Dual State: The Case of Sweden. Part I

At a conference in 1993 outside Oslo (Norway), former Director of Central Intelligence and later Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger brought up the existence of a Swedish “dual state”. We had talks at lunch and on a two-hour car trip back to Oslo. He made a distinction between the more “neutralist” “Political Sweden” and some senior military officers, a “Military Sweden”, that in case of a war was planning for the United States to come to Sweden as soon as possible. His statement on the “two Sweden” had some impact on my research.

[A similar version of this article was published as Chapter 8 in Eric Wilson’s book The Dual State: Parapolitics, Carl Schmitt and the National Security Complex (Ashgate, 2012). That chapter has 103 footnotes that are difficult to include in this article, because many of the references are from before the age of the internet. I recommend the reader to go back to Wilson’s book. This article has also been discussed on the American Exception podcast with Aaron Good].

The Concept of a Dual State: Illustrations from Turkey and Italy

In 1955 in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, Hans Morgenthau wrote about a U.S. “dual state” in a study of the U.S. State Department. According to Morgenthau there was in the United States, on the one hand, a regular democratic state hierarchy that acts according to the rule of law, and, on the other hand, a more or less hidden security hierarchy, or what I will call a “security state” or “national security state,” that monitors and controls the former, or at least is able to “exert an effective veto over [its] decisions,” to quote Morgenthau. This article was also published as a chapter, “The Corruption of Patriotism,” in Morgenthau’s 1962 volume Decline of Democratic Politics. While the democratic state or what Peter Dale Scott has called the “public state” deals with political alternatives, with elections of governments and apparent political choice, the “security state” enters the scene when “no alternative exists,” when a certain activity is defined in terms of life and death, when this activity, in Ole Wæver’s words, is “securitized.” In fact, this parallel security structure, the “security state” or what some would call the “deep state,” is the very apparatus that defines when and whether a “state of emergency” will emerge. This aspect of the state is what Carl Schmitt in his work Political Theology from 1922 referred to as the “sovereign.”

The existence of such a parallel security structure has often been denied. Political scientists including proponents of “political realism” usually speak about the state as if it was a unified entity despite the fact that Morgenthau, strongly influenced by Carl Schmitt, has been described as the father of “political realism.” However, in contrast to the writings of today’s political scientists, this is not the way many political leaders themselves speak about the state. They often speak about the state as a divided entity: a dual state. In certain countries, this is obvious. In Turkey, the existence of a dual state has been admitted at the highest level. The “security state,” or what in Turkey is called the deep state, is always present, and every political leader knows that it intervenes in case

of “emergency.” Turkish Prime Minister Recep Erdogan and former Turkish presidents Kenan Evren and Suleyman Demirel have all confirmed the existence of a Turkish deep state, a hidden and parallel state structure that in certain respects exists above the regular state with direct links to the protecting power: the United States. “In our country there are two [states],” President Demirel said; “There is one deep state and [one legal state],” adding that the “state that should be the real is the spare one, the one that should be spare is the real one.” The deep state with the CIA-linked Grey Wolves and death squad leader Abdullah Çatli carried out bomb attacks in the 1980 that justified or provoked General Kenan Evren’s military coup on 12 September. Former CIA Station Chief in Ankara,

Paul Henze told President Jimmy Carter: “Our boys have done it.” After the coup, a Turkish-American Defense Council was established to guarantee total Turkish loyalty to the United States. In a car crash in Susurluk close to Istanbul in 1996 a black Mercedes hit a truck. Çatli’s body was found together with a Turkish government MP Sedat Bucak (still alive), whose militia forces had been used by the Turkish government to fight the Kurdish rebels in the southeast, along with the corpses of an important police chief, Husseyin Kocadag, who commanded Turkish counter-insurgency units, a beauty queen (Çatli’s girlfriend, Gonca Us), and a large amount of narcotics and weapons, including pistols with silencers and machine guns. Çatli, who was a contract killer and a major heroin trafficker on Interpol’s wanted list, was carrying six different identity cards with different names; one “passport” for the exclusive use of Turkish officials was signed by the Minister of Interior. When Turks speak about the deep state (derin devlet), they speak about the link between organized crime, security forces, other government agencies and the U.S. intelligence and Special Operations Forces. However, while Demirel focused on the military as a veto power, General Evren and former Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit have focused on the Stay-Behinds and their connections to organized crime and U.S. intelligence as the real actor. But all of them seem to emphasize the role of the United States. U.S. security forces intervene when “necessary” in collaboration with the local security forces, the Turkish deep state, by planting bombs and provoking military coups or by the use of military coups like the ones in 1960, 1971, 1980 and 1997. Special police officers were used for killing a large number of dissidents. Threats of military coups are always taken seriously by the political leaders.

