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

The police documents and some witnesses

Reconstruction of the killing of Prime Minister Olof Palme at the Dekorima shop at the corner of Sveavägen-Tunnelgatan (Hötorget Subway Station marked by a "T") in the very center of Stockholm at 23:21, 28 February 1986. The killer is taller than Olof Palme and behind them, one can see the witness Anders Björkman (Photo Public Domain: “Assassination of Olof Palme”, Wikipedia).

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 police documents and Gunnar Wall

It is not yet confirmed who shot Olof Palme. On a Friday night, 28 February 1986, Palme went to a movie with his wife in central Stockholm. He was shot at subway station at the street corner of Sveavägen-Tunnelgatan at about 23:21. It was a busy night. There were several witnesses at the scene. Statements from each witness are now to be found on the internet. You can find early statements from some of the police interrogations. Less than a handful of witnesses saw the shooting (Anders Björkman, Anders Delsborn and Inge Morelius) and about ten witnesses saw the killer run away and disappear. The witnesses describe the killer in some detail: a couple of witnesses said that he had a dark knitted cap, and a dark or black knee length coat that flew as he was running. After the two shots, he took a couple of steps and began jogging into the dark narrow street of Tunnelgatan among some barracks. Some people believe that he disappeared into the Skandia building (historically the office for Swedish Stay Behinds). But one witness said that he ran up the stairs to the street of David Bagares gata, where he supposedly disappeared.

The autopsy found that Olof Palme had been shot in the back (through the spinal cord, the trachea and the aorta) at a distance of 20 cm. He was hit at “exactly the right place”. He was shot with metal-piercing ammunition designed to penetrate bullet proof vests or at least these were the bullets that were presented officially. Witnesses describe the killer as calm. One witness said that the revolver had a relatively long barrel. It might have had a silencer. Olof Palme’s wife, Lisbeth, had walked close to Olof. When he was shot, she was walking in front of him and she thought the sound came from Easter crackers. She did not connect the sound with her husband falling on the street. She didn’t understand what had happened. She was screaming: “What are you doing?”, one witness said. She went down on her knees and then looked around for help. She saw a man standing some 5-10 meters behind her. She said, when interviewed by the police, that he was staring at her. He had a blue down jacket. He was just standing there. Afterwards, we know that this man was a witness, who had been walking some meters behind Olof and Lisbeth Palme and was now hiding in a doorway shocked by the shooting. His name is Anders Björkman. He had been at a bar with some friends and saw the shooting and, similar to a few others, he saw the killer run away. He told the police that the woman (Lisbeth Palme) had been staring at him. Lisbeth Palme believed that this man (Björkman), with his blue down jacket, was the killer (she described the killer as having a blue down jacket standing at this very place), but other witnesses say that the killer had a dark coat and disappeared immediately.

After Olof Palme’s body and Lisbeth had arrived at the hospital, Lisbeth told Chief Inspector Åke Rimborn that she had seen two men at the crime scene. One had supposedly a beige coat or something similar, and he had avoided her, when she looked for help. A witness in a car, Leif Ljungkvist, who had stopped for red light seems to have seen the same person moving fast from the crime scene but southwards on Sveavägen. In a professional operation, it would very likely have been two people on the crime scene: one is shooting, while the other will intervene if something would go wrong, a Swedish intelligence officer told Sydsvenska Dagbladet days after the killing (Kari Poutiainen 2025). At the hospital, Lisbeth Palme told a nurse that it was Olof that wanted to go to Dekorima (the shop in the corner Sveavägen-Tunnelgatan). Several people believe that Olof was supposed to meet someone. Gunnar Wall and Lars Borgnäs point to the fact that a couple of witnesses Anders Björkman and Anders Delsborn claim that the killer and the Palme couple appeared to be “a group of three”. A third witness in another car, Anna Hage, said the same. Palme and the killar may have been talking to each other. Lisbeth and then Olof left the man (or at least she walked in front of Olof). The man then put his right hand on Olof’s shoulder and shot him in the back, Björkman said. The man shot twice. Olof Palme would have died immediately from the shot that hit him. One shot hit Lisbeth Palme’s coat. The killer must have used his left hand for shooting him, Borgnäs writes. This either indicate a left-handed man or a professional that is comfortable using both hands.

Although we don’t know who the killer was, we now know quite a lot about what happened and which people might have been involved. A number of books bring up declassified documents from the police inquiries that tell us about these events. See Kari and Pertti Poutiainen, Inuti labyrinten (Stockholm: Grimur, 1995; pp. 887); Gunnar Wall, Mörkläggning: Statsmakten och Palmemordet (Göteborg: Kärret 1996; pp. 980); Thage G. Peterson, Olof Palme: som jag minns honom (Stockholm: Albert Bonniers förlag, 2002; pp. 439) Lars Borgnäs, En iskall vind drog genom Sverige (Stockholm Norstedts, 2006; pp. 512); Gunnar Wall, Mordgåtan Olof Palme (Stockholm: Semic, 2010; pp. 528); Lars Borgnäs, Nationens Intresse: Har svenska folket vilseletts om ubåtarna, Estonia och mordet på Olof Palme (Stockholm: Norstedts 2011; pp. 348), Gunnar Wall, Konspiration Olof Palme: Mordet, politikern och hans tysta fiender (Stockholm: Semic, 2015; pp. 398); Lars Borgnäs, Olof Palmes sista steg: i sällskap med en mördare (Semic, 2020); Kari Poutiainen, Den hemliga alliansen: Palmemordet och Stay Behind (Stockholm: Karneval, 2025; pp. 808).

