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

by Jan Stocklassa

Riaan Stander, who worked with Craig Williamson in 1986, had fingered him as the organizer of Olof Palme’s assassination. Stander was one of Boris Ersson’s most important sources for the memo that I had brought with me to South Africa.

Another person I looked for was Nigel Barnett, a.k.a. Henry Bacon, a.k.a. Leon van der Westhuizen, a.k.a. Nicho Esslin. He was an agent in the South African military security service and one of the people who came up frequently in connection with the Palme assassination. He was also mentioned as one of the members of the murder group that was sent to Sweden. Barnett had been adopted by a Swedish missionary and had lived in Sweden for a while.

Heine Hüman

Oh come on

A memo from Säpo concluded that Hüman was probably an “information swindler,” which was a term that came up over and over again whenever the Palme investigation set someone’s information aside. But I wanted to hear his own account.

Peter Casselton was the helicopter pilot from the former Rhodesia who had been unswervingly loyal to his colleagues in the South African security services. Casselton was the only one on the team behind the ANC office bombing in London in 1982 who had not been awarded a medal by the South African government, since he was going to keep working in London as a secret agent after the deed.

In an interview on South African TV in 1994, Casselton accused his former boss, Craig Williamson, of having asked Eugene de Kock to murder him. Two years later, when more agents fingered Williamson as the organizer of Palme’s assassination, Simon managed to get a budget from Sveriges Television to make a documentary. Right away, he contacted Casselton.

In January 1996, Casselton was in touch with multiple people who were interested in what he knew about Olof Palme’s assassination. One of them was Jan-Åke Kjellberg, the Swedish police officer who was on loan in South Africa to assist the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s work.

When I interviewed Vic McPherson, he had left out the fact that he himself was a suspect in the South African police’s murder investigation into Peter Casselton’s death. But soon, the investigation was shut down and the incident declared an accident.

By the beginning of the twenty-first century, Falköping had turned into yet another in a string of sleepy little Swedish towns. The primary tourist attractions were a glider museum, a motorcycle museum, and—true to the spirit of the departed residents and aging population—a funeral museum.

The article by the Dutch journalist Evelyn Groenink described three murders that on the surface appeared to have been carried out for political reasons to defend apartheid, but that actually had financial motives. Another common denominator was that there were scapegoats in each of the killings—people who could take the blame and who made it easier for the actual perpetrators to get away.

After reading the article, I got in touch with Evelyn Groenink. She told me that she had been threatened by both former foreign minister Pik Botha and French businessman Jean-Yves Ollivier. Her book, which the article was based on, was published only in Dutch, and a threat against the publisher stopped them from releasing it in English in South Africa.

Another email contained a tip about a new book, Apartheid Guns and Money: A Tale of Profit. Craig’s review was gushing: “Highly recommended. Unbelievable research that dug up a bunch of stuff that most people thought would continue to be speculation.”

Boris asked Stander whether the killing was done by White himself or if someone else fired the actual shot, and the answer was: “Do you remember the murder of Chris Hani in 1993? Do you really think that a weird, lone foreigner could have done that all by himself? No, this was standard procedure: You find a suitable person and use him to press the trigger.

I pulled out the CIA’s assassination manual and compared the scapegoat setup described in those pages with the Chris Hani setup Stander described. Stander’s statements fit the “lost” scenario, where the killer was a scapegoat intended to be apprehended or even killed. In such a setup, according to the manual, the assassin would be a fanatic of some kind and wouldn’t know the identities of the other members of the organization, which, according to Evelyn Groenink, was the case with the Polish right-wing extremist Janusz Waluś, the man who was convicted of killing Chris Hani.

