He took a couple of deep breaths.
In the filing cabinet for the year 1986, he found a dossier bursting at the seams. This was what he had come for, and he had to swallow hard when he saw that it was still here.
The front page of the folder read: The Murder of Prime Minister Olof Palme.
Modin stiffened when he saw the fat official ink stamp below the subject line:
The case has been investigated and closed. By order of the Swedish government, the investigation has been given the highest level of classification.
Security Service 07 November 1986.
Really? Case closed?
Modin was trembling. Years of service in the most secret organization of Military Intelligence, the Department of Special Operations, had hardened him. This unit employed people who would, in principle, do whatever was necessary to protect the security of the nation. But what lay before him was overwhelming even for him. The investigation had been closed down on November 7, 1986, barely eight months after the murder of the then Swedish Prime Minister, Olof Palme. The official version, fed to the Swedish people, was that no murderer or murderers had been identified, let alone caught. The Palme case had given rise to the greatest amount of shelf space containing investigatory documents in all of Sweden. It was the investigation of investigations. But except the drug addict Christer Pettersson, who was sentenced but later released, officials had claimed that there had been few clues to follow. The murder remained unsolved and no one had much hope that the truth would ever be found. Now he knew why. The case had actually been closed long ago, and the supposedly official investigation the Swedish public knew about had been nothing but a ruse. He had suspected as much, but to find proof was overwhelming nonetheless.
The front page of the dossier in Modin’s hand gave an overview of the case. The murder had taken place on February 28, 1986, at 23:21:20 hours. The Prime Minister was shot in the back by person(s) unknown at the intersection of Sveavägen and Tunnelgatan in central Stockholm on his way home after a visit to the cinema with his wife. Someone had written that a slight breeze had been blowing from the northwest and the temperature was twenty degrees Fahrenheit. A thin powdering of snow lay on the surface of the street the night the Swedish nation lost its innocence.
Case closed! Bullshit, Modin thought as he walked to the center of the room and sat down at the desk. The fact that the case had secretly been closed in November 1986, yet the results had never been released, suggested a covert operation. Top secret? Right! The security of the state at stake? Sure!
Is that why Hans Holmér, the official lead investigator of the Palme case, resigned in January 1987? Modin studied the buff-colored cover. The dossier contained ten separate sections, five of them specifically about the murder. This was one of the largest personal dossiers Modin had ever seen. He just couldn’t bring himself to dig into it. He felt the kind of hesitation he would always feel when extremely important information lay in front of him.
He had always been like that, even way back when the letter from the Military Academy had arrived. He had waited several hours to open it, unsure what he would find inside—acceptance or rejection. And when his wife was pregnant, he had asked her to postpone the ultrasound that would tell them the gender of their unborn child twice, once with his first (a boy) and once with his second (a girl). Information of such magnitude could change your life, and that made him feel uneasy and excited at the same time.
The answer to the Palme murder presumably lay in the file before him. His heart began to pound as he realized that reading this file might involve a risk. This information isn’t meant for me, let alone for newspaper headlines, he thought. If those who murdered the Prime Minister find out that I read the file, I might become a target, and that wouldn’t be good for my health. Was that the plan? That someone would kill him now! Fuck paranoia! he thought but at the same time, he couldn’t let it go.
Why did he not consider that when he had negotiated the time in the archive? It was too late now; he couldn’t back out any more. Literally so—he was stuck in here until the next morning.
He swallowed hard again and leaned forward as the chair was pressing into his back. With his fingers on the dossier, he tried to recall what he himself was doing the night Palme was murdered.
In February 1986, he had been working for the military in that most secret of intelligence departments, the DSO, Department of Special Ops. Modin drew a blank when he tried to remember the time immediately before the murder. He found it odd that he couldn’t even recall where he was the evening the murder took place. You ought to be able to remember such things, he thought, scratching his cheek where the stubble itched. 23 years had passed; he was now 43. “Not that young any more, buddy,” he told himself and smiled.
