersson”.

Defense Minister Andersson and his State Secretary for Defence Karl Frithiofson (father of Ola Frithiofson) were almost certainly informed about the US hydrophones, and Runa Blomqvist Secretary General for Frithiofson’s 1965-67 Defense Commission, knew about them, I was told by Andersson’s closest advisor Ingemar Engman, who had been working with Blomqvist for the Defense Commission 1970-72. Blomqvist became number three in the Defence Ministry and Deputy Secretary General for FMV (Swedish Defense Material Agency). Robert Bathurst said that the US had used some small submarines to maintain these hydrophones, and as commander of U.S. Naval Intelligence in Europe (in London) 1969-72, Bathurst regularly received information from them. He briefed the admiral, CINCUSNAVEUR (Commander-in-Chief US Naval Forces Europe, Waldemar Wendt and William Bringle), about the positions of all Soviet submarines and surface vessels every morning at seven o'clock. A former director of the Submarine Section of FMV, Arne Åsklint, told me that the head of the Hydrophone Section Väynö Alamaa had showed him a hydrophone that a fisherman had got in his net at the Öland Island. It was built for sending signals to a maritime patrol aircraft that would pass over the hydrophones regularly. This was exactly what Robert Bathurst had said. This was clearly the same hydrophones, and these hydrophones were also confirmed by a third officer from US Naval Intelligence. The hydrophones sent compressed information to a maritime patrol aircraft, and they were maintained regularly by “small foreign special purpose submarines”, he said. He explained to me that these small submarines were taken into the Baltic Sea on converted merchant ships, dumped along the Swedish coast and then picked up on the ships’ way back after they had delivered their cargo. These small submarines were not based in the Baltic Sea, he said. He confirmed that they were Italian. The United States had used Italian vessels for “plausible deniability”, to quote Lehman. The then Chief of the Norwegian Intelligence Service, Rear Admiral Jan Ingebrigtsen (1979-85), said that these merchant vessels had a hatch in the bottom hull of the ship, where the small submarines could go in and out unseen. The US Navy brought these small submarines into the Baltic Sea in a hidden section of, for example, an oil tanker. There was a US flagged oil tanker, Mormacsky, outside the Swedish archipelago in October 1982. She and her sister ships had been built with US Navy support. Several people have confirmed the use of these small submarines in Swedish waters.

Left: official CIA photo of Bobby Ray Inman from March 1983 as a former Deputy Director of Central Intelligence. Right: a detail of a contemporary photo of FMV’s Arne Åsklint taken through a periscope of a submarine at a distance of 300 meters.

Robert Bathurst but also Bob Woodward (Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA, 1987) said that while Bobby Inman was in Stockholm he had “a terrific source, who provided significant military information on other countries”. That may have been Sven Andersson, who when Inman left Stockholm had been defense minister for ten years, but it may also have been the later Chief of Navy Per Rudberg, who went on holiday with Bobby Inman’s family. This is what the Deputy Chief of Swedish Defence Staff Intelligence Service, Björn Eklind, told me. Rudberg would have been Chief of Defense if Sweden had been occupied. On his visit to the United States in 1978, Rudberg was received by the leadership of the US Navy. They held a dinner for him with seven admirals. He met CINCUSNAVEUR, later Chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff William Crowe, three times, according to the notes from the Swedish attaché Lennart Forsman (Mikael Holmström, 2011). Rudberg told me that it was Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, who had selected him as his escort officer during his five-day visit to Sweden in October 1981. Per Rudberg had great confidence in Sven Andersson, who in turn did not have a similar confidence in his prime ministers (Tage Erlander and Olof Palme). Andersson did not to tell them what was most important. Ulf Larsson, State Secretary in the Ministry of Defence (1974-76) wrote: “Olof [Palme] and Ingvar [Carlsson did not necessarily] know what happened. Sven Andersson could definitely play his own game if he wanted to.” In 1983, Andersson was chairing the “Submarine Defense Commission”, which claimed that the mini-subs that had operated at Muskö in 1982 were almost certainly Soviet. The question is whether Andersson then knew that these mini-subs were from the West, and that they were the same mini-subs that he himself had approved in the 1960s. But in April 1983, Andersson and the Submarine Defense Commission told Prime Minister Palme that the Soviet Union was to be blamed for the intrusions. Had Andersson lied to Palme?