There were, according to this document, supposedly two motives for the assassination: 1. To neutralize Sweden’s support for the fight against South Africa in the 1980s. Olof Palme was the dominant statesman behind the support of the anti-apartheid regime. He loudly censured South Africa in Sweden, in the UN, and in other international arenas. He had to go, just like the new generation of black leaders in South Africa who were being methodically imprisoned, tortured, and murdered during the hard years at the end of the 1970s and beginning of the 1980s. 2. Another, more private, motive. There was apparently a personal conflict between Craig Williamson and Olof Palme. The conflict was significant and had to do with money that had gone astray in connection with IUEF.

The book Craig recommended to me, Apartheid Guns and Money—A Tale of Profit by Hennie van Vuuren, was a brick, a good six hundred pages long, plus a number of illustrations to show how, when, and from whom South Africa bought weapons and oil—despite official sanctions. As I flipped through the pages, I got a glimmer of a motive that was far more concrete and actionable than the vague notion that Palme was among the foremost of apartheid’s countless enemies.

Stieg’s partner, Eva Gabrielsson, had suggested I read a book from 1988: Arms Smugglers (Vapensmugglarna) by Bo G. Andersson and Bjarne Stenqvist, which focused on explosives smuggling and illegal arms trading.

Despite an explicit ban by the US Congress, the CIA decided to support the counterrevolutionary Contra guerillas in Nicaragua by providing them with weapons. At the same time, people realized that Iran’s Islamist regime was there to stay and that it was desirable to start reestablishing ties with Iran by selling them weapons. Congress forbade this as well, but CIA director William Casey, one of Ronald Reagan’s personal appointees, designed a complex plan to avoid unnecessary interference by the United States’ democratic institutions. Thus, the CIA facilitated arms sales to Iran with a markup good enough to finance providing arms to the Contras.

the Iran-Contra Affair was revealed and shook the US for the entirety of 1987. An important part of the arrangement, which didn’t receive very much attention but was described in detail in van Vuuren’s book, was the export of oil from Iran to South Africa.

Through the arrangement, Iran received revenue as well as assistance in meeting its enormous need for weapons, and South Africa received the oil that they couldn’t buy on the open market. The deals were carried out with the help of the CIA, which received part of the profits and was able to finance arms for the Contras in Nicaragua and other anti-Communist resistance movements.

The Seychelles were key to South Africa’s frequent efforts to evade sanctions in order to deal in arms and oil.

In an interview published by the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training with the headline “The Seychelles—Gangsta’s Paradise,” the CIA chief of station at the US embassy in the Seychelles said he had been given an unusual order by Casey: “You are hereby instructed never to report, never to use any assets or any resources to pursue anything regarding international fraudulent banking operations in the Seychelles.”

During the days between Christmas and New Year’s in 1983, he signed seventy new contracts in Tehran for a total of 2.7 billion kronor ($291 million) in today’s money. Managing the deliveries of those enormous volumes of gunpowder and explosives required the production capacity of a large number of European producers in what was called the gunpowder cartel. Bobbo handled the physical shipments by leasing several Danish vessels, arranging false end-user certificates from Kenya and other places, and creating routes through various countries including East Germany, Yugoslavia, and Pakistan to avoid attracting suspicion.

On January 2, 1985, Bobbo met Mats Lundberg and offered him the whole war matériel package he had signed for the week before. Bofors and its subsidiary, Nobelkrut, would inherit the orders for 5,000 tons of howitzer gunpowder, 1,100 tons of explosives, 400,000 shell casings, and 1,000,000 mortar charges. The result of that meeting was a close collaboration between the two, which in the end would put them both at risk of spending many years in jail.

In March, April, and May 1985, Swedish customs officials raided Bofors and its subsidiary Nobelkrut. In the middle of May 1985, marketing director Mats Lundberg met Nobelkrut’s CEO, Hans Sivertsson, and canceled confirmed orders that would have required illegal smuggling of the equivalent of 370 million kronor ($40 million). On June 5, 1985, Dagens Nyheter revealed that Bofors was suspected of smuggling gunpowder to Iran.