Modin gripped the edge of the desktop with both hands and rose to his feet. He felt the dry, rough wood between his fingers. He was six-foot, one-inch tall, weighed 190 pounds, had a fair crew cut, and, as a number of his female admirers had pointed out, looked just a tiny bit wild and dangerous. He was fit enough, nowadays. Much fitter than he had been for quite some time. He had had a number of good months, except those drinking spells last summer. As much as he had enjoyed them, they had been but a ploy to fool the DSO into leaving him in peace to supposedly self-destruct, while he and his friends were, in fact, planning to dive for the submarine nobody wanted him to find. Miraculously it had worked, too.
On wobbly legs he staggered back to the table with the coffee and poured himself another cup. He knew he was procrastinating, but he couldn’t bring himself to look at the Palme dossier in detail. It felt like too dangerous and irrevocable a step. Life or death. His.
He drank the coffee, although it was boiling hot, and looked straight at the concrete wall ten feet in front of him. His heart pounding, he turned around, eyed the dossier on the desk, and decided to go for it. He only had this one night, and he felt he had to hurry. It’s now or never, he told himself, and sat back down to read.
• • •
The Supreme Head of the Swedish Security Service, Klas Berg had a bad taste in his dry mouth and couldn’t sleep. It would soon be early morning, September 29, 2008, and his insomnia was caused by the previous day’s decision to grant access to the Security Service archives to a veritable maniac. He turned his moist pillow over. Now having deliberately shifted the balance of power and influence in the Kingdom of Sweden, he prayed to God Almighty that it would not cause havoc. Anton Modin was clearly a security risk; for God’s sake, the man was likely an alcoholic. However, if a night of research in the holy caverns of the Security Service archive sealed that bastard’s lips, then he’d hopefully avoid the grim fate of meeting with an unfortunate accident in a dark alley somewhere. The Swedish Security Service had been cornered, which was a bitter fact in itself. Hence they now had a judicial train wreck on their hands, sitting five stories beneath Police Headquarters in Stockholm, digging through the nation’s holiest and best preserved classified files.
Supreme Head Berg contemplated getting up to get something to drink, but he wasn’t quite sure his legs would support him. The kitchen was on the ground floor. The dog would come running and think it was time for their ritual morning walk. Modin had made him a prisoner in his own home! He tossed and turned in the moist sheets that were stuck to his lower legs. His cheek pressed hard against the pillow and he could feel a slight tingling sensation in his fingertips.
• • •
Modin opened the dossier carefully. The files within looked fresh, as if nobody had ever thumbed through them. Presumably very few people had worked with the files, which, given the highly classified nature of the investigation, made sense. He turned around yet again. He couldn’t shake the feeling that someone was watching him.
The first page listed biographical details on the dead Prime Minister:
Sven Olof Joachim Palme, born in the Swedish Artillery Regimental Congregation, January 30, 1927. Died February 28, 1986, at Sabbatsberg Hospital in Sto
ckholm. Cause of death: hemorrhage after a severed aorta following a shot to the chest. Other contributory factors: inhalation of blood to the lungs. Origin of damage: shot on the street by unknown assailant. Stockholm 86 03 01, National Forensic Center, Milan Valverius, Chief Medical Officer.
Next were the autopsy report with bloody pictures of Prime Minister Palme’s body lying on the street, and photos of his corpse lying on his back on a bare, stainless steel operating table.
Modin flinched. One of the fluorescent tubes clicked. Palme looked thin and pathetic as he lay there in rigor mortis. Not the great, powerful, and influential politician that Modin remembered. He almost resembled a doll. Modin closely inspected the autopsy pictures. There was an open wound in his chest where the bullet had emerged. Palme had been shot in the back, and the bullet had gone right through his body, which had been wiped clean of blood and was colorless. His almost black hair looked damp. Modin felt uneasy but was fascinated by the sharpness of the photographs.
He leafed on.