Rossö/Orust around 1960 with Ola Frithiofson serving coffee to Rosa Andersson and with Sven behind them (Karl Frithiofson's archive). Ola's father, Karl Frithiofson, was Defence Minister Sven Andersson's State Secretary for almost ten years. He had a house on the island of Orust near the Andersson family. Andersson was minister of defense for 16 years until 1973 (when he became foreign minister), but in 1979 according to later state secretary for defense Sven Hirdman, Andersson was still responsible for the most secret defense activities six years after he left as minister. In practice, he was probably responsible until his death in 1987. Frithiofsons said that when Rosa passed away in 1967, Sven lost his labor movement identity. He was deeply involved with Swedish and American weapons manufacturers. As a foreign minister in 1973, he married the British Ambassador's Social Secretary, Ulla Brambeck, the only thing that was mentioned in a declassified CIA document from 1976. They moved into her apartment in Count von Rosens’ Palace on Strandvägen, practically next door to Baroness von Platen's Palace, where Bobby Inman had been living as attaché in Stockholm. In 2015, Ola Frithiofson spoke with Bobby Inman, who had worked in the Swedish Ministry of Defence under Andersson and Karl Frithiofson. Inman had great respect for Andersson. He was "a fine man" and he kept in touch with him via Wallenberg's “intelligence chief” K.A. Norlin. The contact was almost certainly about US hydrophones (in Swedish waters), which from 1970 were maintained by small, western mini-subs. On 1-2 December 1983, Karl Frithiofson informed Prime Minister Olof Palme about these Western submarines at Muskø. He said that Sven did not take the decisions by the party congress very seriously. Prime Minister Tage Erlander wrote that Sven could not be trusted. Prime Minister Palme asked if Sven had deceived him about the submarines. Sven Andersson was perhaps closer to the Americans and the British than to his own prime ministers (see Ola Frithiofson, 2021).

Swedish Prime Minister Tage Erlander (1946-1969) and his successor Prime Minister Olof Palme (1969-76; 1982-86) (Photo: Wikipedia /Public Domain).

When Sven Hirdman became State Secretary in the Ministry of Defense in 1979, he was repeatedly informed that the most “sensitive issues they discussed had been the responsibility of Andersson. No one else took over when he had left his position as defense minister in 1973”, Ola Frithiofson wrote after his interview with Hirdman. Sven Andersson is said to have kept the most sensitive ties with the United States for himself also in the early 1980s, long after he left the Ministry. Hirdman was then State Secretary for Defense, and according to the Diary of the Chief of Defense, General Lennart Ljung, he was actually acting Defense Minister.

We have now reason to assume that the damaged mini-sub in 1982 (with an American survivor), which the most important representatives of the CIA and US Navy came to call “an Underwater U-2”, was Italian or Italian-built and was under the command of a very secret part of the CIA and the US Navy. Three days after this incident, a meeting was held in Geneva between two Swedes, four Americans and one Italian intelligence officer, I was told. From the Swedish side, there were supposedly an industrialist and an officer (or retired officer), but no diplomat. From the American side, there were two civilians (one may have been from the CIA) and two military officers, and the only reason to include an Italian officer was that this “Underwater U-2” was Italian. The leak came from Italian intelligence to Italian radio and to the Italian news agency ANSA. ANSA supposedly had its information from the Italian attaché through an intermediary, who had told ANSA that Sweden was having talks with the responsible power without mentioning who this power was. Italian radio said it was a Western power, while my source, who was also ANSA's source, told me that there had been four Americans and an Italian intelligence officer, a lieutenant colonel Accame. In the week leading up to this meeting, the Swedes had dropped 45 depth charges. The following week, they only dropped 2, and orders about these two were given by a relatively independent Coastal Defense commander Lieutenant Colonel Sven Olof Kviman at Mälsten. Several people on the Swedish side knew about this sunken mini-submarine, but they were very few, and many of them have now passed away. If this issue had exploded in the media, on TV or in the newspapers in 1982, as the U-2 affair did in 1960, this would have led to a major setback for the United States in Europe. It had been one of the biggest events in the world that year, but the Swedish admirals kept silent.

