The Man Who Played with Fire: Stieg Larsson's Lost Files and the Hunt for an Assassin

by Jan Stocklassa

In Swedish, the term “Palmehatare” (Palme hater) was used to describe anyone who objected to his leadership—and many did, vehemently.

Palme took over the post of prime minister and party leader in 1969 from Tage Erlander, who resigned after holding the position of prime minister for twenty-three years—a record at that time for the elected head of state in a Western democracy.

On the other side of the Cold War, he also provoked the United States, which broke off diplomatic ties with Sweden twice due to Palme’s actions. The first time was after he marched in a torchlight procession side by side with North Vietnam’s ambassador to Moscow in February 1968. The second time was after he criticized the bombing of Hanoi just before Christmas 1972, comparing the United States’ actions to the worst massacres of the twentieth century.

When Jan Guillou, a reporter for the socialist magazine Folket i Bild Kulturfront, revealed that the Social Democratic Party, led by Palme, had used the Information Bureau (IB), a military intelligence service, for its own private purposes and, among other things, recorded suspected Communist sympathizers, it was reminiscent of the Watergate scandal. But Olof Palme played his cards better than President Nixon.

The result of the revelation over the IB affair was that Olof Palme kept his position, and Guillou and his journalist colleague Peter Bratt were each sentenced to a year in prison for espionage.

Newspapers published caricatures of Palme with a hooked nose, bad teeth, and dark rings under his eyes.

Yiiiiiikes

A general election was held in September 1985, which resulted in yet another Social Democratic government coming to power. At one of the Moderate Party’s campaign events, a doll depicting Olof Palme was tossed around in the audience for public scorn and derision.

Säpo had abjectly failed in their responsibility to protect the prime minister in the first place. If they were put in charge of the investigation, they would be examining their own failure, which would be closely scrutinized by the media. That left the National Criminal Investigation Department and the Stockholm police as the only viable choices.

When Hans Holmér heard the news of the assassination at 7:35 a.m., he was—by his own admission—at the Scandic hotel in Borlänge, 130 miles northwest of Stockholm, with his girlfriend Åsa. He had been planning to ski his eighteenth consecutive annual Vasaloppet cross-country race the next day, but instead he got into his car and returned to Stockholm immediately. By the time he arrived, he had been put in charge of the murder investigation.

Holmér gave the first in a long succession of press conferences. He had time to receive only a short briefing from his colleagues, but he quickly decided that one of the two people named in the nationwide bulletin should be removed, so that the new text contained only one perpetrator.

Holmér had accepted responsibility for a murder investigation that trained the whole world’s eyes on him, and many people expected him to appoint one of his most qualified homicide detectives to lead the investigation. But Holmér surprised everyone by taking on the role himself. He had no relevant experience with cases of this magnitude, but his investigative team, which after only a couple of days had expanded to include more than two hundred staff members, did.

Ebbe Carlsson also attended that meeting, which was unconventional given that Ebbe’s official title was acquisitions editor for a book publisher, but both Ingvar Carlsson and Holmér knew that Ebbe, as Olof Palme’s friend, had often been present in situations when he shouldn’t have been. And almost as often, he had successfully cleaned up messes that no one else could fix.

For the first few days, tips poured in, pointing to everything from a foreign conspiracy to the work of a lone deranged gunman. The first tip that the press picked up on concerned a disturbed Austrian, which definitely fell under Holmér’s jurisdiction.

he also revealed that Säpo had tapped a phone call that they interpreted to mean that the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) was preparing a murder in Sweden. The Säpo contact didn’t know who was going to be murdered, but after the news of Olof Palme’s death broke, Carlsson put two and two together.

Based on a witness’s basic description—for example, a round face with a big mouth, a receding chin, and a high forehead—a photographic quality face could be created almost magically and then transferred using a video camera to a fourteen-inch TV screen. The witness could then point out differences between the projected image and the face in his or her own memory. The operator could change the distance between various components of the image or swap out individual parts and, in a few minutes, create a new picture for the witness to comment on.

The Palme murder investigation was no common murder investigation, and this witness was no common witness, as it turned out she had extraordinary observation abilities. Instead of one hour, it took just over four hours before the process was completed. The result was a photo-quality black-and-white portrait.