Left: The protocol from the introduction to the police interrogation with the police driver for the two police officers, C-G Östling and Stellan Åkerbring, for their trip to the U.S. Embassy in early autumn 1986 (see Part II). They had told the driver that they knew “who the killer of Palme was, and they said that the killer will never be revealed”. Right: C-G Östling.

Some suspects, the Larsson document and Alsén, Hasselbohm and Poutiainen

The first main suspect was a 33-years-old religious right-winger, Victor Gunnarsson. He later moved to the U.S., and in 1994, he was found shot with two bullets in his head. He was naked, wearing only a gold watch and a gold ring. At his home, he had the address to Ivan von Birchan and a note, “Charles ITT”, which would be the same “Charles Morgan” ITT, who in November 1985 had offered the Swedish-Yugoslav mercenary Ivan von Birchan two million dollars to shoot Olof Palme. Von Birchan was approached twice by “Morgan” (November 1985 and January 1986). He reported this to the Stockholm City authorities, to K-G Ohlsson at the Stockholm Police and to the responsible Security Service police, Alf Karlsson, more than a month before the killing. Von Birchan knew “Morgan” as a CIA operative from his time in Southern Africa (from the civil war in Rhodesia). He had been Special Force officer in Vietnam and von Birchan claimed that “Morgan” was involved with the Contras in Honduras (with Oliver North, Richard Secord, and John Singlaub). Some people linked to Singlaub’s organization, World Anti-Communist League (WACL), were of interest to the Inquiry. In addition to the warning from von Birchan, there were several warnings presented to Olof Palme or to the Social Democratic Party weeks before the killing (see Part IV).

One week before Olof Palme was killed, Anders Larsson, a former Swedish WACL representative, handed in a warning of a pending threat to Palme´s life to the office of Prime Minister Olof Palme and to the Foreign Ministry. Shortly before he died, Larsson wrote that “CIA Covert Action Department” was involved in the killing (see Part IV, the book volumes above and Larsson’s report from September 1990). Already in August 1985, Alf Karlsson from the Security Service said that Kurdish people were a threat to Olof Palme although this did not appear to be very credible. Olof Palme had let Kurdish leftwing organization PKK stay in Sweden despite their guerilla attacks on the Turkish state and violent attacks on their own traitors. A Swedish South African agent and a former WACL representative Bertil Wedin had planted a “Kurdish lead” in a Turkish newspaper, while the South African death squad leader Eugen de Kock told the South African Supreme Court in 1996 that Wedin’s chief, a South African secret police agent Craig Williamson, had organized the killing of Olof Palme. De Kock’s predecessor, Dirk Coetzee, said the same. This was reported in a series of articles by the Swedish journalist Anders Hasselbohm. In an interview, Craig Williamson said that he had done operations for the Americans and the British as if they preferred to use the South Africans for “plausible deniability”. South African security forces were certainly interested in having Olof Palme eliminated. Sweden was the Western country that was the strongest supporter of the ANC in South Africa. Swedish Chief Prosecutor Jan Danielsson confirmed that Williamson was in Stockholm at the time of the killing. It later turned out that shortly after the killing, the former Chief of the Swedish Security Service Per-Gunnar Vinge had sent an exclusive piece of art, a glass sculpture of a blacksmith with a hammer, to South Africa. According to the South Africans, the code name of the operation was “Hammer” (Google has recently removed the original article with reference to the laws of the European Union).

The first head of the Palme Inquiry, the Stockholm County Chief of Police and the former Chief of the Security Service, Hans Holmér, argued that it was all a “Kurdish conspiracy”. The police started to tap the phones of Kurdish PKK members in Sweden, but they found nothing. Holmér had to leave after a year following the conflict with the chief prosecutors. In 1988, the Palme Inquiry supposedly had a few suspects: a Croatian rightwing radical, a member of Ustasha and WACL, Miro Barešić; a Swedish-Finnish Nazi and former weapons instructor for the Stockholm police, Carl-Gustav Östling; and a violent alcoholic and drug addict, Christer Pettersson. The police arrested the 41-year-old Pettersson in December 1988, which made the police now try to find evidence against him. In practice, they dropped all the other leads. Pettersson had been in the area the same night. He had been violent and had killed a man, but he never had used a gun.

In July 1989, he was found guilty of killing Prime Minister Palme after Lisbeth Palme had “identified” him as the man standing behind her. She had confused the killer with the witness Anders Björkman with his blue down jacket standing exactly where Lisbeth Palme said that the killer had been standing. The Chief Prosecutor K.G. Svensson said later that it was clear that Lisbeth Palme had confused the killer with Björkman. However, it turned out that one prosecutor had told her that the suspect was an alcoholic, and when the police let Lisbeth Palme “identify” Pettersson among some anonymous police officers, she had said: “one can easily see who of them is an alcoholic”. But in November 1989, a higher court found Pettersson not guilty.

What is remarkable with Lisbeth Palme’s “identification” of Pettersson is not whether he was the killer or not (which he obviously wasn’t), but why the police accepted Lisbeth Palme’s claim that the man in the blue down jacket (apparently Björkman), standing 5-10 meters behind her, was the killer, when the autopsy had found that Olof Palme was shot at a distance of 20 cm and when other witnesses said that the killer had had a dark coat, that he shot Olof Palme at close range and that he had disappeared immediately. Lisbeth Palme may not have seen the killer, but some evidence indicates the opposite. As stated above, three witnesses claim that the killer seemingly had been talking to Olof Palme. They appeared to be a group of three before Lisbeth and then Olof took a couple of steps towards the subway entrance. Then, the killer put his hand on Olof’s shoulder and shot him. He died while falling.

