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

by Jan Stocklassa

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.

Between 1980 and 1982, Palme was the UN’s peace envoy for the Iran-Iraq War. He failed at this impossible task, and when people found out that he had been actively involved in helping Swedish arms manufacturers, primarily Bofors, secure export deals to India, many people considered him hypocritical. One minute he was promoting disarmament and peace, the next he was supporting Swedish arms exports to save jobs.

Stieg couldn’t help but see the parallels to the Palme murder investigation—the arguing back and forth between the police and the prosecutors, the lack of any results to show from the investigation, and Hans Holmér’s press conferences, complete with pretentious statements about lights being turned on and off in tunnels along with numerous Churchill quotations. The only metaphor that really fit the Palme investigation was that it, too, had suffered a massive meltdown.

The group that was openly hostile toward foreigners was more aggressive and therefore more visible. It was clear from the archive that in the years before and after 1986, Stieg was at least as fascinated by the other, less visible group. Maybe because members of that group were also embedded in Sweden’s central power structures, where the resources existed for them to cause a great deal of harm.

“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 premise was worded this way: “The work in this series of articles will be based on the supposition that the murder of Olof Palme can be viewed as a logical consequence of changes that happened gradually in the Western world and Sweden.”

One of the things that interested Stieg the most was that warnings had been received about the assassination ahead of time. 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. Säpo was responsible for investigating the warnings and that was surely why they were trying to keep quiet about it for as long as possible. What was most exciting was that there was at least one common denominator between the two warnings.

In the wake of the fall of apartheid, the restorative justice effort known as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission demanded that individuals who wished to receive amnesty for crimes committed in the fight for political power tell the full truth about what they had done in the service of the old regime. As part of that process, people who had served as agents of the South African apartheid government started talking. And one event they were talking about was the assassination of Olof Palme.

When I had sat with Gerry, it was obvious how important he had been to Stieg. He was Stieg’s friend and mentor for more than twenty years. But Eva had known Stieg for ten years longer than that, and when he passed away, she was closer to him than anyone. She was his life partner. And she lost her life partner when he died. I wouldn’t ask her again how it felt to live with a loss like that, so I chose a different question instead. “How much did Stieg work?” I said. Eva stopped. She leaned forward over the table between us and looked me in the eye. “It’s not possible to work so many hours of the day for so long.”

The police had never questioned Bertil Wedin. According to them, it was because he had eluded them for almost thirty years. According to Wedin, it was because they didn’t want to. I could not understand how the police had not been able to get ahold of a person of interest for three decades. What level of incompetence was needed for that?