Between Summer's Longing and Winter's End: The Story of a Crime

by Leif G. W. Persson

  Contacts with the parent organization that the group was created to watch over and defend were, naturally, surrounded with every conceivable secrecy. To start with, the group was run solely by the head of the operations bureau, who in reality was head of the entire secret police. Because of the character of the group’s mission this solution had proven to be far from ideal, primarily because it limited the opportunities for systematic insight into the various branches of the operation.

  For that reason, changes were made the following year. Another special group was created within the larger organization—the Group for Organizational Protection—and on the basis of that, a network of informants had been built up in all branches of the operation. At the same time, the majority of them were—hopefully—unaware of the fact that they now had a dual function in which they not only did their work but also reported what they and their colleagues were doing via daily hour-by-hour reports and continuously updated logs of data access as well as internal and external contacts. The union had objections, of course, but because SePo’s union was only a pale shadow of the uniformed police officers’ professional organization—and as usual had no idea what the whole thing was really about—the new system still turned out as planned.

  The external group had been retained, of course, and essentially in the same form as before. The influx of information had also increased markedly, but the price to be paid was that more people within the parent organization were now aware of the external group’s existence. The entire process was a good illustration of the classic dilemma of all secret police work. Ultimately it was about putting together a puzzle, and it went without saying that the task was considerably easier if the ones doing the solving had access to all the pieces. As a method the process was a complete disaster, of course, if the intention was to simultaneously keep both the puzzle-solving and the finished puzzle secret from as many people as possible, regardless of which side they belonged to.

  Among the initiated few who were aware of the external operation, it was also known that the entire construction was the idea of the bureau director, Berg. Berg was the head of the operations bureau but had never breathed a word of his role as its originator, which among his superiors was interpreted as a good sign of both discretion and personal modesty. Berg himself knew better, for he had gotten the whole concept from the German security service, from its major and minor aspects all the way down to pure details; they had a long tradition of just this aspect of secret police work.

  Based on his historical knowledge and everything he knew about the work of foreign security agencies, he also had a strategy for how he might get his new operation to grow and develop. The ultimate goal he envisioned was a secret bureau, or perhaps even a separate secret organization for constitutional protection, where not only the secret police were under surveillance, but also the so-called open operation within the police, and the military, of course, as well as every other governmental authority, private organization, or sector whose activity might conceivably threaten or damage the highest political authority. This mission was the historical basis of all governmental security services, the primary task overshadowing everything else. Constitutional protection, thought Berg. An excellent phrase in a context where he had to be utterly discreet when describing his assignment to an outside world often both ignorant and hostile, and which gladly took any opportunity to portray the guardians of democracy as its enemies.

  The Swedish secret police, in contrast to its counterparts in both the West and the East, was an organization made up almost exclusively of police officers. The Swedish secret police had no intellectual or academic tradition whatsoever, and it was Berg’s firm conviction that this was also its main strength. No upper-class pansies from Oxford or Cambridge who might sell out the whole country to the enemy for a piece of ass at some shabby hotel in a third-world country; no overexcited theoreticians who couldn’t think a single original thought without immediately broadcasting it in a seminar with a crowd of their ilk; no philosophical scatterbrains or political brooders. A completely pure organization made up solely of police officers, thought Berg.

  During the following years they indeed had great and well-deserved successes, both within the organization as a whole and perhaps above all else within that part of the operation that was Berg’s darling; day by day it was becoming more and more like the secret bureau for constitutional protection that he had imagined. They had good luck and they had bad luck, made use of the good and turned the bad to their advantage; in brief, they successfully managed the whole situation.

  At first they had good luck, exposing a spy within their own organization. An alcoholic police officer who had sold secret information to the enemy with all the finesse of a common street peddler and whose prices weren’t much higher. Life imprisonment, good press, and encouraging pats on the back from the average man on the street as well as from the political bosses.

  Then they had bad luck. Hostile-minded elements on the outermost fringes of the left had spread a story that it was in reality the Israeli security service that had captured the Swedish spy. In their usual unsentimental way, their agents were said to have spirited him away at the Beirut airport and conveyed him to a suitably situated prison hole where they put the muzzle of a gun to his temple and invited him to unburden his conscience. When he was through with that, which should only have taken a few days, they had driven him back to the airport and put him on the airplane to Copenhagen, at which time they called their Swedish colleagues and informed them that they had just sent them a present.

  True or not, this had caused problems. Berg was not one to debate his operation in the media, however much the media nagged, but the minister of justice, who was politically responsible, had taken up the matter at their weekly meeting, and for reasons of which only he and Berg were aware he had chosen to sound more worried than irritated. Was there any truth in these, to say the least, astounding assertions?