Some witnesses turned up from two cars and a taxi, that had stopped for red light. The taxi driver, Anders Delsborn, called the switchboard at Järfälla Taxi immediately, and they tried to call the Police Operation Center. A young nurse student Anna Hage in another car saw the man (Olof Palme) falling, the woman (Lisbeth) went down on her knees. Another man was running away. She did not hear any shots. She thought it might have been a heart attack. She left the taxi and began to make heart compression, but it was blood all over. She was interviewed as a witness. The police wanted to know exactly what she saw. The Security Service also approached her, but it was unclear what they wanted. Cars were often waiting outside her house with the lights turned off. She called the police, but then the cars disappeared. In August 1988 she was contacted by a man in military uniform. He chose a caffe that she used to visit. She was afraid. He said she was under surveillance. She could talk to family and friends but not to the wrong people, and certain things should not be disclosed. “We have to keep the country calm”, he said.

Left: The street Tunnelgatan today, where the killer disappeared after having shot Olof Palme. In the background, one can see the stairs up to David Bagares gata. The middle photo: the view of the same area in the night. Right: the view from the crime the following morning showing the blood and some flowers on the street and the barracks in the middle of Tunnelgatan that made it difficult to see where the killer disappeared. (Photo: Wikipedia, Tage Olsin and Gunnar Wall).

More precisely, the killing may have taken place about 23.21.30. Anders Delsborn would have called Järfälla Taxi seconds later. The woman at the Taxi switchboard tried to contact the Police Operation Center but she had to wait. The Police received her call about “a man that had been shot at the corner Sveavägen-Tunnelgatan” at 23.23, or at least the responsible officer, Ulf Helin, who usually did not work at the Operation Center, registered the call at 23.23. He asked for confirmation and sent his own police car no. 1230, but the police documents show that he, at 23.24, sent this very police car, not to the shooting at Sveavägen-Tunnelgatan but to a quarrel between drunken men at the Central Railway Station. The police car sent to the crime scene at Sveavägen was accordingly several minutes late, which made it easier for the killer to disappear. However, a police car with Chief Inspector Gösta Söderström happened to pass the area and arrived minutes after the killing, at 23.25 (Poutiainen) or shortly afterwards (Söderström), and he arrived before the car sent by the Operation Center. A witness from another private car, Leif Ljungqvist, called the Alarm Center at 23.22, and telephone calls from the Alarm Center were supposed to have priority at the Police Operation Center, but this mechanism was turned off this very night. When the Alarm Center reaches the Police Operation Center close to 23.25 (and you can hear the exact time on the tape in the background), the police Janne Hedlund answers. He says that we have not been informed about any shooting (Poutiainen 1995; 2025). Helin had seemingly not informed others at the Operation Center about it. Not until now, at 23.25, did the Police Operation Center go out with a local alarm for the police cars in the vicinity.

Kari Poutiainen also found that the Police Operation Center had received another call about the shooting (Sveavägen-Tunnelgatan) already before 23.23, but from a police radio 3625. Birgitta Brolund at the Operation Center said that this call was received before the call from [Järfälla] taxi. Police radio 3625 belonged to a reconnaissance car that supposedly wasn’t on duty that night. A person with access to this police radio must have been close to the place of the killing, informing the Police Operation Center and then left. Why did this police officer not turn up on the crime scene? A witness saw a man running on David Bagares gata, the continuation of Tunnelgatan from the crime scene (as if he had been running up the stairs from Tunnelgatan), while trying to put down something in a hand bag. It was first believed that this was the killer putting down his revolver, but the killer had put down his revolver immediately. Perhaps was the man on David Bagares gata putting down his walkie-talkie or communication radio after having left the top of the stairs from where he had reported about the killing at Tunnelgatan-Sveavägen. He might have been one of the perhaps ten people with walkie-talkies that seemingly followed the every movement of the Prime Minister Palme that night.

Another remarkable incident minutes after the killing was reported by a Dagens Nyheter photographer Åke Malmström, who arrived to his car at Dalagatan not far from Sveavägen. He turned on the police radio, as he used to do, and heard the following: First voice: “Hello up there. How’s it going?” Another voice responded: “Fine, but bloody cold”. The first voice: “The Prime Minister has been shot”. Then it was silent. This is not a typical police communication, and it took place when very few people in addition Lisbeth Palme knew that the man, who had been shot, was Prime Minister Olof Palme. The first minutes after the killing, none of the other witnesses understood that it was Prime Minister Palme that had been shot. The communication in the police radio appears to have been part of an exercise or an operation, where the prime minister should be taken out. When Malmström informed the police a couple of days later, they were not interested in his testimony, and they were not even interested in looking at his police radio in the car.

Many witnesses had seen people with walkie-talkies in the Old Town close to Palme’s apartment, at the subway station and around Sveavägen north and south of the cinema. This was unusual at the time (there were no small mobile phones in 1986) and there were several tens of observations. Most of these men with walkie-talkies spoke Swedish, but at least one spoke German/Dutch (or perhaps South African Afrikaans). A man from the Parliament used to pass the house for the Palme family on his way to his job, and the week before the murder, there used to be two to three men standing there, and they spoke something that sounded like German. The editorial writer at Dagens Nyheter Olle Alsén interviewed a Finnish woman, who told that she and her friend had been walking on Sveavägen this very evening. She claimed that they had passed the place of the killing shortly before it happened. They saw a man standing there. One woman recognized him as a Finnish-speaking man she had seen earlier. She asked him in Finnish what time it was. He then spoke in Finnish into a walkie-talkie, saying: “I am recognized. What should I do?” (To use another language is logical in a covert operation and the U.S. had used American Indians in the World War II instead of coded communication). The answer in Finnish was: “Well. Do what you should do. They are coming now”. One of the women argued that the man had had a gun in the other hand. They had heard gunshots minutes afterwards. Frightened, they decided not to tell anyone, but one woman did.

