The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest by Stieg Larsson
Gullberg had spent his life on His Majesty's Secret Service, or perhaps more accurately in the secret service of the social-democratic welfare state. Which was an irony, since he had faithfully voted for the moderates in one election after another, except in 1991, when he deliberately voted against the moderates because he believed that Carl Bildt was a realpolitik catastrophe. He had voted instead for Ingvar Carlsson. The years of "Sweden's best government" had also confirmed his worst fears. The moderate government had come to power when the Soviet Union was collapsing, and in his opinion no government had been less prepared to meet the new political opportunities emerging in the East, or to make use of the art of espionage. On the contrary, the Bildt government had cut back the Soviet desk for financial reasons and had at the same time gotten themselves involved in the international mess in Bosnia and Serbia--as if Serbia could ever threaten Sweden. The result was that a fabulous opportunity to plant long-term informants in Moscow had been lost. Someday, when relations would once again worsen--which according to Gullberg was inevitable--absurd demands would be made on the Security Police and the military intelligence service, as if they could wave a magic wand and produce agents on demand.
Gullberg had begun at the Russia desk of the third division of the state police, and after two years in the job had undertaken his first tentative field work in 1952 and 1953 as an air force attache with the rank of captain at the embassy in Moscow. Strangely enough, he was following in the footsteps of another well-known spy. Some years earlier that post had been occupied by the notorious Colonel Stig Wennerstrom.
Back in Sweden, Gullberg had worked in Counter-Espionage, and ten years later he was one of the younger Security Police officers who, working under Otto Danielsson, exposed Wennerstrom and eventually got him a life sentence for treason at Langholmen prison.
When the Security Police was reorganized under Per Gunnar Vinge in 1964 and became the Security Division of the National Police Board, or Swedish Internal Security--SIS--the major increase in personnel began. By then Gullberg had worked at the Security Police for fourteen years, and had become one of its trusted veterans.
Gullberg had never used the designation "Sapo" for Sakerhetspolisen, the Security Police. He used the term "SIS" in official contexts, and among colleagues he would also refer to "the Company" or "the Firm," or merely "the Division"--but never "Sapo." The reason was simple. The Firm's most important task for many years was so-called personnel control; that is, the investigation and registration of Swedish citizens who might be suspected of harbouring communist or subversive views. Within the Firm the terms "communist" and "traitor" were synonymous. The later conventional use of the term "Sapo" was actually something that the potentially subversive communist publication Clarte had coined as a pejorative name for the communist-hunters within the police force. For the life of him Gullberg could never imagine why his former boss P. G. Vinge had titled his memoirs Sapo Chief 1962-1970.
It was the reorganization of 1964 that had shaped Gullberg's future career.
The designation SIS indicated that the secret state police had been transformed into what was described in the memos from the justice department as a modern police organization. This involved recruiting new personnel, and continual problems breaking them in. In this expanding organization the "Enemy" was presented with dramatically improved opportunities to place agents within the division. This meant in turn that internal security had to be intensified--the Security Police could no longer be a club of former officers, where everyone knew everyone else, and where the most common qualification for a new recruit was that his father was or had been an officer.
In 1963 Gullberg was transferred from Counter-Espionage to Personnel Control, a role that took on added significance in the wake of Wennerstrom's exposure as a double agent. During that period the foundation was laid for the "registry of political opinions," a list which towards the end of the sixties amounted to around 300,000 Swedish citizens who were believed to harbour undesirable political sympathies. Checking the backgrounds of Swedish citizens was one thing, but the crucial question was how security control within SIS itself would be implemented.
The Wennerstrom debacle had given rise to an avalanche of dilemmas within the Security Police. If a colonel on the defence staff--he was also the government's adviser on matters involving nuclear weapons and security policy--could work for the Russians, it followed that the Russians might have an equally senior agent within the Security Police. Who would guarantee that the top ranks and middle management at the Firm were not working for the Russians? Who, in short, was going to spy on the spies?
In August 1964 Gullberg was summoned to an afternoon meeting with the assistant chief of the Security Police, Hans Wilhelm Francke. The other participants at the meeting were two individuals from the top echelon of the Firm, the assistant head of Secretariat and the head of Budget. Before the day was over, Gullberg had been appointed head of a newly created division with the working title of "the Special Section." The first thing he did was to rename it "Special Analysis." That held for a few minutes, until the head of Budget pointed out that SA was not much better than SS. The organization's final name became "the Section for Special Analysis," the SSA, and in daily parlance, "the Section," to differentiate it from "the Division" or "the Firm," which referred to the Security Police as a whole.
"The Section" was Francke's idea. He called it "the last line of defence." An ultra-secret unit that was given strategic positions within the Firm, but which was invisible, it was never referred to in writing, even in budget memoranda, and therefore could not be infiltrated. Its task was to watch over national security. Francke had the authority to make it happen. He needed the Budget chief and the Secretariat chief to create the hidden substructure, but they were old colleagues, friends from dozens of skirmishes with the Enemy.
