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

by Jan Stocklassa

But Palme’s commitment to those foreign politics often occurred at the expense of the existing superpowers. He annoyed the Soviet Union in April 1975, when he called the regime ruling their satellite state of Czechoslovakia “the beasts of the dictatorship,” and again when he criticized the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979. 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.

Palme’s, and therefore Sweden’s, political philosophy was referred to as the “third way,” a path that negotiated a space between the Capitalist West and the Communist East. Palme spearheaded and became chairperson of what is often called the Palme Commission, where, along with other leading global politicians, he tried to come up with a blueprint for disarmament that would make the world safer. The United States was only moderately interested in this alternative, so the plan died, but because the Soviet Union had shown interest, distrust of Palme increased in Sweden and abroad as he became known as the Russians’ tool.

Stieg was satisfied anyway. If it had to do with a right-wing extremist or an anti-Communist as they usually called themselves, he had a head start thanks to his own mapping work, which was at his fingertips in a couple of two-foot-high stacks on his desk.

The last few years, Stieg had started mapping out organizations, networks, and individuals that were marked by their right-wing extremist ideas and views. Despite all the time he’d spent on the subject, he was still often flummoxed. How could people in the 1980s, who appeared to be otherwise normal, participate in gatherings and organizations where fascist and racist views were expressed? The same people kept cropping up in political parties that seemed completely on the up-and-up, like the Moderates or the Liberals, and then gradually the boundaries were erased between the right wing, right-wing extremists, and even outright Nazis.

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. In the decades following World War II, these movements had not been very active, but they definitely had not disappeared. German Gestapo officers had sought out places of refuge; South America was popular, but also East Germany because the country was still the enemy of the United States and the UK, and because anti-Semitism lived on behind the iron curtain. 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.

Severin hated Nazism and, even more than that, he hated the Nazis who had changed their outward masks after the Second World War but still clung to the evil ideology in their hearts. There were a lot of them and they occupied higher positions than anyone could imagine. Stieg listened and learned. There weren’t that many little kids in inland northern Sweden who were interested in politics, and a lot of them soon began to think he was precocious.

His grandfather Severin’s stories from the Second World War and the years following it had surely sparked Stieg’s interest, how Severin had been punished as a suspected Communist while Nazi sympathizers had been able to keep working in neutral Sweden.

“Sure, but will I still be able to work? My goal is to fight right-wing extremism, not to become a famous journalist. So, the question is: Will I lose more opportunities than I gain?”

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. Casey was a real piece of work in Stieg’s eyes because of his active role in the completely unnecessary invasion of Grenada in 1983.

UNITA Guerilla movement from Angola supported by the United States with an office in Stockholm and ties to the CIA. Their representative Luís Antunes shows up in several of the organizations above. Anders Larsson applied for a job here after he was fired from the Baltic Committee.

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.

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. Biko was just one example of the anti-apartheid activists who died as a result of Craig Williamson’s actions.

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 place of work 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.

That meant that the person who had been convicted of murdering a politician had, in fact, been convicted by people who were politically appointed.

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.

“What drove Stieg?” I asked. “It came from his grandfather, who he grew up with until he was nine,” Eva said. “His grandfather was a Stalinist and was definitely anti-Nazi during the war. That’s where Stieg learned about World War II and right-wing extremism, from his grandfather Severin.”

The CIA operations PBFORTUNE and PBSUCCESS had striven to topple Guatemala’s democratic government led by President Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán. The first attempt at toppling President Guzmán was authorized by US president Truman in 1952. At the beginning of the same year, CIA headquarters started producing memos with titles like “Guatemalan Communist Personnel to Remove During Military Operations.” The A-list of people being considered for “removal” included fifty-eight people.

“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. That necessitated ‘the total strategy,’ which meant that for the first time it was possible to carry out attacks outside of southern Africa. That required our best agents, who were encouraged to do black ops, black ops to hurt the enemy.”