A copy of a Swedish Radio interview with this woman was later found in the possession of a South African military intelligence agent, “Nigel Barnett” in Mozambique. In 1997, he was arrested in Maputo on charges of espionage. He had several passports and aliases like “Nicho Esslin” and “Henry William Otto”, but his real name was Henry B. He was a trained killer with experience from the civil war in Rhodesia in the 1970s. He spoke fluent Swedish, because of his adoptive mother. A Swedish police officer in South Africa, Jan Åke Kjellberg, followed the court case and he was able to question Henry B., who had been to Stockholm several times in the 1980s. He did not pass the polygraph test (“lie detector”) specifically “whether he participated in the killing of Olof Palme or whether he suspected someone specifically for the murder”, but he also said that “he knew for sure that it was a South African operation”. However, despite the espionage charges, he was suddenly released from the arrest, which only could be explained by a high-level intervention or rather by an intervention from a foreign state. His ashes were officially buried in Stockholm in his family grave in 2017, but whether it was really his ashes is uncertain, Kjellberg told Hasselbohm. Henry B. had supposedly been healthy before he died. A senior official in the British deep state once told me that when you bury an agent, you may not know this person’s real name or identity.

As analysed by Poutiainen (1995), the Palme case would have been easier to solve if the Police Operation Center in Stockholm had sent a car immediately to the place of the shooting. As stated above, they sent a police car to deal with a quarrel at the railway station. Only a couple of minutes later did they send a car to the place of the killing, which gave the killer time to disappear. For this very night and only for this night, Ulf Helin was taking over as one of the responsible officers at the Operation Center. He was a close colleague of one of the main suspects, the Finnish-Swedish Carl-Gustav Östling. Helin had sent a police car with their mutual colleague Claes Djurfeldt, who ran up the stairs to David Bagares gata “to follow the killer”, and the last person seeing a man running at David Bagares gata told that he disappeared behind a car, which turned out to be Djurfeldt’s own private car meters from the small office of Östling and his colleague, a retired officer, Major G., formerly a liaison to the U.S. at FFV (Swedish Ordnance). Five weeks before the killing (on 20 January), Major G. had been given a position at Televerket Radio, which demanded high security clearance. This supposedly enabled him to follow all radio traffic and walkie-talkie traffic in the Stockholm area. He left his position a week after the killing (on 9 March) and started a weapons company, Strateg Protector, together with Östling. They also started a couple of other weapons companies. They both had close South African police ties, and they provided Hans Holmér and the Palme Inquiry with all its weapons. Holmér’s “bodyguards” came from the same group of police officers.

Some police officers were surprised to find that Holmér’s “bodyguards” were not regular bodyguards but political right-wingers or rather extreme right-wingers and that they were sitting with Holmér inside the “Palme room” (the Headquarters of the Inquiry) and not outside. This was the same group of police officers that Palme’s State Secretary Ulf Larsson had said that they had made “Hitler salute” at meetings in the Old Town in 1985 and that had “discussed the removal of Prime Minister Palme”, according to Commodore Cay Holmberg (see this article, Part II). According to Anders Larsson (mentioned above), Holmér had not chosen his “bodyguards” himself. They were appointed to control the Palme Inquiry. A week before the murder, Östling had cut out his appendix, but after lunch on 28 February he left the hospital against his doctor’s advice. However, he received an alibi for the early evening from his friend Per Arvidsson at FMV, but it turned out that he had no alibi for the late evening. According to a taxi driver, five minutes after the killing, he had picked up two men on Malmskillnadsgatan a couple of hundred meters from the crime scene. The stairs from Tunnelgatan leads up to Malmskillnadsgatan (in parallel to Sveavägen). After having seen a photo of Östling, the taxi driver claimed that he was one of the two men he drove to Söder (or South Stockholm, where Östling was living). Östling could have been the man speaking Finnish in the walkie-talkie with the man at the corner Sveavägen-Tunnelgatan that the two Finnish women had spoken with. Östling, Djurfeldt, Helin and Major G, and two officers analyzing the bullets, Sonny Björk and Per Arvidsson, all belonged to the Stockholm Combat Shooting Club (Stockholms försvarsskytteförening) with 18 people (see above), a society for combat shooting and training military combat in the city, which might have been a cover for a group within the Stockholm Stay Behinds or rather “parallel Stay Behinds” (see above).

What happened is still not clear. In the Palme Inquiry, these police officers have been described as a group of right-wing police officers, but they rather seem to have had a role linked to the Stay Behinds using their positions as police officers on this very occasion. I have not published anything serious about the killing of Olof Palme for 30 years, so there may be some mistakes in this text, but I have tried to verify all of it. Much of the above network was revealed in a 1995 book by Kari and Pertti Poutiainen, Inuti labyrinten (Stockholm: Grimur, 1995). The book was recommended in a review on the leader page in Dagens Nyheter by former Minister of Finance and Deputy Prime Minister Kjell-Olof Feldt (Kjell-Olof Feldt, “Vem lita på om inte sina egna” [Who to trust if not your own people], Dagens Nyheter, 17 August 1995). Dagens Nyheter was the most influential Swedish newspaper. The day after, 90 % of Swedish local newspapers wrote about Feldt’s comment on Poutiainen’s book. In the following night, there were two men on the roof of Prime Minister Carlsson’s residence – they were both caught by the police but then released. This might have been a “security test” at the Prime Minister’s residence, similar to the test at the defence staff (see above), but it was definitely also something else. The next day, Carlsson suddenly announced his resignation as prime minister. Media became immediately occupied by Carlsson’s resignation. Nothing more was then written about the book of Poutiainen. It was certainly not the Government but other forces that were responsible for this operation.