The same was the case in Cold War Italy as well as in Greece in 1967, when a coup was organized by the Greek–U.S. liaison officer Colonel Georgios Papadopoulos to “veto” the anti-NATO policy by the Greek Prime Minister Georgios Papandreou. The CIA’s former Chief of Station in Athens and Rome, Thomas Karamessines, played an instrumental role. In Italy, U.S. forces in collaboration with Italian intelligence and local fascists “initiated” military coups in 1964, 1970, 1973 and 1974. Elected governments were forced to modify or change their policies to make the coup forces withdraw from the political scene. The 1964 coup was led by General Giovanni de Lorenzo, Italy’s former Chief of Military Intelligence, who had been appointed on recommendation of the U.S. Ambassador Clare Boothe Luce. De Lorenzo later became MP for the fascist party MSI (Movimento Sociale Italiano). His collaborator in 1964, and leader of the 1970 coup, Prince Junio Valerio Borghese, had been Benito Mussolini’s most trusted officer, a former commander of the fascist Naval Special Forces Decima MAS and later Honorary President of the MSI. At the end of the war, he had been rescued and then recruited by a U.S. intelligence officer, the later CIA Chief of Counter-Intelligence and CIA liaison to Italy, James Jesus Angleton. De Lorenzo had used his counter-insurgency plan Piano Solo (or Plan Solo) for the opposite purpose similar to what Colonel Papadopoulos did three years later with the Prometheus Plan.

In 2006 the shadow Foreign Minister during the 1970 Borghese coup, Adriano Monti, said that he had received the “green light” for the coup from the CIA’s Otto Skorzeny in Madrid. Skorzeny had been Adolf Hitler’s most trusted lieutenant, who had saved Hitler’s and Mussolini’s lives at critical moments 1943–1944. In 1970, Skorzeny represented the CIA after having been recommended to the Agency and to its Director Allan Dulles by Hitler’s intelligence chief for the Eastern front, General Reinhard Gehlen, CIA’s man for West Germany after the War. In the preparation for the coup in 1970, the CIA and Skorzeny only had one condition: Giulio Andreotti should be prime minister. However, sources argue that Angleton had aborted the coup after the Italian government had given its “assurances of a total pro-American loyalty.” Others argue that it was President Richard Nixon himself, who intervened and stopped the coup through his man in Italy, Hugh Fenwich, who also was close to Monti. At that very moment, Borghese’s people—along with the fascist leaders, the shadow Minister of Foreign Affairs Adriano Monti and his colleague Stefano delle Chiaie (Abdullah Çatli’s Italian collaborator)—had already taken control over the Ministry of Interior and sized a large amount of machine guns from its weapons depot. In all these cases, the fascist coup plotters, often inside the intelligence and security services, collaborated with their U.S. counterparts, but the fascist activists and leaders, who were part of the security state or deep state, were rather instruments of a high-level network of Italian liaison officers to the United States. On several occasions, Italian governments were forced to modify their policies in line with U.S. demands. Franco de Felice argued in his Doppia lealta e doppio stato (1989) that the dual state was born from the incapacity of the Italian state to reconcile its domestic policies with its foreign policies. The elected government had to be disciplined to accept total U.S. loyalty. Paolo Cucchiarelli and Aldo Giannulli (1997) have written about the dual state or “parallel state” as a state that operates both inside and outside the law.

Some would argue that the Italian state or the Greek state at the time — and even more the Turkish state — had not yet developed a democratic culture. Turkey had a limited democratic experience and Italy came directly from its fascist experience of the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s. Similar to other Mediterranean states like Spain and Portugal and former fascist states like Germany, they were not yet considered mature in their democratic development; the recurrent patterns of military coups and coup attempts were explained by the comparative immaturity of their nascent democracies. But there were also similar coup attempts and a similar parallel security structure in traditional democracies like France, and, surprisingly for many, similar coup attempts, and a similar dual state structure are to be found in states like Sweden, which has had a most excellent democratic reputation. It is not enough to look at the history of the state, its autocratic origin in the monarchy or aristocracy; one may also have to look at the structure of the type of democratic state that we know from the Western world.