That such a revelation might backfire was indicated by Steve Recca, who had been "Special Assistant" to the US Secretary of the Navy and to the CIA Director (1995-98), Assistant Attaché to Oslo (1998-2001), and he was then given “The Admiral Bobby Inman Chair of Intelligence” at the Naval Postgraduate School. According to Recca, it was Captain Peter Swartz who tipped him off about me and John Kristen Skogan at NUPI (Norwegian Institute of International Affairs), because we were the two researchers in Oslo who had written about naval strategy. Swartz had drafted Lehman's Maritime Strategy, advised Admiral Watkins and Lehman, and Lehman's close ally Admiral James Ace Lyons had been his mentor. In 1989, Swartz was Special Assistant to Admiral Bill Crowe's successor as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Colin Powell. After that Swartz was at the US Navy’s Center for Naval Analysis (CNA), but the fact that I had lectured at CNA and at the Naval Postgraduate School was hardly the reason why Recca contacted me. Recca was very nice but also worried about what I wrote and that the activity in Swedish waters might “backfire”. He came to my office a few times and he invited me to lunch at the embassy and to receptions, but the only thing he asked me about concerned a US-critical lecture held by the former Norwegian Chief of Defense General Vigleik Eide (which we listened to together and which he had secretly recorded on tape) as well as my contacts in Italy. I had to ask myself: why is a former assistant to the US Secretary of the Navy and to the Director of the CIA uneasy about my studies of Western activity in Swedish waters, and why are my sources in Italy of particular interest? It was clearly something sensitive. I was also visited by a friendly officer from Italian Military Intelligence, who came up from Italy. Captain Peter Huchthausen, former US Naval Attache to Moscow and Soviet specialist in the US Navy, wrote a book Hide & Seek: The Untold Story of Cold War Naval Espionage (2009) with his French colleague Alexandre Sheldon-Duplaix (also a friend of Swartz). The book had a chapter on submarines in Swedish waters, and they were positive to my analysis. The mini-submarines in Swedish waters were hardly Soviet. Dirk Pohlmann from ARTE approached Huchthausen for an interview in June 2008, but Huchthausen told Pohlmann to come back in August after he had finished off his work with their book. However, Huchthausen was found hanged in his home in July. Some people might have been worried that more American naval officers would speak out.

From left: Prime Minister Tage Erlander with his State Secretary for Defense Karl Frithiofson (in the middle) and the Chief of Navy Åke Lindemalm (to the right). Frithiofson was Bobby Inman’s superior at the Ministry of Defense and Lindemalm was heading the Swedish Navy, while Bobby Inman was attaché in Stockholm. Lindemalm and Frithiofson were almost neighbors on the island of Orust on the Swedish West Coast (photo: Karl Frithiofsons private archive). 

6. What did the Swedes know?

It is unlikely that the Swedish government knew what had happened. Despite the fact that Sven Andersson probably knew about the Western mini-subs, as Chairman of the “Submarine Defense Commission” (April 1983), he blamed the Soviet Union. Ingemar Engman, who Karl Frithofson had recruited as Andersson’s closest adviser in the Defense Ministry's and who later became head of the Defense Materiel in the Ministry, said: “If Sven knew about the Western submarines and suspected their interference, he would have to point as far away from the culprits as possible and thereby point to the Soviet Union.” Chief of Defense Lennart Ljung writes in his diary for 13 January 1983 that State Secretary of the Foreign Affairs, Pierre Schori, had had a meeting with former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. Kissinger had said: “It was smartly done by the Swedish [governments] to release the submarine the way you did it”. Kissinger never mentioned the submarine’s nationality, Schori said, but his wording hardly indicated a Soviet sub, and it was hardly the Swedish Cabinet but rather the Swedish “Navy part of the Government” that had released the submarine. However, at the time, almost everyone in Sweden, also in the Cabinet, believed that the submarines were from the Soviet Union, and in a declassified report from May 1983, Prime Minister Olof Palme still believed that the submarines were from the Soviet Union. So did other members of the Cabinet. It was probably not until August 1983 that Olof Palme realized that they weren't. President Mauno Koivisto had met the Soviet leader Yuri Andropov, who had asked Koivisto to tell the Swedes that they should “sink every submarine they could find in their own waters”, so they could see for themselves what it was. They are not ours, Andropov said. Koivisto wrote about it in his memoirs, but also in an article for the Swedish daily Svenska Dagbladet (2008). Also, other Soviet representatives said the same, wrote Swedish Prime Minister Ingvar Carlsson (1986-91, 1994-96). The Soviet ambassador to Sweden, later Foreign Minister Boris Pankin and the Prime Minister Nikolay Ryzhkov asked the Swedes to use more force against the submarines. That is, they wanted the Swedes to use torpedoes or bottom mounted mines to sink the submarines, but the Swedish admirals did not want to do that.

