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

by Jan Stocklassa

Wedin got a job as a journalist in Wallenberg’s newly established news agency Press-Extrakt. In 1975, Wedin and his family moved yet again, this time to London. In his new hometown, Wedin continued working for Swedish trade and industry, and he also began the ultraconservative Monday Club with Lord Moyne as chairman.

Wedin’s ties to Carl G. Holm were stronger than his ties to Anders Larsson, since Wedin had recruited Holm for the Federation of Swedish Industries. In fact, at some point Wedin had begun to consider Anders Larsson an enemy, possibly even a spy working for the Soviet Union.

Through an ingenious ruse, Craig Williamson convinced Lars-Gunnar Eriksson that, even though he was obviously a white South African police officer, he was actually opposed to the apartheid regime, and Eriksson recruited Craig Williamson to work at the IUEF in early 1977. Soon Williamson was second in command in the organization and responsible for handling all the administration, including making payments. The result was that a large portion of the money that was supposed to go to opposing apartheid instead went toward supporting apartheid.

Through his position, Williamson also received information about what the apartheid opposition was up to. When black anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko planned to travel to Botswana in September 1977 to meet Olof Palme and the ANC’s Oliver Tambo, Williamson passed the information along to his colleagues within the South African police. On August 18, 1977, Steve Biko was arrested at a roadblock and beaten severely during his interrogation. He died of his injuries on September 12.

The years that followed were intense, including multiple bombings and break-ins that Williamson was responsible for. In March 1982, a bomb exploded in the ANC’s office in London, but no one was injured. In August 1982, Olof Palme’s friend Ruth First was killed by a mail bomb in her home in Maputo, Mozambique. In June 1984, the anti-apartheid activist Jeannette Schoon and her six-year-old daughter, Katryn, were killed by a letter bomb in Lubango, Angola.

In London, Wedin also worked for South African agent Peter Casselton, a former helicopter pilot from Rhodesia. Casselton was sentenced to prison in 1983 for his involvement in breaking into several black liberation movement offices, but Bertil Wedin was acquitted of the same crimes, even though the British police found documents from the break-ins in his home.

The next interesting event took place in November 1985. Three months before the murder of Olof Palme, Wedin and his family suddenly made a permanent move to the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, a country that had a population of three hundred thousand and a reputation as a sanctuary for criminals, since there were no extradition agreements with other countries besides Turkey.

Stieg suspected that Anders Larsson was the anonymous source for the book To the Right of Neutrality (Till höger om neutraliteten), which was written by Stieg’s friend Sven Ove Hansson. That book described how extremist opinions found their way into Swedish trade and industry, with the case of Carl G. Holm described in detail.

The “police trail” rubric covered quite a bit of information on ten police officers who had become of interest in the investigation for different reasons. Some of them were interesting for having attended meetings where vitriol against Palme had flowed freely, or having access to potential murder weapons, or having traveled to South Africa, or even having been in the vicinity of the assassination.

Several of them had belonged to the Baseball Gang, which was a particular group within the Norrmalm police that was started by Hans Holmér at the beginning of the 1980s to stem street violence. The nickname had come about not because the group played baseball but because the members preferred to wear civilian attire, including baseball caps, instead of their uniforms.

Yet the Palme investigation kept receiving tips about Östling. He was an arms expert and sold weapons. He had a documented hatred of Palme, and there were several photos of him doing the Nazi salute.

In thirteen photos, Östling and his partner in the arms business could both be seen giving the Nazi salute in locations such as a Jewish cemetery, in front of Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate, and in Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest at Berchtesgaden in the Bavarian Alps.

Charming.

Almost all of the ten police officers included in the “police trail” line of inquiry had some connection to Östling.

The same day, Holmér’s former bodyguard Per-Ola Karlsson was stopped by customs officials as he tried to smuggle illegal wiretapping equipment into the country. It later came out that the South African legation was the buyer listed on the invoice, and the person behind the delivery was arms dealer and former police officer Carl-Gustav Östling.

The political opposition reported several ministers of the government to the constitutional board of the Swedish Parliament. For many months to come, the Swedish public was overwhelmed, disgusted, and entertained by the live TV broadcasts of the parliamentary hearings of a number of the key players—a farcical parallel to the Iran-Contra hearings in the United States one year earlier.

The way the Swedish system worked, lay judges were politically appointed and were not trained lawyers. The city court’s two qualified members had voted not to convict. That meant that the person who had been convicted of murdering a politician had, in fact, been convicted by people who were politically appointed.

The next fact was that there was only one actual piece of evidence, which was Lisbeth Palme’s identification. The rest of the evidence against Pettersson had come from people who had not witnessed the actual crime or seen Pettersson at the scene of the murder; in other words, there was only circumstantial evidence linking Pettersson to the crime.

The value of the identification as evidence was further diminished because Lisbeth had several unusual and controversial demands. The lineup was supposed to be recorded on video, but she refused to be videotaped. Furthermore, the accused’s defense attorney was not allowed to take part. In addition, the records from the lineup were not written down until six weeks afterward and then only as a summary.