This chapter will deal with Sweden, and it will show that a state that often is considered to be a most respectable democracy also has had a hidden parallel security state that in Morgenthau’s words is able to veto the decisions of regular democratic state. This hidden deep state defines when a “state of emergency” will emerge. It “decides on the exception”, to quote Carl Schmitt, and during the Cold War it was linked to the protecting power: the United States with its Western security apparatus. Thus, the Schmittian sovereign here is the parallel hierarchy of informal Western structures with their military/intelligence center in the United States. It has been this informal security structure, or security state or deep state, which has intervened if necessary to guarantee U.S. or “Western” interests. Indeed, the central actors of this Western security network appear as the real sovereign, in the Schmittian sense, that decides on the exception in the Euro-Atlantic area, or in what Schmitt would call a Grossraum. By letting the security aspect of the state invade the public sphere and “securitize” the political life, the democratic state loses its influence; the deep state or security state is able to “fine tune the democracy.” I will discuss these problems, especially the divide between the nation-state aspect and the protecting power, using Sweden as an example.

The Swedish military leadership with Chief of Defense Staff (soon Chief of Defense) General Olof Thörnell, Chief of Navy Fabian Tamm, Chief of Army Staff Helge Jung and Captain von Stedingk congratulating the German Chancellor Adolf Hitler on his 50 years birthday 1939 in Berlin.

The Origin of the Swedish Dual State

In 1941 Ernst Fraenkel published a book about the dual state in Nazi Germany. He located the roots of the dual state in the ambivalence of the democratic breakthrough, in its divide between the new democratic Rechtstaat and its traditional aristocratic Machtstaat (power state). Fraenkel describes this duality as typifying the German state of the 1930s. In the German case, however, this duality was overt, combining the “regular” legal state with a parallel SS-Staat, an autocratic emergency state operating outside or “above” the legal system, with its philosophical foundation in the Schmittian “sovereign.” Fraenkel refers to Emil Lederer, who argues that this Machtstaat has its historical origin in Europe’s aristocratic elite, which still played an important role after the triumph of democracy.

In the Swedish case, we know that the revolutionary chaos in Russia and Germany after World War I and the simultaneous hunger demonstrations in Sweden made the Swedish industrial and financial elite, particularly the influential Wallenberg family, turn to the Conservative Party to force it to accept general and free elections for women as well as for men. Democracy was introduced as a concession primarily to the Social Democratic labor movement to avoid the dramatic events on the continent. The Social Democratic Party was voted into power, and they strongly favored a neutral policy in foreign affairs, while the industrial and aristocratic military elites kept their traditional ties to Germany. Germany had from the early 20th century been described as the protecting power of Sweden. During World War I, Sweden and Germany used the same intelligence net in Finland, and the close Swedish–German collaboration continued into the 1930s. Chief of Defense General Olof Thörnell, Acting Chief of Defense Staff Major General Axel Rappe, his successor Lieutenant General Samuel Åkerhielm and several other top generals wanted Sweden to enter World War II on the side of Finland and Germany. Commander of the Northern Military District, later Chief of Army, General Archibald Douglas, was, together with Herman Göring’s friend and brother-in-law in Sweden, Eric von Rosen, a co-founder of a Nazi Party, the National-Socialist Bloc. In 1940 Douglas invited the Nazi Party leader Per Engdahl to speak to the troops. Protesting soldiers “were immediately sent to Vitvattnet” (Douglas’ “concentration camp”), to quote Engdahl. Other pro-Nazi generals—Hjalmar Falck, Commander of the Northern Military District Nils Rosenblad, Commander of the Eastern Military District Rickman von der Lancken, and Chairman of the Swedish-German Society Henri de Champs—all belonged to the Swedish aristocracy. In 1939 the Wallenbergs had negotiated a deal with major German companies, Bosch A.G. and I.G. Farben, to buy their assets in Allied countries and, according to a secret agreement, let the Germans have the right to regain these assets after the war to avoid confiscations by U.S. and British authorities. Sweden’s signal intelligence FRA (Försvarets Radio Anstalt) was ordered by General Åkerhielm not to report to the Cabinet [to the Social Democratic Defense Minister Per Edvin Sköld] about the communication between Swedish generals (and colonels) and their German counterparts. Not until late 1943 did the Chief of FRA inform Defense Minister Sköld. The elected government, the political elite, was supposed to be kept in the dark. In July 1942 a Swedish–Russian military phrasebook was printed for a Swedish military attack against the Soviet Union as part of the Nazi German offensive. The phrasebook was signed at Stockholm Castle by the Conservative minister K. G. Everlöf and Lieutenant General Henry Kellgren, the liaison officer between the defense minister and the Defense Staff and close friend to the German Defense Attaché. Later Defense Minister and Foreign Minister Torsten Nilsson wrote that General Archibald Douglas wanted to move his army forces in Northern Sweden into Finland to annex a considerable portion of Soviet territory. General Rappe, who was the most outspoken supporter of the war, presented maps to the Cabinet for the Swedish operation into the Soviet Union in his briefing to the government. He wanted to move two-thirds of the Swedish Army to the Finnish–Soviet front, but Prime Minister Per Albin Hansson (1933–1946) turned down his request. According to Chief of Navy Admiral Stig H:son-Ericson, General Axel Rappe tried to recruit officers for a military coup in Sweden already in March 1940. Admiral Ericson was himself in doubt; Rappe wanted to get rid of the “neutralist” government, but he did not receive enough support. According to Gunnar Pettersson, the aristocratic coup-plotters turned to King Gustav V several times during the spring of 1942, but despite the young Prince Gustav Adolf’s ties to Herman Göring and the Nazis and, despite the King’s pro-German attitude, the King did not support a military coup.