Not until 1-2 December 1983, after the annual meeting between Sweden’s Chief of Defense Lennart Ljung and regional wartime commanders-in-chief (Military and Civilian), did Civilian Commander Western Sweden, Andersson's former State Secretary for Defense Karl Frithiofson, tell Olof Palme about the submarines. He had meetings with Palme these two days, and shortly afterwards he told his son, the International Secretary for the Social Democratic Youth, Ola Frithiofson, that the submarines were from the West. In April 1983, Palme had protested against the “Soviet intrusions”, but the submarines had been Western submarines “playing Russians”. Palme must now have realized that he had been tricked (perhaps also by Andersson). On 28 December, Sweden’s ambassador to Moscow, Torsten Örn, was briefed by Olof Palme's colleague in the Palme Commission, Soviet adviser Georgy Arbatov, who said that Moscow now believes that it was “possibly the CIA that was behind the submarine intrusions”. The fact that the submarines were from the West came also up six months later with a book by the journalist Anders Hasselbohm. Dagens Nyheter's editorial writer Olle Alsén showed the book to Olof Palme. Olof Palme said to himself: “Did Sven [Andersson] cheat me? Did Sven cheat me?”

Mini-submarine from Maritalia 1980 (see above) and a slightly smaller dark green 3GST9 (10 meters) also from Maritalia, (later GSE) in the Fincantieri Hall in La Spezia. These vessels are almost identical to the ones the Swedish Navy called the “whaleback” or “Type 1” with several observations each year. According to a now partly declassified top-secret report from 1984, there were 15 observations of a Type 1 submarine in 1983 alone (see below).

Former Chief of the Swedish Intelligence, then head of the International Dept. at the Ministry of Defense, Major General Bengt Wallroth (together with Jan Eliasson from the Foreign Ministry and Hans Dahlgren from the Prime Minister's Office), wrote in December 1987 in a document for Prime Minister Ingvar Carlsson saying that the two types of mini-subs, which had been observed deep into Swedish waters, did not correspond to any Soviet mini-sub. Wallroth later confirmed to me that they could have been Italian. Top secret documents for Chief of the Navy Per Rudberg (19 July 1984) and for the Chief of Defense (25 November 1987) showed that all characteristics of these submarines matched exactly the small Italian mini-submarines, which the US Navy is said to have used in Swedish waters. The Type 1 was a 10-metre drop-shaped submarine (a “whaleback”) without a sail (without a conning tower; see drawing below) and with a thin periscope and a large viewing port in the bow. All these characteristics were identical to the 3GST9 and its predecessor, which was brought to the area of operation on top of a regular submarine (a MOSUB or Mother Submarine) or in a compartment of a merchant ship (MOSHIP or Mother Ship). The Type 2 was a 20–30-meter submarine. It had a rectangular hull and a high snorkel mast behind the sail (see drawings and photos below). The snorkel could be raised from horizontal to vertical. The 1984 report also said that this mini-sub could have a wire from the top of the sail to the bow. The Type 2 could carry two SDVs (Swimmer Delivery Vehicles). This was very specific information, and it all fits exactly with the Italian COSMOS submarines (see photos and drawings below). A US Navy Intelligence expert on Soviet submarines, Peter Huchthausen, said in the book together with Sheldon-Duplaix (2009), that there were no such submarines in the Soviet Union. The later Soviet Pyranja (28 meters) had a very different shape and wasn’t operative until 1989.

From left: Drawing of a Type 1 submarine (Svenska Dagbladet, November 1987), drawing of declassified photo of a Type 1 submarine, July 1987 (in a fjord in northern Sweden). These Type 1 submarines were very similar to the Italian drop-shaped mini-subs of Maritalia from 1980 and onwards. They appear to have been identical to these submarines.

Italian-built COSMOS 506-SX (23 meters) of the Colombian Navy with a high snorkel mast behind sail and with a wire from the top of the sail to the bow identical to the Type 2 submarines in Swedish waters. No other submarines had this high snorkel mast behind the sail and no other submarines had a wire from the bow to the top of the sail

A drawing of the Type 2 submarine (20-25 meters) in Stockholm southern archipelago in July 1987 and a drawing of a Type 2 submarine (20-25 meters) from October 1982 close to Muskø. The third drawing is made after the description of the 1982 submarine. Both submarines had a high snorkel mast behind the sail. Both drawings and descriptions are now declassified.

Left: a printout of a sonar image of a Type 2 submarine from Stockholm northern archipelago 1984. The hull has a rectangular shape and one can see a white shadow from the small sail at the center of the hull. The size is the same as the larger COSMOS submarines. The hull appears bow shaped, but this is a distortion because of the particular sonar used. Right: drawing of a COSMOS SX-506 with a rectangular shape and a snorkel that can be raised from horizontal to vertical.

Left: a COSMOS SX-506 (23 meters) with a SDV on each side similar to the Type 2 submarine in Swedish waters. Right: a COSMOS SDV in Livorno close to the production plant (Photos from early 1970s: Defense Today, July 1980).