The next section provided personal details, school certificates, and other merits. In 1948 and 1949, Olof Palme had gone to college in the U.S. He had studied several subjects, among them American history and sociology at Ohio State University. According to his personal file, one of his close friends had been a 33-year-old future professor at Ohio State: Professor X. Professor X , who remained unnamed in the file, had been lecturing history and received his doctorate while Palme was there. Professor X had worked for the U.S. Navy Intelligence between 1940 and 1945. He was a specialist in signals and communications intelligence. Professor X must have been a celebrity in the U.S. if his name was still classified in this archive, Modin thought and turned to the next page.
It was a section titled Suspicions of Crimes Against the Security of the State. Modin couldn’t bring himself to turn the page. He was no longer sure whether he really wanted to see what was in there. Crimes against the security of the state, what could that be all about? Whose crimes? Palme’s?
Modin put down the file carefully and looked straight into the table lamp. Typical for the 1970s, it was screwed to the tabletop and had a spring along the side—ultra-modern in its day but obsolete nowadays. It was maroon and made of steel. The only part made of plastic was the on-off button. A thin layer of dust lay on the inside of the metal lampshade. He turned the lamp away from his eyes. The fluorescent tube directly above him clicked ominously but continued to emit light.
The musty archive air, low on oxygen, began to affect him. He began to scrape his gums with his tongue in an attempt to swallow saliva. His throat almost creaked.
He got up, put his palms against his hips, and stretched his back. He had been concentrating so intently that his muscles had grown stiff. He rolled his hips to relax his lower back; there were a few clicks as the movement loosened up the lumbar.
Modin looked at the far wall of the archive. In the faint light, he thought it looked like concrete painted gray. Dust flew around in the beam of the reading lamp. He shuddered. It was simply too much to take in, he couldn’t digest it.
He paced back and forth in order to clear his head. He would have to take in the information in suitable doses and analyze the material before he drew any conclusions. At the same time, he realized that perhaps it was possible to find out who murdered Olof Palme. The solution to the impossible murder, as the head of the Security Service had put it, might well be in this classified file in front of him. Thousands of different theories circulated amongst the public! And this material would inevitably open new doors. He had stood in doorways before and seized opportunities. He had found old airplanes and mini submarines; so why not add a murder mystery to the list? Someone had to do it!
Modin went back to the desk with the files lying scattered across it. He stacked them up and tried to concentrate as he took another look at the file marked Suspicions of Crimes Against the Security of the State.
• • •
Klas Berg was lying in bed, seemingly lifeless. A faint rattle came from his throat, sporadically interrupting the dense silence between the walls and ceiling like explosions. His face was gray. His left arm and leg twitched slightly. Karin, Berg’s wife, could explain no more because her throat stung and the tears were running. She was standing in the hall of her modern villa in Bromma just outside Stockholm, the receiver pressed to her ear. They had moved out there thirteen years ago to get some peace and quiet. She had never in her wildest dreams thought it would come to this. She had rung for an ambulance in a panic, and while she was waiting, she had called the duty officer at the Security Service, Police Superintendent Göran Filipson.
Filipson tried to calm her down and offered instructions for artificial respiration. She told him, crying, that they had been at a restaurant earlier that evening. They had been there before and nothing had ever happened; that night the two of them even ate the same dish. She hadn’t noticed anything odd. She felt fine. But Klas had become ill at about midnight. He was unconscious now. She feared the worst.
Filipson put down the phone, and immediately picked it up again to put full emergency procedures in place at the Security Service. Berg, his boss, the head of the Security Service, could have been the victim of an assassination attempt.
Filipson almost forgot that Anton Modin was sitting down there in the archives, reading.
• • •
Modin finally went back to the file. The bright red stamp with double edging indicated that the report on the murder of Olof Palme was considered top secret. The prosecutor in the case had been Klas Berg.
Anton Modin was keenly aware that Klas Berg was the current Supreme Head of the Security Service. He let me in here, based on Filipson’s recommendation, so he is darn well aware of what I am about to see.