This was the first time the term “composite image” was being used in Swedish, so the Swedes borrowed the word for it straight from the German term used by the BKA technicians: “phantombild” or “phantom image.”

After that, the German technicians had time to produce some additional facial composites with the less important witnesses, but the only picture that was published to begin with was the one that would for all eternity be known throughout Sweden as the phantom image. Rather fitting, as the suspect seemed to have vanished into thin air like a ghost.

To an outsider, the right flank in Swedish politics could look like it had grown up out of nowhere or merely been buoyed by opinions that had, over time, shifted from the middle. In reality, there was a relatively small but close-knit group of people who were often part of multiple organizations, and there was an unbroken line back to the growing Nazi movements from the interwar period.

A handful of die-hard Nazis came to Sweden, where there were multiple layers of hidden adherents and sympathizers. Stieg’s own mappings from the last year showed what others had warned of: there were direct and indirect ties between Swedish right-wing extremists, Swedish parliamentarians, and people in the top levels of the Swedish economy.

In his case, one of the organizations appeared to be the European Workers’ Party (EAP) which, although it sounded left-wing, was actually a right-wing organization and the Swedish branch of the Lyndon LaRouche movement.

By Swedish law, the important role of leading a preliminary investigation belonged to the prosecutor, but Holmér had said in no uncertain terms that the prosecutor would have to wait until the police decided they had enough evidence to present. Soon enough, Chief Prosecutor K. G. Svensson started showing his frustration, and the conflict only escalated when the police requested that Victor Gunnarsson remain in custody. But that decision was up to the prosecutor, and he decided to release Gunnarsson anyway. At this point, Holmér was furious and broke off all communication with Svensson.

The whole production around Victor Gunnarsson had resembled a cockfight and didn’t actually matter very much to Holmér, since his interest was really focused on the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). But the Swedish police were finding it hard to map out that group, despite Säpo’s having had their eye on them for years.

A handful of detectives were assigned to follow other clues, but it became clear that the leaders of the investigative team were not interested in their results. Summary reports went unread. Suggested actions pertaining to other lines of inquiry were rejected by the investigative leads without explanation. There was a lot of frustration, but as is typical with the police, any dissatisfaction was kept within the organization and did not make it past the newly installed bombproof doors of the Palme Room, which contained a trove of materials related to the assassination investigation, or out to the public.

Hence in the spring of 1986, the path was already clear for Holmér to prove the PKK’s guilt in the assassination of Olof Palme. What Holmér didn’t know was that this was the first step into the labyrinth of bizarre, far-fetched theories that would ensnare the Swedish police for decades to come.

The most likely theory was that the killer had been flown in from Turkey, kept hidden until the opportunity arose, and driven to the corner near an art supply store. He carried out his assignment and was then whisked away back to Turkey as quickly as possible. An alternate theory was that the PKK terminated the shooter after the murder so that no loose threads could be found.

The buildings were connected by an underground passageway, aptly named the Passage of Sighs, since this was where anyone taken into custody was conveyed from the police building to the courthouse in city hall and then, once sentenced, back to jail again.

With one of his usual well-formulated arguments, Guillou pulverized the police’s PKK suspicions and turned the sword that the police had aimed at the Kurds on Holmér himself. Guillou made Holmér look like a self-absorbed, conspiratorial buffoon, which Holmér in turn considered the epithet that fit Guillou himself best.

G. Svensson had been gone for a long time, and the public prosecutor’s office had replaced him with Claes Zeime, a sly old fox who would be retiring soon and didn’t have anything to lose by saying what he thought. Holmér continued to systematically pursue his investigation against the Kurds but was constantly under attack from the media, the prosecutor, and—at least it felt this way—parts of his own organization.

No less than fifty-eight people would be questioned simultaneously. In Holmér’s eyes, there was no doubt that these so-called freedom fighters were guilty. Hell, his friend Ebbe Carlsson had gotten a tip about an upcoming murder by the PKK the day before it happened, directly from the secret police.

Operation Alpha was carried out on January 20, 1987. Twenty individuals, mostly Kurds, were brought in and questioned simultaneously. But the prosecutor decided that almost all of them should be released that same day, and the rest were released shortly thereafter.