During the first year, the Section consisted of Gullberg and three hand-picked colleagues. Over the next ten years it grew to include no more than eleven people, of whom two were administrative secretaries of the old school and the remainder were professional spy-hunters. It was a structure with only two ranks. Gullberg was the chief. He would ordinarily meet each member of his team every day. Efficiency was valued more highly than background.
Formally, Gullberg was subordinate to a line of people in the hierarchy under the head of Secretariat of the Security Police, to whom he had to deliver monthly reports, but in practice he had been given a unique position with exceptional powers. He, and he alone, could decide to put Sapo's top bosses under the microscope. If he wanted to, he could even turn Per Gunnar Vinge's life inside out. (Which he also did.) He could initiate his own investigations or carry out telephone tapping without having to justify his objective or even report it to a higher level. His model was the legendary James Jesus Angleton, who had a similar position in the CIA, and whom he came to know personally.
The Section became a micro-organization within the Division--outside, above, and parallel to the rest of the Security Police. This also had geographical consequences. The Section had its offices at Kungsholmen, but for security reasons almost the whole team was moved out of police headquarters to an eleven-room apartment in Ostermalm that had been discreetly remodelled into a fortified office. It was staffed twenty-four hours a day, since the faithful old retainer and secretary Eleanor Badenbrink was installed in permanent lodgings in two of its rooms closest to the entrance. Badenbrink was an implacable colleague in whom Gullberg had implicit trust.
In the organization, Gullberg and his employees disappeared from public view--they were financed through a special fund, but they did not exist anywhere in the formal structure of the Security Police, which reported to the police commission or the justice department. Not even the head of SIS knew about the most secret of the secret, whose task it was to handle the most sensitive of the sensitive.
At the age of forty, Gullberg consequently found himself in a situation where he did not have to explain his actions to any living soul and cou
It was clear to Gullberg that the Section for Special Analysis could become a politically sensitive unit, and the job description was expressly vague. The written record was meagre in the extreme. In September 1964, Prime Minister Erlander signed a directive that guaranteed the setting aside of funds for the Section for Special Analysis, which was understood to be essential to the nation's security. This was one of twelve similar matters which the assistant chief of SIS, Hans Wilhelm Francke, brought up during an afternoon meeting. The document was stamped TOP SECRET and filed in the special protocol of SIS.
The signature of the prime minister meant that the Section was now a legally approved institution. The first year's budget amounted to 52,000 kronor. That the budget was so low was a stroke of genius, Gullberg thought. It meant that the creation of the Section appeared to be just another routine matter.
In a broader sense, the signature of the prime minister meant that he had sanctioned the need for a unit that would be responsible for "internal personnel control." At the same time, it could be interpreted as the prime minister giving his approval to the establishment of a body that would also monitor particularly sensitive individuals outside SIS, such as the prime minister himself. It was this last which created potentially acute political problems.
*
Evert Gullberg saw that his whisky glass was empty. He was not fond of alcohol, but it had been a long day and a long journey. At this stage of life he did not think it mattered whether he decided to have one glass of whisky or two. He poured himself the miniature Glenfiddich.
The most sensitive of all issues, of course, was Olof Palme.*
Gullberg remembered every detail of Election Day 1976. For the first time in modern history, Sweden had voted for a conservative government. Most regrettably it was Thorbjorn Falldin who became prime minister, not Gosta Bohman, a man infinitely better qualified. But above all, Palme was defeated, and for that Gullberg could breathe a sigh of relief.
Palme's suitability as prime minister had been the object of more than one lunch conversation in the halls of SIS. In 1969, Vinge had been dismissed from the service after he gave voice to the view, shared by many inside the Division, that Palme might be an agent of influence for the KGB. Vinge's view was not even controversial in the climate prevailing inside the Firm. Unfortunately, he had openly discussed the matter with County Governor Lassinanti on a visit to Norrbotten. Lassinanti had been astonished and had informed the government chancellor, with the result that Vinge was summoned to explain himself at a one-on-one meeting.
To Gullberg's frustration, the question of Palme's possible Russian contacts was never resolved. Despite persistent attempts to establish the truth and uncover the crucial evidence--the smoking gun--the Section had never found any proof. In Gullberg's eyes this did not mean that Palme was innocent, but rather that he was an especially cunning and intelligent spy who was not tempted to make the same mistakes that other Soviet spies had made. Palme continued to baffle them, year after year. In 1982 the Palme question arose again when he became prime minister for the second time. Then the assassin's shots rang out on Sveavagen and the matter became irrelevant.
Nineteen seventy-six had been a problematic year for the Section. Within SIS--among the few people who actually knew about the existence of the Section--a certain amount of criticism had surfaced. During the past ten years, sixty-five employees from within the Security Police had been dismissed from the organization on the grounds of presumed political unreliability. Most of the cases, however, could never be proven, and some senior officers began to wonder whether the Section was run by paranoid conspiracy theorists.