All this information has appeared in a number of Swedish books, but there are not much translated into English. We still do not know exactly what happened, but it seems pretty clear what kind of networks that were involved in the killing, and we know quite a lot about the ties between these networks and foreign agencies. The killing was certainly not the responsibility of a single individual seeking revanche or acting against the Prime Minister because of private hatred.

Already from the night of the murder, both Feldt and Carlsson had been wondering what the Stockholm police was doing. Vice Prime Minister Ingvar Carlsson had received a phone call from Olof Palme’s State Secretary Ulf Dahlsten saying that Olof had been shot, and the Cabinet would have to meet immediately at the Prime Minister’s Office. Ingvar Carlsson was living in Tyresö outside the central Stockholm. He took a taxi. He thought it might have been a coup or something, and he hide in the back of the car, but when he arrived at the Prime Minister’s Office at 00.45, there was no police presence, no protection, nothing (Carlsson, 1999). Feldt was also informed by Ulf Dahlsten (about the killing of Palme and about the meeting), and around midnight, 40 minutes after the killing, he called the local police in southwest Stockholm and asked them to drive him to the Prime Minister’s Office, but they had no information about the Prime Minister being shot. There had been no police alarm for the Stockholm area, only for some police cars in central Stockholm. A nation-wide alarm about the killing of Prime Minister Palme went out at 02.05 (two hours and 40 minutes after the murder), and the Swedish Defence Staff was, at least officially, not informed until 01.15, when they received “a call from Sweden’s Defence Attaché to Washington [Jan-Henrik Torselius]”, who told that Palme had been killed, and it had been on American TV 15 minutes earlier.

The day after the killing, the new prime minister Ingvar Carlsson spoke with the leader of the Opposition, the Conservative Party Leader Ulf Adelsohn. Adelsohn wrote about Carlsson as saying: “Now, when this has happened, it would have been better if there was a lone gunman, but the killing seems to have been planned for quite some time in advance. There are signs that there is a group that is willing to damage the Swedish society. In that case, it is very serious.”

Protocol from the early police interrogation with Carl-Gustav Östling about the murder of Prime Minister Olof Palme, 19 August 1986.

The strange connections

At the time of the murder Carl-Gustav Östling and his colleague Major G started a company Strateg Protector providing weapons, including machine guns mounted into briefcases, to Hans Holmér and the Palme Inquiry, which was their only customer. Holmér’s “bodyguards” came from the same group of right-wing police officers. When Swedish Customs authorities entered the apartment of Strateg Protector, they found a large amount of ammunition, guns, revolvers and a couple of anti-tank rifles. They found a postcard linked to the journal Contra, 13 photos of Östling and his colleague making Hitler salute (also on Jewish graves), a file for South African contacts, and exactly the same metal piercing ammunition as the one that had been used for the killing of Prime Minister Olof Palme. In 1988, Östling purchased bugging equipment that one of Holmer’s “bodyguards”, P.O. Karlsson, tried to smuggle through the Swedish Customs to Holmér’s close associate Ebbe Carlsson. Holmér, the first chief of the Police Inquiry, and Ebbe Carlsson had had close contacts since 1970s. The formal receiver of the bugging equipment, however, turned out to be the South African Legation in Stockholm. Before the killing, Östling’s colleague as well as several other police officers made trips to South Africa in close contact to the South African police.

Ebbe Carlsson was a journalist and a publisher, who had been press secretary for the Social Democratic Minister of Justice Lennart Geijer (1974-76), and he had been close to Hans Holmér already at the time when Holmér had been Chief of the Security Service (SÄK) 1970-76. The most delicate question, however, is: why did Hans Holmér and Ebbe Carlsson, who both were described as “Social Democrats”, collaborate with people who were working for the South African apartheid regime and with people who were active Nazis making Hitler salute and discussing the killing of Olof Palme? Why did Holmér and Ebbe Carlsson recruit these people and use them as bodyguards? Several extreme right-wingers seemed to have known about the killing in-beforehand. From 1984, Holmér was the Police Director for Stockholm’s Län (County), and he had appointed himself to investigate the murder. Soon afterwards, together with Ebbe Carlsson, he gave the first briefing for the new Prime Minister Ingvar Carlsson. Ingvar Carlsson said later: why was Ebbe Carlsson there together with Holmér? Ebbe Carlsson was just a private individual. “Why was he briefing me, the Prime Minister?” Ingvar Carlsson asked on Swedish TV.

In recent interviews with Michael MacLaine Ångman, it turned out that Hans Holmér had never been a Social Democrat. He had visited the family since the time of Michael’s childhood. Holmér was supposedly best friend of Michael´s father, Gösta Ångman, a director of a management company and a former director at the Wallenberg company Electrolux. In the early 1980s, they regularly had had “anti-Palme dinners”: “he should be shot in the back of his head”, someone said. At these dinners at Ångman’s home in Näsbypark (north of Stockholm), there were naval officers, businessmen and lawyers. The home was close to Näsby Castle and the Royal Naval War College, where later Admiral Bror Stefenson and Bofors’ Claes-Ulrik Winberg studied in the same class together with my stepfather and Admiral Carl-Fredrik Algernon. The latter lived almost next door to Ångmans. The owner of Ångman’s company told the son Michael: “Your father is saving this country”.

The son said that the father had a large mobile phone in the car already in the early 1970s, which private individuals did not have at the time. He was well-trained as a military officer. He was shooting with his left hand as well as with his right hand. He might have had a secret position in the Swedish Stay Behinds, the son said. After the killing of Olof Palme, there were no more dinners. There was nothing. Someone sabotaged the brakes of Ångman’s car. All brake hoses had been cut. After a second event, a naval officer told the father that “they are serious”. Take your son and leave, he said. The Ångmans “escaped” to Spain and went into hiding. The son became almost hostage of his father. When the son demanded to go back to Sweden, the father gave him a naval officer to keep an eye on him, as a “bodyguard” (see several interviews with T. Gjutarenäfve 2022).

