The killing of PM Olof Palme: Part IV (DRAFT)

The role of NATO committees and the Anglo-American secret world.

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.