The Deception Committee: Part II

How the CIA and the US Navy deceived the Swedes in the 1980s

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”.