In MacLaine Ångman’s account, Holmér appears clearly as a right-winger linked to naval officers and to his father, who hated the Social Democrats and particularly Olof Palme. Holmér’s recruitment of Nazis and other right-wingers as “bodyguards” and weapons providers is suddenly much easier to understand. Holmér’s driver claimed that he had driven Holmér on the evening of the murder in Stockholm, also to the place of the murder, while Holmér himself claimed that he was far north of Stockholm intending to participate in a skiing competition, “Vasaloppet”, but the support for that is very weak. The son describes his father as having been a very social figure until all this ended, after the night of the killing. He then went into isolation worrying about every car behind him. The son believes that the father might have been the man who shot Olof Palme or just been involved in one way or the other. Both Gösta Ångman and Hans Holmér died 72 years old.

Together with Ebbe Carlsson, Hans Holmér had claimed that the Kurdish group PKK (the Kurdistan Workers’ Party) had been responsible for the killing of Prime Minister Palme. The same had been claimed by the Swedish-South African agent Bertil Wedin (who worked for Williamson, who was accused in the South African Supreme Court for having organised the killing of Palme) and by Alf Karlsson, who had been the officer responsible for Olof Palme’s security, and he had refrained from acting on specific plans to kill Prime Minister Palme. Alf Karlsson went from Security Service (SÄK) to P.G. Vinge’s private security company. Vinge had been forced out as chief of SÄK by Olof Palme, and he had been one of four senior officers who, according to the IB Document, had taken the decision to take him out (see Part II). After Holmér had been forced to leave as the Chief of the Palme Commission in 1987, Ebbe Carlsson tried to continue to push for a Kurdish suspect, and he had received support from Walter Kegö and Jan-Henrik Barrling from SÄK. This was a hidden investigation linked to SÄK.

In recent years, however, it has turned out that the Kurdish lead, according to Barrling and others, was a cover for the Soviet KGB. PKK was believed to have acted as a proxy for the Soviets, and a KGB officer in Stockholm responsible for their agents without diplomatic cover, was believed to have been deeply involved in this operation. The weeks prior to the killing, there had been a radical increase in Soviet short wave-transmissions, SÄK had claimed. This KGB officer, Vladimir Nezjinskiy, was a Soviet diplomat and was under surveillance. He had supposedly arranged an apartment for the Kurdish suspect. In October 1985, the British MI6 had unlawfully installed listening devices in Nezjinskiy’s his private apartment in Stockholm, and this was made at the time when MI6 had been able to make a copy of Olof Palme’s handwritten agenda for the meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev. The British had, according to the ACC/SOPS documents above, demanded that the “threat to the Northern Flank” should be eliminated. Olof Palme had to go, but in collaboration with SÄK, MI6 listened to all Nezjinsky’s conversations. And in the early night after the killing of Olof Palme, Nezjinsky had supposedly said: “Now, it has happened”, which not only SÄK and MI6 but also officers in the Swedish military intelligence service had interpreted as “foreknowledge”. The Soviets would have been directly involved, they argued, and this information would also have been forwarded to Hans Holmér as the leader of the Palme Commission and to Prime Minister Ingvar Carlsson.

Exactly as the Warren Commission during the investigation into the killing of President John F. Kennedy, the Swedish Government and the Palme Commission would have been faced with the choice of either investigate the Soviets and “their attack on the country” or point to a single assassin, and the former alternative would have made the investigation into the Palme murder much more difficult. However, the last state to be interested in killing Kennedy as well as Palme was the Soviet Union. Recent research makes a convincing case claiming that the CIA Chief of Counter-Intelligence James Jesus Angleton had planted these alternatives for the Warren Commission, and Angleton seems himself to have been deeply involved in the planning of the killing of John F. Kennedy. In the Palme case, the MI6 may on purpose have installed the equipment in Nezjinsky’s home before the Palme murder to pick up something of Nezjinsky’s conversation that could possibly be used to put the blame on the Russians. Both Barrling and Kegö from the Security Service and the officers from Swedish Military Intelligence seem actually have believed that the Soviets could have been involved. All their energy were used to surveil the Soviets, and they could hardly imagine any other suspect. It seems that the MI6 had used the same trick as Angleton had done more than 20 years earlier. Up to now, this information has been classified, and originally, it seems to have been the Government or rather Prime Minister Ingvar Carlsson, who wanted to keep this information as top-secret. He had experience from the submarine incidents and people from SÄK and Swedish Naval Intelligence always pointed to the Soviets, while having no real evidence. Prime Minister Ingvar Carlsson would definitely not have trusted them. The KGB reaction to the killing, “Now, it has happened”, was no evidence of “foreknowledge”. It was rather what many people were thinking and what I actually was saying day after, because of the massive campaign against Prime Minister Olof Palme.

Ebbe Carlsson had ties to intelligence, but also to both extreme right-wingers and to leading Social Democrats. At the first glance, this appears to be very confusing. We may therefore have to look at who these Social Democrats were and particularly we have to look at Sven Andersson.

Left: Defence Minister Sven Andersson 1966 (Photo: Digitalt Museum). He was defence minister 1957-73 and cabinet minister 1948-76. Right: Prime Minister Olof Palme 1985 (Photo: (Photo: Source: Ministry of the Presidency. Government of Spain, Public Domain). He was prime minister 1969-76 and 1982-86 and cabinet minister for 17 years.