Sweden’s wartime Defense Minister Per Edvin Sköld, who was kept in the dark by his generals. General Axel Rappe, who tried to organize a coup against the Government, and General Archibald Douglas, who started a Nazi Party 1933. He wanted to let his forces in North Sweden annex parts of the Soviet Union. From 1945, he tried to seek closer ties to the United States.

However, the seriousness of the military coups proposed by the aristocratic elite indicates that the Swedish state was not a unified entity; this military-security elite was primarily loyal not to the elected government but to the King and to Germany as a protecting power. This parallel security hierarchy kept its informal ties to the Germans and kept the elected government in the dark. The origin of this Machtstaat in parallel to the Swedish Rechtstaat was not just the continuous political ambitions of the aristocratic elite after the democratic breakthrough, as proposed by Emil Lederer and Ernst Fraenkel. Rather, the origin should also be sought in the split between the state’s democratic hierarchy and its security hierarchy linked to the protecting power: Germany. The origin should also be seen in light of the fact that the domestic policies of Sweden were impossible to reconcile with the policy of the protecting power, in a manner similar to what Franco de Felice had stated about Cold War Italy.

It is interesting to note, however, how easy it was for Sweden’s pro-German military elite to switch to U.S. loyalties after the war. In November 1945, General Archibald Douglas, who had been the founder of the National-Socialist Bloc, invited the U.S. General George Patton for a dinner at the Wallenberg residence. The leading Swedish generals were primarily anti-Soviet and now the United States turned out to become the new protecting power. They kept the Americans fully informed, while certain figures still kept the elected government in the dark. Swedish Waffen SS officers and officers from the Nazi Sveaborg, who had been fighting as volunteers at the Finnish-Soviet front, including the commanders Anders Grafström and Otto Hallberg, established parallel Swedish Stay-Behinds, the former under the Defence Staff (in collaboration with the CIA representative in Stockholm, William Colby). [Swedish Stay-Behinds were initiated in 1946 and Prime Minister Tage Erlander (1946–69) appointed Alvar Lindencrona, Director for the Swedish insurance company Thule (bought by the Wallenberg company Skandia in 1963) as Chief of the Swedish Stay-Behinds. Anders Grafström headed the department for recruitment, military training, and arms caches. In the early phase, however, the government knew very little about the people involved. From 1957 the Swedish Stay-Behinds were put under the Ministry of Interior and from 1967 under the Ministry of Defense, but still, according to the Assistant Under-Secretary of Defense Ingmar Engman, only a couple of people at the Ministry knew about them. The headquarters was located in the Thule Building on Sveavägen 44 in Stockholm. Swedish representatives participated in NATO’s Allied Clandestine Committee (ACC) meetings that supervised the European Stay-Behinds. The major difference between the ACC and the CPC (the Clandestine Planning Committee) according to a participant in both committees was that the “neutrals,” including Sweden, participated in the ACC but not in the CPC. The latter committee was chaired by SACEUR (Supreme Allied Commander Europe). The decisions in the CPC were supposedly more interesting. After the war, the Swedish “secret army” became firmly integrated into the U.S. and British sphere of influence.