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

The IB Document, the North Diary and some other documents

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

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

The IB/Lingärde document and the ACC/SOPS document

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Borgnäs Documentaries

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Lindquist Document and Lieutenant X

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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