The Palme-Andersson split and the role of the Deep State

Unlike his contemporary ministers, like his predecessor, Defense and Foreign Minister Torsten Nilsson and Prime Minister Tage Erlander, Andersson did not write about his time as a cabinet minister in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. The other two wrote several volumes about their years as cabinet ministers, and Erlander’s minister of finance Gunnar Sträng, who also had been minister for 25 years, let a researcher, my colleague Anders Johansson, write his memoirs. Sven Andersson, however, wrote (together with Ebbe Carlsson) about his experience during World War II and his Swedish military trip to Berlin in late 1940, where he received “terrific” information about the upcoming German attack on the Soviet Union half a year later. But he did not write about the years after 1948. Perhaps Andersson had reasons not to write about his own 28 years as a Swedish minister (minister without portfolio responsible for defense issues, minister of communication, his 16 years as minister of defense and then minister of foreign affairs). According to the only declassified CIA document on Sweden from 1976 that I found, Swedish Foreign Minister Sven Andersson was, from 1972, married to Ulla Brambeck, the Social Secretary of the British Ambassador. It is remarkable that the Swedish Foreign Minister is married to a secretary of the British Ambassador. This was the only information in this document. Andersson moved into Brambeck’s apartment in the Palace of von Rosen at Strandvägen in the most exclusive part of Stockholm. Ola Frithiofson, the son of Karl Frithiofson (Andersson’s state secretary for defense for ten years) had a conversation with former Deputy CIA Director Bobby Ray Inman. Inman said that Defense Minister Sven Andersson was “a very fine man”, and that he (Inman) had, as U.S. Assistant Naval Attaché to Stockholm in mid-1960s, used Wallenberg’s senior intelligence officer, Karl Arvid Norlin as his “go-between” to Andersson. Norlin was deeply involved with the Wallenberg-produced Swedish Air Force and with the weapons deals with the Americans. Andersson seems to have been equally preoccupied by these affairs. Inman had had an apartment in Baroness von Platen’s Palace practically next door to the Andersson-Brambeck´s later apartment. Inman apparently trusted Andersson and he had close private ties to Bengt Schuback’s predecessor as Sweden’s Chief of Navy, Vice Admiral Per Rudberg (1978-84). Like Inman, Rudberg also really trusted Sven Andersson, he told me. Inman told Bob Woodward (1987) that he, in Stockholm, had had a “terrific source who provided significant military information on other countries”. If that was Sven Andersson, Per Rudberg or someone else, I don’t know.

Hans von Hofsten, who initiated the Naval officer´s revolt against Olof Palme, visited Sven Andersson shortly before the killing. And Ola’s father Karl, did not only have professional ties with him. The Frithiofson family had also private ties to Anderssons, because the two families had summer houses close to each other on the island of Orust/Rossö. Ola’s parents said that Sven lost his foundation in the Social Democratic Party, when his wife Rosa died in 1967. Sven did not always take the decisions by the Social Democratic Party Congress “very serious”, the father said. Sven collaborated closely with others, and it was certainly not with the Soviets. There are strong indications that he was as close to the Americans as to the British. Ola’s mother’s characterization of Ulla Brambeck was not very favorable, and when Sven died in 1987, he was buried together with his former wife Rosa.

Sven Hirdman, State Secretary for Defense in the late 1970s and early 1980s, said that Sven Andersson was still responsible for “the most sensitive issues” (in other words the Stay Behinds) many years after he left as Minister of Defence (see Ola Frithiofson, 2021). Later defense ministers had not been that senior and could obviously not be entrusted the most secret information. Hirdman had actually been “acting” Defence Minister at the time, according to Chief of Defence General Ljung, but the real secrets were still kept by Sven Andersson despite the fact that Andersson formally had left the Ministry many years earlier. Sven Andersson may have kept his secret position in the Deep State also in the mid-1980s.

Hirdman was a senior ambassador. He had replaced Algernon as responsible for export of war material in 1987, he had been ambassador to Israel and had been ambassador to Moscow for ten years. A confident of Andersson, Tage Tuvheden, said: after Olof Palme had criticized the Americans, Sven Andersson had to turn to Washington to calm them down. Nothing had changed, Andersson told them. Tuvheden had been offered to become neighbour to Sven Andersson at his summer house on Rossö, because of his important role for the Swedish Air Force (interview with T. Gjutarenäfve 2023). Another confident of Andersson, Tore Rainer, had been working for the Swedish signal intelligence agency (FRA or the Defence Radio Agency). He belonged to the crew of the DC-3 that conducted Swedish reconnaissance flights along the Soviet Baltic coast after the War, and the signal intelligence was conveyed directly to the Americans. When the airplane was shot down by the Soviets in June 1952, he was not onboard, but he continued to work for FRA and had a central role in the agency. In his home, he had a lot of radio equipment. When someone was going to visit him, he or she had to give a coded signal before entering. He would, as stated by Donald Forsberg above (see this article Part II), in case of an occupied Sweden have a role for the communication network of the Swedish Stay Behinds. He married a Finnish woman. His stepson, Carl-Gustav Östling, seems to have become a central figure in the U.S.-linked “parallel Stay Behinds” in Stockholm (see above). He may have been introduced to this world by his stepfather. It seems likely to assume that Andersson was aware of this. He was as deeply involved with the Americans as he was with the British.