When he came home to his apartment in Rotebro in Sollentuna carrying bottles of alcohol, the photographers were waiting. Christer Pettersson’s favorite drink, consisting of equal parts Baileys, Explorer Vodka, and ice, if there was any on hand, quickly became a hit in Stockholm’s trendy bars and restaurants. It was called the Killer.

one fact baffled Stieg. No one had managed to come up with a satisfactory explanation for why the murderer had taken his revolver with him when he fled. In every beloved spy novel, professional murderers ditched their weapons as soon as possible, because their risk of getting caught increased exponentially if they were carrying the actual murder weapons around with them. In the case of Olof Palme, the murderer brought a Magnum revolver “as big as a suckling pig” away from the scene with him. He couldn’t have counted on the Swedish police making the monumental mistake of failing to seal off the downtown area or known that it would take them several hours to even send out a nationwide alert.

an equally plausible reason for him to take the weapon with him was that he viewed it as a trophy. The gun that changed Swedish history would have some value to a person who murdered Sweden’s prime minister for his politics. Less so if he was a professional killer who had done it for the money. Since the gun had not been found, that increased the odds of a political motive and, therefore, the involvement of some Swedish right-wing extremist.

Ehhhhhh

Around the same time, the Palme investigation received a comprehensive and detailed memo written by Swedish journalist Boris Ersson, who had visited South Africa and received new information there that seemed to demonstrate that the South African security services were behind Palme’s murder. After taking a few basic steps, the investigative team set the information aside. Instead, the police were focused on trying to find new evidence against Christer Pettersson.

Nelson Mandela had been South Africa’s president for two years, and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission had recently begun its work. Since it was now possible to receive amnesty, agents from the security services were competing to confess their evil deeds and singling each other out for culpabilities.

In the 1980s, Stieg learned the tricks of the trade; in the 1990s, he used them. The mood in Sweden had hardened, and confirmation of this came when the xenophobic New Democracy party entered parliament and John Ausonius, “the Laser Man,” shot immigrants using a rifle with a laser sight.

In the book, Anna-Lena and Stieg hammered home that “right-wing extremism” was an imprecise expression since some of the relevant groups could be considered left-wing and others didn’t have any political party affiliation. The right-wing groups could then be divided into “fascists” and “the radical right.” The only thing they all had in common was hostility toward immigrants.

Expo wasn’t just fighting extremists but also financial difficulties. Threats against the staff, hard work, late nights, and financial troubles wore them down, but the biggest ordeal came on June 28, 1999. A car bomb injured a journalist who wrote for Expo, along with his eight-year-old son. The man’s girlfriend, also a journalist, was traumatized when she found her partner and son among the splintered metal and pieces of glass.

Stieg fought hard to make everything work. Openly neo-Nazi groups had grown in number and size as anti-immigrant sentiments gained public acceptance.

In the final years before the new millennium, Stieg was the one who realized that a large percentage of right-wing extremists were changing their tactics. Instead of shaved heads, boots, and Nazi salutes, they had clean-cut hairdos and well-shined shoes, and they behaved, at least on the surface, like members of the established political parties. They had cleaned up their agenda—although the old Nazis were still there in the background—but they still wanted to get rid of immigrants.

Together with his coworker Mikael Ekman from Expo, Stieg wrote the book The Sweden Democrats (Sverigedemokraterna), which described how the party grew from Nazi soil and transformed into something that looked acceptable on the surface.

It turned out that the Sweden Democrats’ accusation that immigrants were criminals was considerably more applicable to the party’s own representatives. Assault and battery, violence against women, threats, cruelty to animals—the list of the different types of crimes they had been convicted of was long and damning.

Expo’s future was secure at any rate, thanks in part to money from Stieg’s estate. When Stieg warned of the Sweden Democrats in 1991, they received scarcely five thousand votes in the parliamentary election. In 2010, in the second election following Stieg’s death, they made it into parliament for the first time with 340,000 votes.

My book was going to be about locations where serious crimes had been committed and the place itself had been a factor. I was fascinated by the notion that places could possibly influence people to commit crimes and that this could be studied but not explained. After about a month of research, I came up with several locations where more than one crime had been committed, but one of them in particular captivated my interest—24 Norr Mälarstrand in Stockholm.

The infamous von Sydow murder had shaken Stockholm many decades earlier. Late in the afternoon on March 7, 1932, three people were found beaten to death in a 2,700-square-foot eight-room apartment on the fourth floor of 24 Norr Mälarstrand. The three bodies were discovered by the family’s fifteen-year-old daughter. The victims were identified as Hjalmar von Sydow, who lived in the apartment, Karolina Herou, the cook, and Ebba Hamn, the housekeeper. All three had been killed by blows to the head with a blunt object, probably an iron that was missing from the household. Hjalmar von Sydow was the president of the Swedish Employers Association, a member of the upper house of the Swedish parliament, and a knight of the Royal Order of Vasa and was, therefore, one of the most prominent personages in the city and the country. As soon as the police were called, it was clear that the killer was probably the family’s twenty-three-year-old son, Fredrik von Sydow, who had fled the scene with his equally young wife, Ingun von Sydow, née Sundén-Cullberg.