On July 25, a plane landed in Mehrabad outside Tehran. Twenty-two tons of Bobbo’s gunpowder deliveries were unloaded from the plane, one he had leased as an emergency solution to fulfill his contract and temporarily remedy Iran’s acute shortage of explosives. The plane was a Boeing 707 that Bobbo had rented from Santa Lucia Airways, which was indirectly owned by the CIA. A month later, Bobbo rented yet another Boeing 707 from the same company for deliveries to Iran. Three months later, Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North started using the same airline company and the same type of plane to deliver Hawk and TOW missiles to Iran.

even though he made a show of cooperating with the Swedish authorities, Bobbo still managed to continue the deliveries all the way up until midway through 1987, although with producers and dedicated companies outside Sweden.

In the fall of 1985, both Swedish and foreign media wrote about the startling extent of these arms deals, but interest quickly waned when Olof Palme was assassinated on February 28, 1986. Parallel to this, Bobbo continued his gunpowder deliveries to Iran via multiple producers, without the Swedish authorities or the media knowing about it.

In May 1987, the Swedish government, via minister Anita Gradin, reached the conclusion that Bobbo had not broken the sales ban but rather the law on “trading in explosive products,” a law that was often used in connection with sales of dynamite and firecrackers to private individuals, and which fell under police jurisdiction. In this way, the Swedish government was able to avoid being directly responsible for his case.

In the days following the assassination, multiple tips were received that pointed to South Africa. One of them came from the chairman of the Swedish Civil Defense Association, Karl-Gunnar Bäck; on the Monday or Tuesday after the murder, he was contacted by an acquaintance of several years who was a British citizen. This man came urgently to Stockholm the next day and explained how the foreign section of the British intelligence service MI6 had received information that the assassin should be sought among South African contacts and that there was a connection to South African arms dealing.

After Bäck received this information, his information officer gave it to a personal contact at the local department of Säpo in Uppsala. Säpo thus received this highly sensitive information the week after the murder. However, for inexplicable reasons, the tip was not passed on to the Palme investigation team, which did not hear about it until eight years later, and at that point, the tip came from a journalist.

With the help of Apartheid Guns and Money, which Craig Williamson had recommended, and Arms Smugglers, which Eva Gabrielsson had recommended, it was easy to find a handful of names that had significant financial interests in stopping an anti-smuggling campaign of that type. But for some reason, the Swedish police effectively avoided getting to the bottom of that for more than thirty years.

Craig Williamson had often said in interviews that when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and the Cold War ended, the Western powers didn’t need the apartheid regime in South Africa any longer.

My list was a compilation that showed that white South Africa had benefited in various ways from a long string of people’s deaths, whether they were considered murders or accidents, or were unresolved. In my view, the list increased the possibility that South Africa was involved in the assassination of Olof Palme, but it was far from something that would hold up in court.

In 1985, the US, South Africa, and Iran did big deals in secret, but after Swedish customs and the National Swedish War Materials Inspectorate stopped the arms and explosives deliveries intended for Iran, the three countries were all in a mess together.

If Reagan were forced to step down, that would have impacted the final years of the Cold War and threatened America’s victory.

Lololol they'd never impeach back then.

a plausible possibility was that the loyal apartheid regime in South Africa was asked to take on the assignment to give the United States deniability and ensure its continued support for the apartheid regime.

The Swedes would have had a different motive than the South Africans. To them, Olof Palme was a traitor to his country who was about to sell Sweden out in his upcoming trip to the Soviet Union.

The first person asked to carry out the assassination might well have been former mercenary Ivan von Birchan—an acquaintance of Bertil Wedin’s from the Democratic Alliance in the 1970s.

It was probably Anders Larsson who, under a false name, started writing letters to the police describing how the assassination played out. In 1991, he died of a perforated ulcer at the age of fifty-three.

His acquaintance Victor Gunnarsson moved to the US, where he was murdered in December 1993 in North Carolina.