Gullberg still raged to recall the case of an officer hired by SIS in 1968 whom he had personally evaluated as unsuitable. He was Inspector Bergling, a lieutenant in the Swedish army who later turned out to be a colonel in the Soviet military intelligence service, the GRU. On four separate occasions, Gullberg tried to have Bergling removed, but each time his efforts were stymied. Things did not change until 1977, when Bergling became the object of suspicion outside the Section as well. His became the worst scandal in the history of the Swedish Security Police.
Criticism of the Section had increased during the first half of the seventies, and by mid-decade Gullberg had heard several proposals that the budget be reduced, and even suggestions that the operation was altogether unnecessary.
The criticism meant that the Section's future was questioned. That year the threat of terrorism was made a priority in SIS. In terms of espionage it was a sad chapter in their history, dealing as they were mainly with confused youths flirting with Arab or pro-Palestinian elements. The big question within the Security Police was to what extent Personnel Control would be given special authority to investigate foreign citizens residing in Sweden, or whether this would continue to be the exclusive domain of the immigration division.
Out of this somewhat esoteric bureaucratic debate, a need had arisen for the Section to assign a trusted colleague to the operation who could reinforce its control: espionage, in fact, against members of the immigration division.
The job fell to a young man who had worked at SIS since 1970, and whose background and political loyalty made him eminently qualified to work alongside the officers in the Section. In his free time he was a member of an organization called the Democratic Alliance, which was described by the social-democratic media as extremely right-wing. Within the Section this was no obstacle. Three others were members of the Democratic Alliance too, and the Section had in fact been instrumental in the formation of the group. It had also contributed a small part of its funding. It was through this organization that the young man was brought to the attention of the Section and recruited.
His name was Gunnar Bjorck.
*
It was an improbable stroke of luck that when Alexander Zalachenko walked into Norrmalm police station on Election Day 1976 and requested asylum, it was a junior officer named Gunnar Bjorck who received him in his capacity as administrator of the immigration division. An agent already connected to the most secret of the secret.
Bjorck recognized Zalachenko's importance at once and broke off the interview to install the defector in a room at the Hotel Continental. It was Gullberg whom Bjorck notified when he sounded the alarm, and not his formal boss in the immigration division. The call came just as the voting booths had closed, and all signs pointed to the fact that Palme was going to lose. Gullberg had just come home and was watching the election coverage on TV. At first he was sceptical about the information that the excited young officer was telling him. Then he drove down to the Continental, not 250 yards from the hotel room where he found himself today, to assume control of the Zalachenko affair.
That night Gullberg's life underwent a radical change. The notion of secrecy took on a whole new dimension. He saw immediately the need to create a new structure around the defector.
He decided to include Bjorck in the Zalachenko unit. It was a reasonable decision, since Bjorck already knew of Zalachenko's existence. Better to have him on the inside than a security risk on the outside. Bjorck was moved from his post within the immigration division to a desk in the apartment in Ostermalm.
In the drama that followed, Gullberg chose from the beginning to inform only one person in SIS, namely the head of Secretariat, who already had an overview of the activities of the Section. The head of Secretariat sat on the news for several days before he explained to Gullberg that the defection was so big that the chief of SIS would have to be informed, as well as the government.
By that time the new chief of SIS knew about the Section for Special Analysis, but he had only a vague idea of what the Section actually did. He had come on board recently to clean up the shambles of what was known as the Internal Bureau affair, and was already on his way to a higher position within the police hierarchy. The chief of SIS had been told in a private conversation with the head of Secretariat that the Section was a secret unit a
Gullberg was willing to accept this situation. He issued instructions that required even the chief of SIS not to discuss the topic in his office without taking special precautions. It was agreed that Zalachenko would be handled by the Section for Special Analysis.
The outgoing prime minister was certainly not to be informed. Because of the merry-go-round associated with a change of government, the incoming prime minister was fully occupied appointing ministers and negotiating with other conservative parties. It was not until a month after the government was formed that the chief of SIS, along with Gullberg, drove to Rosenbad to inform the incoming prime minister. Gullberg had objected to telling the government at all, but the chief of SIS had stood his ground--it was constitutionally indefensible not to inform the prime minister. Gullberg used all his eloquence to convince the prime minister not to allow information about Zalachenko to pass beyond his own office; there was, he insisted, no need for the foreign minister, the minister of defence, or any other member of the government to be informed.
It had upset Falldin that an important Soviet agent had sought asylum in Sweden. The prime minister had begun to talk about how, for the sake of fairness, he would be obliged to take up the matter at least with the leaders of the other two parties in the coalition government. Gullberg was expecting this objection and played the strongest card he had available. He explained in a low voice that if that happened, he would be forced to tender his resignation immediately. This was a threat that made an impression on Falldin. It was intended to convey that the prime minister would bear the responsibility if the story ever got out and the Russians sent a death squad to liquidate Zalachenko. And if the person responsible for Zalachenko's safety had seen fit to resign, such a revelation would be a political disaster for the prime minister.