For obvious reasons, the history of the apartment was tarnished, and in the decades after the murders, even though many people wanted to live in one of the most beautiful apartments in Stockholm, none of them stayed at the address for very long. That is, until the summer of 1980 when notorious anti-Palme activists, the physician Alf Enerström and actress Gio Petré, moved into the von Sydows’ apartment. Enerström and Petré proceeded to conduct their concerted anti-Palme hate campaign from the very same apartment where three people had been brutally murdered several decades earlier.

Alf Enerström was to be evicted on November 28, 2003. On that day, he opened the door to the enforcement officials and the police wearing only a shirt and with a saucepan on his head like a helmet. When he realized why they were there, he quickly locked himself in and started shooting his gun through the double doors with their panes of etched glass.

The fuck is going on in Sweden

I quickly found the Review Commission’s 1999 report on the Palme case—a one-thousand-page-long review that more or less accurately summarized all the various lines of inquiry that the police worked on while investigating the assassination. A long series of actions taken against Alf Enerström was described over six pages. It was clear that in the shadow of the PKK and Christer Pettersson inquiries, some police investigators were also interested in Enerström—the most active of them was Detective Inspector Alf Andersson.

One informant reported that a few months before the assassination, Enerström had said, “I am going to remove Palme from office faster than you think,” and that “the day we’ve gotten him out of the way, the Social Democrats will elect us.”

The premise of my book began to take shape. Certain locations could influence people to commit serious crimes. In order for that to occur, it required that a man—always a man, it seemed—with hubris spend a long time at a location that kindled his arrogance. The location had to be secluded and exclusive and provide a sense of invincibility. If all those prerequisites were met, it could happen that a certain type of man would commit a serious crime in that location.

Instead of symmetrical ink splotches, you looked at the Palme assassination, and what you saw revealed more about you as a person than about the truth behind the assassination. Do you favor the alcoholic, Christer Pettersson, the right-wing extremists within the police, or the South African security services? You see what you want to see.

My preliminary conclusion was that neither the police nor Wedin were particularly interested in meeting with each other.

Wedin’s reaction to Palme’s close coworker Bernt Carlsson was interesting. The reason I asked about him was that Bernt Carlsson was one of the people who had directed the IUEF’s work during the time when Craig Williamson infiltrated the organization. Wedin didn’t know Bernt Carlsson but said that he was convinced that the plane over Lockerbie had been blown up because Bernt Carlsson was on board.

Firearms have other drawbacks. [. . .] Their use as a murder weapon is consistently overrated.

The handbook’s classification of various types of assassination was straightforward: “simple” meant that the victim was unaware of the operation, “chase” that the victim knew about the threat but was unguarded, “guarded” that the victim was guarded, “lost” meant that the assassin would be sacrificed and preferably killed, “safe” meant that part of the plan was for the assassin to escape, “secret” meant that the assassination would look like an accident, “open” that it wasn’t necessary to hide that it was an assassination, and “terroristic” that the assassination required subsequent publicity.

In all types of assassinations that were intended to be “safe,” the assassin should have the same properties as a “clandestine agent.” He should be determined, intelligent, resourceful, and physically active. If special equipment such as a pistol were to be used, he would need to have exceptional skill in using it.

I compared A Study of Assassination with Stieg’s theory about a professional organization and my own conclusion that the assassination was probably carried out by an inexperienced perpetrator. There was a possibility that both were actually correct. A professional organization could have used an inexperienced perpetrator.

Based on the report, my conclusion was that if the assassination of Olof Palme were organized by a security service, with access to knowledge equivalent to what the CIA had in the 1950s, then the arrangement had been lost, simple, and open, meaning that the killer was a fanatic, Olof Palme was unaware of the threat, and the assassination did not need to be concealed.

Thirteen years earlier, despite the criminal allegations against him, Franz had succeeded in buying South African citizenship for 550,000 South African rand. Since then, the unscrupulous businessman had tricked many people in his new country. In his old homeland of Germany, he was wanted for rape, extortion, assault and battery, fraud, and tax evasion. In his new home of South Africa, he had long been protected by his ties to the security services agents and the highest political leaders, including the foreign minister Pik Botha.

“In 1982, we were assigned to blow up the African National Congress (ANC) offices in London. It was part of Prime Minister P. W. Botha’s reaction to what he called ‘the total onslaught,’ which we South Africans felt we were being subjected to.

Sounds familiar

Despite Vic’s willingness to talk about the violent crimes the South African regime had actively carried out on foreign soil, he had effectively shot down the possibility that Olof Palme was a target for the South African security services, either civilian or military.

The bombing in London in 1982 was carried out in cells on a need-to-know basis. The illustration in the GT from 1987 described a scenario with cells just like that for the Palme assassination. Foreign Minister Pik Botha was among the first upon the scene of Samora Machel’s accident, as if he had known the plane was going to crash. An agent had been tasked with killing a foreign prime minister, even though the South African security services supposedly didn’t perform those types of operations. Vic didn’t know anything about what Craig Williamson did after he went into the military security service in the middle of 1985.