  Berg shook his head emphatically. Not in the least, but as so often before in a situation like this the truth was such that it couldn’t be told or discussed even in the most exclusive company. It was actually his internal security group that had been on the trail of the spy and the external part of that group that had carried out the practical aspects. Because the operation was so sensitive, and must be concealed at all costs, it was Berg who had made contact with the Israelis and in consultation with them worked out the actual arrest. Afterward they had collectively cooked up a kidnapping story on how it had been done and through their usual channels seen to it that the “news” spread to their opponents.

  “They swallowed it all, hook, line, and sinker, so we killed two birds with one stone,” Berg summarized, with a friendly nod toward the speechless minister. Just like you, but the other way around, he thought.

  “You may rest assured that this will stay in this room,” the minister of justice replied warmly.

  Unmasking a spy in your own organization was good, but nothing you could live on until the end of time, and if there was more than one it could quickly get really bad. Besides, it was unnecessary. What security work was primarily about was refining information that was being gathered anyway, taking care to manage every conceivable risk, and exploiting this to the organization’s advantage. In that way conditions for expansion could be created without a need to point out a lot of annoyances that had already occurred.

  Threats and menaces, dangers and future scenarios, prognoses and preventive measures were what it was really about, and you would have to be a complete fool not to understand that a well-written, well-supported, and selectively distributed security analysis, all else aside, was far superior to any number of airplane hijackings, bombing attacks, or assassinated politicians when it was a matter of securing economic resources. We have a lot to learn from the Germans, thought Berg, who had studied in detail how they dealt with the legacy from their domestic terrorists. But we haven’t been as good on that point, he thought. At the beginning of the eighties it was ti
me for the next change of organization.

  First the in-house part of the operation was renamed the Group for Departmental Protection. For one thing this sounded better, a little more diffuse, a little broader, a little more Swedish, to put it simply. Also, the workload had increased markedly and among other things a special unit had been formed to inspect and refine all the information compiled within the framework of the overarching operation. No possibilities could be left untried in the hunt for new resources. Berg had been careful to underscore this when they had an introductory kickoff. Even if he hadn’t put it that way.

  The external operation had been retained. True, it had grown so markedly that it became necessary to create yet another front organization, which in turn gave rise to a set of leadership and coordination problems, the solution to which was found within the framework of a foundation, but the fundamental strategy, as well as the direction of the work, remained the same as before.

  The special “threat group” that he had set up—Berg often, and with pride, used to think of it as his own marketing department—also had a very successful start in its operation. First, the situation in the Balkans had been taken up. Since the early 1970s, the Yugoslavs had been a source of happiness for the Swedish secret police. Croatian extremists had shot the republic’s Serbian ambassador, after which their comrades freed them from a Swedish prison by hijacking an airplane, and in the end the Swedish secret police received major appropriations to battle the new terrorism.

  But the Yugoslavs had been good in more ways than that. The stream of political refugees had increased steadily, and among those who came here there were strong political divisions and a reasonable element of common career criminals who gladly sat up nights, conspiring in their smoky club quarters. Appropriations for reconnaissance and external surveillance, wiretapping, and interpreters had multiplied. Appropriations for interpreters alone had increased by more than two thousand percent in less than five years.

  But then it was as though the air had been let out of them, and in melancholy moments Berg used to think that the Yugoslavs clearly couldn’t handle the comfortable coziness of Sweden. The terrorist acts flagged in their forecasts had simply not happened, and while year followed year and appropriations continued to climb, the opposite side quite simply refused to deliver all the atrocities that SePo had promised its political superiors. Illegal clubs, aggravated robbery, and the occasional bloody reckoning among Yugoslavian criminals were all well and good, but in the context within which Berg was operating this was clearly insufficient. The politicians had started grumbling, and among operatives within the open operation there was a growing and increasingly vocal opinion maintaining, in complete seriousness, that they now had the Yugoslavs under control and that the secret police ought to occupy itself with other things.

  The situation was not good, the trend even worse, and it was at exactly that point that his newly formed threat group, the Group for Analysis and Processing of Information, as it was called in more solemn contexts, had gone in and taken a concerted hold on the entire Balkan problem. Suitable sections of a large number of old strategic analyses acquired from the Swedish military intelligence service and their foreign colleagues had been compiled—the sections that for several years had been promising the imminent collapse of the Yugoslav republic and subsequent total chaos in the Balkans and elsewhere in Europe. With these simple means a report was produced with alarming content for the nation’s guardians: highest level of secrecy, highest priority, and the most restricted distribution to political superiors. Additional appropriations had arrived like a check in the mail.

  After that they quickly moved ahead and went to work on the Kurdish problem. It wasn’t all peace and harmony among the Kurdish refugees elsewhere in Europe, and when conflicts flared up they did sometimes shoot each other. The problem was that they stubbornly persisted in only shooting other Kurds, which from a secret police point of view was economic madness. Berg’s German colleague at Constitutional Protection had the same problem as he did, and due to the fact that the Kurds themselves clearly lacked political ambitions they decided they had to do something about this.