He turned the page to a picture of a hand holding up a rifle with a bayonet and a red flag in the barrel. The caption read: Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, the East German Stasi.
The report contained the code names of Stasi agents working in Sweden. At the top of the list was the codename Anders, one of the top executives at the Bofors Weapons Systems. Stasi agent Anders had been interrogated on a number of occasions.
The next page showed a picture of the Skandia House on Sveavägen. Skandia was the insurance company headquartered in the building right next to the scene of the murder. He turned to the next page and found an organizational chart with the acronym AGAG at the top. If he was not mistaken, that stood for Aktionsgrupp Arla Gryning, or Action Team Crack of Dawn.
What the hell is this? Modin thought. AGAG and the Stasi in the file about the Palme murder?
He didn’t understand a thing. He scratched his head and then his stomach. He found top-secret interrogation reports with some of the security guards at Skandia House, and photos of a security guard vehicle.
Modin browsed through the report with an ever increasing pace and intensity. He came across an old, yellowed document issued by the Thule Insurance Company, which had been founded by Olof Palme’s grandfather and managed by Olof Palme’s father. Thule was eventually acquired by Skandia and both companies ended up sharing the same premises. The main entrance to Skandia’s headquarters was only a few steps from where Olof Palme took his last breath.
Modin carefully looked at a sketch of the Center of Command and the network of tunnels underneath the Skandia House. On the last page, which dated from November 7, 1986, about nine months after the Palme murder, he read: “Operation Thule was planned and implemented by the Stay Behind organization, Action Team Crack of Dawn. The responsibility seems to lie with the secret military organization, the Department of Special Ops or DSO. DSO is taking orders directly from the government and Supreme Commander. Presumably, foreign powers are involved in the murder. On orders from PM, the case is closed effective immediately and classified for at least 50 years.”
Prime Minister Swanson, who had taken over the night Palme died, closed the case? This was explosive content. Operation Thule was conducted by Swedish Mil
itary Special Ops? But Operation Thule was the codename for the Palme murder! This made no sense at all. Modin was completely absorbed in the document, when suddenly the door to the archive opened.
“Sorry, Modin. Time’s up.”
It was Göran Filipson. His sweeping gesture told him in no uncertain terms that resistance was pointless.
“What? Already? I’ve only started.” Modin closed the file in his hand.
“I know, but we’ve got to close up shop now. We have a crisis on our hands. We’ve got to secure the building.”
“What the… Filipson. You promised!”
“I’m sorry, but we’ve got a new boss now. The one who gave you the promise is dead.”
“You got to be kidding me? Klas Berg is dead? When did this happen?”
“Just now. A massive heart attack. Can I have the Olof Palme dossier now? I see that you managed to find it. Anything interesting?”
“Nothing yet,” Modin lied. “When can I continue?”
“I don’t actually know,” Filipson said as he made sure all filing cabinet drawers were rolled back into place. “Depends on the new leadership. Everything’s in flux right now.”
Modin feared the worst. No one was going to open the archives to him ever again. Not when it contained the things it did. Fuck!
CHAPTER 3
STOCKHOLM, MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 29
Anton Modin leaned back in the front seat of his car, staring out through the windshield without actually turning on the ignition. His thoughts were far away, back in the 1980s at the time of the Palme murder. He was exhausted from the revelations in the archives of the Security Service. Fuck! What he had read was unbelievable. The Swedish Military Intelligence was involved in the murder of Prime Minister Palme, and the government was covering it all up.
Am I on the shitlist now? I’ll probably never, ever get near those files again. What happened to Klas Berg? Died, that’s for sure, but a heart attack? Is there a connection to my visit to the building? Probably. Will they come for me? Modin wondered, before he willed himself to shrug off these thoughts as unnecessary paranoia. Fuck I’m damned. No one was supposed to know that Special Ops was involved in the Palme murder. Given my background with Special Ops and my history with its boss, Chris Loklinth, least of all me. Klas Berg paid for his indiscretion with his life.
Enemy of the State Page 2