The loudspeaker asked for Mr. Joseph Slovo to please come to the transfer desk.” That name sounded familiar, but Vic could tell that I wasn’t sure who that was. “He was a white South African and a Communist. We considered people like that traitors. Since he was also a Communist leader, he came in first place.” “First place?” “Joe Slovo was at the top of our kill list. And now he was in the same airport with some of South Africa’s most highly skilled security agents. Eugene immediately said we ought to get him. Craig was more hesitant. Eugene pulled out this orange Bic pen

with a blue lid. ‘If you lure him into the bathroom, I’ll get him with this. I’ll just push it up into his solar plexus at an angle and puncture his heart.’ In theory that was a good idea, but in the end everyone realized it was too risky and convinced Eugene not to do it. We flew home and were awarded a medal. We got Joe Slovo a few months later. Well, actually we got his wife, Ruth First, with a parcel bomb Craig gave the orders for.”

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. Stander hinted that Craig Williamson may have had some kind of hold on Olof Palme in connection with this conflict.

“Speculations would include the possibility that South African interest was behind the murder. The Palme Commission—of which Palme himself was a crucial figure—had begun a campaign against arms dealers selling to RSA.” Stieg wrote that line less than three weeks after the assassination. Thirty years later, Craig Williamson recommended further reading to me about South African arms dealing during the apartheid era. Craig, who knew how interested I was in the Palme assassination, apparently thought I should do more research into South Africa’s role in the international arms trade.

Some of the world’s biggest export contracts applied to weapons, and if anyone stood in the way of these deals or threatened to reveal secrets that could harm the bottom line, then a human life was a low price for being able to complete the highly lucrative and often shadowy deals.

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.

In the middle of the 1980s, the biggest armed conflict in the world was the war between Iran and Iraq. Olof Palme himself was a mediator in the war between 1980 and 1982, which turned out to be an impossible assignment, and the war continued all the way until 1988. Another strategically important conflict was the one between Nicaragua’s socialist government and the Contra guerillas supported by the United States. A third was the war in southern Africa, where the most significant fighting was between the apartheid regime and the black resistance movements headed by the ANC.

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.

On November 3, 1986, eight months after Palme’s death, 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. Because of international sanctions, South Africa sometimes found itself only a few weeks away from running out of oil reserves. 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.

CIA director William Casey visited South Africa several times to draw up the deals and met the highest-ranking political leaders, including Pik Botha. According to the Boston Globe’s sources in Congress, William Casey made a secret visit to South Africa on March 8, 1986, to meet Pr...

The Seychelles were key to South Africa’s frequent efforts to evade sanctions in order to deal in arms and oil. For his company GMR—named from Ricci’s initials—Ricci found a business partner who was well connected in the top circles of South African politics. That partner’s name was Craig Williamson. Williamson and Ricci worked together busting sanctions in 1986 and 1987 by, among other things, supplying the apartheid regime with oil from Iran. The deals through the Seychelles most likely happened with the knowledge of CIA director William Casey. 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.”

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. Santa Lucia Airways and their Boeing 707s were also used for arms deliveries to the UNITA guerilla group in Angola, which was supported by both the US and South Africa.

I put together a list of important deaths and events in which South Africa and their business partners stood to gain something from an assassination or other dark deed being carried out. I included many events that were known to have been carried out by South African security services—for example, the murders of Griffiths Mxenge, Ruth First, and Jeannette Schoon. Other deaths had been investigated, but the South African authorities had decided they were accidents—for example, Samora Machel, Franz Esser, and Peter Casselton. Some events were not directly linked to South Africa, such as Olof Palme’s assassination, but did further their goals. Finally there were deaths that were not directly tied to South Africa and were considered accidents by the police, such as those of Swedish journalist Cats Falck and Carl-Fredrik Algernon of the National Swedish War Materials Inspectorate.

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. Sure enough, after Nelson Mandela was released and Prime Minister F. W. de Klerk lifted the state of emergency on June 7, 1990, the number of operations dropped dramatically.