A real conflict between Prime Minister Palme and Defence and Foreign Minister Andersson seems to boil down to when to receive the bomber and attack aircraft of the U.S. Air Force, if a war starts. Andersson’s close assistant Ingemar Engman (see Part I) argued that in the 1960s, Sweden’s prime minister, foreign minister and defence minister had accepted the U.S. use of Swedish airbases from Day One in a war, already before Sweden had been attacked (Tunander 1999; 2003). In the 1960s, Prime Minister Tage Erlander (1946-69), his assistant and later Prime Minister Olof Palme (1969-76), Defence and Foreign Minister Torsten Nilsson (1951-57; 1962-71) and Defence and Foreign Minister Sven Andersson (1957-73; 1973-76) supposedly believed that the U.S. would have a significant air force available to deploy in Sweden only in the very early phase of a war. Some Swedish air bases were prepared to receive U.S. aircraft “on their way eastwards”, Engman stated (Arte documentary “Täushung: Die Methode Reagan”, 2015). However, in the 1970s, there are clearly indications that at least Olof Palme and his close colleagues rejected this idea, because U.S. use of Swedish airbases would make Sweden a target of Soviet nuclear missile strikes. The Soviet war planning for 1970s and 1980s did not include an occupation of Sweden, but the elimination of Swedish airbases used by the Americans, we were told by the Lieutenant General Vladimir Cheremnikh, who had been Deputy Chief of Staff for Leningrad Military District up to 1986 and responsible for the war planning for the Nordic Region. In a war with United States, the forces of the Leningrad Military District would occupy Finland and Finnmark (in northern Norway) as a buffer zone. They would not take Sweden and the rest of Norway, but they would eliminate the airbases used by the Americans. Olof Palme would have been aware of these Soviet plans. And the secret Swedish policy of the 1960s, as described by Engman as Andersson’s assistant, was not handed over to the new Prime Minister Thorbjörn Fälldin in 1976 (Holmström 2015). Sweden would, according to Palme’s policy only receive U.S. aircraft after a possible Soviet attack.

Lieutenant General Vladimir Cheremnikh paying tribute to Olof Palme at his grave in Stockholm in connection with a conversation on SVT in 1995. General Cheremnikh had two wishes when he arrived in Sweden: to see the place where Olof Palme was shot and to visit his grave (Photo: Private Archive).

If the Soviets had tried to take out the Swedish airbases with conventional bomber aircraft, they would have to continuously bomb these airbases. They would lose too many aircraft. The Soviet Union would almost certainly use nuclear weapons. This is the only logical conclusion. Olof Palme was preoccupied with the risk of a nuclear war, and to let U.S. aircraft operate from Swedish airbases would be nothing but an invitation to Soviet nuclear strikes on Sweden. In a war, the Soviets would be short of forces on the Central Front (MccQwire, 1987), and one would very much prefer a neutral Sweden. Sweden could accordingly stay out of a war, perhaps until the very end of the war. But this became a major U.S.-British problem, because they wanted to use Sweden as an unsinkable aircraft carrier in the very early phase of a war to firstly, establish air cover over the Central Front; secondly, to attack Soviet reinforcements through Poland and along the Baltic Sea coast and thirdly, to take out the Soviet air defence systems in the Soviet Baltic Republics in order to open up for U.S. bomber aircraft to facilitate their attacks on Leningrad and Moscow. On this very issue, Olof Palme knew that Sweden had common interest with the Soviets. For the Americans and the British, however, a Swedish neutrality was unacceptable (“Russian Military Thinking”, Tunander 2024).

In other words, with Olof Palme as prime minister, there wouldn’t be any Soviet attack on Sweden that would justify U.S. and British use of Swedish airbases. And if the Russians didn’t want to attack Sweden, the U.S. and the British had to do it themselves. They had to instigate a false “Soviet attack” by using British and small Western submarines under U.S. command to land Special Forces that would kill Swedish political and military leaders to create an impression of a Soviet attack (see Part II and Part IV). Top-leaders like Olof Palme that would prefer to keep a neutral Sweden would have to be taken out. They would be described as “important carriers of information” and they would be taken out so the Soviets “won’t be able to get their hand on them” (see this article Part II). Many Swedes would believe that such a fake “Soviet attack”was real, and to them it would justify U.S. and British use of Swedish territory. The major problem for the U.S. and the British would be Prime Minister Palme, who, from 1983-84, had understood that these intruding submarines actually were Western submarines. Olof Palme and some other responsible ministers in the Cabinet like Foreign Minister Sten Andersson and later Defence Minister Thage G. Peterson would have to be taken out by the use of Swedish assassination teams (or Stay Behinds) or by British Special Forces. The latter would be put ashore from British Oberon- or Porpoise-class submarines and coordinate with Swedish Stay Behinds, and this British attack would appear as an attack made by the Soviets. Sweden would largely turn against the Soviets and enough many Swedish military officers “were plugged into” the U.S.-UK system to administrate the landing of U.S. and British air forces in Sweden. The Swedish Deep State would act, and leaders like Sven Andersson were trusted by the Americans and the British and by the U.S.- Swedish liaisons, by Admiral Bobby Ray Inman and by Admiral Rudberg, and the latter would be responsible for the Swedish Stay Behinds.

The question seems to be: not if but when Prime Minister Palme was going to be killed. Was he going to be taken out when the war started? Or already in peacetime? It may be of some significance when Sven and Sven O Andersson told MI6 and Mac Falkirk shortly after the murder: “if the Swedes will get to know the truth about the murder of Palme, Sweden will not be the same in hundred years”. Hans Holmér said something similar in an interview with Dagens Nyheter. The Swedish Parliamentary Committee on the Constitution was questioning Holmér on 7 March 1989 about this statement. A female Committee representative asked Holmér: You said: “When the truth about this [the murder of Olof Palme] will be revealed, the Swedish society will change in its foundation”. And she continued: “What did you mean by that?”. Holmér first said that this would take too long to explain and the issue was not within the competence of this Committee, he said. When the Committee representative did not accept his answers, he just refrained from answering.