  First, they increased the pressure on their informants among the Kurdish refugees. They were warned in no uncertain terms that if they couldn’t deliver anything more than the usual nonsense on yet another impending murder of some talkative guy with a fruit stand, they might just as well pack their bags and go back to Turkey. The argument clearly hit home, for within just a few months much disturbing information had come in from several different infiltrators in both Sweden and Germany. It was obvious that extremist political groups among the Kurds were planning assassination attempts on several centrally placed domestic politicians in those countries where they had the privilege of residence as refugees. And yes, new appropriations also arrived like a check in the mail. Finally, thought Berg, who had at last succeeded in showing that there was even a way to squeeze money out of a former shepherd from the mountainous regions around Diyarbakir.

  When Berg, much later, looked back at the early eighties, he would think of that period as the happy years in his life. There had been a lot to do, but it had been fun doing it and the successes had been great. Then worries started to pile up. First he was saddled with a regime change. He had calculated at an early stage that the conservatives wouldn’t last forever, and he had no political opinions whatsoever, if someone were to come up with the preposterous idea of asking him, but if he were able to choose … of course.

  The conservatives had been easy to deal with, unaccustomed as they were to people like him, but the social democrats represented a different species. That he knew from early experience. Berg had been around a good while, and six years in line for the public troughs had given them sufficient appetite when it was finally time. As soon as the election results were clear, Berg had cleaned out his calendar, taken his closest associates with him to a secure location, and devoted three whole days to analyzing the new situation. Analyze? They had gone over it down to the minutest detail. They were forewarned, and thereby forearmed.

  The new government had hardly had time to take its place before the military intelligence service performed the anticipated assault, with the help of its well-trained contacts within the social democratic leadership. It was the usual old turf war, but this time Berg had been better prepared than anyone before him. The day before the meeting in the government office building he had sent over the latest analysis of the situation on the terror front and seen to it that it was well spiced with an optimal selection of the military intelligence authority’s own judgments. Where was the antagonism? Berg wondered innocently. As far as he could understand, both he and his coworkers were in complete agreement with their military colleagues in their view of the matter.

  Berg had chosen to head back after the meeting on foot, and as he was walking in the autumn sun between Rosenbad and his own building on Kungsholmen, he became aware that he was humming the finale from Beethoven’s choral symphony. Alle Menschen werden Brüder, Berg hummed contentedly, and when he sat down behind his desk the papers he had requested the weekend before were already topmost on the pile.

  First he went to work on the requested compilation of the new government ministers, government secretaries, and the remaining politically appointed officials and advisers who had now taken over the government office building. Up until a day ago, a good many of the latter had been found in the secret police register. For good reasons and with well-deserved thick files, thought Berg with a wry smile, but after the just-completed autumn housecleaning the archives were neat and tidy and all necessary papers that might cause unnecessary annoyance were now in secure storage outside the building. In a week he would meet with the politically appointed board for the secret police, and bets were already being made among his coworkers on which of the new board members would suggest a visit to SePo’s personal archive this time. There were three to choose from, and none of them was a sure thing.

  Within t
he external operation an analysis had been made of the key political figures with whom the parent organization would now be working. All in all it consisted of a dozen people, of which a two-thirds majority sat in Rosenbad and was divided approximately equally among the preliminary Cabinet and the justice and defense departments. All of them had been made a gift of a secret police profile, the main point of which gave a summary of their special interests and inclinations in matters of national security.

  With that as a foundation, a client-oriented list of priorities had then been made of those areas and issues that might conceivably appeal to the tastes of the new consumers, and for the time being his entire analysis group was busy picking out the information that must be available when, in approximately two weeks—and here too the wagering was well under way—it would be necessary to demonstrate that these were the very problems which had been viewed for a long time with the utmost seriousness.

  The list of priorities was hardly exciting for an old fox like Berg. There were all the usual old articles from the standard assortment, such as the supervision of persons with sensitive positions and the surveillance of various extreme political parties, which solely concerned their own ends regardless of political orientation. Ultimately it was only a matter of weeding a little in the flower beds and shifting perspective a few degrees; after that for the most part things could proceed as before. Obviously it was necessary to raise the priority of neo-Nazis and right-wing extremists, as much as this irked him. His resources were not inexhaustible, and it was Berg’s firm conviction that there were better ways to use money than keeping an eye on a few hundred semi-retarded, misguided, snot-nosed kids who marched out of step even when they didn’t have a case of strong beer under their belts. Which they no doubt usually did, Berg thought acidly. But that is how things were now and that’s the way it would have to be.