Holmér still had his network of Social Democratic ministers and his friend, the police fixer, Ebbe Carlsson. People would keep toying with the PKK line of inquiry for a while to come, only this time, they would do so in secret.

the Swedish part of Operation Chaos. The latter was the CIA’s infiltration of, among other things, American Vietnam War deserters in Sweden, which was carried out with CIA director William Casey’s consent.

Another difficulty was that many of the organizations that Stieg had mapped out overlapped each other. They often united, split up, or disbanded. And when you got down to looking at the level of the individual people involved, the picture became hard to understand, at least to everyone except Stieg, who remembered most of it—and if he didn’t, he always knew exactly where to look in all his papers.

Aside from more or less open hatred for Palme, which they all shared, there was a recurrent pattern: People of a certain standing put themselves at the head of an organization. Behind them, with significantly rougher agendas, were those who were actually pulling the strings.

An extremely small political party founded by American millionaire Lyndon LaRouche, active in Sweden since the 1970s.

The EAP may have been infiltrated by CIA operatives posing as Vietnam War deserters living in Sweden.

UNITA Guerilla movement from Angola supported by the United States with an office in Stockholm and ties to the CIA.

Holmér’s abrupt departure caught the police involved in the Palme investigation off guard. One day they had a boss who decided everything and acted as the head of the investigative team, the police chief, and the leader of the preliminary investigation all at the same time. The next day they had nothing.

On paper, department head Ulf Karlsson at the Swedish National Police Board (Rikspolisstyrelsen) was going to head the Palme investigation, but in reality, there were suddenly at least three separate investigations instead.

Things were easiest for the individual police officers further down the pecking order in all three organizations. That’s where the experienced investigators were, and with no one calling the shots from above, they just carried on with business as usual. In each of the three investigations, a list was made of all the theories that were relevant for that department.

But 1987 was also the year when the various police units were able to work systematically on the case, following their usual methods and checking with their colleagues in other departments when necessary. Over the spring, the work continued with sporadic meetings between the various units. And somewhere in there, the contours of a plot began to emerge.

There were up to ten people who claimed that they knew about the assassination in advance and notified the press or the police (and the police then leaked this to the press). Two of these warnings stuck out because they had unquestionably been passed on to the authorities prior to the assassination and should therefore have resulted in Säpo raising the threat level for Palme’s security team, which might have prevented the assassination from taking place.

In January 1986, Ivan von Birchan called both Säpo and an acquaintance in Stockholm’s city government and told them that he had been offered a large sum of money to assassinate Olof Palme. Von Birchan was a former mercenary who had worked in Rhodesia, and a person named Charles Morgan, whom he had met during his time in Rhodesia, had asked him to kill Palme.

On February 20, eight days before the assassination, another person delivered two envelopes with identical contents to the Swedish government offices and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

information about South Africa’s involvement in the Palme assassination had come from a number of sources as early as the first few days after the murder.

The South Africans had a motive: Palme’s outspoken opposition to apartheid. And, if it was true, Palme’s repeated attempts to stop their arms trading were further motivation for the South Africans to want him dead.

There were a number of alternatives for who was on the other side of Wedin, but one possibility was that one or more people in Sweden had helped carry out the murder. The South Africans definitely had the ability to shoot someone, but carrying out an assassination on the other side of the world in a foreign city involved countless logistics, so Wedin’s network of Swedish right-wing extremists could have come in exceedingly handy here.

The right wingers believed that Olof Palme was a traitor, a spy that was going to sell Sweden out to the Soviet Union. And they believed it was going to happen soon. In April 1986, less than two months after he was murdered, Olof Palme was supposed to have gone to Moscow on the first official visit to the Soviet Union by a Swedish prime minister in thirty years.

Wedin’s résumé was colorful, to put it mildly. He was a UN officer in the Congo in 1963, where he was taken hostage, and then he was in Cyprus in 1964–1965. During the 1960s, he supposedly worked as a mercenary and later recruited mercenaries for Rhodesia, which was confirmed in at least one case. After he returned to Sweden, he served as an officer, and at one point in the early 1970s, he went to the American embassy and unsuccessfully offered his services in the Vietnam War. When he was forced to leave his military career, he went straight to the Wallenberg group of companies.