Italian-built COSMOS SX-506 (23 meters) with a high snorkel mast behind sail. Right: mass production of COSMOS SX-506 in Livorno in the early 1970s (Photo: Navy International 1974). Most buyers of these small submarines are not known. These vessels must have been delivered to a Western power for the use in very secret operations. 

In May 1983, Swedish newspapers, Aftonbladet and Expressen, and Swedish TV News, all referred to an article by a Soviet Captain B. Churin, who had a detailed description of the above mini-submarines in a Soviet military magazine Tekhnika  i vooruzhenie (April 1982). Churin wrote about the advantages of these small Western submarines (the Italian COSMOS and the West German Type-100), but Swedish media claimed that he definitely was writing about small Soviet submarines. Aftonbladet said that Churin claimed to be writing about Western submarines, but all experts agree: “the Russians are speaking about their own submarines”. “There is no doubt”, Expressen wrote, this is the same type of Soviet midget submarine that “had operated for extended periods of time in [Swedish] archipelagoes”. Western midgets that actually operated deep into Swedish waters and naval bases were, by Swedish military officers and mass media, described as Soviet submarines. Facts presented in the Russian article about these Western submarines were described as “false information”. The Swedes could not imagine that the intruders originated from the West. In 1983, after three years of dramatic intrusions, more than 80 % of the Swedes thought of Russia as a threat or as hostile. This was probably the most successful American PSYOP ever.

Left: the drawings of an Italian COSMOS SX-506 and a West German Type-100 in the Russian magazine Tekhnika  i vooruzhenie from April 1982. Right: three COSMOS MG-110 (28 meters) in Pakistan (Photo: Wikipedia /Public Domain).

Karl Frithiofson's son, Ola, spoke with Admiral Bobby Inman in 2015, and I had a long conversation with Inman in 2021. Inman said more or less the same thing to us. He said that Soviet submarine captains had practiced in the Swedish territorial waters in the 1970s and early 1980s, but they had never entered the archipelagos. They never went into ports and into naval bases such as Muskö or Karlskrona (Those who did were obviously from the west). Inman told Ola Frithiofson that they knew where the individual Soviet submarines were, because they had deployed hydrophones along the Swedish coast. In my conversation with Inman in 2021, he confirmed that “Bob” [Robert] Bathurst had used to visit him in Stockholm, but he didn't want to talk about the hydrophones. He obviously wasn't “happy” with what Robert had told me. He was well acquainted with my studies of submarine activity in Swedish waters, and when Ola Frithiofson called him in 2015, he initially thought he was talking to me.

When Robert told me in 1991 about their submarines and hydrophones along the Swedish coast, American intelligence followed my work. Someone went into my office and opened a specific document in my computer at night. The document had been saved at a certain time in the night, which means that someone must have opened it. A US intelligence officer asked at a party about some content in this very document that I hadn’t shown to anyone. After a Norwegian admiral had helped to locate a car used by a somewhat careless agent, this admiral found that the car, despite having regular Norwegian number plates, belonged to the Italian embassy. The admiral was invited to the Italian defense attaché shortly afterwards, but the attaché didn’t want to say anything. After a few days, however, the U.S. defense attaché approached the Norwegian admiral and asked if he was collaborating with me. The US Navy used the Italians agents for plausible deniability in Oslo as well, and in his window, he had the same porcelain eagle award as Caspar Weinberger had in his window. The operation was apparently American.

Bobby Inman was from 1991 President George H.W. Bush's Closest Intelligence Advisor (Chairman of the President's Intelligence Advisory Board). He was paying attention to these, the most sensitive things, and he might have had told his successor as presidential adviser, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral William Crowe about the matter, because, when Crowe was about to give a lecture in Oslo, he went straight through the crowd of academics and officers up to me. Several researchers gathered around us, and the only reason why he was interested in me would have been my conversations with Robert. In 1993, after Crowe took over as President Bill Clinton's Chairman of the President's Intelligence Advisory Board, Inman was Clinton's first candidate for the position as Secretary of Defense, despite that he had been voting for Bush. However, after media attacks in 1993-94, Inman declined the nomination and was replaced in 1994 by his former colleague, William Perry. While Inman was NSA Director, Perry was Deputy Secretary of Defense for research and development. Perry visited Sweden as Secretary of Defense in 1995 and he went by car to Hårsfjärden with Swedish Defence Minister Thage G. Peterson (Peterson, Resan mot mars, Stockholm: Bonniers,1999). Peterson asked Perry about the subs in Hårsfjärden. Perry said: “if it's a submarine, it doesn't have to be Russian”. This became all the more clear after Weinberger’s words in the year 2000.

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